Month: January 2004

In time, we may come to understand what, exactly, drives 400 Lonely Things. That will occur down the road, when there’s a full body of work to be listened to from a distance, something that will, having reached a critical mass, divulge its themes, its core sounds, its agenda. In the meanwhile, we have two full length albums of diverse constituent parts. Following up on last year’s self-titled debut (comprised of various brief sound experiments — think Webern with a DAT machine and a four-track recorder), 400 Lonely Things has produced She Blinded Me with Silence, three full tracks of which are up on its website (here), ranging in vocal content from what sounds like Teletubbies at their moment blissed-out, “(You’re Standing in a Shape),” to church chants echoed and cross-faded, “The Sunday Funnies”; plus, there’s a short bit of synth-driven, spacey instrumental fun, “Jupiter’s Eyebrow.” Of the three, the “Sunday Funnies” track is the keeper, thanks to its pop transformation of liturgical source material, and its hypnotic side effects.

It’s been a big week for streams. First the two-part Brian Eno interview from TechTV, then the Beans video from Warp Records. The general purpose of Disquiet.com’s Downstream section is to link to recommended free electronic-related music on the web, especially downloadable music, and in particular MP3 files. But some streams are more equal than others, and so for the fourth day in a row, a stream is the focus of Downstream — in this case, the preview of the new three-track Squarepusher release, Squarewindow, from Warp Records.

For not only is the release a primer for a forthcoming Squarepusher album, titled Ultravisitor, it’s also available for preview currently only on the new Warp Records online MP3 store, which made its debut today. The site is called Bleep (at bleep.com, or warprecords.com/bleep), and it offers, for sale, most of the Warp catalog, from the earliest Aphex Twin singles to the most recent work by Plaid and Broadcast. The files come as high-quality MP3s, and they’re not copy-protected (in contrast with the secure measures behind the major online music retailers, such as Apple’s iTunes). As has been widely quoted, Bleep’s FAQ explains the site’s philosophy as follows: “We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals.” The Squarepusher single is available for preview here, though it is not yet for sale.

Two caveats: the Squarewindow streams are low-quality audio, as are all the Bleep preview streams; and you can only listen to them in 30-second snippets, though that’s a small price to pay for a peek at a new work of Squarepusher’s serendipitous, elastic rhythms. And, no doubt, there’s already some wily criminal out there right now stitching the segments together, in advance of the single’s on-sale date, January 26.

The artists on Warp Records have long drawn on the rhythms and technology of hip-hop for their sounds. The label has been cementing that relationship, most recently with the release of music by vocalist and producer Beans, a former member of Anti-Pop Consortium. A video for “Mutescreamer,” off the forthcoming Now Soon Someday EP, is up on Warp’s site right now (here). Remixes on the EP feature noodling by Prefuse 73 and El-P.