Month: February 2004

A few days after his interview on Disquiet.com (“Shawnee for ‘Laptop'”), Brad Mitchell (aka Pocka) has posted a new set of MP3 files on the netlabel he runs, Kikapu.com. Number 58 in the label’s catalog, Veem‘s Station album is an hour of instrumentals, its seven tracks clinically labeled “000” through “600.” It opens with ten minutes straight of far out space drones, deep clouds of sound crossing each other like porous Venn diagrams. As if for the sake of orientation, toward the end a pulse appears, a beep really, every 10 seconds or so, too infrequently to serve any traditional rhythmic purpose. It’s like a pod slowly arriving from the other side of the galaxy — no doubt trafficking a load of classic white-label singles lifted from a multi-tentacled DJ in the Beta Pictoris solar system.

The pod beeps its last beep in time to usher in track two, “001,” which is one of the better songs in recent memory to play with sort of “ping pong” sound that both Monolake and Plastikman experimented with on their recent albums. The simple beats are set in motion, slowly building up rhythmic complexity. Not too soon, elements that last more than a split second begin to appear, and as the track nears the four-minute mark these longer phrases become the dominant motif. To that extent, “001” is the opposite of “000” — its beats disappear into, rather than out of, the haze. The remaining tracks run the gamut, from a loose jazzy electric piano melody (“002”) to jangly detuned guitar lines (“005”) to, in the end (“006”), a fairly bouncy bit of wordless pop. (Kikapu at kikapu.com; Veem album here.)

Monotonik, the prolific netlabel, already has two releases in 2004, but let’s rewind to the end of 2003 for a moment, when the musician named Gschmidt closed the year with the December 17 EP Nibiru Coming, consisting of three drama-packed tracks. Each starts in one place and ends in another, from light fantasia to chase-scene hyperactivity (“Head for the Hills”), from sci-fi docudrama spoken word to peppy electronica (“Alientanz”), and from alt-country raga to … well, to alt-country drones, but in between there’s another campy-creepy dialog bit about an alien encounter with the foreboding Planet X (“Roz8”).

Schmidt knows exactly what he, or she, is doing when it comes to these genre shifts. As “Head for the Hills” nears the two-minute mark, it makes the move from one musical flavor (smiley-faced minimalism) to another (pounding synth-prog) not with a lazy crossfade, but with a little musical figure that notes that a transition is underway; what follows, in full Goblin or Tangerine Dream mode, reminds us that space music isn’t always spacey. In “Roz8,” that spoken word bit arrives in time to turn the preceding drones into background music, and while the narrative unfolds the track’s rhythm slowly builds up. On all three parts of Nibiru Coming, these transitions may be the most interesting material. The circular arc of “Roz8,” with its bookends of what sound like Zen guitar, makes it the pick of the batch. (Monotonik is at mono211.com, and the Gschmidt EP is here.)