Penultimate Musork MP3

In a post titled “The End Is Near,” Kit Clayton and Sue Costabile, founders of the Musork record label, announced on its website that they’ll be closing the organization down in early 2005. Since 2000, the duo’s label has released fine original recordings and remixes by the likes of Blectum from Blechdom, Stephan Mathieu, Ekkehard Ehlers, Kid606 and many others. Musork’s 18th and most recent set, Westernization Completed by AGF, earned an Award of Distinction this year, along with Janek Schaefer’s Skate, in Ars Electronica’s Digital Music category (Thomas K?ner, of minimal-techno greats Porter Ricks, took the top prize, the Golden Nicas). Today’s Downstream entry is a track from that award-winning AGF album, “Private Birds” (album page here, MP3 here), which features the voice of Antye Greie (aka AGF) intoning fragments of poetry, the fragments gaining an almost funky quality the way they’re interspersed with, and joined by — and set up against — snippets of delicate electronica, and how her words are sometimes tweaked and echoed with light digital processing. More on Greie/AGF at poemproducer.com. More on Musork at musork.com. (Clayton and Costabile mention on the Musork site that there will be one more release, due out in spring 2005: “something new made out of things old … mostly out of past Musork releases.”)