The Hazard Records netlabel, at hazardrecords.org, welcomes you with a Q&A that sums up the attitude of many skeptics toward free downloads: “Want to lose all your rights on your music? Sign to Hazard Records!” Fortunately for the listener, the label has found numerous willing participants, including Ze (no relation, one assumes, to Tom Ze), whose Electronics Anonymous is among Hazard’s most recent albums. If you like your dank ambience stirred by the occasional clang, and your vocals filtered through an old FM radio that’s taught itself to dance, this is your kinda music. Electronics Anonymous, eight tracks in all, was recorded live in London last year.
Month: April 2005
Jam Band Techno
Seek in the Internet Archive’s audio catalog (archive.org/audio), and you might just find. Several years ago, the String Cheese Incident, a noodle-rock jam band, turned some of its recordings over to a pop-minded technologist, DJ Harry, the result of which was a recommended album (The String Cheese Remix Project) of techno music fabricated from sun-dried straw and wildflowers. A search at archive.org yielded two live concert results of this union, one from July 15, 2000, and another from November 26, 2004. The latter, recorded at the Tweeter Center in Camden, N.J., features Harry joining SCI onstage for an encore. Titled “On the Road,” it starts off in space-rock zone but soon solidifies into the Deadheady music one expects from SCI, but then it breaks open wide for an extended bit of looping (focused largely on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech) against SCI’s backwoodsy ensemble. Some caveats: the music is encoded as an “SHN” file, a so-called “lossless” (or hi-fidelity) format that is (1) really large (65.5 megabytes for about 10.5 minutes of music) and (2) kinda hard to play, because not a lot of MP3 players support it (there is a plugin for Winamp software). Oh, as for that July 15 track, it’s only downloadable as part of a zipped 3.2 gigabyte file. Save that for another rainy day. Search for “harry string incident” at archive.org.
Prefuse Hip-Hop MP3
Back in early March, Prefuse 73 made the Disquiet Downstream with a track, “Pagina Dos Featuring the Books,” that the Warp Records label posted for users of its bleep.com digital-music retail service, as an apology for some sort of technical error. Later that month, Warp gave another track, “Hideyaface,” to Salon.com for the site’s daily free-download feature, “Audiophile.” The track features Ghostface (and it appears, El-P, though the Salon entry doesn’t mention him) rapping over beats that Prefuse (aka Scott Herren) emphasizes with a tangy percussive hook and hazy synths. The chorus includes this particularly interesting line: “Cuz radio don’t play you / doesn’t mean that you great.”
Dreamy Kettel MP3
A fine match for yesterday’s material by Eluvium is this month’s “MP3 Rotor” entry at kracfive.com, a syrupy run of undulating ambience by Kettel, one of kracfive collective’s mainstays. Well, it begins in the dreamy thick of aquatic haze, but prior to the two-minute point it dives deeper down, with cinematic breadth, to achieve what James Cameron’s Aliens of the Deep might have sounded like had it been rated R. And then the piece, titled “Pellegrin,” heads high; this may be an imposed narrative on the listener’s part, but there it seems to make a transition from water breaking, as if over the hull of a ship, to birdsong, to heavenly voices. Again, this is all imagined referentiality, but it says something about “Pellegrin” that it can suggest so much, in about six minutes.
Three Eluvium MP3s
Over in the MP3 section at pitchforkmedia.com, there’s a transcendent piece by Eluvium (aka Matthew Cooper), “New Animals from the Air (edit),” which pitches soft balls of melodic loops, one atop another, until they build to higher and higher peaks, reminiscent of 4AD Records stalwarts the Cocteau Twins, though never getting as close to song form as that group was wont to do. More info at website of the Brooklyn-based label that released the full-length version, temporaryresidence.com, and at Eluvium/Cooper’s site, eluvium.net, which houses two additional MP3s: the lush, if peculiarly detuned, “Under the Water It Glowed” and the deceptively rudimentary piano piece “Genius and the Thieves,” which sounds like Rufus Wainwright playing a Harold Budd cover.