Month: January 2006

The rise of bleep.com, the online music retailer that doesn’t impose any DRM (so-called digital “rights” management) on its files, potentially signaled the decline, if not end, of free downloads from the growing list of labels associated with the enterprise (Warp, Ninja Tune, etc.). The website’s simple message for the new year: Fear not. Shortly after January 1, users registered with the site found a nice surprise in their checkout interface (not as romantic as “under their pillows,” but so be it), a various-artists set titled Bleeps-oh-six LP. Tracks include four blobs of funky old-school-ish electro/pop (Dexter‘s “D-Funked,” Jimmy Edgar‘s “My Beats,” National Trust‘s “It’s Just Cruel,” Skeletons & the Girl Faced Boys‘ “Git”), some rock’n’roll (Nectarine No9‘s “South of an Imaginary Line”) and folk (Mara Carlyle‘s “He Makes My Day”). But don’t be disheartened; there’s stuff here to remind you that Warp, the label that founded bleep.com, is the house that Aphex Twin helped build: Kero‘s “untitled (On Acid Again),” with its skittling beat and denial of routine structure; Wisp‘s rubbery “Congratulations” (with chatty and incongruous voiceover); and the nine-cut compilation’s shortest and, by far, best entry, Battles‘ stop’n’start “IPT2,” which sounds like a rough-hewn remix of the great punk band Fugazi. Just head over to bleep.com/bleeps06. If you don’t have an account, it doesn’t matter. Just sign up. It’s free, just like this compilation.

ELECTRO-ORGANIC MP3S: A cough, of all things, lends some context. As if to underscore that what you’re hearing is, in fact, being performed live, amid several of the downloadable tracks by Doogie (aka Nathan Mclaughlin) at his website, fluxed.net, you can quite clearly make out someone clearing his (or her) throat. It may be Doogie himself, it may be an audience member, but it isn’t particularly distracting, and in fact hearing the familiar sound helps your ear get a sense of the space in which the performance took place, because nothing else here is remotely familiar. Soothing, yes. Artful, yes. Terrestrial, no. This is beautiful music, exemplary of the kind of electronic goods that get described, widely, as “organic.” Though the sounds are self-evidently artificial, their rendering is so warm, and they so suggest life forms the way they cycle and burble and quaver, that you can’t help but think of them as, well, organic. Particularly recommended is “Whats in a Species” (sic), a chimey formulation, like some cast-off riff by mid-period R.E.M. that’s taken on a purpose all its own (MP3). (The live tracks, recorded last November, feature accompaniment by one D. Fox.) “Keys,” from Doogie’s album The Spatulate Finger, released last September, is a drone that slowly changes over the course of nearly five minutes, from monastic om, to breaking-dawn lightness, to industrial burr (MP3).

Yet another twist in composer Koji Asano‘s weekly free downloads, at kojiasano.com. When the second weekly file was uploaded, the first one disappeared, suggesting that subsequent entries in the series would be available for one week only. But that plan has changed. Now, when a download is first made available, it’s done so as a massive file, “lossless” in the current lingo (“lossless” may be inexact, but it’s no understatement; the second week’s Asano file came in at just under 100 MB). Thereafter the piece is downsized significantly (same length, different density), and archived permanently (that 100 MB piece is now just under 14). Well, maybe not permanently. It’s Asano’s site, and he’s welcome to change the rules. So get ’em while they’re hot. The current entry, “January Rainbow (Cold Winter Mix Version),” is an extended piece of digitally treated chamber music, displaced fragments of piano chords echoing as they drop through computer-generated motes.

You can’t get much more minimal than a song in which a slight twitch in the downbeat is as close as the piece comes to a hook. And that’s exactly how Mark Hamn chose to begin his phenomenal Function Buttons, on the Hungary-based netlabel Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod). Above a gaggle of light-industrial textures, his little eight-beat “Un autre chose” motif rings on each cycle with a guitar strum that’s ever so slightly off the meter, glitch as interpreted by strings. Even when distant orchestration subsumes what preceded it, the pace makes its steady way through your skull. The six-track set forges transient atmospheres out of many such steady paces, some stuttered into a confetti of broken syllables, as on “La duree d’une respiration,” others circulating with such finesse that they come to resemble the work of Philip Glass, as on “Groupe scenique” (well, once you get past the field recordings of forced overheard laughter and table-rattling moans at its opening). More on Hamn, aka Italian-born musician Francesco Giannico, at markhamn.altervista.org.