Some of the best remixes are incidental, accidental, chance. Think of the way a favorite song sounds on an unfamiliar stereo system. Or when a specific moment of a CD (an ever so brief segment) chooses to go, anarchically, into manic loop mode on a restaurant’s creaky stereo system. Or how inadequate radio reception can transform an innocuous pop hit into something clandestine. All of the seven pieces that comprise Bird Requiem, by Summons of Shining Ruins (aka Shinobu Nemoto), are heavily distorted melodies, heard through numerous filters and decaying techniques that render the original as some rough-hewn, world-weary document. Case in point the garbled, shaky thing that is “Utan” (MP3), which has the same sort of sense of sonic withdrawal that informed Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’s Blood, the half-conscious jitters of a soul going through rapid, unsolicited detox.
Get the full set at netlabel restingbell.net, for which this is the 60th release.