As Grassy Knoll, musician Bob Green has recorded some of the most rarefied ambient jazz, as well as some of the most raucous mashups. They were proto-mashups when he first started out doing them, taking the best parts of classic-rock songs and out-jazz jams, and making momentum-driven new things out of them. He’s posted one such contrapuntal conglomeration at his feedtheenemy.com blog. Green subtitles the site “music you haven’t heard yet,” but in this case it’s more a matter of “music you’ve heard — just not in this manner.” Moving back and forth between hardened riffs and snippets of solo piano, he proves that in music, as in food, sometimes leftovers are even tastier than they were the first time around. The track is titled “Are You Ready to Testify” (MP3), and Knoll/Green welcomes listeners to train-spot the source material
Warning: the opening of the cut is, as they say on the Internet, “not safe for work.”
Six drones comprise Glenn Ryszko‘s album Machine, but they’re only drones in a very general sense. There is texture, percussion, and even form — yes, form, the seeming antithesis of drone-craft — inherent in these works. Take the fourth track (“Machine 004” — that’s how they’re all titled, just the number changing, like pieces moving off an assembly line), for example: There’s a lazy sway to its thick warble; it moves like a sine wave doubling as a kid’s swing set on a hot summer day. But this drone, even at just under three minutes, doesn’t merely stick to that. In time, a higher-pitched tone enters, like a distant prayer bell — and the piece’s fadeout is so slow, that it’s not merely a matter of closure; it’s akin to narrative, as each constituent sound slowly disappears (
