If great mixtapes often express inspiration through contrast, then the centuries-spanning The Varieties of Ambient Experience, compiled by Ronen Givony, is truly something. Opening with a particularly introspective reading of one of J.S. Bach‘s Goldberg Variations, it moves back to the future and forth to the reconsidered past, from recent glitchy-ambient pieces by the likes of Boards of Canada and Loscil, to early works that serve, in this context, as precognitive glimpses of the importance, often hundreds of years in advance, that near-silence and a meditative pace would (eventually) play in music (MP3).
Thus laptop-wielders such as Tim Hecker and Stephan Mathieu (the latter collaborating with Ekkehard Ehlers) are heard interspersed with half-century-old Johannes Ockeghem (by Huelgas Ensemble) and Christopher Tye (by Kronos). The classical components of most recent vintage provide a kind of pivot — these include a 99-year-old piano piece by Claude Debussy and, even more literally, the 40-year-old Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars in a 2003 remix by Aphex Twin. Also heard: Grouper, Broadcast, Múm, and others.
Givony is the founder of the excellent Wordless Music concert series in Manhattan. Get full details on the mix at percussionlab.com.
For the next few days, several fellow ardent listeners will join me here for the latest edition of Disquiet.com’s “MP3 Discussion Group.” We’ll be discussing the recent album by the Moritz von Oswald Trio, Vertical Ascent (Honest Jons). The trio is von Oswald, plus Max Loderbauer, and Sasu Ripatti. (Ripatti’s album Tummaa, recorded under the name Vladislav Delay, was the subject of last week’s “MP3 Discussion Group 
The latest bit of information about the forthcoming Gristleism gadget is just 194 KB in size, just 19 seconds of sound — but that’s a valuable chunk of information, because it’s the first evidence of the loops that are included as part of Gristleism. The device is a team-up between FM3, creators of the Buddha Machine, and Throbbing Gristle, the band that has been said to have invented industrial music. It’s a small, handheld machine containing various short loops of sound, and it includes the ability to slow and speed up each loop. The sound quality is reportedly significantly higher than was the case with the Buddha Machine, of which there have been two versions thus far.
