Ben Fleury-Steiner and Christopher McFall teamed up for The Dirty and the Clean, a three-track EP released earlier this year on the con-v.org netlabel. The music is a soundtrack to a journey through urban neglect. This much is clear in the sounds: the sullen stride of a wary wanderer, the gathering clouds of impending violence, the minor-key sense of concern. Whether it’s the metallic clanking of the first track (MP3; they’re all listed as “untitled”), the enveloping whirl with which opens the second (MP3), or the sour tonality of the third (MP3), they’re each a highly detailed map — not of a place, but of an emotional state. Fleury-Steiner explains the process in a brief liner note at the con-v.org website. He likens the performance/compositional process to “creating a musical environment I intended throughout to be a kind of reclaiming of what lay beneath the taken-for-granted, indeed, ‘dirty’ city underbelly.”
Get the full release at con-v.org, where it’s also downloadable as massive, “loss-less” FLAC files.
More on Fleury-Steiner at myspace.com/bfsprojects, and on McFall at myspace.com/christophermcfall.