In an interview with the duo Les Freres Courvoisier, member Joshua Smith is quoted as saying of his LFC colleague, Jonathan Canupp:
Jon is one of the bigger names, I think, in IDM these days, which means, really, that 5,000 dudes with glasses have downloaded your music from Soulseek.
Full interview at westword.com. More on the group at soundcloud.com/les-freres-courvoisier and acrerca.com/lesfrerescourvoisier.
The Taalem label circulates its music in various ways. There are CD-Rs, FLAC files, a streaming radio station. No MP3s, aside from excerpts, but since we’re talking about Taalem, we’re talking to some extent about drone music, which means an excerpt, at upwards of five minutes, is longer than what many musicians working in electronica would consider a proper song. Case in point, “Jule 0” by Pollypraha, off the Jule album, one of three released by Taalem on Halloween. (Taalem is based in Paris, so this may not have been a meaningful date — it may simply have been October 31.) Pollypraha is Japan’s Takeyuki Hakozaki, and “Jule 0” is an extended, slowly executed wave form, a series of wave forms, really, that strive in loose conglomeration to avoid any semblance of a down beat without ever fully evaporating (MP3). And it — or, that is, they succeed.
Full details on release at taalem.com. More on Hakozaki at myspace.com/pollypraha.
A lot of electronically mediated music and sound is described as “brainy,” usually with the term employed to suggest (or perhaps cover) dismissive intent. The word, though not the negative connotation, applies fully to Ganzfeld State by FSK1138, aka musician Donald Baynes. To record the lightly rhythmic works, Baynes used electroencephalography to map his own brainwaves back in August, and then used that data as the basis for the album’s sound. Some of the tracks add in vocal samples, among them an opening remix (a “Roshak Edit” of a song titled “Beneath Me,” which features a voice over from the Watchmen movie adaptation) and a track titled “I See Calculus,” in which the phrase is spoken over the electronica equivalent of an old radiator spewing metallic rhythms and hiss.
The standout track may be “Hushed,” which dispenses with the verbal toying and puts all its eggs in a fragile basket true to its title (MP3), a lightly flanged whir over the tribal beats of dust mites.
Get the full release at the Panospria netlabel (notype.com) or at its archive.org page.
It’s rare that an act manages to pull off what Underworld does — locate a place where populist techno pulses its way deep into a noirish zone. There’s a whole lot of Underworld inside Etienne Jaumet, whose Night Music EP came out recently. Case in point, the collection’s lead track, “For Falling Asleep,” an upbeat-yet-dreamy swath of head-nodding 4/4 fun, all the flurrying synth action of a Dario Argento soundtrack, and enough Tangerine Dream”“style counterpoint to keep things interesting (MP3). There’s also layers of saxophone that bring to mind Spring Heel Jack before they went deep into the realm of free improv. More on Jaumet at myspace.com/etiennejaumet and at dominopublishingco.com.
