The 16 tracks that comprise The Coat Hanger Clinic, its title and content reportedly informed by a binge of Korean horror flicks, range from vocoded computer vocals to elegiac piano to 8-bit giddiness to abstract electronica to saccharine pop. Recorded by Cursed Chimera (aka Benatos Thompson, and formerly L.A.M.P.), it’s a purposeful mixed bag, but in that bag are some fine treats. These are the highlights: “Desi Watfah,” a mix of church bells and choking androids, intermittently punctuated by ritual percussion (MP3); “Face Breaker,” a kind of microwave patchinko noise madness that slowly lets its emotive side show (MP3); and “Two Teeth In,” which is simply good old pneumatic pounding (MP3).
http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/02_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Desi_Watfah.mp3|titles=”Desi Watfah”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/07_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Face_Breaker.mp3|titles=”Face Breaker”|artists=Cursed Chimera] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/bp054/09_-_Cursed_Chimera_-_Two_Teeth_In.mp3|titles=”Two Teeth In”|artists=Cursed Chimera]
Get the full release at archive.org. More on the musician at myspace.com/cchimera. Visit the releasing netlabel at bp.bai-hua.org.
The excellent Complementary Distribution netlabel isn’t as prolific as it has been in the past, but a recent EP makes up for lost time with five tracks by four different artists, among them nAsty, Banyek, and NiT Grit, all working broadly speaking in a dubstep vein. The highlight of the record, titled Dubstep Is Fun! Vol. 2, is by tOOk. His is a nearly six-minute piece titled “Honvágy,” which appears to mean homesickness or nostalgia in Hungarian (the label is based in Hungary, though tOOk appears to be in Belgium). The latter definition, nostalgia, fits with the sample of haunting vocals that is the core of the piece. The track opens with the voice all contorted, and when it shows up later, a verbal lamentation heard amid pounding drums and somnolent synths, it’s all the more affecting (
When they remake the film Deliverance — and they will, because everything gets remade, whether directly or indirectly — Scott Tuma (long ago guitarist with Souled American) will be hired to do the score. There will be no dueling banjos this time around. There will only be the creaky, meandering, semi-melodic noodling of old coots on a porch, a porch swamped by kudzu and collapsing under its own weight, what weight there is left in those old boards, eaten through as they have been by termites. The old coots’s half-remembered songs will break apart like the distracted thoughts they are, and they’ll be heard, in the film’s score, as mere fragments, muddied by audio effects that simulate the dank environs. That score may exist already in the form of Dandelion, Tuma’s new solo album, three tracks of which have been made available for free download by its releasing label, Digitalis. 
The cunning, big-eared, abstractionist hip-hop producer Madlib has as much Robert Rauschenberg in him as he does Afrika Bambaataa. His works are often sewn from pre-existing material, but he’s less a DJ than he is a die-hard object-oriented composer, forming from pre-existing parts these wide, broad pieces of music that are entirely his own, yet take few if any pains to lose sight of the myriad places from which those individual parts originated. Madlib’s music often has its closest equivalent not in a DJ set, or a mix tape, but in a collage — and his audio collages bring to mind some manner of large-scale cork board, covered with items that overlap each other, ever so slightly, and thus both locate unexpected parallels and highlight under-appreciated details. The resulting assemblage may seem haphazard, but it divulges its logic, and its pleasures, in time.