Earlier this year, a track by Hoist made an especially strong impression. Titled “Bleakscape,” it featured a drone that brought to mind a slow meander, a kind of edging away from the sense of stasis that is often a key constituent part of a drone-based piece of music. Showing himself to be no mere drone-centric composer, Hoist recently posted another track, titled “Skittery I (excerpt),” which like “Bleakscape” signals its sound with its name. On first listen, it is all tentative pixelation, a lo-impact pixel-dust rendition of the modular synthesizer experiments that Keith Fullerton Whitman has been making on such albums as Generator. What it shares with “Bleakscape” is a sense of drift, here heard as a mix of shifting layers that lead to slight alterations in counterpoint, like if Steve Reich had scored the video game Centipede:
More on Hoist, aka Charlie Hoistman, at soundcloud.com/hoist and snowofbutterflies.com.
This post is a make-up from yesterday, when I failed to do a (week)daily Downstream post. I’d messed up the WordPress calendar system.