The Tumblr Album (MP3)

Sol Rezza's free-download album makes expert personal use of the ubiquitous curatorial tool

There is a techno heart somewhere deep in Sol Rezza‘s “The Existence of the Light Part III.” It’s in the wisp of a beat that patters along beneath everything else, a pixel tick tock. There’s a current of a beat above that, too, a more thorough pulse, one that fades in early and out late, that again has some semblance of techno to it. But the music is, after a brief moment at the start that suggests a clear genre slot, adventurous and spacious and adventurous in its spaciousness.

There’s plenty use of techno’s flavors, notably gurgling synth and those bauble beats, that bring Underworld to mind, that ability to have one foot in the rave and another in the gallery, both in the same pair of shoes.

This single track is, as its title suggests, part of a large-scale “album,” more a collection of images, still and moving, and text fragments as well as voluminous sounds that makes extremely creative use of the Tumblr publishing system’s inherent promise as a cabinet of curiosities. This screenshot below is just a narrow band of Rezza’s generous spectrum:

Track found via devinsarno.com. The large-scale project is housed at light.radio-arte.com, a subset of Rezza’s radio-arte.com webiste. She is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Grouper Takes Dead Moon’s “Demona” Literally

A punk favorite goes through the ambient pulper

Grouper has covered an old punk-rock song. Grouper has channeled has an old punk-rock song into something akin to a deep drone. Grouper has accomplished this task not by undermining the original but, in fact, showing it deep respect — by, in essence, taking the song’s lyrics literally, especially the lines about how the title figure “comes in shallow light and disappears” and, later, the cryptic vision of a “silent chamber.” The song, “Demona” by Dead Moon, is in her rendering (Grouper is one person: Liz Harris) a deeply fuzzed out figment, less a song than the song equivalent of the illusion of water that results from hot tarmac being viewed at a distance on a sunny day. The melody and chord structure and overall shape are retained, but they’re produced in a way that makes the term “shoegaze” insufficient — this is “shoehaze” or “shoedrone” or “songdrone” or what-does-it-matter because trying to place the song in a tidy box is very much at odds with the ephemeral quality of the sound that it aspires to (MP3). It sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick wall. It isn’t wall-of-sound; it’s wall-as-filter.

[audio:http://media.xlr8r.com/files/downloads/mp3s/Demona.mp3|titles=”Demona”|artists=Grouper]

The track was made available for free download by Yeti, the magazine in whose latest issue it appears as part of an enclosed 7″ (along with three other songs, apparently not available for free promotional download).

Found via xlr8r.com and thefader.com. More on Grouper at her site. The original can be heard on youtube.com. It is redolent with a particular quality of guitar playing, one that is at once lackadaisical and jarring, and is distinct to a certain realm of non-hardcore punk

Industrial/Drone/Chimes: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of January 2012

There were 38 posts on Disquiet.com in January 2012, and the most popular were as follows:

(1) a consideration of white noise in the work of Phil Julian (“A Variety of Noises, White and Otherwise”), (2) a “Sneak Peek at New Disquiet.com Project: Disquiet Junto,”, (3) the fuzzy beats of Would-Be Messiahs (“Hairshirt Industrial”), (4) a work for dual wind chimes by Josh Davison, aka Stringbot (“Chimes and More Chimes”), (5) Alarm Will Sound performing a syncopated work by Liza White (“When a Chamber Ensemble Sounds Like a Jazz Ensemble Sounds Like Breakbeat”), (6) a pair of tracks off Michal Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly), (7) “Russian Post-Turntable Turntablism” by Mizontiq, and (8) “Sketch of a Drone / Drone as Sketch,” on a piece by Pacers that at times sounds like a church organ being tuned by an especially patient and exacting workman. Also: not (9) one but (10) two automated selections of what has happened in the previous week at twitter.com.disquiet.

The most popular searches (searches that didn’t yield null results) were: harold budd live, junto, autechre, best of 2010, In the Echo of No Towers, souns, mark harris, saito koji, Kahlen, weir, would-be messiahs, airport, brian eno, Carrie Underwood, compilations.