Month: May 2012

At 1:39, suspicions are verified. In the expansive world of experimental music, it’s pleasant to listen to each new individual track as a standalone entity, to take it as a self-contained whole, let its internal coherence be the ear’s sole guide — but there’s always some bit of metadata to help shape the imagination in advance. It may be a title giving white noise a conceptual framework, or it might be a brief annotation, alloying the sonic abstractions with facts about performance technique. Or it may, simply, be the musician’s name.

Hey Exit is Brendan Landis, whose experiments in music and sound generally employ some manner of string-based instrumentation (guitar, koto), a dose of noise-based sonic perception, and sometimes digital processing. So, when “It’s Just an Ugly Thing to Say,” a track he recently uploaded to his soundcloud.com/hey-exit account, begins with a slowly played acoustic guitar, the ears do two things: first, they wait for the noise, and second, they listen for the potential processing. They wonder, when the acoustic guitar’s notes begin to double, if that is two fingers, or if there is a digital tool being enabled as a subtle level. The sequence is slow, distantly folk-like.

And then, at 1:39, a note kicks in that is far beyond the guitar’s fundamental range. It is a single held note: a round, sour bit of sine-wave emersion that sways a little here and there. It blankets the guitar but doesn’t mute it. It confirms that this is, indeed, Hey Exit, and that a throwback John Fahey fan hasn’t hijacked his SoundCloud account. And it plays with the foregrounded guitar part, as the ear seeks out harmonic alignments and metric significance. It lasts for just over a minute, this tone, and then disappears. But like a bright light impressed upon the retina, it leaves an after image.

More on Landis, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at heyexit.com.

Mark Browne‘s Malapert and Erratic is an expansive and ambitious project: seven tracks, one over twenty minutes in length, none shorter than six minutes, all with lengthy titles somewhere between a Dickensian subtitle and a Fluxus manifesto, such as “Adjusting the Windows in the Loneliness of My Car so That the Wind Whistles Through at an Ill Defined Pitch and Volume.” But the true mark of the album’s broad goals is the way it mixes such seeming disparate elements as improvisation, jazz, field recordings, and noise into one rich associative endeavor. The strongest track may be the longest, “From the Diaries of the Too Numerous Cursed Poets.” It is a deeply coded narrative of dark intonations and frazzled nerves. Browne’s sound may be abstract, but he isn’t uncomfortable explicating his maneuvers in text. Accompanying the album is a lengthy PDF, with track-by-track notes. This is what Browne says of his “From the Diaries”:

This piece was devised for boiling water, hot fat, synthesizer and sopranino saxophone. This is the second piece I have recorded using this instrumentation and approach and is largely the result of finding the appeal in listening to Noise Music at low volume levels. The piece uses four frying pans initially containing only water. Variation is created by allowing the pans to nearly boil dry, adding and melting fat into the water, and adjusting the gas. The synthesizer uses a touch pad that can be operated using a small stone allowing the saxophone to be played.

Get the full album at linearobsessional.bandcamp.com. It was released by the London-based netlabel linearobsessional.weebly.com. This is the first Linear Obsessional release to be featured on Disquiet.com.

Burble, burble. This is “Finally Sunny,” a nearly four-minute piece by Rawore uploaded to his soundcloud.com/r-37 account. It’s a bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus. The melody takes the form of occasional tones that move up and down and up again in a manner that suggests a loose, genial structure. What makes the melody especially enjoyable isn’t the tune itself, though it is a lovely fragment of a tune, but instead the manner in which the motion of the tune resembles the ping-ponging percussive effects amid which the steadily bounding tones appear. The blurring of foreground and background is splendid.

For his part, Rawore provides only the slightest of contextual information, a description that clearly suggests its intended readership — true to the workshop nature of so much of SoundCloud — is soleley his fellow musicians: “playing around with audio damage tools. phosphor synth and ronin effect.”

More on Rawore, aka Bob Phillips, at raworeb.blogspot.com.