The songlessness of experimental music is often overstated. Autechre’s distressed digital inventions, for example, gain from their cover art an association with impossible architectures, things that CAD software can imagine but no general contractor could actually build. XYZR_KX of Chicago, aka Jon Monteverde, took the challenge upon himself to transform the turntable-laden, scratch-infused, murky wonderment of “Goz Quarter,” off the 15-year-old Envane EP by Autechre, and turn it into something playable — playable on guitar, no less. His resulting work trades the subsumed hip-hop of the original for something closer to dub, and while hearing the melodyishness of “Goz Quarter” is a pleasure, the real richness of the track is how the dubby environment has the echoed strings and bits of percussion swirling around each other and never … quite … coming … into … sync. By mimicking the song’s melodic path, XYZR_KX has produced a cover; by re-engineering the piece’s inherent complexity, he has produced a tribute.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/xyzr_kx. More on XYZR_KX/Monteverde at xyzrkx.com.
Alan Morse Davies has been posting some of his earliest work recently. He’s associated with the process of slowing down, though his work is often more complicated than simply the mechanical action of reducing the pace of his source material. A single dating from 1984, released under the moniker AED, shows him on the gentle side of things from early on. By his telling, the single made it onto the John Peel show, and sold some 17,000 copies. The A side, “Infer Ships Sink,” has a British folk feel to it, with hints of Robert Wyatt and, perhaps, Syd Barrett. The B side is where the action was — or, more to the point, the enjoyable inaction. Titled “Emporium Halls Pt. 4,” it’s described by him in his post briefly as “layered slowed down birdsong” (