Joseph Branciforte’s 2018 sound journal is the gift that keeps on giving, a window into his process, an upturned glass against his studio wall. The latest entry, dating from March 6, is a mix of dreamy keyboard tones and bracing textural play. The former is a series of briefly held tones that cluster ever so slightly, like something out of one of Brian Eno’s generative-app collaborations with Peter Chilvers. The latter is a kind of elaborate, rubbery, surface-vinyl effect. It’s pushed to an occasional extreme: an irritant that becomes an element of play. How Branciforte accomplished this all is detailed in the accompanying [note](https://soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte/march-6-2018-overnight), for those who want a sense of the track’s inner workings.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte](https://soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte/march-6-2018-overnight). More from Branciforte, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at [josephbranciforte.com](http://www.josephbranciforte.com/).

Graciously arranged music can often find itself described as “balletic” — as having an aspect not unlike that of ballet. It’s a useful comparison, except for the fact that there are many types of ballet, some far more fierce than the elegant, epitome-of-grace quality that the term “balletic” is generally employed to suggest.

The track “Undercurrents (On an Optimistic Note)” by Ian Joyce is the lead one off a new four-track album. It’s a slowly growing ambient drone that has within it a host of intertwined elements. There is an underlying pad of soft spaciousness, and a small number of sinusoidal tones, and a sequence of brief moments in which the machine-like quality gives way to something that feels “played,” like there is a person at a keyboard making something happen. That the played element never veers too far from the organic-yet-automated quality is a testament to the composure of which Joyce is capable.

What makes this track balletic, then, is how those varied elements are choreographed. At times it is like watching numerous bodies float in space, and at other times it is like the finely honed sinew evident during exertion by one especially well-contoured limb.

Track originally posted to [soundcloud.com/ikjoyce](https://soundcloud.com/ikjoyce/on-an-optimistic-note). Get the full album at [ikjoyce.bandcamp.com](https://ikjoyce.bandcamp.com/album/undercurrents). More from Joyce at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/user/ikjoyce).

Steady rhythm comes easily in our time of widely available digital music technology. As a result of that ready availability, rhythm’s purpose — its origin, its impetus — is something whose exploration can distinguish a recording. A steady beat can be as comfortable for a musician as for an audience. Pushing at that sense of comfort — questioning it, pondering its power — can lend a sense of intentionality to recordings that they might lack otherwise. For example, while a lot of music takes a 4/4 beat for granted, other music tests its familiar metrics, toying with the ear’s expectations.

In “I Started Wearing Black” by the Cologne-based musician Sonae, three full minutes, nearly half the track, proceed through rumbly white noise scritchy scratch before a proper beat appears. Her track begins, that is, where many close: with the looped-groove crackle at the end of a vinyl record, albeit here expanded into a kind of sonic installation. And then, fairly suddenly, the track pounds its way quickly into the foreground at 120 bpm, and continues for two minutes. Yet even throughout its extended moment, the beat feels formed from the muted noises that preceded it. For all its mathematical certainty, it is still remote, muffled, cautious. And then, just as suddenly, it gives way to a mix of ringing tone and vinyl crackle. The beat, usually the undergirding of a recording, is here merely a memory.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/monikaenterprise](https://soundcloud.com/monikaenterprise/sonae-i-started-wearing-black), the account of Berlin-based Monika Enterprise record label. More from Sonae at [sonaemusic.net](https://sonaemusic.net/).