Category: the crate

In the face of countless electronic-music compilations, the Luaka Bop record label, run by David Byrne, faux-hubristically titled its entry The Only Blip Hop Record You Will Ever Need — and then added Vol. 1, in order to further hedge its bets. The album’s 13 tracks include work by Mouse on Mars, To Rococo Rot (in collaboration with I-Sound), Doctor Rockit (better known these days as Matthew Herbert), among others. By “blip hop” is meant that pop-minded brand of electronic music that, for all its skittery rhythms and scraped together samples, is still identifiable as pop music, what with its emphasis on danceable beats and soundbite-memorable riffs. The phrase “blip hop” is unlikely to surface as the defining term in electronica, any more than “glitch” or “IDM” or, for that matter, “electronica,” but it is a useful hybrid. “Blip” stands for the simple, lo-fi tones that typify “glitch” electronic music, sounds that often seem to have derived from malfunctioning equipment. “Hop” is cleaved from “hip-hop,” which is to say rhythmically inventive pop music made from spare parts (two turntables and a microphone).

The liner notes, by Byrne himself, confirm his potential as a standup music critic. They evidence the kind of wit and insight associated with his forbearers, the cutup composers John Cage and Eric Satie. The lengthy essay is titled “Machines of Joy” and subtitled “I Have Seen the Future and It Is Squiggly” and it opens with a deadpan reflection on how the “cold damp climate” of Northern Europe, which he posits as the birthplace of the genre, is responsible for everything from the region’s highly “symbiotic relationship” with machines to its inhabitants’ philosophical “inward”ness and, as a result, the music that helps humans dance like computers. Byrne, it should be noted, is Scottish.

Given the likelihood that fans of David Byrne, best known for his work with the art-pop band Talking Heads, are going to purchase this album, it couldn’t have started off better than it does, with Mouse on Mars’ “Mykologics,” which sounds like a remix of the Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody).” To the uninitiated, many of these tracks will sound more like blueprints than like songs, what with their uniformly unflappable spare-ness. Pickadelic‘s “Burn Mamacita,” with its swollen drumming and its light accent of dub reggae, sounds more like the foundation of a world-music cut than a final edit. On first and tenth listens, Mental Overdrive‘s “Gravity Sucks, Maan” will have you waiting for a vocal to, finally, cut in — but it never does. The compilation was made with the uninitiated in mind, and it’ll satisfy curiosity many times over. Much of the music is, true to the collection’s mock-historical liner notes, history: the Mouse on Mars track is from 1999, the Mental Overdrive from ’98, the Pickadelic from ’97; in a kind of meta-compilation mode, one track (Skist‘s “Shift”) is from the original Clicks & Cuts compilation. But there is new music, too, including a vocal cover of an Autechre instrumental (“Gnit,” off Tri Repetae++) by Maria Daulne (of Zap Mama), and a track by Vibulator, which turns out to be Byrne himself.

The Dorobo record label has produced a four-track compilation of resolutely elemental sounds. The title of the compilation is Grain, which suggests both the physical-world reality of dust and texture, and the compositional technique known as “granular synthesis.” (Granular synthesis involves the production of a long-form composition as the end result of individual actions made on exactingly brief sound samples.) The album includes work by four Australian composers: Philip Samartzis (“Microphonics”), Pimmon (“Slegner Forgets”), Darrin Verhagen (“_frame”) and David Brown (“Voices of the Air Shaft”). At nearly 18 and a half minutes in length, “Microphonics” is the longest, and most widely ranging, piece on the album. From small scratchy sounds, to nearby bells and distant voices, it might be a recording made of a composer’s workshop with a window left open — while the composer is asleep on the couch. Pimmon’s entry is considerably more static, unnervingly so, with the quiet hum of an after-hours industrial site. Verhagen’s is quieter still, at least at the start, albeit with a more lively percussive element, by far the warmest thing on the entire album. Brown’s “Voices” is shrill and dramatic, and appears to have been derived from orchestral music; there are sounds of string sections and percussion and coarsely edited vocals. It is as eventful as the rest of the album is quiet, and ends even more suddenly than it begins.

The title of the compilation Music to Listen to Music By (Privatelektro Records) may have been intended as a joke, but it’s worth taking at least a little seriously — what with John Cage’s famous comparison, in his book Silence, of music to wire sculptures through which one views other things. The album title suggests music that is so quiet that it can be added to other music like so much salt and pepper. In fact, though, it isn’t volume that distinguishes the 13 cuts here from pop music; it’s their eschewing of static metrical structure for a more open form, like the industrial static and drone of Alias‘ “Darkdust” and the semi-chaotic jitters of triPhaze‘s “Kilmarnok.” There is no self-apparent downbeat, or chorus, or verse, to be heard on most of the album. Instead there’s the ominous “Early Walk to the Busstation” (also credited to triPhaze), which sounds like a UFO field recording, a theme picked up on “300 Years and Waiting,” which teams triPhaze with another contributor to the compilation, listed here as Mr. Sakori. One other thing, besides a purposeful lack of rhythm, that binds much of the tracks together is the presence of vocal samples, which share a B-movie flavor. An alternate title might have been Music to Witness Alien Invasions By.