Amon Tobin‘s forthcoming album, Out from Out Where, due out October 15, is his fourth full-length under his own name (and his fifth full-length in all, assuming you count Adventures in Foam, which he recorded under the name Cujo). In any case, the new record distinguishes itself with a variety of tracks, including “Verbal,” a masterful vocal cut-up in the form of an abstract and entirely incomprehensible rap, and “Rosies” and “Hey Blondie,” a pair of downtempo tunes laced with psychedelic pop. “Verbal” will be available a month earlier as a single, complete with an a cappella version. Most of the tracks segue from one to another, making for a long-form listen, something Tobin has eschewed in the past for the most part, in favor of a more singles-oriented format. Also cementing the album as a long-form experience, he occasionally lifts an element from one song and embeds it in another (for example, the guitar from the opening track, “Back from Space,” shows up two tracks later, on “Chronic Tronic”). The strongest Tobin trademark — i.e., percussion from his native Brazil — is not pronounced on this album, but he does reportedly draw from a number of Bollywood film soundtracks.
Category: the crate
Sci-Fi Techno Play
Siren’s Voice is an engaging five-part audio drama about a techno musician who is contacted by a woman who claims to be from the future. The musician, whom we know by his first name, Sean, performs and records under the moniker Cyanide, and he’s embarking on an overseas tour when the woman’s voice first intrudes on his thoughts. Travel proves so exhausting to Sean that he’s not sure if the voice is his imagination or not; all he really wants is some rest and privacy. Soon enough, though, he’s intrigued by his ghostly inquisitor, whose line of questioning, delivered in a voice as ethereal as it is husky, may even be arousing him. The drama’s segments are each five minutes in length, and are available for free as MP3 files on a promotional website. (Originally the files were distributed on Napster and other peer-to-peer services, and much of the Siren’s Voice website promotes P2P file-swapping as a unique performance venue; the P2P theorizing is interesting, but in this case the message, fortunately, is more substantial than the medium by which it is transmitted.) Also available is an MP3 of a song credited to Cyanide, which according to the site was recorded once Cyanide had come to grips with his otherworldly experience. The electronic-music theme works well in Siren’s Voice, providing a stylish aural backdrop and infusing the story with a techno-spiritual vibe, like something straight out of a Japanese manga or a cyberpunk story by William Gibson or Richard Kadrey. The five-minute episodes are seamlessly edited, and the traditional tools of the electronic musician (sampling, reverb, sound effects, quick edits) are also employed in the telling of the story. Siren’s Voice was directed by Bernard Vehmeyer from a script by Willem Verhoef, with music by Roy Cordu, who records for Rush Hour, an Amsterdam-based label. They’ve successfully applied the old-time radio format to a contemporary music phenomenon set in the sci-fi near future.
Dark Ambience from 1999
Of the small stack of releases by Crawl Unit that have slowly accumulated on the shelf over the past decade, Everyone Gets What They Deserve in particular is worth revisiting regularly. Crawl Unit is the pseudonym of Joe Colley, a self-motivated, drone-oriented musician who resides in Northern California. Everyone Gets What They Deserve, released on C.I.P. Records in 1999, contains six recordings, totaling nearly an hour of cautiously layered industrial noise. The album reverses the common pop format, from whisper to scream, and instead descends from the sort of distant hum that might keep you up at night, to the kind of slightly overheard resonances that would make you shutter, if you were certain you’d heard them in the first place. The depth of Colley’s sound can best be communicated by what is not heard — that is, by the contrast between listening to this album on a pair of Walkman-style “ear buds,” and letting it play out loud on a proper stereo. “Holy Static,” the album’s opening track, is a thick chant, like some mechanistic Tuvan throat singer on autopilot. The closing track, “Flicker (Elapsing State of Grace),” makes “Holy Static” sound pastoral by comparison; it maps a sequence of sonic irritants, from a bug-like buzz to a threatening slab of white-noise, with a momentous silence somewhere in between; voices emerge at a remote distance, and eventually the quietness is threatened to be overrun by the motor in your CD player. On common small headphones, these tracks might merely sound thin and trebly, like a nearby river, or perhaps an emergency broadcast signal on a neighbor’s television. Heard aloud, so to speak — that is, on speakers at a comfortable room volume — the effect is bodily, three-dimensional. The debate over the proliferation of MP3 files has been hijacked by mere commercial concerns. Of far greater significance, one might argue, is the increasingly prevalence of poor sound quality, in MP3 files as in everyday headphones. At a time when sound quality is being ignored in favor of convenience, Joe Colley makes sound art that commands attention to details.
Sonic Diptych Recommendation
If you have on your computer any of the various free software that allows you to “DJ” with MP3 files (Disquiet, a longtime “WinTel” hostage, recently switched from PCDJ to MixVibes), it’s worth the time it takes to make a snippet of the opening, deeply ambient initial 30 seconds or so of Gustav Mahler‘s First Symphony, and to either loop it for an extended period of time, or to layer it on top of itself. The free edition of MixVibes allows two tracks to play simultaneously, but the affordable upgrade versions allow for four, even sixteen tracks. In most renditions of this Mahler symphony, such as the Leonard Bernstein on CBS Masterworks or the Christoph Eschenbach on Koch, this segment starts as quietly as can be imagined, and proceeds tentatively, as a few, light pulses introduce themselves. With most of these PCDJ-style programs, you can reduce the tempo of the track, allowing it to last longer and, generally speaking, sound deeper.
MP3 Files from Acid-Jazz Great
Ubiquity Records reported on March 23 that Greyboy, aka Andreas Stevens, the DJ who helped bring acid jazz to the United States, has delivered rough, initial tracks toward his next full-length release. (Greyboy’s longtime live act, Greyboy Allstars, helped get the careers going for such groove-oriented jam-jazz players as saxophonist Karl Denson and keyboardist Robert Walter.) In advance of the arrival of a full Greyboy disc, there remain a solid 10 free MP3 tracks available on Greyboy’s somewhat out-of-date website.
The tracks, dating from the latter half of 2001, are all drawn from a reportedly unreleased album he recorded with DJ DNO, apparently titled In the Lab. These are all relatively minimalist breakbeat tracks, looped drums enlivened by a small amount of melodic dressing. “Three Gods” layers a short, sharp harp run over a lowdown bass line and a drum pattern that retains the grit of the vinyl from which it was lifted. “Organ Grind,” a great title by the way, runs a taut organ riff over a staunch, lockstep pattern. “Street Tech” opens, uncharacteristically, with what might as well be a sample from the theme from Fame, with small bursts of anthemic, Giorgio Moroder-style synthesizers, but soon the drums come in, and in a subtle way they insinuate some swing into the initially cold keyboards by accenting an off-the-beat rhythm; the result has a light taste of Kraftwerk to it. At under three minutes a pop, these 10 tracks work well as a mini suite of downtempo counterpoint.