Every week or so, the MP3 Discussion Group gets together online to talk about a recent release. The latest object of our collective, occasionally obsessive, close listening is Alphabet 1968, released on the Type Records label, and recorded by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter. The album’s 10 tracks range from epic drones to compact minimalism, with all manner of lo-fi field recordings mixed in. Type Records generously streams all its releases in their entirety on its website, and Alphabet 1968 is no exception. Below is the full album, available via the SoundCloud service:
Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:
Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”
Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.”
Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”
Lauren Giniger: “I’m an occasional rock-centric music writer who enjoys the opportunity to flex a little mental muscle deconstructing ambient works.”
The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section.
A little note on MP3 Discussion Group format: This is by no means a closed conversation, so do feel free to join in. The initial posts by participants were all written before they had an opportunity to see each other’s take on the album in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.
More on the album at its label’s website, typerecords.com, and on Richter at blacktocomm.org.
When is an album not an album? Perhaps when it consists of 20 songs — two of them topping 20 minutes each, over half over 10 minutes, none shorter than four — spread over three CDs, at which point it can feel as much like a challenge as it does an act of artistic self-expression. That’s certainly a teetering point that we’ll be debating in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group, where the object of our collective fixated listening is Leyland Kirby‘s elegiacally titled Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was, released on the label History Always Favours the Winners.
This week, the Disquiet.com MP3 Discussion Group returns to collectively given a listen to Mirroball (Metamatic Records/Universal), a new-ish album-length collaboration between two early figures in electronic pop music: John Foxx (b. 1947, original vocalist with Ultravox!) and Robin Guthrie (b. 1962, cofounder of Cocteau Twins). It’s a gauzy pop album, redolent with Foxx’s maudlin-romantic singing and Guthrie’s florid shoegazer lushness. As such, it’s a little off topic from the more abstract work generally featured on Disquiet.com, but between its opulent haze makes it a peer to the kind of work that’s often cited on Disquiet.com, and Guthrie’s shoegazer credentials played a role in the decision-making, too. For reference, the track listing is as follows:
This week, the Disquiet.com MP3 Discussion Group returns to collectively given a listen to two albums released this year by the duo Mountains: Choral (cover at left — on the Thrill Jockey label) and Etching (cover below — and which Mountains self-released). Mountains is Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, and they traffic in a rich and unique realm of drone-music, in which rural guitar atmospheres and acoustic elements mingle amid lush, beautiful harmonic fields. A previous Mountains album, Sewn, was one of the top-10 albums of the year on Disquiet.com in 2006 (
Participating in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are: Julian Lewis: “I write much of 
This week, the MP3 Discussion Group extends its Finnish fixation, by focusing its collective ears on the album Dustland by the duo Gentleman Losers — this following up recent group discussions of two efforts by Finland’s Sasu Ripatti (