Category: the crate

Like perfume, ambient music comes in lots of different flavors, and it isn’t always as subtle as its fans might imagine. On Fade (Austere), Austere paints quiet music with broad strokes — singular, thick swells that can sound like giant steamships passing overhead, albeit muted by a thick ceiling and, no doubt, a pillow or two. The result here is much more corporeal than the group’s packaging suggests (all white, with barely legible typography), but that physicality is very much in the music’s favor. This is immersive stuff, ranging from vast expanses of sound to something closer in timbre to a digital didjeridu. The last track on Fade experiments with near-intelligible vocal samples, and the result is especially haunting. Worth getting lost in.

Moljebka Pvlse is actually someone named Mathias Josefson, a Stockholm, Sweden-based electronic musician. He toured the U.S. early this fall with his countryman, Mikael Stavostrand. You wouldn’t know from your first taste, but the six tracks on the appropriately titled Koan (Eibon/Prefeed) are based, in large part, on the sound of a Washburn guitar. There’s a real thrill, if that’s the appropriate term in such downbeat circumstances, to hear him work hard to posit tiny details amid huge clouds of ambiguous sound. The music seems to bend under its own weight as it progresses from one track to the next. “Micchaka” is a fairly traditional atmosphere, albeit rich beyond most electronic musicians’ abilities. “Parshva” lopes with an extremely slow, automated pace. “Zhijian” will test your speaker’s bass response with its brobdingnagian heart murmur. All the tracks fade in slowly, magnifying their dread, like a particularly bad Monday.

The last thing the world may need is another subgenre. What the world could use, though, is one or two solid compilations to define each of the various subgenres that currently occupy — or, more politely, to help adventurous listeners correlate — the ever-increasing number of electronic musicians worldwide. Lowercase (Bremsstrahlung Recordings) is one of the various names (along with “microsound,” among others) given to a realm of music that dances slowly on the precipice of the subsonic. This compilation, by a new San Diego-based label, contains 27 separate tracks by such lowercase leaders as Bernhard Gunter, Steve Roden and Taylor Dupree. Other popular names are notably absent (like Ryoji Ikeda, Oval and Tetsu Inoue), but what lowercase lacks in comprehensiveness it makes up for in other ways. First, it gives us a glimpse of tiny experiments by musicians, like kid606, who are better known for noise than for tenderness. Second, it provides a separate CD-size postcard with detailed biographical and discographical info on each of the 27 cuts’ musicians. Third, for the price of the box set’s two CDs, you get a second copy of the CDs — free. The second set’s envelope reads, “Please pass on to another curious listener,” but you won’t be blamed if you choose to hold on to both sets and mix ’em up at home.

Xencuts (Ninja Tune) is one of those collections that’s so huge it becomes almost transparent, a backdrop against which everything else we listen to takes place. The Ninja Tune record label has been home to some of the most engaging electronic musicians of the past decade, from the Brazilian-born Amon Tobin to the Russian DJ Vadim; from the label’s sample-mad co-owners (Coldcut, aka Jonathan More and Matt Black) to the jazz-inflected relative newcomers of Cinematic Orchestra; from under-sung talents (Funki Porcini) to burgeoning turntable stars (Kid Koala). All of them, and more, are represented on this compilation — which, typical of the label’s homebrew spirit, comes in more formats than one cares to recount. Suffice to say, the harder-to-find edition includes a “Missed, Flipped & Skipped” EP of rarities by Tobin, Sukia, Squarepusher and others. Even without the rarities, though, the box is essential, as it provides a clear timeline between the second-generation hip-hop that got the label started and the ongoing innovations that kept fans happily guessing over the years. Ninja Tune was founded in 1990 when More and Black achieved major-label burnout — having gained fame for work with Eric B & Rakim, Yazz and Lisa Stansfield — and chose to retreat to the independent, artful, stealth habits of their label’s namesake. Here’s to another ten years.