The sonic raw materials with which Gabriel Hernandez constructed his album Long, lointain probably wouldn’t fill a shoebox. Hernandez, who makes music under the name GoGooo, built each of the album’s 10 tracks from what essentially amounts to a shared set of related sounds: bell and organ tones, natural and urban field recordings, quiet singing, and overheard voices. And like any other meaningful keepsake, it’s a shoebox that listeners will learn to cherish.
The tracks balance those elements to varying degrees of emphasis, some heavy on song, others heavy on sound. On several, the raw noise captured by Hernandez’s microphone is left virtually unmediated. That’s the case with two that appear close to the end of Long, lointain: “Lueur,” which could be pebbles mixed by hand in a wet slurry, and “LÃ ,” in which raindrops are eventually joined by hand bells (or, perhaps, wind chimes). Those bells are the distinguishing factor between the two tracks, for in “LÃ ”the bells introduce a melodic component, if not a proper melody, whereas “Lueur”is pure field recording. In “LÃ ”the bells strike the ear as music, all the more so because the field recording part of the piece eventually fades and the bells are, briefly at the track’s end, revealed as a separate audio layer, a matter of subtle artifice. The same method informs a track titled “Calme,”in which noises similar to those in “Lueur”are joined late in the work by a slowly played harmonica; it’s an injection of melody that is all the more arresting because it fails to resolve, fails to return to its root note, before “Calme”ends.
Long, lointain, released late in 2007 on the French label Baskaru, is a small masterpiece of such elegant maneuverings between the natural world and composed sound. Consider for the sake of contrast the two tracks on Long, lointain furthest from “Lueur”and “LÃ ”along the spectrum from sound to song: “Prés de L’arbe”and “Partir Loin.”The former opens with a tune strummed and plucked on an acoustic guitar. That guitar line distinguishes it from the rest of the album. The finger-picking is something one might expect not from a sound artist like Hernandez but from some singer-songwriter — except for two things: first, the detail of the recording focuses on the texture of the strings to a fetishistic degree, aligning it with the high fidelity of the field recordings, and second, as the piece proceeds small echoes extend and enhance the guitar playing, making it feel epic despite its meager dimensions. The piece is somehow, at once, as peaceful as a John Fahey koan and as anthemic as a U2 song. After a brief bridge passage of field noise, the guitar returns transformed, the texture amplified, the plectrum activity layered until it achieves a gentle noise.
“Partir Loin,” despite the rough sounds and birdsong with which it opens, is the closest thing to a proper song on the album. It serves as a kind of reward, or dessert, coming as it does at the end of the record. Played out like an introspective organ solo, it’s enlivened by occasional bell tones and small touches of field recordings. In its closing moments, which is to say in the closing moments of the album, those real-world noises rise to the fore, reminding the listener of the variety of materials that were heard earlier.
The remainder of Long, lointain falls somewhere between those two types of music, between the framed field recording and the gestural song. The album opens with “Derrière,” its initial ring — like a call for worship or a ritual in advance of meditation — soon sharing audio-space with lulling swells. “Echappée” dives deeper into belltone, swirling in ghostly noises. “Je Ne Te Vois Plus” has the rough toil of those “Lueur,” mixed with more of those gently swaying bells; the real-world sounds seem more magnified here than elsewhere on the album, yielding a hyperreal experience, the way a hair can look like a snake when plucked from context. “Les Nuages Flottent” is a solo organ piece, performed as if the organist is stuck inside a church while the rain, heard just outside, keeps him from leaving. “Affleurement” returns to the guitar of “Prés de L’arbe”but applies a fair amount of digital effects, extending the tones with a ripe artificiality, which is set in contrast to a clock-tick backing beat and the voices of children at play; the use of the kids’s voices here, and of labor elsewhere on Long, lointain, bring to mind Bob Ostertag’s early work at remixing field recordings, Sooner or Later.
I rarely — which is to say, probably not frequently enough — note who masters a recording, but it’s difficult not to connect the meticulous detail of Long, lointain, along with its avant-folk feel, with the fact that the album was mastered by Greg Davis, who achieved a foundation of rural ambience on such albums as Arbor and Somnia.
More on Hernandez/GoGooo at gogooo.free.fr and on the Baskaru label at baskaru.com.
Finally had a chance to watch The War Within, to which I was looking forward primarily because its score is credited to the Free Association, a group of musicians working in cahoots with DJ and composer David Holmes. Holmes is an occasional Steven Soderbergh collaborator, most notably as creator of the scores to Out of Sight (1998) and the three Ocean’s movies (2001, 2004, 2007), and he’s also done excellent work on such films as Code 46 (2003) and Stander (2003), both of which emphasized his interest in 1970s soul grooves and, as time has passed, an increasingly light touch.
(1) A Late Winter: First Snow, the Guy Pearce film, came out about a year ago, but Cliff Martinez‘s score only saw release last week, at least according to iTunes, which lists the release date as June 10, 2008. The score’s 20 tracks of intimate yet abstract soundscapes, with occasional moments of traditional instrumentation, are of the sort that have earned previous Martinez scores, notably that to Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris, a dedicated following. According to iTunes, the record label for the score is YFG Records, LLC. That would be the Yari Film Group, which released First Snow. The film was directed by Mark Fergus, who wrote the screenplay to Children of Men.
(2) Live Beats: A new single by J. Rawls takes one of the great instrumental hip-hop tracks, the backing music to the Beatnuts‘s “Off tha Books” (off the 1997 album Street Crazy), and refashions it with sinewy live instrumentation. It’s a jazz fusion hybrid of hip-hop that Rawls has practiced previously, but fortunately none of the slickness that marked his 2006 album The Liquid Crystal Project is heard here. The flipside of the new single pays similar tribute to Da Beatminerz. The tracks are available on a 7″ single (titled “A Tribute to the Beatnuts/ A Tribute to Da Beatminerz”) from Polar Entertainment.
(3) Calm Before the Drums: The recent album Dharma Dance (Popgroup) by Japanese beat figure DJ Baku is a little heavy on the rock’n’roll, a little tight to the 4/4, but the opening track, simply titled “Intro,” elegantly layers street noise, orchestral overtones, and distant piano to rich effect, slowly building over the course of its brief but detailed minute-and-a-half length.
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. In fact, the album, Hudson River Wind Meditations (Sound True), collects music that Reed has explained he first recorded entirely for himself — “as an adjunct to meditation, T’ai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life — to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature.” Heard in sequence, “Move Your Heart” has the sing-songy ebb and flow of an everyday drone, rocking back and forth like a small boat, while “Find Your Note” adds ringing tones that suggest a prayer bowl was sourced. Then comes “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance),” which is comprised of the white noise of field recordings. And then the whole thing closes on “Wind Coda,” which begins with a refrain from “Move Your Heart,” and soon moves to elements from “Find Your Note” and adds in some of the atmospheric material from “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance).” That last piece serves as a kind of meta-coda, a form of compositional reflection applied to inherently reflective music. More info at 
(2) A Xylophone’s Spots: It’s true that Snöleoparden‘s self-titled album, due for March 3 release on the Rump label, isn’t as inherently electronic as Rump’s usual fare, but with its emphasis on a child’s xylophone and its communal, folk-core vibe, it’s right at home. The opening track, helpfully titled “Nr. 1,” layers sleepytime mallet-work above an increasingly squelchy noisemaker. “Xylofon” is a multitrack wonder, all pointillist glee, like if Steve Reich had written music for Sesame Street; “Lillecykel” employs the same tool set, but toward a more dissonant and quasi-ethnomusicological end. With a nasal whine in the background and cabal of guitars in the foreground, “Water Puppet Theatre” is what T-Rex might sound like if it were still recording today. And those are just a few of the album’s 11 tracks. Snöleoparden is a pseudonym for Jonas Stampe, of the groups Mofus and Badun. More info at 
(3) A Quiet Legend: The great movie-score composer James Newton Howard can fill modern cineplex with the ethereal and the bombastic. Those are his minimal-techno tone poems in Michael Mann’s Collateral and Tony Gilroy’s recent directorial debut, Michael Clayton. But he’s also capable of potting up the orchestral and ethnic percussion, matching the music’s histrionics to the starring actors’s wattage, as he has of late in Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith — not to mention the old-school romanticism he’s brought to M. Night Shyamalan’s films. Howard’s scores, like the movies they accompany, have different audiences — and, as the ongoing awards season suggests, different admirers. Tellingly, his Blood Diamond work was nominated for a Grammy, while Clayton is up for an Oscar. Minus the introspection of the latter or the globalization topicality of the former, I Am Legend (Varèse Sarabande) is unlikely to attract many nominations. But fans of Howard’s less volatile scores shouldn’t pass it by. The cue titled “I’m Sorry” strikes the perfect balance between melodic infusion required in a Hollywood blockbuster and the hazy sound design to which the composer seems more naturally inclined. In it, a piano part is echoed and amplified by a string ensemble, each note setting off low-key undulations in the orchestration, and later the piano gives way to an elegiac horn. More info at 
(4) Test Tube, Baby: The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks to which I keep returning most often is the title track off The Door by Multi-Panel (aka Dutch musician Ludo Maas), on the Test Tube netlabel. The song is a mere shimmer of a recording, but it’s lent some texture thanks to a heavily processed vocal sample.(
(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (
(2) Even with the John Fahey-esque guitar runs that constitute such as albums as Sunshrine and O True Believers, the latter spiced with sitar, there was little in introspective guitarist James Blackshaw‘s output to necessarily prepare listeners for the Metal Machine Music-quality industrial drone that is “Clouds Collapse” off his excellent recent The Cloud of the Unknowing (
(3) There’s a sped-up vocal, yeah, on rapper Percee P‘s “Watch Your Step,” produced by Madlib (it’s off Percee’s Perseverance album — both single and album on 
(4) The track “Glitchfarben” on last year’s Clear the Club (