Category: the crate

Over the course of four full-length CDs, Steve Roach‘s Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces (Projekt, 2003) extends itself beyond the traditional realm of music. The sheer mass of sound — in terms of length as well as depth — is a challenge for listeners hung up on such arcane concerns as “song” or, for that matter, “melody.” Roach refutes such preconceptions with a ritual hum that will resonate in the body cavity and the imagination as much as it will in the ear.

These four CDs are the result of Roach’s long-running communion with his computer, which is no less a tool in his ambient toolbox than are his deeply echoing electric guitar or his pulsing, aboriginal didgeridoo. For more than 20 years, Roach has probed sounds for their essence, recording over 50 solo and collaborative albums in the process. Mystic Chords & Sacred Spaces was made on a computer, but it is not computer music, per se. It is indifferent to the metronomic synchronization inherent in most digital media. Instead, Roach pulls pure cloudstuff from his sonic source material, sounds that never quite begin or end, but just float and flow.

The album alternates between existential epiphanies and industrial dread, and it’s a triumph of widescreen ambient music that defies the listener’s sense of proportion and scale. At a low volume, it’s an aural scent, a background flavor; played loud, though, it’s a whole other world, reproduced with detail and precision. Despite this otherworldly aura, at times figments from our world surface, as with the birdsong that enlivens the track “Wren and Raven.”

Glitch is the word, have you heard? The term “glitch” is shorthand for the use, by electronic musicians, of bits of sonic material that mimic the sounds associated with everyday technology that has ceased functioning effortlessly. The most common example of glitch in pop music is what sounds like the repetitive skipping of scratched CDs. This tenacious electronica technique — found in music by Oval, Autechre, Matmos and many others — is less a genre than it is a flavor. And in the hands of Tim Hecker, glitch is more than just an Information Age trope — it’s got move, it’s got meaning. Hecker can turn what sounds like a broken record into a background groove, and he can make those repetitions sound less like echoes and more like premonitions — less like a reflexive mechanical effect and more like a compositional salvo. On the opening track of Presents Radio Amor (Mille Plateaux, 2003), “Song of the Highwire Shrimper,” the glitchy repetition comes in the form of single notes that ping slowly in a kind of decay, or quite suddenly as if something has short-circuited and a switch is being flicked on and off with great anxiety. Hecker has managed to find in this repetition a common ground with solo piano music — not only the minimalism of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, but the romantic etudes of a century or two earlier. His repetitions almost always have an arc, and when that arc is slow it has the elegance of a rolling object coming gently to rest. In terms of sheer hyperactivity, the album’s eighth track, “The Stair Compass,” is its most glitch-intensive — with all that quiet buzzing, it could easily accompany a documentary about termite infestation. Hecker’s trick is that his sounds, for all their furious friction, meld into something as soft as wool. The track that follows, “Azure Azure,” has the same sort of textural, almost visceral, richness, but it achieves this with a more monotonic haze.

“You can’t beat radio,” says an upbeat voice at the start of the song “Radio,” the opening track of Oki-Doki‘s eight-song album Vila Kula, on the Denmark-based Jenka Music label — the same folks who previously gave us the strong debut of Sofus Forsberg. What follows is R2D2’s idea of dance music: florescent baubles of synthesized pop that rush by with the effervescence of a fountain drink and the bright colors of a spring fashion show. If “Radio” is all beeps and burps, then “Jenka,” the track that follows it, vastly defies initial expectations. “Jenka” may start with a lullaby melody and rhythm, the sort of thing that accompanies battery-operated mobiles — but less than a minute in, a few gentle pauses make way for a far more ambitious composition. Not only does that synthesized beep of a melody calm down — a few key notes providing a thoughtful riff — but about two thirds of the way through the song, what sounds like an electric guitar solo quietly appears and slowly veers close to the foreground. The solo is just the sort of thing that might have spiced up a Steely Dan song way back when.

It’s downright energizing to hear what Oki-Doki manages to do with the simplest of sounds, just the sort of enjoyably saccharine pitter patter that will remind listeners of Trio (famous for the pointillist oldie, “Da Da Da”); despite the music’s playpen palette and its echo of new-wave pop, there’s nothing infantile about it. On a track titled “PW,” the tune is rendered with just enough verve to leave it up to the listener’s imagination as to whether it’s being played by hand, or if it is simply being triggered by a pre-programmed computer. Occasionally, acoustic elements make their presence heard, as with the guitar that is eventually outlined with electric beats on “Pop the Catfish.” Simply put, you can’t beat Oki-Doki’s Vila Kula.

There is a moment on NO/1, the solo debut album by Sofus Forsberg on the Denmark-based Jenka Music label, as fine as anything released this year. Well into track three, which is titled “Autotune Track,” a little buzz shuffles its way from background into the foreground. Up until that moment the track has consisted of squiggly noises and playful beats, very much like something Aphex Twin might put his name on. That little buzz is just static, additional texture, noise. It may raise the tension a little, but it’s not so much in tune or out of tune as it is apart from the tune, like something passing by, like a fleck of dust in the eye. As soon as your ear accepts it as such, though, that noise turns into a melody very much like the melody with which the tune opened; that strange little noise warps into a strange little riff, bringing to mind nothing so much as the magical anthropomorphizing utensils in Walt Disney animated films. NO/1 is rich with such detail. There’s the deep hum on “So Alone” that can feel like a scalp massage if you’re listening on a proper pair of headphones. There’s the bouncy stereoscopic play at the start of “Venice Beach,” in which reverberating tones bound from left ear to right in a delightful syncopation. Forsberg has produced 11 fine tracks, which share an attention to memorable moments but otherwise vary widely, from heavy percussive polyrhythm to spacious drone to quiet song. When he uses acoustic instruments, like the piano at the end of “Convertible Love” or what sounds like guitar at the start of “Det Ser Vi Pa,” the sounds are lightly treated — clipped or looped — in a way that blends them perfectly into his electro-acoustic palette. He recorded most of the music himself, but there are a few guests — there’s the occasional vocal by Henriette Sennenvaldt, who has Bjork’s majestic remoteness, and there’s the occasional saxophone part by Niels Bottcher, the rare untreated analog instrument in this sea of digital sounds, and just about the only thing to suggest the record was recorded on Earth.