Burble, burble. This is “Finally Sunny,” a nearly four-minute piece by Rawore uploaded to his soundcloud.com/r-37 account. It’s a bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus. The melody takes the form of occasional tones that move up and down and up again in a manner that suggests a loose, genial structure. What makes the melody especially enjoyable isn’t the tune itself, though it is a lovely fragment of a tune, but instead the manner in which the motion of the tune resembles the ping-ponging percussive effects amid which the steadily bounding tones appear. The blurring of foreground and background is splendid.
For his part, Rawore provides only the slightest of contextual information, a description that clearly suggests its intended readership — true to the workshop nature of so much of SoundCloud — is soleley his fellow musicians: “playing around with audio damage tools. phosphor synth and ronin effect.”
More on Rawore, aka Bob Phillips, at raworeb.blogspot.com.
Alan Morse Davies has been posting some of his earliest work recently. He’s associated with the process of slowing down, though his work is often more complicated than simply the mechanical action of reducing the pace of his source material. A single dating from 1984, released under the moniker AED, shows him on the gentle side of things from early on. By his telling, the single made it onto the John Peel show, and sold some 17,000 copies. The A side, “Infer Ships Sink,” has a British folk feel to it, with hints of Robert Wyatt and, perhaps, Syd Barrett. The B side is where the action was — or, more to the point, the enjoyable inaction. Titled “Emporium Halls Pt. 4,” it’s described by him in his post briefly as “layered slowed down birdsong” (