Apostolos Loufopoulos‘s “Bee” has been recognized with an Award of Distinction by this year’s Ars Electronica. It is a thrilling feat of audio imagery, putting the listener on the wings of its title subject. Much of the experience involves the illusion of motion through a three-dimensional space, but it isn’t all fast-passing objects, virtual wind, and the razor flutter of forewings. There is a martial beat that brings another illusion to the fore, the illusion of anthropomorphism (MP3).
We don’t just settle onto the bee’s back for this ride. In Loufopoulos’ telling, we appear to swear allegiance to the Queen and proceed quickly into a state of warfare. There is martial drumming that clearly intends to signal active battle. There are rat-a-tat-tat percussives that may be rooted in the rhythms of wings, but they also bring to mind machine-gun fire. There is a tonal hum that could be the kind of rapid action that presents itself as a mirage of stillness, but it also posits a psychological toll. And then there are hints at orchestral scoring, bringing to mind the big screen WWI and WWII dramas of the past. Loufopoulos’ technical mastery is state-of-the-art, but it works precisely because his allusions and entertainment instincts are splendidly old-school.
Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. Loufopoulos maintains a youtube.com presence. More on the composer at his essim.gr page. (Bee photo via itlab.us.)
Spirituals are about faith, and so it is a leap of faith that one takes when absorbing the deep dark drone that is Crypsis, a recent single-track release by Horchata. This is because the Crypsis drone, solitary and harmonically dense as it appears to be, reportedly was derived from spirituals. “Each of the song elements, there are 10 of them in this long one-hour ambient song, are from popular spirituals,” explains Horchata in a brief liner note at the releasing netlabel, 
There is a whole subgenre of latter-day trip-hop that melds the kind of reflective moodiness perpetrated by Ennio Morricone in classic movie scores and the loop-focused efforts of bedroom beatmakers. The situation, the correlation, between Morricone’s music and studio beats may be the result of a simple conflation in the public imagination, since both Morricone’s work and dub music, a key part of trip-hop’s origin, have the meldodica as one of their constituent parts. And, of course, both traffic in somber melodrama. Still, there’s no melodica in “New World,” one of the keeper tracks on Frenic‘s recent EP, Lessons from the Past (