Metáforas do tempo by Carlos Suárez ranges from mechanized piano that sounds like mellow Conlon Nancarrow (“Catro danzas macabras para piano”) to rhythmic melanges of found audio (the upbeat title track, the fireside atmospherics of “Memento homo”). The keepers are when Suárez is at either his most or least chaotic. “Sic transit gloria mundi” (MP3) is a heavily orchestrated mix of celebratory drumming, chanting, pneumatic percussion, and industrial grind, but what makes it is the central riff of unidentifiable soundstuff, and the constant flux of tiny samplets that fill in the spaces between the various major elements. Quite the opposite, “AlegorÃa do poder” (MP3) is a haunting expanse of low-end rumbles and eerie dissonance. Eventually it gains steam, but temporarily, and more as a singular mass of sound than the ecstatic hodgepodge of its contrasting track.
Get the full release, 10 tracks, at alg-label.com.
If memory serves sufficiently, then the purportedly imminent Singularity, such as it is envisioned in various novels by the esteemed Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan, is no more evenly distributed than is — as William Gibson put it with a characteristic axiomatic repeatability that unfortunately evades Egan — the future that is already here. Egan is the poet laureate of post-human rationalism, and in his vision, not every server farm unto which we might upload our consciousnesses runs at the same speed. There will be haves and have-nots in the post-digital future, just as there are in the digital present, and were in the pre-digital past. There will be, in the year 2050, those enjoying whatever the consensual-hallucination equivalent of retina display is, and there will be those plodding along on an old server just about capable of projecting its population as something more like virtual Lego figures. This all came to mind during a repeat listen to the chiptune collection Bit Pairat by Kupa, aka Cristian Cárdenas, who is based in Mexico City, Mexico. It opens, wisely if not uncommonly, with its strongest track, “Perdido,” which manages to be one of the best attempts ever to render dub with 8bit tools. It’s highly recommended, if only to experience the thick echoes of dub reproduced as blocky wave-like patterning.
The Microbit Project release Prosit Neujahr on a Russian netlabel also named Microbit is three brief tracks of light glitch. How light? There’s as much space as there is sound, and rarely more than two elements at once. How glitch? Short bursts of a restricted number of elements play off each other, like a forgotten algorithm caught in a tight nested loop. The result is a series of semi-random occurrences, not so much melodies as the occasional repetition of proximate materials — parallels that once in awhile make themselves heard, and leave the remote expectation of reappearance. It’s a tune that is broken, yet just barely functioning — that is a glitch rudiment, perhaps the glitch rudiment. The first track is the keeper, tiny little digital marbles making their way on a lightly textured grid, bounding, bouncing, wavering (