NB: I usually don’t use the “more” tag to break a post into two parts, only the first of which appears on the home page, but the Bandcamp embedded player is breaking in several browsers on the iPad. On Mac and PCs, it looks fine, but in iOS, something is up — it appears in the upper-left corner of the page. Needless to say, if anyone reading this has insight into such things then I am, as always, all ears.
The drones of Cinchel‘s recent five-track album, friday”‹.”‹deconstrucion, harbor illusions. At the end of a listen to the record, and multiple listens are suggested, the result is a series of memories whose subject, brief riffs that stood out, prove difficult if not impossible to locate during a subsequent listen. On the surface, the tracks are steady-as-she-goes minimalism, burbling feats of low-key momentum, but close attention, even if it fails repeatedly to align with memory, reveals the drones as, in fact, the combined effort of numerous tiny percussive elements: treble scintillate, throaty bass-region chords, textured cloud-like gaseous effects, urgent yet muted timpani. They’re each like a low resolution Fourier series approximation of a curve, turning a sinuous shape into a stepwise gradient.
For the first seven minutes and fifty seconds of the track “Unconscious Listening III” by Gutta Percha, it’s all murky noise, the gentle creepiness of industrial industrial music. But a second later, at 7:51, everything changes. A true oldie pops up, like someone flipped a switch on the radio. It’s ballroom nostalgia, dancing cheek to cheek, but the signal is marred, either the band caught in a time slip or the vinyl record left out in the rain. The melody is indelible, even if it is forced to stop and restart repeatedly. Percha manages to have it both ways, to treat the listener to a great song, and to mark it up, to deface it (
Static means different things to different people. The surface noise of vinyl. A programming error. A cable disconnect. Interference from a cellphone, a crossed signal. To some musicians, all of the interpretations, all of the guesses, are crossed signals — and to these musicians the static is yet another thing: a compositional element, one that itself signals a consciousness of the intrinsic failure inherent in technology. It can ring of nostalgia (a sonic palimpsest, the Ghost of Data Past), and it can suggest what’s yet to come (message seeping in from the future). In the case of Gastón Arévalo, the glitch is matched, in a track titled “Agreste,” with a lulling sensibility, a marshy, singsongy slow wave that neither suffocates nor is irritated by the glitch’s spiny presence. That balance is the track’s major accomplishment, and the source of its pleasure:
They are likely intended as interludes, even if they equal the number of vocal tracks. The album is The Travelers Ghost (no apostrophe), credited to Skipless. The tracks in question are all downtempo excursions into instrumental hip-hop, the beats wobbly and often pleasingly off-kilter, the mood smokey, The surface noise right in your ear if not your face. They’re also quite consistent. A lot of netlabel instrumental hip-hop albums feature one, maybe two, standout tracks, and a whole lot of material that either could have used more time in the sampler-cum-incubator. One of the tracks acknowledges its interlude status, including the word in its title, parenthetically — “Time (Interlude).” It’s all looped bass and drums, sodden vocal snippets, and dubby echo (