Rare these days is the glitch album that doesn’t ultimately disappoint. Like “dubstep,” the term “glitch” has been yanked from its utility and, a victim of its relative success, turned into a label attached to music by companies and musicians eager for the association, though not for the ingenuity necessary to really earn the rubric. In the case of “glitch,” it means music that explores the beauty in failure (and, arguably, the failure of beauty). Often as not, a glitchy opening to a song reveals, eventually, a cursory appreciation for the actual pleasures of the risk inherent in the undertaking. The glitchy effects move to background from foreground, and more immediately melodic and rhythmic elements supplant them.
And then you get a nice surprise: Precocious Mouse‘s 2_3/.dll (grey circuits) (from the netlabel brusionetlabel.altervista.org) knows exactly what it’s up to, and over the course of nine tracks explores the rarefied, splintering spaces of glitch with precision, affection, and no small amount of patience, for constructing some of these tracks may have required the kind of effort that goes into making a ship in a bottle. “Phasecycle,” for example, plays glitch against drone, a flittery pattern in pixel-wide beats versus a worrisome hum (MP3). And “dll_1_1_alpha_e” is even more remote, like the dying gasps of a satellite circuit recorded for its loved one back in the recesses of ground control’s freezer unit (MP3).
The “dll” in the album title (and various track names) appears to be a reference to those countless infinitesimal system files that dirty up Windows installations. Oval, one of glitch’s true originators, may have dispensed with the genre’s aural trappings on his recent works, but Precious Mouse shows there’s still life in the particulate.
Get the full release at brusionetlabel.altervista.org. More on Precious Mouse (aka Caleb Wood, aka Kid Functional), who is based in London, England, at precociousmouse.virb.com.
Diatribes walks a unique path, between European free improvisation and microsonic experimentation. The duo of D’incise and Cyril Bondi between them are credited, on Complaintes de Marée Basse, with playing laptop, objects, snare drums, bow, cymbals, gramophone, drums, percussions, bow, cymbals, as well as “various instruments.” Somehow, despite that plethora of material, they manage to bring a third player into the mix, Abdul Moimême (equally equipped: “two prepared guitars, metalic objects, springs, cymbals, metronome”), and still sound subdued, remote, even tiny at times, all that noisy detail distilled to the point of being nearly silent. Exactly how many free improvisers can you fit on the head of a pin? Perhaps the answer is three. The first track, “Pavillon Noir,” is by far the most hectic of the batch, and once the album proceeds past it, all the banging and clanking and scraping gets ratcheted down to the point where it sounds like field recordings of a particularly busy old furnace, especially on “Voile et Vapeur,” in which the interplay is at once bleak and fanciful (
Drones may strike at the heart of music as we traditionally know it: threatening the notoriety of melody, putting unheard of weight on our expectations for harmony, creating a sense of rhythm that is somehow entirely devoid of a percussive impulse. And yet traditional instrumentation is often one of the most rewarding places to experience a drone. Cellos in particular have made headway, thanks to digital processing. The ebow long ago gave the guitar access to a kind of perpetual emanation. Numerous recent experiments in slowed sound have explored the angelic hidden in everyday pop. Monolyth and Cobalt, on its recent La température du feuillage entre deux saisons, has a track that uses the string quartet as a starting point (