At some point, it may be necessary to retire certain sources from the Disquiet.com week-daily Downstream series of legal, freely downloadable MP3s — they’re be treated the way certain jersey numbers are when they’re retired by sports teams. The list of such luminaries to be hung on the proverbial wall would include eminent podcasts, such as Touch Radio and Phoning It In, whose bounty alone could fill up a week’s postings — and it would include certain prolific musicians, such as Ooray, aka Ted Laderas.
Laderas’ main tool is his cello, which he shifts through all manner of devices until he becomes a one-man orchestra, a strings-only affair that sounds at times like the Boston Pops doing a show of My Bloody Valentine. Well, that’s an imprecise comparison — the Boston Pops would play up the melodies buried deep in the shoegazer music that MBV helped define. Meanwhile Laderas, to his listeners’ pleasure, comes at that sonic legacy from the opposite direction. His thick, rich, ethereal pieces emphasize the textures, the sonorous miasma of shoegazer pop.
Take “Lalalalah,” which he posted recently. Unlike some Ooray work, which is lush beyond ambiguity, the piece is clearly played on a cello — there’s enough slow sawing to keep that self-evident. But in time that cello is heard as one among many, perhaps an infinite many, cellos laid out to the horizon as in a carnival hall of mirrors:
Original track at soundcloud.com/ooray. More on Ooray/Laderas at myspace.com/ooraygun and 15people.net.
Upright bass? Check. Taut, mechy beat? Check. Loungey echo? Check. Washboard chucka-chucka? Check. Light keys? Check. Sudden break? Check. Entirely refreshing? Check. The opening track from David Rinman‘s Beyond the Billows of Boom continues the Dusted Wax label’s string of jazz-meets-electronica releases in fine form. Titled “Based On Instrumental” (
Some brides- and grooms-to-be pass out cheap cameras at their weddings, as a means to collect casual, nonprofessional, candid documentation of the momentous event. Tim Dwyer (who goes by Off Land) recorded his with a microphone — not just the ceremony but, as he puts it in the liner note to his album Anniversary, “pre-ceremony unpacking / chatter / music, post-ceremony celebration / music, and a hike up a mountain.” Dwyer later took those raw materials and formed a seven-track release of treated field recordings. Thus the water from the hike, likely, surfaces in “Streams” (
The mix of found noises and hip-hop-derived beats that comprise “Saloon Shwagger” render the track, by 22tape (aka Jared Dunne), absolutely irresistible. It’s from his MosaicChangeTone EP, available for free download. “Shwagger” is all looping horns and these splayed beats that break apart in time for sauntering piano, brief call-outs, and stereoscopic droning. On Soundcloud.com, where the track is hosted, he labels the music “vinylistic downbeat hip/glitch hop,” which isn’t far off — the “vinylistic” suggests music that’s indebted to early, LP-based hip-hop, even if it’s constructed on computer (hence the qualifying “-istic” suffix); the “downbeat” speaks to its tempo, which is slow as can be without losing sight of its downbeat; the “hip/” clarifies that the “glitch” is not of the abstract variety from whence the word comes; and the “hop” seals the deal, brings it all home: