The recording has the rough texture of some lost-then-found artifact, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. The simple fact is that its two constituent components inherently bring texture to the forefront. The performance, a live recording at Flushnik by the duo Battery, consists of “raw cello and bubbling cassette loops.” The former is a tensile fabric of scraped strings, the latter is a lofi fantasia of colluded sound. Together, they’re a deep, lingering, maximalist drone (MP3) on the order of a Michael Gordon crescendo or a Glenn Branca symphony. Battery consists of Bryan Teoh (who records as Always Tokyo) and Erik Schoster (who does so as He Can Jog).
|titles=”Live at Flushnik”|artists=Battery]
Get the release in a variety of formats at archive.org (including a massive, 100MB-plus you-were-there FLAC file), and visit the releasing netlabel, where it was the single of the week the first week of September 2009, at luvsound.org/singles.
More on Schoster at hecanjog.com, and on Always Tokyo at bryanteoh.com. More on Flushnik Studios, site of the performance, at flushnik.com.
Tokyo-based musician Chihei Hatakeyama‘s The River appears as one of those increasingly common and altogether curious post-iTunes artifacts. It is both severely limited-edition, and easily ubiquitous. The album itself is available as one of only 500 printed CDs, but a sample track has been made freely available by the releasing label, Hibernate, for streaming and download. Collectors can snag the physical item, while casual appreciators (if that isn’t itself an oxymoron) can savor one segment. (Inevitably, I imagine, the full record will be available as a virtual-goods sale — one would hope at a level of bitrate compression commensurate with the music’s level of sonic detail and nuance.) 
Long-running Disquiet.com favorite Y?Arcka is uploading a beat a week over at his 
Field recordist Mike Hallenbeck knows that the sounds documented by phonographers — by those who tape and collect the noises of the natural and the built worlds — are both unique and interchangeable. He knows that a car horn in one country is just that country’s version of what is heard, however slightly differently, in numerous, in countless, other countries. And he also knows that despite that interchangeability, in fact because of it, each car horn is all the more special. As he jokes in the liner notes to his recent album, Just Before Diwali – Field Recordings from North India, “The art of field recording needs another recording of trucks in the street like I need a hole in my head, but I found this particular sonic situation valuable.”