For the next few days, several people whose reflections on music — whose enthusiasm and insight — I admire have signed on to do in public what I, for one, have been doing in private for a week-plus now: playing over and over, as well as pondering, the recent two-song 12″ by Burial and Four Tet, a pair of songs (“Moth,” “Wolf Cub”), released on the Text Records label earlier this month.
Joining me are:
- Robert Gable is a listener and musical enthusiast who has been blogging at aworks (rgable.typepad.com) about “new” American classical music since 2003. Earlier, he played jazz saxophone and blues harp until realizing he would always pale in comparison to Sonny Rollins and Little Walter. He works for a company that develops software and hardware IP used in multimedia devices.
- Lauren Giniger is possessed by a deadly sense of the absurd and so is often paralyzed when composing her biography. When she is able to get over herself, she can be found organizing large productions, most recently including the 24th annual World Jewish Music Festival. She lives with two adorable rabbits; her current project is developing a vaccine to fight the overblown and imaginary scourge of lagomorph influenza. Also, she occasionally write about music for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
- Alan Lockett is a sometime writer of electronic music reviews/features. Previously a contributor to e/i magazine, recent writings are mainly viewable via igloomag.com and furthernoise.org. His main interests are in ambient, drone, and the more experimental end of techno/house, post-dub, and “IDM.” He is based in Bristol, UK — a useful vantage point in being a breeding ground for stylistic tweaks which have impacted crucially in recent decades.
You can listen to streaming versions of the two tracks here, which I first came upon at pitchfork.com.
The discussion will play out in the comments section below.
Burial/Four Tet’s “Wolf Cub”
Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”
PS: This is not, per a reader’s inquiry, a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in. And for anyone reading this after May 19, for the first day the tracks below were mis-titled. Sorry about that.
PPS: Given the willful opaqueness of the “Moth”/”Wolf Cub” 12″ — it comes on black vinyl in a black sleeve — I looked around for how it was being visually represented. Directly below are three such representations via, from left to right, createdigitalmusic.com, which made the requisite Spinal Tap joke; stereogum.com, which described the release as “a black sleeve and pressed onto a slab of 12″ vinyl with a black label”; and residentadvisor.net, which ignores the package and fairly thoroughly describes the music in its write-up:
Continue reading “MP3 Discussion Group: Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”/”Wolf Cub””
Y?Arcka: I had that The Appreciation project [cover pictured at left], actually done before I did Un-Herd, but at the time, I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna have enough time to promote it and do stuff with it. Un-Herd kind of came up out of nowhere, where I was like, I could put something together a little different from Appreciation — because Appreciation was something you couldn’t really have rappers over, because it’s unusual, the unusual loops I did were not your ordinary stuff. I liked it more, because it’s different, but maybe it’s too different for people to start off with, as my first project. 