Disquiet

There’s much to ponder in MMtm‘s three-track Chant of the Booster, the latest from the Surreal Madrid netlabel. There’s the opening track, “Brew Ha Ha!” (MP3), which is all video-game noises stretched to the breaking point, like a handful of dying Centipedes crying out at once — not to mention the way the closing track, “Activating Solenoids,” moves between blurbly bass and snippets of spoken audio as if that’s the most natural way to spend time at one’s mixing deck (MP3).

But the keeper is the rhythmic title cut, which opens with rubbery cadences that might have been tapped out on upturned buckets, before it dives deep into glossy half-speed techno (MP3).

Get the full set at surrealmadrid.net.

The willfully frail sounds on Anois‘s Tree House Whispers are the stuff of half-remembered noises, whirring in your head on a distracted afternoon. One highlight is “Small Electric Battery,” all backward-masked elements biding time before a soothing melody takes over, and with that melody the rattling of sticks that could be kitchen labor (think Erik Satie at his hypothetical table setting), or a drummer just settling in at his kit (MP3).

There are 13 tracks on Tree House Whispers, most of them featuring vocals, introspective half-sung lyrics with a shoegazing quality (think Low, or Damon and Naomi — or the duo from Once, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, remixed by Postal Service). But interspersed amid the actual songs are three brief pieces that drop the vocals in favor of a precious disruption. “Small Electric Battery” is one of these. The others two are “There Must Be Some Book About It” (MP3), a treat in which a momentarily folktronic introduction gives way to violin and closley mic’d acoustic guitar, only to come round to the digital processing at the piece’s close, and “It Is All So Curious at the End,” a rising cascade of the most brittle and self-lacerating noises heard on the collection (MP3), that despite the friction still telegraph a tidy sense of reflection.

Again, to be clear, these three pieces are mere interludes on the album, but together they make for a self-contained little sound space unto themselves. Here they are, playable as one sequential set:

Get the full set at aerotone.300l600.de.. More on Anois (aka Lars Kranholdt and Anne Baier) at myspace.com/anois and pleasemutetoday.com.