What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) The X-Ecutioner Looks Back: Now, DJ Rob Swift‘s album Dust to Dust doesn’t have the swagger or intensity of his recent trio effort — the group Ill Insanity, which teamed him with DJs Total Eclipse and Precision, and debuted early last year with Ground Xero — but the set’s 17 tracks of old-school breaks is tasty, rich with surf rock, r&b, and more stripped-down percussion than you can shake your maracas at. And, for fun, the titles of the songs read in sequence as a sentence, which serves as the project’s manifesto: “Dust,” “To,” “Dust,” “Is,” “A,” “Collection,” “Of,” “Breaks,” “Inspired,” “By,” “The,” “B,” “Boy,” “Movement,” “Of,” “The,” “1970s.”
(2) South Boston’s Slow Burn: In what would make a good double feature with Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, director Brian Goodman’s What Doesn’t Kill You is small film about small-time hoods (both movies share a lead actor in Ethan Hawke), a group of South Boston thugs whose criminal pursuits unfold against an excellent score by Alex Wurman (Criminal, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Wurman brings an understated sensibility to the narrative, but manages to infuse it with enough melody to be true to the drama without edging it into melodrama. Especially strong are a “What Doesn’t Kill You” suite, built from minimal piano, sour strings, and tiny little sonic details that bring a tension-building undercurrent of gears that would benefit from a little oil. (The set is reportedly due for release directly to iTunes on the same label, Yari, that brought out Cliff Martinez’s music for First Snow.)
The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 25,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 28-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album. The contributing musicians are AllThatFall, Roddy Schrock, Pocka, Stephane Leonard, (dj) morsanek, MrBiggs, John Kannenberg, My Fun, Mark Rushton, Prehab, Ego Response Technician, and Doogie.
Drum’n’bass could have become chamber music, but instead it became a plug-in. Once upon a time, those ricocheting beats, along with sudden moments at which the bottom simply drops out, felt like they’d landed from some alien nightlife. But within a few years, they were serving as backing tracks to car commercials, especially once the production became routinized, and the drums and the bass started to play tertiary fiddle to synthesized chimes and florid, insta-atmospheric aural haze.