Enjoy nearly a quarter hour of a bunch of Buddha Machines mixing it up, along with the sounds of the environment in which they are present. Writes the Polish musician responsible for the recording, Grzegorz Bojanek: “Aside from the Buddha Machine loops, every sound you hear comes directly from my garden — from the gentle hum of insects and the chirping of birds to the soft crunch of my footsteps.”
Jeff Parker Goes Silent (Way)
A new one from the ETA IVtet
We’ve now gotten a taste of the forthcoming The Way Out of Easy album due out November 22 from Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, a jazz ensemble featuring Parker (Tortoise, Isotope 217, Chicago Underground Trio) on guitar, Josh Johnson on saxophone, Anna Butterss on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums. Titled “Late Autumn,” the slowly simmering track — it purposefully never reaches a boil — is one of four on the album, and at merely 17 and a half minutes, it’s the shortest of them. Echoing Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and the work of the Necks, it has a steady pulse above which the musicians ease their way around each other. Both Parker and Johnson are credited with amplifying their instruments with electronics, and Parker also, according to the liner notes, employs a sampler. Those effects are quite subtle, and like the musicianship in general, never try to command attention.
Refresher Course Set 4: Oval, Potter, Reviews
A methodical pass through the Disquiet.com archives
This is the fourth set of the process of my making my way, in chronological order, from the earliest entries on this website, all the way through the 7,500+ that have accumulated since December 1996, when the site launched. That number includes posts from before 1996, those that I later ported from print media and other writing opportunities.
As I finished the third set this weekend, it occurred to me that 10 posts a day may be a burden for the reader, so I may slow the pace a bit — not of the re-archiving, but of these summary posts. I may do one every 30 archived posts, which would mean roughly every three days, rather than a summary post every single day for each set of 10 I’ve cleaned up. We’ll see. Also, rather than lay them out here as bullet points, I may summarize them thematically, at least when doing so applies.
The main item in the set of 10 I looked over today is a 1996 interview with Markus Popp of Oval, both the original published profile, and the full text of the Q&A that informed the profile.
There are a bunch of reviews. In some cases, the albums aren’t online, at least not on official channels. This batch includes the Sci-Fi Cafe compilation (covers of movie and TV theme music by the likes of Loop Guru and Kinder Atom), a Tone Rec album, a Kiyoshi Izumi release on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, an Asian Dub Foundation/Atari Teenage Riot split, a Toru Takemitsu compilation, a Steve Roach album, a great David Holmes album I still listen to regularly, and Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony, which I single out because it is featured in the screenshot of the earliest evidence on the Internet Archive of Disquiet.com:
And finally, there’s mention of a 1997 musical episode of Chicago Hope, which name-checks Dennis Potter. Musical episodes of TV shows have become so common that I’m not sure how many people producing them or participating in them these days are aware of the importance of Potter to the format.
On Repeat: Husebø, Seidel, More
Home/office playlist
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
And let’s be clear: given the semi-methodical processing of all the old posts on this website — and the addition of other old stuff that’s coming online for the first time ever — I’ve been doing a lot of retrospective listening, revisiting old Funki Porcini and Matmos and so forth, and being alarmed by how much music from not even 30 years ago is not (officially) online.
Meanwhile, some more recent favorites:
▰ I’ve spent a lot of time with Kjetil Husebø’s Years of Ambiguity since it came out in 2023, and he’s now followed it up with Emerging Narratives, which again teams him with guitarist Eivind Aarset and trumpeter Arve Henriksen for a slate of Fourth World wonders.
▰ Post-Orientalism No. IV: Dream Inside a Dream is an intense drone work by Dave Seidel, who is based in New Hampshire. If the word “arpeggio” in the accompanying descriptive text puts the fear of automated cascades into your imagine, don’t worry. These come in slow motion.
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▰ The EP MEMO by mr.coon is an excellent concoction of beats and samples, echoing at the intersection of dub, noise, and big beat.
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Refresher Course Set 3: Vibert, Porcini, Matmos
A methodical pass through the Disquiet.com archives
Well, I’ve made it three days in a row, which makes places the Refresher Course series — and yes, I’m still considering other names for it — 30 posts into the 7,500-plus exploration of this website’s nearing 30-year archive, and it goes back further still because I’ve also posted plenty of pieces that predate the Disquiet’s December 13, 1996, birth.
A bunch of these pieces from today’s clean-up happen to date from around 1996, when the major labels had a (false) sense that electronic music — specifically under the still new “electronica” genre name — was going to solve their financial problems. Also a sign of the times, I felt the need, in the Richards/Extreme interview, to note that an emoticon as sign that we did the interview via email.
One thing I’m having trouble sorting out are tags. If you’re reading along with these old posts and have thoughts on any that are lacking (or low on) tags, lemme know. Thanks.
And yes, I realize that if I do manage to persist in these summaries of the back catalog, it’ll add roughly 750 posts to the website. I hope never to have to revisit those.
Today’s posts are:
▰ A full 1997 interview with Luke Vibert
▰ The Vibert profile that resulted from the above interview
▰ Review of a 1997 reprint of Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present by David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello
▰ A 1997 interview with Roger Richards of Extreme label
▰ A 1997 interview with Steven Levy of the Moonshine label
▰ A 1997 interview with Erik Gilbert of the Asphodel label
▰ Short 1997 review of Matmos’ self-titled album
▰ Short 1997 review of the compilation The Knights Who Say Dot
▰ Short 1997 review of a Gianluigi Trovesi Octet album
▰ Short 1997 review of a Funki Porcini album. I was pretty addicted to Funki Porcini.