If the idea of electronic music from the Ukraine brings to mind crackling radio static, melodies seemingly sampled from rusty old circus carousels, and vintage synthesizers that have seen better days, then the album Disaster in Room 208 won’t do much to disabuse you of your prejudices.
But rest assured that all of those elements are very much in the album’s favor. Recorded by OK_01 (aka Oleg Kovalchuk) and released on the Surreal Madrid netlabel, Disaster in Room 208 collects six tracks that are all the more enticing due to their threadbare nature. “Happy End” mixes scratchy noise, distant syrupy strings, and a sweet guitar line, never quite letting any of the layers match with the others (MP3). “Driving – Screws” opens with a brief retro-rock moment (think Billy Childish at his most dissolute) before the sound gets warped, as if the FM station was shifted slightly and the music suddenly exposed some mischievous alternate agenda — insert Cold War surveillance imagery here (MP3). Likewise “Rocky,” which plays with a squelchy sine wave like it’s a theremin, above a chipper chip-tune rhythm and a recording of water that lends the imminent threat of a short circuit (MP3).
And that’s just half the set. Get the full thing, and more more details, at surrealmadrid.net.
The new album on the Highpoint Lowlife label, Magnetism, That Electricity, is less a various-artists collection than it is a set of four individual EPs — one on each side of a double vinyl set (also available via DRM-free digital retail and as a CDR). Two free full-song downloads on the label’s website, 
The speaker is one Darlene, the proprietor of the store Metotem Metabooks, a “hangout for the Mission metanovelists” in the sci-fi-ified San Francisco, California, that is the setting for Rucker’s book. This San Francisco exists in a world rapidly, and only recently, transformed by the arrival of ubiquitous sentient technology. Darlene is speaking to one of the book’s main characters, a street urchin named Thuy, who had just proposed including in her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Wheenk, all of the meta-texts in Darlene’s shop — “to capture,” as Thuy puts it, “the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.” Darlene educates her on the value of judicious editing.