Late last year, the five-strong Primordial Undermind released Loss of Affect on the Strange Attractors label. The album’s a triumph of less-ism, not so much minimalism, with its Zen patterns and often terse vocabulary, but music far more select and simple than its various contributors’ involvement might suggest. Specifically, on tracks like the freely available “Breathe Deep” (MP3), the group explores the revived folk-as-art realm with a heady, deeply strummed, lithe romanticism. Fellow traveler Douglas Ferguson guests on “electronics” elsewhere on the album. This is quintessential less-ism: music that is less than the sum of its parts, and all the better for it. More info at strange-attractors.com.
Ambient Metal MP3
Wondering what Disquiet.com’s humble suggestions as to the best commercial recordings of 2006 might sound like? Well, for starters, the Southern Lord record label’s “Listen” page includes a full track from numerous among its recent releases, including the dirge-rock of bands SunnO))) and Boris, who teamed up for last year’s Altar. “Etna,” presumably named for the active Sicilian volcano, is a voluminous, slo-mo surge of, well, darn near molten metal, all the energy of hard rock, but stripped of its rhythmic vertebrae, left to writhe on the ground fearfully, or sumthin’ like that (MP3). More on the bands’ collaboration at southernlord.com. More on Disquiet’s top 10 of 2006 at disquiet.com/new2006.html.
5 Vantages on an MP3 Theme
In the classic story “Rashomon,” several individuals witness or are involved in a crime, but when they each recount the event after the fact, they tell markedly different versions. That tale, published by writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1915 and immortalized 35 years later in a film version, directed by Akira Kurosawa, has the quality of a fable, and its lessons are of self-evident value during our ongoing Age of the Remix. Fitting, then, that a song by the group Rashamon (note distinct spelling) has been offered up in five different post-production versions by four artists (Motion, Fisk Industries, Duff Parker, si-cut.db), each of them providing different vantages on the original. You might argue that the original stands apart, but in fact when they’re played as a set of six it’s difficult to point to the “real”one.
The original is the heaviest by far, certainly. It begins with a tamped down piano figure and a sampled voice, that of a crazed man, complete with tape-deck surface noise, soon muddied with elastic percussion of the exaggerated drum’n’bass variety, which is flanged until it sounds like the heavy flaps of metal used to summon thunderstorms in motion pictures. Motion’s “Mix One” is almost impossible to reconcile with the original, built as it is from little more than slow aquatic pulses, intoned on distant gongs, details that go by almost unnoticed in Rashamon’s track. Si-cut.db’s lengthy entry (seven minutes, compared with the original’s 5:41) comes closest to Motion’s “Mix One”for its estimable attempt at weightlessness — but how Si-cut employs the little offbeats is even more enticing, bringing them in on occasion, making them swing; those tidy rhythmic cues alone make it the choice cut among the interpretations here. Duff Parker likewise emphasizes the delicate moments that the original used as mere accent marks, and his piece is widely varied, with periods of intense echo and others of pristine silence. Motion’s “Mix Two”shares Parker’s interest in veering off in various directions. Fisk Industries retains the original’s throaty holler, burying it in a watery dub, interspersing bits of the original syncopation, their pitch raised considerably, to a tinny consistency. They’re all for free — the original, and the five remixes — on the Highpoint Lowlife record label’s “download”page: highpointlowlife.com/downloads.shtml.
Fripp-Eno MP3
Most major musicians, especially in the age of the Internet, don’t go away. They drift off the mainstream media’s line of sight and set up cottage industries. Guitarist legend Robert Fripp exemplifies this. Over at dgmlive.com (“DGM” standing for “Discipline Global Mobile”) there’s a steady stream of live and archival Fripp-related recordings that would make the most entrepreneurial and prolific jam band blush. Often as not, these include free downloads, as does a recent assortment of Fripp collaborations with Brian Eno, titled The Cotswold Gnomes, which is available as a set of MP3 files for the iTunes-like $9.95 and, for a few bucks more, in a “lossless” format (a la many of bleep.com’s offerings). As what the site refers to as a “hot tickle – free MP3 download” comes “Hopeful Timean” (MP3, dgmlive.com), though likely only for a short time. It’s a five-minute track of shifting synth clouds and gentle single note guitar lines. Those lines are echoed, in classic Frippertronic style, into the hazy background, but less for their ability to build algorithmic density than as distant echoes that double as premonitions. The piece was recorded on March 14, 2006, according to the information that accompanied the DGM site’s RSS feed of free downloads… er, tickles (RSS).
Click Tone Drone MP3s
The monohm.com netlabel offers little in the way of context for its releases, less than a handful of terms, tags really, for each of its freely downloadable sets of music. Take its most recent entry, Post Zero, credited to Drumlake, which is tagged “clicks,” “tones” and “drones.” Speaking categorically, tags are more useful, more truthful, than are genres; it’s more helpful, for example, to say that Boxhead Ensemble is “ambient” and “country” than to choose between the two, but those three Drumlake descriptors, as monohm tags its tags, don’t do much justice to the oddly lifelike gurglings of “Hulverhead,” which sounds like the world’s first sentient Jew’s harp moaning about how lonely life can be (MP3), or to the lushly sustained drone-hum of “Circle of Hills” (MP3), in which clicks are so minimal, barely surface noise, to even really register. And “Abram Cove,” the most widely ranging of the three Post Zero tracks, sounds like the audiolog of a journey through some subterranean maze (MP3). Sometimes descriptors aren’t enough; a map would be appreciated. The meanderings of “Abram Cove” are suggestive enough to make you want to draw your own.