Disquiet

The freaky thing about speaking in tongues isn’t how meaningless all that gibberish sounds. The freaky thing is how, despite the fact that it’s all nonsense syllables, glossolalia seems to contain meaning, like an ancient forgotten language, or something other and paraphysical. Transfer that sort of meaning-through-meaninglessness from words to beats and you have some sense of the rhythmic disjunction that is “Away” (MP3), the latest free monthly download from kracfive.com. Credited to Nepracww, a name that seems like a snippet of glossolalia itself, the piece plays like several different songs simultaneously, snippets of percussives never quite meshing, each one straining for your ear to identify it as the root rhythm. Despite which chaos, it sounds very much like a song.

Talk about a short-lived blog. Perhaps throttleclark.com will find a second life, but with its third posting it’s pretty much fulfilled its charter agenda. Clark, a prominent artist on the Warp label, has posted three tracks at the site over as many weeks, in advance of the release of Body Riddle, his forthcoming Warp album. As an appointment in appointment-downloading, it’s been a success. Furthermore, it’s done more than just whet our appetites. Sure, the first track was from the album itself, but the subsequent entries haven’t been, which has made listeners all the more curious about what’s to come. (Sure the tracks can be streamed, in 30-second chunks, at bleep.com, but that requires patience and a blind ear when it comes to the seams between chunks.) And the final of the three free downloads, “Dusk Raid” (MP3), may be the best so far, less rhythmically succinct than what came before, and rich with plucked instrumentation and broken beats that suggest DJ Krush’s machine-molested shamisen, not to mention muddled horns that bring to mind Robert Wyatt’s solemn art-pop. If these are the leftovers, one can only imagine what the main course will bring. The album will be released the first week of October.

Over at the website of Ghostly International, they’re pushing the new Christopher Willits album, Surf Boundaries, due out in about a month, with a free download. “Yellow Spring” is a pop song by an electronic musician whose best work in the past has veered toward pop without ever reaching it (MP3). Thanks to a floating rhythm and a spirited if ephemeral vocal part, the track adheres to a beat without ever making its purpose clear. This is a notable achievement for Willits, who previously has largely avoided evident metrics in favor of ever-shifting rhythmic centers that rotated their heft like a planet making its course in a solar system comprised of many small suns. With “Yellow Spring” Willits keeps to the straight and narrow, but never succumbs to the metronomic impulse. And when the piece fades for its extended, centerless denouement, we get a taste of the Willits behind the beat. More info at christopherwillits.com.