Darren McClure and Hiroyuki Ura performed live at a spot in Tokyo, and in preparation to do so, they brought the outside in. According to the brief liner notes that accompany Content in a Void, a four-MP3 document of that performance, the duo “gathered field recordings from the area around the venue” and then improvised on a mix of various electronics. That real-world sound is especially evident on “Loop Line I” (MP3), which is close to six minutes of the urban audiosphere, from kids screaming to water dripping to whistles blowing, all sewn into a singular trip. “Loop Line II” (MP3) trades exteriority for its opposite, a fine thread of miniscule sounds, little fuzzy bits, with the occasional high-pitched bleep of a Morse Code machine on the fritz. “Loop Line III” (MP3) adds mechanical drones, which threaten to subsume those coded beeps. And the real keeper, “Loop Line IV” (MP3), locates a nearly melodic cohesion that deserves repeated listens; its lovely pulses approximate a developing musical pattern, even if they’re clipped and splintered like flashing images from an old zoetrope. Though the four tracks have their own inherent flavor, they are intended to be listened to straight through, and easily fade from one to the next. More info at the website of the releasing netlabel, standard-music.net.
Bush of Ghosts MP3
As of today, 119 remixes have been uploaded to the website set up in tribute to the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Many of those remixes are interesting not simply because they filter Byrne and Eno’s raw materials through someone else’s taste-filter. Some of the best entries also bear the mark of other Byrne and/or Eno albums. There have been, for example, tracks that have the rumbling pop momentum of Eno’s work with John Cale and Paul Simon, and there have been tracks that reduce the Bush of Ghosts stuff to something approaching pure ambience. Stike‘s remix, titled “Help Me Design Intelligently” (MP3), was uploaded on the 11th of this month, and though it has more rambunctious energy than anything on the original album, its highlight is a sprightly guitar line that brings to mind the hijacked juju that Eno enabled when he produced Talking Heads albums like Remain in Light and Fear of Music. More info at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.
In Print
The seventh and, according to the publisher’s introduction, final edition of the print magazine e/i has been published, and it features my interview with laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits and a small heap of record reviews I wrote, including Battles‘ EP C/B (Warp), F-Space‘s Prelimary Impact Report (Mobilization), Gisela‘s Weib (Gruenrekorder), Johann Johannsson‘s Dis (The Worker’s Institute), Kettel‘s Through Friendly Waters (Sending Orbs), Magicicada‘s Everyone Is Everyone (Public Guilt), Somatic Responses‘ Pounded Mass (Hymen) and Jozef Van Wissem‘s Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (BVHaast), as well as Permanent Flow (Accretions) by Joscha Oetz, Andreas Wagner and Greg Stuart, and three compilations: Der Michel und Der DOM and AudioArt Compilation 02, both on Gruenrekorder, and Malpractice: A Fflint Central Compilation (Birdman). I’ll post all that material on Disquiet.com in a few months, once the magazine has had its time on newsstands. In the meanwhile, more info at ei-mag.com.
20 Singular MP3s
Twenty short pieces comprise K.M. Krebs‘ The Jade Furnace I, a recent free download from the Treetrunk netlabel. Though the individual tracks each strike a singular sound and stick to it, many of them approach four minutes in length, and thus can’t be considered miniatures, per se. Cycling cicadas fill up one entry (“Unscal”), while flanging gongs (“Psulty”) and what might be mumbling vocoders (“Riveal”) do others. One personal favorite layers recordings of alarm clocks (“Edgemerams”). More info at Krebs’ site (833-45.net) and that of Treetrunk, archive.org/details/treetrunk. (Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation.)
Folk-Core MP3
The Kranky label’s releases, varied as they may be, often are rooted in a kind of rural sound that’s mediated by electronics, something that’s as true of Christopher Bissonnette’s Periphery, with its treatments of acoustic material, as it is of Greg Davis’ work, which ranges from folktronic to downright droney. Though Jessica Bailiff‘s “Lakeside Blues,” a free download of which is available as a premonition of her forthcoming Feels Like Home album (due out July 10), features a proper if truly understated and hymn-like vocal, along with a rudimentarily plucked and John Fahey-esque guitar line, it layers its background vocals with the elgance of proper slow-core, and the piece eventually blossoms into a field of electrified effects that are true to Kranky’s standards: stereoscopic, amorphous, hallucinogenic (MP3). What results suggests an Americana spin on the trip-hop ideal. More info at kranky.net and brainwashed.com/jb.