Disquiet

When the brief write-up at the Kranky Records website, kranky.net, describes its most recent free download as “a live version of the song, ‘Coral Gables'” from Gregg Kowalsky‘s forthcoming debut full-length release, Through the Cardial Window, due out in April, the more ethereal-minded listener might fear that, well, you know, it’ll be a “song”: words that hint at a story through rhyme, a tune that treads the familiar path back and forth between verse and chorus, tossing in perchance a bridge. God forbid, ya know?

Fear not, fans o’ abstraction. This latest MP3 is true to the Kranky label’s strengths in rural atmospherics. Kowalsky makes his musical home in the remote fringes of headspace, even if the free Kranky track takes its name from a stately Miami suburb (Kowalsky’s bio states he was raised in Florida). “Coral Gables” (MP3) is a burbling brook of organo-electronica, and it adheres to, if not song structure, then certainly the single-sine-wave arc of much drone music, moving from near silence and back again, in between peaking with a hazy, textured moment that would only be considered loud relative to the quietude that bookends it. That texture at times sounds like a filtered waterfall, at others merely like you have water in your ear. And though the arc is singular, the sound is not; it is many simultaneous layers of airy noise, from quick rounds of digital riffs to more serrated, granulated material.

More info on Kowalsky at his website, ossobucco.net, where a second free track, from the same session that yielded “Coral Gables” (he describes the pair as “2 live compositions from the Ensemble Room, Mills College [Oakland, 2004]”), can be found. Titled “Into the Marshes They Drove Me,” it’s another essay into low-to-the-ground, murky soundscapes (MP3), but with the benefit of sublimated tribal drums that lend momentum. (I was hoping to see Kowalsky play at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco this past Friday, along with Birdshow and the duo of Greg Davis and Sebastian Roux, but a nasty sore throat, which I didn’t feel like sharing with some of my favorite musicians and their fans, kept me home.)

The rise of bleep.com, the online music retailer that doesn’t impose any DRM (so-called digital “rights” management) on its files, potentially signaled the decline, if not end, of free downloads from the growing list of labels associated with the enterprise (Warp, Ninja Tune, etc.). The website’s simple message for the new year: Fear not. Shortly after January 1, users registered with the site found a nice surprise in their checkout interface (not as romantic as “under their pillows,” but so be it), a various-artists set titled Bleeps-oh-six LP. Tracks include four blobs of funky old-school-ish electro/pop (Dexter‘s “D-Funked,” Jimmy Edgar‘s “My Beats,” National Trust‘s “It’s Just Cruel,” Skeletons & the Girl Faced Boys‘ “Git”), some rock’n’roll (Nectarine No9‘s “South of an Imaginary Line”) and folk (Mara Carlyle‘s “He Makes My Day”). But don’t be disheartened; there’s stuff here to remind you that Warp, the label that founded bleep.com, is the house that Aphex Twin helped build: Kero‘s “untitled (On Acid Again),” with its skittling beat and denial of routine structure; Wisp‘s rubbery “Congratulations” (with chatty and incongruous voiceover); and the nine-cut compilation’s shortest and, by far, best entry, Battles‘ stop’n’start “IPT2,” which sounds like a rough-hewn remix of the great punk band Fugazi. Just head over to bleep.com/bleeps06. If you don’t have an account, it doesn’t matter. Just sign up. It’s free, just like this compilation.

ELECTRO-ORGANIC MP3S: A cough, of all things, lends some context. As if to underscore that what you’re hearing is, in fact, being performed live, amid several of the downloadable tracks by Doogie (aka Nathan Mclaughlin) at his website, fluxed.net, you can quite clearly make out someone clearing his (or her) throat. It may be Doogie himself, it may be an audience member, but it isn’t particularly distracting, and in fact hearing the familiar sound helps your ear get a sense of the space in which the performance took place, because nothing else here is remotely familiar. Soothing, yes. Artful, yes. Terrestrial, no. This is beautiful music, exemplary of the kind of electronic goods that get described, widely, as “organic.” Though the sounds are self-evidently artificial, their rendering is so warm, and they so suggest life forms the way they cycle and burble and quaver, that you can’t help but think of them as, well, organic. Particularly recommended is “Whats in a Species” (sic), a chimey formulation, like some cast-off riff by mid-period R.E.M. that’s taken on a purpose all its own (MP3). (The live tracks, recorded last November, feature accompaniment by one D. Fox.) “Keys,” from Doogie’s album The Spatulate Finger, released last September, is a drone that slowly changes over the course of nearly five minutes, from monastic om, to breaking-dawn lightness, to industrial burr (MP3).

Yet another twist in composer Koji Asano‘s weekly free downloads, at kojiasano.com. When the second weekly file was uploaded, the first one disappeared, suggesting that subsequent entries in the series would be available for one week only. But that plan has changed. Now, when a download is first made available, it’s done so as a massive file, “lossless” in the current lingo (“lossless” may be inexact, but it’s no understatement; the second week’s Asano file came in at just under 100 MB). Thereafter the piece is downsized significantly (same length, different density), and archived permanently (that 100 MB piece is now just under 14). Well, maybe not permanently. It’s Asano’s site, and he’s welcome to change the rules. So get ’em while they’re hot. The current entry, “January Rainbow (Cold Winter Mix Version),” is an extended piece of digitally treated chamber music, displaced fragments of piano chords echoing as they drop through computer-generated motes.