Over the course of the weekend, from July 8 through July 11, I’m porting Disquiet.com’s email from one hosting service to another. There will be some disruption in my email delivery as a result. If you send anything important during that time, and don’t hear back from me within a week, you may want to send it again. Sorry for the hassle.
… Update: The email transition appears to be complete. That’s a relief.
“Swamp Road” (MP3) is an elemental track from two musical evangelists: keyboardist John Medeski (Medeski Martin and Wood), an ambassador for jazz in the world of jam bands, and DJ Logic (Eye and I, Yohimbe Brothers), an ambassador for turntablism in the world outside of hip-hop. It’s a fine slice of groove-based turntable-organ funk, with Medeski keeping the chords sublime and Logic (born Jason Kibler) grafting in swatches of choral chanting. It’s not new; the track’s been in heavy rotation on the old iPod a long time. I just thought I’d already mentioned it in earlier Disquiet coverage of Logic, like the interview from 2002 (link) and a Downstream entry from earlier this year (link). Better late than never. It’s housed on the main page of Logic’s site, djlogic.com, which also features the deeply Hendrix-oid “Sonic Thrust” (MP3). More on Medeski at mmw.net.
By chance or design, the latest entry in the kracfive.com collective’s monthly “MP3 rotor” of free downloads clocks in at three minutes and 33 seconds, which means it makes you picture a spinning chunk of vinyl even before you enter its scratchy little sonic world, in which an LP’s surface noise clip-clops like a sodden horse and voices echo past like a lo-fi poltergeist, all edited and sequenced to maximize the sense of moldy continuity. The song is “Atomsk” (MP3) by Octopus Inc. and Le Gun, who have found a unique way to share credit: in the file name, Octopus gets listed first, but in the MP3 file’s artist tag, Le Gun gets top billing. There’s a point about a minute in that exemplifies their ace sense of timing, when the whole thing takes a deep breath of space for all of about a tenth of a second, before rebooting. The looped guitar, the distant squawks, the hoarse whistles — “Atomsk” has all this and more, packed tight as a suitcase. Check it out at kracfive.com.
The Hippocamp netlabel has put together a pair of “summer compilation 2005” releases, 21 tracks in all. A good chunk of the entries bear the distinct mark of Aphex Twin like a bad sunburn (the playroom instrumentation that veers toward infantilism, whether or not you interpret it as a nod to John Cage’s toy pianos; the rubbery beats stretched to the breaking point). There’s also a fair amount of shoegazer rock and some 1980s flashbacks, including a cover of “Our Lips Are Sealed” (more Fun Boy Three than Go-Go’s, if you’re wondering), but even the more derivative entries are fun. There are quite few highlights, notably the first two tracks on the second volume in the series: Kams‘ “Garden” (MP3), which runs pixie-stick xylophone over a deeply intoned hum, with the odd break for sedate solo piano, and Autistici‘s “Some Subjective Space” (MP3), which actually sounds like seashells by the seashore, thanks to its windchime and a field recording of running water. Check the full set out at hippocamp.net.
Ilya Monosov‘s “Music for Electronics and Hurdy Gurdy (2)” will infuriate nearby dogs and intrigue anyone with the patience and concentration to weather its eight and a half minutes, as it builds steadily from a hum to a screech. It begins with sounds pitched high enough to be mistaken for fluorescent lightbulb interference. When the hurdy gurdy makes its presence known, it’s not with the familiar folksiness of the Renaissance Faire favorite, but with rough scrapings that sound like mice are tunneling their way out of your speaker cabinets. Eventually that scraping reveals itself as a harrowingly bowed solo, a gritty howl that occasionally pitches up in the range of that intensely quiet sine wave, the electronic and the acoustic merging in the audiological stratosphere. As intense as some druidic funeral cry, “Music for Electronics and Hurdy Gurdy (2)” is the lead track from Monosov’s Architectures on Air and Other Works, recently released on Elevator Bath label, which has made the piece available as a free promotional download (MP3). More info at elevatorbath.com.
