D12 Logic MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The vast depths of archive.org‘s holdings are difficult to come to grips with. Even putting the public-domain text and video material aside, there seems to be enough music by the Grateful Dead alone to play for a good year straight, and there’s more like the Dead in that corridor of the archive than anything else — more jam bands, more riff rock, more psychedelic noodling. Not, as they say, there’s anything wrong with that. When you’re pleased by recordings that resemble a century-old radiator on overdrive, it’s tough to go complaining about what someone else calls music.

All of which said, it’s initially hard to find much electronic music in the archive’s live holdings, in part because of the abundance of Dead acolytes, and in part because of the site’s search engine, which prioritizes “mediatype” and other categories over genre. (On the other hand, its netlabel directory serves as a backup for many notable electronica free-music concerns, including 8bitrecs, Monotonik, Nishi and Thinner.) Still, search and you shall find. For example, a search for “DJ” in archive’s live holdings yields over 250 results, among them a July 7, 2002, concert featuring the New Orleans ensemble Dirty Dozen Brass Band with New York turntablist DJ Logic sitting in for two songs (“Africa,” “We Got Robbed”). It may be electronic by association, but it’s a great document of an unusual collaboration (one Logic spoke about at length earlier that year in a Disquiet.com interview, “Sonic Anomaly”).

Oh, and as if finding the concert wasn’t tough enough, you’ll discover that it’s only downloadable as a “flac” file — which is a mix of good and bad news. The good news is, “flac” is a high-quality, so-called “lossless” format; the bad is, it’s enormous (94Mb for 15 minutes of audio, the length of the “Africa” track alone). Check out the full set here.

Anticon Hip-Hop MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Start off the work week with two fine background-music instrumental hip-hop tracks from Telephone Jim Jesus, off his late-2004 album, A Point Too Far to Astronaut (Anticon). TJJ’s “Little Boy One Eye,” which runs a romantic piano loop and genre-complementary choral effect above a disjunctive and jittery drum beat, has been featured recently on the music.download.com site, here. Over at anticon.com (click through to the “media” page), you’ll find that track, plus “Struck by Falling Object,” which is more varied, more a montage than a collage, moving from one segment (a slap of jazz horn, a heady beat, etc.) to the next, and using each snippet’s climax as the springboard to the subsequent one. And, a third treat, there’s “Blue in the Face,” which manages to bring an enthusiastic pop sensibility to CD-skipping.

German Techno MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A quick one to end the week. The Uran97 netlabel’s latest release (number 24) is M.M.B.‘s Robot Work Area, an exercise in vaguely Kraftwerkian mechanoid funk, updated with raspy touches of glitch and an abiding affection for moire patterns of elemental counterpoint. M.M.B. is a German duo, Marc B and Marksman, who’ve been working together since 2002. Check the four-track EP at uran97.com (download page here), and visit the group’s homepage at mmb-techno.de.

Latest Tonatom MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When musician Maciek Szymczuk titled his EP Romantic Piano for Lovers, he meant lovers of surface-noise-laden, static-laced, beats-all-a-flutter minimal techno, with saw blade string sections and chest-pounding thuds of subterranean dread. Or he was just being ironic. Either way, RPfL is a six-track set on which the piano is contorted until it skips like a broken self-playing model (“Supper at Piano Bar”), or it’s muted until it sounds like an alien harpsichord (“Romantic Walk”), or it provides occasional accent marks (“Flame of Love”), or it’s entirely abandoned after an opening chord in favor of speaker-shaking sludge and heavenly vocals (“Tender Kisses”). Szymczuk calls his music “click’n’everything” — and he clearly takes pleasure in contorting whatever sounds come his way, running them over mechanistic pulses and through echo chambers with sodden walls. The rich and varied set was the final release of 2004 on the tonAtom netlabel. Download it here, and visit tonAtom at tonatom.net and Szymczuk at mszymczuk.prv.pl.

Guitronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The natural applause that closes the recent MP3 up at William Fowler Collins‘ website, wfowlercollins.ath.cx, signals that the recording is, indeed, of a live performance. Up until that moment, you may not be certain, though a cough midway through also gives it away. There is, so common these days yet still so strange, such an array of simultaneous sounds working in harmony that it’s initially difficult to recognize the music was made by one person: Collins, on electric guitar, with microcassette recorder and steel slide. It was taped at Mills College Concert Hall in April 2004 during the SignalFlow Festival, and it’s a through-improvised tour from cascading opening notes to echoed rages of noise to an arid territory of ringing near-silence, with hints of everything from Jimi Hendrix to Glenn Branca to Michael Brook. What’s remarkable isn’t the range, though, but how naturally the piece flows over the track’s five-plus minutes. Part of this is owed to that reverb, which allows one theme to repeat while another is introduced. But the real credit goes to the composer-performer, who charts the course and sticks to it, even when the going gets rough. The track is an excerpt from Collins’ Evening CDR (West Mountain Road Recordings, 2004). Get the file directly here.