What a beautiful thing, to hear a sample in its original state, to discover a source in its initial context. The subject of a recent Disquiet Downstream entry, Souns’ “Senseless in Space” (here), noted the inclusion of sound elements credited to one Anomalous Disturbances, which turns out to be the pseudonym of a Vancouver, BC-based ambient guitarist named Terry O’Brien. O’Brien has a handful of MP3 files up on his website, including the church-like “Sombunall,” off his HovR CD, and the purposefully more formless “The Spirit Molecule,” off his album of that name. O’Brien builds his richly atmospheric tracks from heavily (very heavily — there are none of the vestiges of familiar six-string sounds you might recognize in the work of, say, Keith Fullerton Whitman or Fennesz) processed guitar, a live-looping format he links back to Terry Riley, Robert Fripp and others. He also annotates his releases with detailed technological information, so if you want to know what bank of hardware helped produce the downright dreamy pulses of “Spirit Molecule,” with its slurry bits of vibrancy, you can easily ascertain that this involved “the Line6 DL4 looping delay stompbox, an E-Bow and various efx processors” and a long list of other equipment. The open book that is his studio is a gracious, if geeky, act, especially in this age of proprietary softsynth algorithms and pricey plug-ins, but it’s O’Brien, not his home studio, who deserves the credit for the murky depths of his work. Of particular note is his apparent penchant for recording straight to tape and then lightly performing some minor post-production edits, which lends his work its liveliness. O’Brien’s music, at least as represented by these two MP3s, benefits from his patience and his emphasis on slow-burn improvisation. More info, including the MP3s (under the Music tab), at anomalousdisturbances.com.
Free Amon Tobin MP3
Free online downloads from major labels and long-running independent labels have decreased in regularity as pay-per-song services have gone mainstream, notably with Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Was a time, you could regularly surf through the sites of maverick electronic labels like Ninja Tune and Warp and find full-length songs, for free, as promotional items. Warp launched its own download service earlier this year, Bleep.com, and since then a number of labels have signed on to use Bleep as the main commercial conduit for their MP3s, including not only Ninja Tune but One Little Indian, Schematic, Mego, Def Jux and others. And while many of these labels still offer the occasional free downloads as well, the site of Ninja Tune, for one example, rarely if ever these days posts MP3s on its Downloads page, and when it does, they hang around for a long time. Right now, the Ninja Downloads page has tons of wallpapers and screensavers, and just one little MP3, but it’s a good one: the first track (“Intro”) off Amon Tobin‘s first full-length release as a DJ: Solid Steel Presents Amon Tobin: Recorded Live, which came out this past July. It’s one of a handful of tracks he composed for the compilation, a set from an Australian gig that also includes material by AFX, Dizzee Rascal and the Velvet Underground (“Venus in Furs,” in case you’re wondering). Tobin’s track is a hard, dense chunk of techno, less rhythmically resplendent than his best work, but still worthwhile for in its sheer thoroughness. Check out the Ninja Tune Downloads page at ninjatune.net/downloads, and download the Tobin track directly here.
Color-Coded MP3 Album
The previous Disquiet Downstream entry from the musician known as Souns, “Senseless in Space” (here, from back in September of this year), was an accomplishment, and not just in musical terms. Sure, its ambiguous rhythmic play amid aquatic ambience was a pleasure to listen to, but perhaps more to its credit was simply how it had managed to distinguish itself amid the vast context in which it first appeared: as one track among 34 (yes, 34) on the Kikapu netlabel’s Wein, Weib und Gesang compilation, a mere eight minutes in the set’s nearly five hours (yes, five hours) of sound. Two months after the release of Wein, Weib came an 11-track Souns full length, titled Lights. The key elements of “Senseless in Space” are here in spades, the watery feel becoming literal on “Orange” (eight of the set’s tracks take colors as titles, including Duke Ellington’s favorite, “Indigo”), in which field recordings of splashy waves play against a low throb out of the Underworld handbook, and figurative on “Rain,” which samples a percussive rainstick (a closed tube filled with small beans). The familiar industrial undertow pervades the album, notably on “Open Tones,” a lengthy dirge, and “Red,” which has the jumpy pulse of a small machine come to life. The album note on the Kikapu sites explains that this music was created for use during the recent New Forms festival in Vancouver, for an event with “ancient healing” as its theme, and much of the music reportedly involves crystal bowls, credited to a Christine Duncan; also contributing is Anomalous Disturbances, aka ambient guitarist Terry O’Brien. (Souns, by the way, is a pseudonym for Michael Red.) Secular humanists should be forewarned that the album’s description is thick with talk of mantras and chakras, but the music doesn’t bear the marks of typical spiritual-shop background music; there are no canned tropes of indigenous spiritual ceremony, no sign at all of keyboard presets marked “Epiphany.” It’s just expertly textured extended tones that don’t swell so much as they rise up, gently but intently, like a Tule fog. Download the full album here, and check out the netlabel at Kikapu.com. A remix project from Souns, titled Coloured Lights, is said to be due out through Kikapu early next year.
Plosive MP3 Set
Back this past summer, in early August, the One netlabel posted an 11-track set by its founder, Aaron McCammon, who records under the name Plosive. The record, titled Neutral, didn’t make the best initial impression, built, as it is, from much material that could easily be seen as part of the ongoing resurgence of the sounds of 1980s new-wave pop music (a keyboard-driven genre, by the way, whose impact on electronic music can be all too easily overstated — for example, the Cure, as writer-musician Joe Gore has pointed out, was at times no less a guitar band than the Allman Brothers). Just listen to the bass line toward the start of McCammon’s “Pavlovian Fear” and the touchtone groove of his “Dirty Button” and you’ll risk unwelcome flashbacks. But something about this set kept it on back-burner, mid-list rotation for months. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking at first, as McCammon’s Casio-driven APM was a Disquiet Downstream favorite back in April (check it out here). As it turns out, several of Neutral‘s tracks don’t just grow on you, they grow as they proceed. That same “Pavlovian Fear” appears to get thicker and darker as time passes. Likewise “Loomer,” which opens with dismissible synth tones; by the time it reaches its peak, each element (the slurry background, the whipped around and flappy rhythm) has developed its own quirky complexities. The same can’t be said for the whole album. “New Kitten” is an easy romantic melody, and “The Night Supervisor” sounds like a music-school homework assignment to write an Aphex Twin track (though in that respect it’s no slouch, and deserves at least a B+). Yet just as those tracks begin to lower expectations, “Acorn” shows up, with a lovely, understated melody and a truly catchy beat, the whole thing tweaked with bits of rave-like squeaks, which grow ever so slightly in purpose as the song’s nearly four minutes come to a close. From little things, big things grow. Check Plosive’s Neutral out at the One label (site here, album page here). More on Plosive at plosive.net.
Christopher Willits MP3s
Sorry for the two-week break. I was traveling (in Tokyo, for the first time — notes on that trip at a later date, as time allows), and then the holidays hit. In any case, we return to your regularly scheduled, free and highly recommended downloads:
In the future, Christopher Willits‘ surname will likely become a verb, at least among musicians, for the technique that most succinctly distinguishes his work: the cascades of computer-pixelated guitar that make each of his records a must-listen. The “Willits sound” is so remarkable that it’s amazing a technophilic pop star like Bjork, Cher or Madonna hasn’t already licensed or aped it for one of their state-of-the-art singles. That his sound lends itself both to extrapolative, nouvelle-classical composition and to imaginary radio hits says much about its appeal.
Willits recently posted three MP3s on his site, all worth checking out: “The Fall in Love Machine,” off EADGBE (a guitar + computer various-artists compilation on the 12K label, also featuring Fonica, Keith Fullerton Whitman and Sebastien Roux); “Your Face Looks Like a 15th Century Carpet,” off Little Edo (Nibble); and “Touch Me and I End Up Singing,” off SMM Vol. 2 (a compilation on Ghostly International, also featuring Cepia and Lusine). That the latter two of these are vinyl-only releases in the physical world makes their free online availability, even as extracts, an added bonus. “Love Machine” is the most characteristic of Willits’ recordings in general: the lilting sway, the pointillist spray of melody, the bridge-like breaks that lend some of his compositions the quality of vocal-free songs. “Touch Me” shares “Love Machine”‘s pointillism, but with its deliberately uncertain rhythmic center it’s considerably less easy to pin down, even with the addition of a discernable, unmolested bass line and what appears to be lightly disfigured vocals. “Your Face” tempers the rush of the other two tracks in favor of a lacey, vocal-oriented piece featuring the processed soulful ahs of Latrice Barnett. They’re all on the “audio” page at christopherwillits.com.