Disquiet

Another favorite from Wein, Weib und Gesang, the massive, 34-track, nearly five-hour compilation from the Kikapu netlabel. (See yesterday’s entry for more info.) Feel free to download the half-gigabyte collection, or just pick out the Downstream recommendations. Today it’s “Senseless in Space,” credited to Souns: a pleasurable eight-minute modulated drone piece, with a mix of aquatic bass depth, ring-tone highlights and glitch textures — the glitch stuff never gets out of hand; it sounds as if the crinkled cellophane wrapper around a CD were part of its sonic content. “Senseless in Space” circulates in a loping manner, but manages its beats with an intriguing strategy — while a lot of beat-based music gets labeled “ambient” due to its casual, spacey aura, Souns keeps its rhythms ambiguous, so just as they come to determine a head-swaying pattern, they drift away. Pleasing stuff. Download “Senseless in Space” here and visit Kikapu.com.

Another day, and one more firm favorite from Wein, Weib und Gesang, the massive, 34-track compilation from the Kikapu netlabel. (See Tuesday’s entry for more info.) Feel free to download the half-gigabyte collection, or just pick out the Downstream recommendations. Vincent Parker‘s “P09IJK” is one of the shorter works in the set, just four and a half minutes that could easily get lost in the nearly five-hour full run. It’s a piece of industrial ambience — crisp little splatters of static and noise, percussive with the urgency of an tiny ant brigade on a foraging mission. There are also these momentary sparks of drama that sound like house music leaking in from a neighboring sound system. As with a lot of great minimal techno, this sounds like a click-track blueprint that knew to quit while it was ahead. Download “PO9IJK” here and visit Kikapu.com.

Today’s Downstream entry is less a review than it is a public notice, because its subject, at five hours or so in length, is too sprawling to be summarized meaningfully, or to be fully consumed any time soon. The release, Wein, Weib und Gesang, is a various-artists collection from the Kikapu netlabel, and it contains 34 tracks by as many artists, ranging in length from two minutes to 14. Rather than wait until the whole thing’s been absorbed, if that’s even plausible, consider this a simple notification of the set’s existence, along with some initial notable highlights.

First up: among the Wein, Weib und Gesang musicians who’ve made previous appearances in the Downstream are Pocka (also Kikapu’s founder, Brad Mitchell), whose 12-minute “Four Little Photos in a Row” begins with a (Steve) Reichian percussion loop and slowly builds its own dense aural gauze, and Raemus, whose 13-minute “Komori-Chambon” sounds like a glass harmonica built from some deeply strange alien crystal, these piercing shards of sound that glint and echo in mysterious ways. Those are just two of 34, so expect additional individual-track recommendations in the near future. The set is downloadable song by song, or as one giant (525 megabyte — no kidding) file, along with a color PDF (by one of the contributing musicians, Matt Borghi) that can be printed and trimmed and fit into a jewel case.

Also appearing on the ambitious collection — the word “album” seems insufficient — are Agnes High Quality, Algorhythm, Autistici, Caddis, Cypod, Dub Jay, EelFayGree, Effacer, Eric Laurence, Evil Jon, Gainforest, Introspective, Jason Sloan, Kaminari Synthesis, Kosik, Latency, Mar.ch, Mike Verde, Notech, Room, Sex Enemy, Souns, Space Plans, Spark, Stephen Philips, The System Boot, These Men Are Cowards, Veem, Vincent Parker, X41 and 518 vs. Joel. Download the compressed, half-gig file here, visit the album’s homepage here, or go straight through the front door at kikapu.com.

The worlds of hip-hop and ambient overlap more often than they collide, which is why Subtle is so welcome. An instrumental quintet plus vocalist, Subtle might find its albums and singles filed under trip-hop, or downtempo, or illbient for that matter, as two free MP3s on the website of its label, Lex, display. “Eneby Kurs,” off the forthcoming A New White, features a distracted keyboard flutter, a rich bridge of nonsense syllables and layered effects, and a bass line so sleepy it seems like at any moment it may nod off entirely (warning: by the end the cut has built to a noisy wall of sound, though the whole thing is so utterly unassuming you’ll wonder when, exactly, someone raised the volume). And “F.K.O.,” a recent single reminiscent of De La Soul, is a feat of pop minimalism just glistening beneath rapper Doseone’s nasal, artfully muffled wordstream. If you dig the song, pick up the release for the extra tracks: an instrumental edit, plus remixes by B. Fleischmann and Console. Both cuts represent a kind of “third way” for hip-hop, neither the fiscally obsessed narcissism of what rules the pop charts with commanding if high-priced beats, nor the often all too earnest enlightenment of so-called “conscious” (as in “socially conscious”) rap, which generally downplays the music in favor of the lyrics. Download Subtle’s “Eneby Kurs” here and “F.K.O.” here, and visit lexrecords.com for more info (among the assorted tidbits, Subtle was tapped to remix a track from the forthcoming Beck album). Oh, one more warning: the tracks are free, yeah, but they’re compressed at the substandard rate of 56 kbps.