Disquiet

“Mine Is In Yours” is not the best song ever recorded by Mouse on Mars. Long gone, apparently, are the days of the group’s production-music youth, when the team of Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma wrote elevator music for exotic shopping malls of the future on albums like Iaora Tahiti. No, the group has long since embraced proper songs, its lyrics processed through effects that serve primarily as an affectionate vestige of its halcyon, purely synthetic origin. The song is, however, a good opportunity to make note of music.download.com, the music wing of CNet’s download service, in which the “Electronic & Dance” category has myriad subsets (as of this typing, in alphabetical order: Acid, Ambient, Big Beats, Breakbeat/Breaks, Club/Dance, Dance, Dance-Pop, Deep House, Down Tempo, Drum N’Bass, Electro, Electronica, Euro-Dance, Experimental, Freestyle, Gabber, Game Soundtracks, Garage/House, Goa, Happy Hardcore, Hard House, Hard Trance, Hi-NRG, House, IDM, Industrial-Electronic, Intelligent Techno, Latin Dance, Minimal, Noise, Progressive/Dream, Techno, Teen Pop, Trance, Urban, Vocal House). The Mouse on Mars song file, the lead track off the recent Radical Connector album, is housed on the band’s home on the music.download.com site, here, filed generously under “Experimental.” More on the group at mouseonmars.com.

When is a stream not a stream? When you click on it, and it downloads to your hard drive, which is the case, at least for the time being, for two RealAudio tracks off the new album by pedal-steel guitarist BJ Cole. The electronic world got wind of Cole’s broadminded, plugged-in surf music in 2000, when he collaborated with exotica’n’bass veteran Luke Vibert (aka Wagon Christ). The resulting album, Stop the Panic, didn’t yield either of their best work — common ground rarely being the most prized territory — but Cole’s new album, Trouble in Paradise (Cooking Vinyl), is worth a gander, as it reunites him with Vibert, and also features studio efforts by Brian Eno, Groove Armada, Bent, Kumo, Alabama 3 and others. The two Trouble in Paradise tracks currently on the CV label website, the title cut (lounge music for interstellar cruises) and “Surf Acid Hoedown” (think about the cast of Deliverance stumbling into a rave and making peace with the natives), mix his slide-mode guitar work with contemporary rhythms. Album info and tracks here.

A lengthy track by Blue Sky Research is mock-dismissed on its netlabel’s website: first, as an offhand, casual work (it was “recorded while testing some homegrown code for an upcoming gig,” in contrast with being some wholly planned sonic item); second, as distinctly less than eventful (“perfect for falling asleep to”). The former we’ll have to take their word for, but anyone who nods off to the track, “Firth of Tay Live” on the Hippocamp label, will miss a half hour or so of extended ambience, a fine blend of samples massaged to quiet-orchestral effect, and mixed with elements of field recordings. Perhaps it was a casual production, but that lack of conceit serves the project well. Like the code it was reportedly produced on, it sounds homegrown. Download it directly (caveat: it’s 45 megabytes in size) here, and visit the label at hippocamp.net.

Midway through last month, the audio irritants at 20kbps netlabel released Paranomia‘s EP Le Requiem Pour les Refrigerateures Solitaires — or, as they helpfully translate for us cognate-challenged types, Requiem for Lonely Refrigerators. From the coarse, scrunched sounds of the first of its four tracks, it’s quite possible to believe that audio emitted by an old Frigidaire is indeed the extent of Paranomia’s palette. But this is no concept album, which means you needn’t ponder the provenance of the pingy echo of “No Prestamos Servicio a los Viciosos” or hard distant techno of “Le Dompteur de Pingouins” in order to take pleasure in this often desperately minimal electronica. The 20kbps site credits Paranomia as “a sideproject by Estonian producer Talvel.” And it’s really no surprise that the landscape that gave us Arvo Part’s haunting minimalism would, a generation or three later, unleash such a parched and monastic digital music. In fact, the submerged vocals on “Les Fusillades Massives des Masses” could very well come from one of Part’s latter-day modernist Gregorian chants. Download a stuffed archive of the set, complete with “album” art, here. And visit the label at 20kbps.sofapause.ch.

If the pastel clouds of Harold Budd and La Monte Young strike your fancy, then float over to the Electronical netlabel for the Piano Versions. Credited to Twocker, its five tracks of minimally — strike that, minimalismistically — enhanced and filtered acoustic piano are caught in an interesting limbo between sound experiments and composition. Chords are announced, and then allowed to fade away, perhaps to be echoed into an otherworldly state; tones are extended until they sound more like breathy church organs on the verge of exhaustion. Twocker aptly describes one track as “a five chord loop treated to a massive amount of short delay times” and another as “a massive chord stab put through a single frequency band.” According to a July post on the site, Electronical had been AWOL for some eight months, due to technical problems. But it’s back, along with it Piano Versions, the label’s 12th and most recent release. Download the album here and visit Electronical at electronical.org.