Live, in performance, the Portland-based quintet Adelaide leavens its post-rock minimalism — all heady, light song form with a decidedly introspective bent — with 16mm films, giving the audience a series of dreamy visuals cues by which to follow the group’s non-verbal pop. If you can’t catch their current summer 2004 tour (more info at adelaidesound.com), you can download three tracks (with and without complementary visuals) from the band’s website. “Green Horizon” and “Bones of Things” are delightful, but it’s “Games Without End” that will entrance ambient/electronic fans, because it’s on that song that the digital nuances are most pronounced, notably a gentle surf of electric piano.
Sing-Song Ambient MP3 EP
Marsen Jules‘ free online EP, Yara, on the Autoplate netlabel as of May of this year, is caught in a blissful limbo between the Cocteau Twins’ hypnotic chamber stews and Julee Cruise’s dub-tinged torch songs. The six-song set is both light and thick, elegant and rapturous. Much of it has the rich, formless, sing-song ambience of a tugboat’s midnight hymn. But what’s particularly amazing is how a seemingly neutral tonal field can fully subsume rhythmic clutter. This is certainly the case on the second track, which starts with a looped snippet, marked by the anti-percussive gap, or seam, where the sample is cued to repeat, but which gives way, effortlessly, to lush drone. The tracks are simply labeled “Yara 1” through “Yara 6.” Number four balances field-recording randomness with a deep, spacious blanket. Number five hangs out in a higher register, but with the same languorous pendulum swing that distinguishes many of the other tracks. Apparently the source material comes (permission granted) from a live performance by a group named Trio Yara — hence the mix of tonal and found sound. Trio Yara and Jules hail from the same city: Dortmund, Germany. Download the full Yara set from the Autoplate website, at autoplate.org. More on Marsen Jules at marsenjules.de.
Orbital’s Farewell Stream
Is this really the case? Have Orbital, granddaddies of rave music, oft conflated with the Orb and William Orbit, called it quits? Well, they apparently did so last week on John Peel’s radio show. Their farewell, encore performance of “Rewind, Rewind,” recorded July 28 at the BBC’s intimate Maida Vale studio, is streaming, in RealAudio format, here. John Peel’s radio homepage, here.
Slovakian MP3 EP
Victor Tverdochlebov, a musician from Slovakia who records under the name Karaoke Tundra, has released nine free MP3 tracks with the dimensions of haiku, the static-laced fissures of microsound experiments, and the overall feel of a pop demo tape. The songs are as short as they are spare, from just over a minute in length to just under two. But if you’re picky about your downloads, then be sure to at least grab “Damn You,” with its combo of two very different retro sounds (a taut jazz trumpet riff against an oscillating analog synth wave), and “Ministry of Fishing,” which introduces its tasty rudiment of a beat with an electric piano hook (is that sample from Steely Dan or Genesis?), and then wanders away until the momentum has pretty much evaporated, only to start it up all over again — imagine the off-kilter funk of James Chance or Jon Spencer or DNA, but played out at small scale on a laptop. The EP is titled Residence, and it’s available from the Kikapu netlabel, at kikapu.com (it’s the label’s 68th release). More info on Tverdochlebov/Tundra at his website, here.
WOMAD 2004 Stream
The BBC, which has so much music on its website that one could get lost for a month in its holdings, only to find them replenished anew the month following, has posted a massive catalog of the WOMAD 2004 festival. Now, much of this is “world music,” albeit with the occasional electronic touch, residue of founder Peter Gabriel’s work in that arena. But there is some more discernibly “electronic” work to be heard, notably a percussive, hour-long set by DJ Dolores, of Brazil, listenable to in streaming form here.