On and off, the website of musician Hrvatski (born Keith Fullerton Whitman) has offered a free MP3 of the month, many of them key entries in the ongoing Disquiet Downstream setlist: lightly edited field recordings from overseas, live guitar experiments from dank clubs in random cities. A few months back, though, Hrvatski switched from downloads to streams, and posted on reckankomplex.com a massive streaming jukebox (click on the word “radio” when you visit), which as of last count had 75 tracks, many of them his own — lonesome, meandering drones; elliptical reflections on static and low-key noise; layered live-looping ditties — and others credited to celebrated peers, including Pimmon, Kim Cascone and Fennesz, among many. There’s no annotation to speak of, and if you don’t click off the “random playback” button the interface can be unintentionally unwieldy, but it’s a rich trove. Dig in.
Matmos Live MP3s
Late last year, the San Francisco-based electronic duo Matmos took over a gallery in the city’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and turned it into its studio, complete with throw rug, piano, computers and all manner of lo-fi noisemakers. For most of a month, Matmos (the pair of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel) showed up at the gallery-turned-studio as if it were a culture factory, a workplace, and made music while museum-goers wandered through. Most nights, they invited musician friends to drop by and jam. A baker’s dozen of those jams now appear for free download as a package of MP3 files on the group’s website (brainwashed.com/matmos), featuring them playing with Coelacanth; Sagan; J Lesser and Vickie Bennett (under the DISC moniker); Kendra Juul and Phatima and the Stud Middle Eastern Drum Ensemble; Sutekh and Safety Scissors; Wobbly and Thomas Dimuzio; and Wobbly and People Like Us. Particularly recommended are (1) the DISC track, which despite its meager substance (“As ever, it’s just compact discs skipping,” reads an accompanying note), churns richly, and (2) the Phatima track, which mixes live percussion and dark, treated piano. (Also, this is the first Disquiet.com posting in over two months. Apologies for the unintended hiatus.)
BBC Chill-Out Docu-stream
BBC Radio 2 has a streaming (and sprawling) hour-long audio-documentary on chill-out music, put together by Chris Coco. It includes interviews with musicians (Mixmaster Morris, Nightmares on Wax) atop an ongoing backdrop of musical examples, from Erik Satie to the Art of Noise to the current day. It’s apparently only up online through the weekend, here.
Venezuelan Techno EP
The standout on Mérida, Venezuela-based Rafael L. Garnica‘s four-track Naif EP, a free download from the Microbio netlabel, isn’t the familiar techno of the title cut. And it isn’t “From LA” (the name of which includes a witty parenthetical clarification: “LA” means “Los Andes”), though that one has a distinct midtempo appeal, especially how on each run through the verse a layer of sound is added or removed. It isn’t “b3,” though this track distinguishes itself with a memorable false denouement at its midway point, when it breaks for an inquisitive line of beeps and a soothing choral “ahh.”
No, the keeper — and it’s a true keeper — is a remix, titled “Luisa a 3 Velocidades,” credited to El Lazo Invisible. On “Luisa,” El Lazo reduces Garnica’s well-honed sounds to at most a fifth the thickness of the other pieces on the album, trimming away the layers, rather than merely teasing with them, and dropping the standard beat like the bad habit that it is. What’s left is a thin slice of a song, the rhythm an occasional trip of a microscopic switch, the melody built from what sounds like a field recording of department-store elevator trills. Some of this relative quietude may have to do with the fact that “Luisa” was compressed at a measly 64kbps, versus a generous 224 for the rest of the EP, but that math doesn’t diminish Lazo’s skill; he really has a way with the stuttered sample, which he introduces on occasion with the low-level intrusiveness of something stuck in the periphery of your memory. Download the full set at microbiorecords.net.
Live Hrvatski MP3
Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) went to Japan and all we got was a free half-hour live recording in the form of a stereo MP3 file. Come to think of it, that’s not a bad deal. Recently uploaded to the musician’s website, reckankomplex.com, is an “experimental session” (his phrase, and the title of the file) recorded in mid-December of last year in Tokyo at the Warszawa performance space. It’s a “whisper to a scream” scenario — well, a “whisper to a scream to a moan” scenario — starting as it does with snatches of circuit-sound, latitudinal guitar figures, and placid tonal elements, and proceeding to a hectic whirligig, a brilliant burst of volume and density that occurs about halfway through, only to simmer down to a syrupy blur of distortion.
Whitman describes the recording, in his characteristic third-person, on the website as follows: “using only his compu-trog 6000 model a/d converter and a borrowed semi-acoustic telecaster with bad grounding problems (there’s a rough bubbly bit in the middle there where the pitch-sensing algorithms simply wouldn’t track anything other than 50/60 cycle hum), keith-hrvatski yielded heretofore unknown worlds of wonder and delight for the 4 or 5 people that showed up. … now available to a slightly larger audience… slightly.” The free download has been made available to coincide with the commercial release of his latest album, Antithesis, a set of four archival recordings. Get the Tokyo file directly here.