Poppy Electronica, Vacation Vibe

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Why is it that the most commonplace good-time pop-music elements — for example, a lilting electric-guitar melody and a cliché hip-hop drum loop — can combine to form something almost unbearably delectable? The musician Dim Dim (known to friends and family as Jerry Dimmer) specializes in exactly that sort of home-studio alchemy. And if “Riri,” the opening track to Kiwi (on the Audio Dregs label), is such a spectacular feat of Saturday-morning good cheer, it’s no surprise that the rest of the album can’t quite equal the initial sugar rush. “Riri” has a Carl Stalling goofiness, all “boing!” sound effects once it gets going, plus a consistent Don Ho, Hawaiian-vacation vibe. The song may appear to be mid-tempo, but it has a secret weapon in its feisty backbeat, which will have you attempting a conga line with the nearest carbon-based life form.

The album is packed with tracks that were built from the musical equivalent of Lego bricks: all the pieces are bright, shiny and interchangeable. “Fucha Fucha” has a kid singing along, nursery-rhyme style, with an occasional snippet of elementary scratching. “Flit” brings in more slack-key guitar, and recalls Kid Koala’s way with ambiguously paced vinyl recordings; it’s amazing what a little mechanized backbeat will do to refurbish an old 78. “Los Gitanos” echoes Amon Tobin’s Brazilian fusion escapades. Perhaps the one truly disappointing track on Kiwi comes midway through, in the form of “Frosty.” The song has all the telltale signs of drum’n’bass — dramatic downward modulation, the zippy back-and-forth percussion — but it’s too familiar to be fun. Perhaps Dim Dim’s point is that drum’n’bass is just another kind of party music, one element among many in his cartoony bag of tune tools, but oddly enough it’s the one element here he has not truly made his own.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

Field Recordings from Unreliable Travelog

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Philip Scheffner builds art from field recordings that he makes on his travels. A/C (on the Pong label) contains a kind of program music, in which the winding narrative that his sounds accompany is the course of his journey: insect noise, traffic, interior hum. Scheffner is no omniscient narrator; much as he is inclined to fracture and layer the recordings, he also intrudes upon them. When a woman yaps into his microphone, you can hear either him or a travel-mate — Merle Kröger, co-credited for recording A/C‘s dialogue — laughing at the absurdity of her hyperbole. “It’s a dead city,” the woman says, as car horns blare repeatedly in the foreground. Even the listener is inclined to giggle at the disparity between what she says and what we’re experiencing, via the proxy of Scheffner’s mic.

There is as much peace on A/C as there is urban anxiety. The music on the album’s third track (there are seven cuts total, ranging in length from a minute to over 11, all untitled) is so patient, the rhythm so seductive, that it girds itself to whatever the listener might be doing. In contrast, track five opens startlingly with car horns and other street noise. “Don’t be so naive,” that same woman tells us, an admonishment in English heavily spiced with an Indian accent. She might be critiquing the assumptions of her arty Western visitors. Or, she might be speaking to the audience, who are accustomed to verses and choruses, and who must make peace with the complexity in Scheffner’s sounds, which are — despite their familiarity — invasive and often grating. At the end of track five, a digitized harmonica fades in, the melody veering toward what sounds like “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (or, perhaps, “God Save the Queen”), and you can’t help but empathize: home feels very far away.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

Two Ninja MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Ninja Tune label has finally updated its free Downloads page (here), with a pair of cuts by two of its newest acts: Blockhead and Skalpel. Blockhead is a New York-based solo musician, and “Bullfight in Ireland,” off his Music by Cavelight album, is a downtempo bit of blunted studio fog; its Spanish elements are lonesome guitar and horn parts, and its Irish material is restricted to an unintelligible vocal by an apparently sloshed gentleman, whose chant recalls the waistrel who sang on Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet” — just in time for Saint Patrick’s Day. Skalpel is Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudlo, a pair of musicians from Wroclaw, Poland, and their “Ninjazz,” the Sculpture single’s closing track, is a languorous bit of fusion, with its emphasis on a lilting keyboard phrases and a rolling trap set. Peculiarly, both the Blockhead and Skalpel tracks are exactly the same length: 4:47. (More on the Ninja Tune label at ninjatune.net. Skalpel’s homepage is skalpel.chlip.com. Blockhead’s is at ninjatune.net/blockhead.)

Throbbing Gristle MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Later this month, on the 29th, the Novamute label will release Mutant TG, an album of remixes of music from the inimitable psychedelic industrial act Throbbing Gristle, who started recording in the mid-1970s. Contributors to the collection include Carl Craig, Two Long Swordsmen and TG members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, among others. In advance of the album’s release comes a mashup of elements from the record, strung together by DJ Si Begg; the mix channel surfs from new-wave dance music, through industrial rhythm sections, to recondite noise. (More on Mutant TG here; the Si Begg MP3 file is located here. More on the upcoming Throbbing Gristle reunion here.)

Fragile MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest free EP from 12k.com’s Term sublabel is a three-track live set by Alessandro Canova, who records as Mugen. The music was recorded like at Fabrica, the Benetton Research and Development Communication Centre, outside Treviso, Italy, on October, 25, 2002. With their lingering pulses of ethereal hum, these are among the loveliest releases yet from Term, which specializes in fragile sound works. The tracks are labeled Parts 1, 4 and 5. Two are about three and a half minutes long (Parts 1 and 5), and the third (Part 4) is a little over a minute and a half. Part 1 has a distant, white-noise groove like the locomotion of a nanotech train engine. Part 4 has, for its rhythm, an initial string of Geiger counter-like static, which gives way to extended long, round tones. Part 5 is distinguished by its opening, a light rupture of irritated beats, a cross between the locked groove at the end of a vinyl LP and the internal workings of a computer; eventually this beat-like material is joined by elegiac synth tones. Term says of Mugen’s music, “In 1999 Canova started experimenting with sine waves and white noise as his only sound sources, developing a special interest in a micro sounds aesthetic. Influenced by his studies on Asian arts he aims to create a meditative dimension: a contemplation of sound that lucidly expresses a refinement of the frequencies.” The Term label’s homepage is 12k.com/term, and the Mugen 25 October Live @ Fabrica EP is located here. (More on Mugen at pachinkostudio.com. More on Fabrica at fabrica.it.)