This is New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh‘s pitch-perfect description of how abstract electronic music tracks differ from their dance-music counterparts:
they are the electronic equivalent of flightless birds, with vestigial beats that serve only to evoke the music’s phylogeny.
From Sanneh’s March 8, 2004, overview of recent mix CDs (nytimes.com).
Saul Stokes recently posted three downtempo tracks at the kahvi.org netlabel, all for free download. Combined, they comprise an EP, titled This Road Is Glowing. “Spirals from Zurich,” with its slow build and its riff slightly behind the beat, resembles, of all things, Radiohead at its most glimmering. “Thick Streets” slows things down further, with a gurgling underbelly and the long, simple tones of an anime soundtrack. The EP’s title cut is its most metronomic. Like “Thick Streets,” it changes as it proceeds, its character darkening, giving way to something more through-composed, more heady and steeped in narrative. Rich, grey clusters swoop overhead — are they inbound motifs, or the thematic equivalent of grace notes. A piece modulates up, or down — is this the beginning of a steady slope, or will it modulate back where it started, returning the piece to song form? The three tracks are varied and long enough, between six and just over nine minutes, that each listening reveals something new. (The label is at kahvi.org, and the EP is located here.) One note: these are all in the Ogg Vorbis (or .ogg) format, which means, among other things, they don’t play on standard iPods. (More info on the format at vorbis.com.)
Aaron Ximm came up with the idea of a “one-minute vacation” — 60-second sound clips that allow the listener to escape to somewhere else, thanks to the immersive properties of headphones. “Surely you can spare a minute to clean your ears?” he writes on his website, quietamerican.org. Ximm posts a new MP3 file just about every Monday, from a variety of contributors, including Andrew Duke (a walk in the snow in Halifax, Nova Scotia) and jhno (the Blue Angels thundering through the San Francisco sky). The two most recent vacations are: from March 1 (here), a July 2003 recording of the New York Public Library’s Reading Room by John Kannenberg, who runs the Stasisfield netlabel , and today, March 8 (here), a summer 1994 recording of a child wheeling her tricycle by — it gets louder as it approaches, braying like an asthmatic donkey. Though the vacation soundclips are unedited documentary records of a specific time and place, they do leave room for interpretation. Kanneberg notes that “moving chairs echo like thunder throughout the room” of the library. And Xavier Briche, who recorded the tricycle, says that he later used its creaky noise in the sound design for “a torture scene in a theatre play.” (More on one-minute vacations at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.)
One cannot subsist on abstract sound art alone, so let’s close the week with streaming audio from the Astralwerks Records compilation, freq.beats. On the double album’s promotional page (astralwerks.com/freq_beats), there are full-length streams of 10 of the set’s tracks, including Fatboy Slim’s “The Pimp,” David Guetta’s house remix of David Bowie’s “Heroes,” and Royksopp’s gleaming “Eple.” The big-eared, pop-minded compilation also features Dirty Vegas, Postal Service, Gorillaz, Fischerspooner, Daft Punk and others.
This month’s free MP3 on the Kracfive label’s “MP3 Rotor” is Colongib‘s “Nrack.” It’s a singsong bit of electro-acoustic music, swaying back and forth between two opposing elements (a child’s death rattle and a plaintive synth tone), until they join together in, if not perfect harmony, then certainly dynamic cohabitation. (Label at kracfive.com; track here.)
