Wednesday night, playing with loops, one seven beats long, the other eight, then layering occasional accent notes. Fade in and out just turning the knob on the amp once the loops were left to their looping. Recorded to phone put in front of the amp. Not sure why the eight-beat loop is more prominent than the seven-beat one, except perhaps that it’s in 4/4 so the brain registers it more easily. Also not sure about that one hiccup at :46 seconds. Something suddenly went out of alignment and then came just as suddenly back into alignment. The bit at the very end isn’t a tape cassette stopping. It just sounds like that.
Maximum Patch Point Capacity
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
This newly arrived synthesizer module appears to have achieved maximum patch point capacity. It may also test the thesis that you can never have too many VCAs. And, indeed, that many unadulterated waves will benefit from [attenuation](https://disquiet.com/2020/08/22/0hp-4life/).
Iwaki/Raffa Split
On the Muzan label
There’s a lot to recommend the new split release by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa, Living Distances (on the Muzan Editions label, out of Nara, Japan). Start with Iwaki’s “April,” a thick bed of throbbing, pulsing tones plus Cheshire Cat choral vocal effects appearing here and there in the mix. Then go for “Correlation,” Raffa’s combination of rattling metallic effects and fragmented field recordings. There’s much much more to the album’s 10 tracks, some more challenging (Iwaki has a thing for fractured dream-state sound design, notably on “Spiral Flow”), others welcomingly lulling (Raffa closes things out with an artificial landscape the listener will be hard put to exit; fortunately it’s the longest track on Living Distances).
Album originally posted at [muzaneditions.bandcamp.com](https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/living-distances). More from Iwaki at [soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi](https://soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi) and from Raffa at [rjraffa.net](https://www.rjraffa.net/). Both are based in Tokyo, Japan.
Freak Flags
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt
The frequent employment of makeshift address labels on doorbells generally comes across as just that: a quick, easy, vaguely stable response to a specific need. The specific need is to align a given residence (or business) with a push button. The vaguely stable part is that those labels are sure to be rubbed down, ripped off, or otherwise damaged by the elements over time (humans count as elements, alongside rain, wind, and heat). The two such labels shown here are in different states of disrepair, and their non-alignment briefly brings to mind the manner in which opening credits for films starring dual leading actors use techniques to suggest neither is truly more prominent than the other: one may come first, for example, but the other is positioned higher. But what if these seemingly temporary labels are hiding their actual purpose in plain sight? What if they’re temporary precisely because the people who use them harbor some sort of fever-dream conspiracy groupthink that their street address can, in the future, be changed whenever they darn well please? Why, all that stands in their way is casting off the shackles of government overreach. In which case, what if such cheap labels aren’t just purposeful hedges in advance of that simultaneously imminent yet elusive utopia, but visual dog whistles: post-truth freak flags left for fellow travelers to acknowledge with a slight, knowing nod while out for a stroll?
Current Listens: New Autechre, Textile Music
Heavy rotation, lightly annotated
A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ The ensemble Third Coast Percussion teamed up with modular synthesizer musician Bana Haffar for a nearly 20-minute performance of “Shed,” inspired by the textile art of Anni Albers. And as a side note, how amazing is it that Haffar’s own website, [banahaffar.com](http://banahaffar.com), is simply a Google Sheet with bits of information and outbound links? More on the piece at [blackmountaincollege.org](https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/performance-bana-haffar-third-coast-percussion). (Thanks, Kim Rueger, for the recommendation.)
▰ Another fine, dramatic yet [gentle patch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY5AMfHoEzI) from Michigan-based Orbital Patterns.
▰ Grassy Knoll has a new EP due out at month’s end, and one of the preview tracks, an instrumental, is a strong crunch of noir-detective electronica. The track is “Into Your Mind,” and the EP is [*EP01*](https://thegrassyknoll.bandcamp.com/album/ep01). It’s due out October 29.
▰ Autechre is back with [*Sign*](https://autechre.bandcamp.com/album/sign), its first album in over two years, though that doesn’t count over two dozen live sets released in between, not to mention a lengthy NTS archival broadcast. It’s more sedate, less brutal, than much of their recent music.
▰ Noise album from the duo of Chinese musician Yan Jun (更多) and Bani Haykal, who I believe is based in Singapore. The record, [*Rats in the Bright Southern Sky*](https://yanjun.bandcamp.com/album/rats-in-the-bright-southern-sky), came out a year ago this month, but I’m just beginning to explore its spartan mix of rapid-fire loops, industrial drones, snatches of voices, and invigorating feedback. (Thanks, Grzegorz Bojanek, for the recommendation.)