Disquiet

Naotko has posted a seven-minute improvisation that wanders through echoey spaces. It’s longer than it seems, because despite its length it moves through a variety of stages, and yet the procedure never seems rushed. There are water drops and rattling metal, quavering drones and sudden silences. If there’s a constant, it’s the ambience of a field recording, the constant presence of tiny sonic variances that suggest a real-time experience. Of course, there’s nothing real here; it’s a fantasy, an aural one. The track, titled simply “E2,” is like minimal techno minus the techno, all the place-setting, all the scenic portent, yet lacking the beat. When a hard rhythm does appear, it’s little more than a tease — a beat arrives, and then is quickly quelled, the hard arrival dispensed within a split second. Some dub follows — not so much a beat as the delayed reverberation of a beat — but impression has been made: the beat, such as it is, is just one element among many. The track was posted to a sub-account of Naoyuki Sasanami, a graphic designer and prolific musician based in Tokyo.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/naotko-686248380](https://soundcloud.com/naotko-686248380/e2-1). More from Naoyuki Sasanami at [soundcloud.com/naotko](https://soundcloud.com/naotko), [naoyukisasanami.bandcamp.com](https://naoyukisasanami.bandcamp.com/), and [twitter.com/naotko](https://twitter.com/naotko).

The waveforms that accompany SoundCloud tracks can be as misleading as they are informative. With pop songs, you can quite literally see the breakdown between verse, chorus, and verse — and if you have a good eye you might even spot a bridge. With techno you can see the beat. Noise and ambient music are, to some extent, especially with drone-based noise, more a matter of volume than anything else — they’re often characterized visually on SoundCloud by a homogenized block of sound that represents a relatively minimal variation in volume. What can sound relaxing often looks hard as a brick. However, the look of a waveform can be deceiving. The only thing that’s dependable is a hard edge, which generally accompanies mechanical sounds.

As for this piece, “Their Time Up There” by Todos, the visualized sine waves are especially close to what is heard. The track is a series of adjacent swells, one after the other, the differences between them fairly indistinct. At the time I first listened to this, there were two clues that something, an alteration, a dramatic shift, was in the making. One was the evident push up about two thirds of the way through, where the waves get taller, sharper, longer — suggesting volume and length, a combination of something both more intense and yet even slower than what came before. This is very much the case.

The other clue was the splendid “Hell yeah!” from listener Idiwa. He called it. The burst that occurs at that moment is quite splendid, like your ears popping as the plane lands, just as the sun breaks through the clouds. Only in the context of listening to ambient music regularly would this alteration, this sudden development, deserve a “Hell yeah!” — but if that is a zone your listening occurs in, then your response will likely be similar to Idiwa’s.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/djtodos](https://soundcloud.com/djtodos/their-time-up-there). More from Todos at [twitter.com/todosofficial](https://twitter.com/todosofficial). (Account found via a repost of a different Todos track by [Novitzkas](https://soundcloud.com/novitzkas) of Cape Town, South Afrika.)

Michiru Aoyama’s glorious new track (Google Translate is failing thus far on this one’s title) is a sweeping, four-minute expanse of sonic cloud formations that turn round and round inside themselves. Glimmers surface and then become the foregrounded sound, only for another theme to pierce the veil and, at a slow pace, subsume everything that had preceded it. The piece isn’t grounded so much as tied to ocean imagery, for amid the haze is the sort of creaking that comes from a taut rope on a boat.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/michiru-aoyama](https://soundcloud.com/michiru-aoyama/b06olp0unv1x). More from Aoyama, who is based in Kamakura, Japan, at [michiruaoyama.jimdo.com](http://michiruaoyama.jimdo.com/) and [michiruaoyama.bandcamp.com](https://michiruaoyama.bandcamp.com/).