Disquiet

The Japan-based Gaapiiiii’s three-track set *Elementary Particle* likely takes its name from how the compositions focus on the reworking of a series of concise audio sources.

The central melodic snippet of “The Kingdom Which Was Lost” may or may not be a tiny sliver of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Edelweiss,” but its treatment here works in favor of the likelihood. The short bit is caught on a loop, a shard of Cold War radio set on repeat as if the remainder had been lost in transmission, and the surviving segment is treated to all manner of rescanning and forensics, eking out what sonic content can be located. By track’s end all that remains is just glitched-out vestigial noise. The melodic curiosity appears as well in “Strange Moment,” just before the track’s midpoint, surfacing out of muddily retuned percussion, and dissolving into murky static.

“Infinity of Feelings,” the third and final track on *Elementary Particle*, is roughly the length of the two previous in combination, and the extended play serves to make it all the more difficult — in a pleasurable way — to get a hold of, to wrestle with. It’s all the more ethereal, wispy, fragmentary, fleeting. Length here does not translate into density — quite the contrary. The most tangible moment is an acoustic guitar figure that takes form out of an initially rain-like sequence of percussive patterning. The guitar part is quite pretty, but what makes it memorable is how it came to be, how in its complete form it retains, for the listener, a memory of its earlier, hyper-particulate self. This is the case for all three tracks. Over the course of *Elementary Particle* Gaapiiiii trains your ear to stop listening for the source audio and to pay attention, instead, to the process.

Set originally posted at [soundcloud.com/gaapiiiii](https://soundcloud.com/gaapiiiii/sets/elementary-particle). More from Gappiiiii, who is based in Hyōgo, Japan, at [selfhelptapes.bandcamp.com](https://selfhelptapes.bandcamp.com/album/sign-stanza-form-scrap-hlp08), [phinery.bandcamp.com](https://phinery.bandcamp.com/album/typedef), and [fagashrecords.bandcamp.com](https://fagashrecords.bandcamp.com/album/that-new-environment).

The track “Hitam Jumat” by Gregory Taylor bears the simple accompanying line *”not buying anything. not me.”* The piece was posted around November 27, which suggests it as a response to — a respite from — the consumer frenzy that is Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) here in the United States. It consists of a field of light percussion and gently dissonant, organ-like chords. The percussion plays as a repetitive, circular theme, the tone somewhere between a gamelan and a Caribbean steel drum (Taylor himself tagged it as #Indonesian). The dissonance plays against the percussion. It’s a bit more brooding. It will momentarily abide by the underlying rhythm, but then hold back, or add a beat, or go in a different, more diffuse direction. This is a beautiful recording, even as it actively undermines the very hush that it evokes.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/gregory-taylor](https://soundcloud.com/gregory-taylor/hitam-jumat). Taylor is based in Madison, Wisconsin. He has recorded for the labels Stasisfield, Palace of Lights, and c74, among others.