Disquiet

Eivind Aarset has [announced](http://www.eivindaarset.com/news/new-album-ie-to-be-released-in-september-on-jazzlandrec) a new album, *I.E.*, due out this month from the label [Jazzland](http://www.jazzlandrec.com/shop.php?iid=109&category=Jazzland&action=item&title=ie). Aarset, a Norwegian who emerged as a player in the band of latter-day fusion trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, also from Norway, has a deep talent for electronically mediated guitar — not electric guitar as it’s become generally understood, but an electric guitar so filtered through a battery of effects and other tools that it isn’t inherently recognizable as a guitar anymore. Pop fans will recognize timbres from U2’s the Edge, the Police’s Andy Summers, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who to varying degrees insinuated FM radio with ethereal, echoing, otherworldly atmospheres. Aarset brings those atmospheres to the foreground. The new record features nine tracks, five of which are previewed (either in full or part) at his website, [eivindaarset.com](http://www.eivindaarset.com/music/ie). (The streams aren’t currently embeddable, so you’ll have to click through to listen.) Some rock fairly hard, while others, notably “One and the Same” and “Through Clogged Streets, Passed Rotten Buildings,” venture into filmic territory.

Aarset’s band consists of Audun Erlien (bass) and Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen (drums, percussion, “and a lot of other stuff”). Guests include Jan Bang (“livesampling co-production”); Lorenzo Esposito Fornaseri (vocals on “Through Clogged Streets”); the wind ensemble Det Norske BlÃ¥se; Michele Rabbia (“electronic treatments”); and Jan Galaga Brönnimann (contrabass clarinet). One of the tunes (“Rask,” according to the album’s [discogs.com page](http://www.discogs.com/Eivind-Aarset-I-E/release/7450323)) — was mixed by Tchad Blake. Design-watchers will want to know that Ian Anderson of Designers Republic did the album cover.

Tracks originally posted for streaming at [eivindaarset.com](http://www.eivindaarset.com/music/ie). News via Michael Ross’ [guitarmoderne.com](http://www.guitarmoderne.com/recordings/new-eivind-aarset-record), which is a great ongoing source for electronically mediated guitar. More details on the album’s recording process at [jazzlandrec.com](http://www.jazzlandrec.com/shop.php?iid=109&category=Jazzland&action=item&title=ie).

Matt Madden is best known as a comics artist. His work plays with form, notably in his book *99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style*. I’ve known Matt for over 20 years, having edited comics he produced for Tower Records *Pulse!* magazine back in the 1990s and early 2000s. (Here’s an essay I wrote about one of them: [“Home Decorating in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”](https://disquiet.com/1996/05/15/home-decorating-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/)) He also allowed the Disquiet Junto early on, for its 14th project, back in April 2012, to [riff on his *99 Ways* book](https://disquiet.com/2012/04/05/disquiet0014-oumupo/).

Despite all of which, I wasn’t fully aware he himself made music. He’s begun posting some of his old work at a new SoundCloud account, [soundcloud.com/mattmadd](https://soundcloud.com/mattmadd). The first track he uploaded, “Telepathy,” dates from 1988. It’s a short, slow, introspective piece. It brings to mind various threads of what would come to coalesce in part as trip-hop, as well as illbient. There are bits of what we’d come to associate later with “Money” Mark Nishita’s funky-sodden organ grooves, and Kid Koala’s sad-sack, muddled beatcraft. A guitar, trying to soar with weighted-down wings, brings manages to bring to mind both Robert Fripp’s echoing guitar loops and Adrian Belew’s chatty six-string birdsong (in particular “The Sheltering Sky” off *Discipline*). There’s something fitting about hearing amorphous ambient music from an artist whose visual work is often fixated on the rigors of form.

Back to the present, Madden has lately been providing music for *Out on the Wire*, a series of podcasts by his wife, Jessica Abel (whose comics work I’ve also edited), relating to her new book by that name, *Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio*, for which Ira Glass wrote the foreword. Check it out at [soundcloud.com/out-on-the-wire](https://soundcloud.com/out-on-the-wire).

“Telepathy” originally posted at [soundcloud.com/mattmadd](https://soundcloud.com/mattmadd/telepathy-remaster). More from Madden at [mattmadden.com](http://mattmadden.com/).