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:: Supposedly a teaser intended to tide us over until their full length release, Tang Kai’s EP Fly Away From This Place is a luscious burst of trip-hop. Mikael Fyrek’s heady instrumentation swoons and undulates like thick water beneath the languorous vocals of Jenny Tang Kai. Ms. Kai, who channels the brittle melancholy of Beth Gibbons as well as the exotic sensuousness of Jennifer Charles, rides the rich wave of the music like a jewel-encrusted mermaid. This is the sort of music that Odysseus heard while passing the sirens on the rocks: blissed out downtempo filled with the seismic rumble of fat beats and crackling melodies over which an angelic voice yearns for succor and salvation. Go now and get this one. Come back and read the rest of the page when you’ve got this loaded into your MP3 player.
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:: In reading over Zainetica’s biolistography, there are a few line items that stick out and offer a summation of his music. Zainetica is: (2) a designer of beautiful things; (6) right handed, left footed; (8) rubbish at maths; and (12) grew up free from TV indoctrination. These are the keys to appreciating the delightful warmth of his analog electronica. Filled with darting synth lines and chattering melodies that sound like nothing more than bird song at the blush of morning, Weightless City soars well free of the turgid grip of gravity.
Here’s the deal with Zainetica’s record: I can’t get my head around it. I’ve been listening to the damn thing for three weeks now and I still can’t figure out a way to properly talk about it. These things are all true about Weightless City: it is filled with light and free of gravity; it is deceptively complex, filling your head with such beautiful colors that it seems like it was done without any effort at all; and it makes me happy and sad and fuck it, I can’t really describe what else. It turns me around, that’s for sure, and it makes me want to be a bird.
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:: Ren-Ga’s latest dark hop EP is provided by the slumbering behemoth of Horchata. The Krystallos EP overflows with Horchata’s organic tones and somnolent beats, and the breaks and rhythms marred with tiny burrs of other rhythms in a Mandelbrotian complexity. Horchata just sounds indolent at a distance like a quarter speed drill ‘n’ bass artist, and it is only as you chase the rhythms down the dark hole they’re whirlpooling around, that you start to uncover the complicated landscape of Horchata’s programming.
“Hoar” lurches and stumbles like a dying mammoth beset by tiny spearmen, their microscopic voices punctuating the lumbering hoofbeats of the beast with gnat-like hisses of sound. “Fern” squeals and hiccups with liquid chaos, as a long tone tries to crease the horizon but is interrupted time and again by squirts of noise and sub-vocal eructations. “Sectored” is a soundtrack to a slow boat ride into the dark heart of the jungle where the song of the cicadas is chopped and spliced into a percussive accompaniment to the dark heartbeat of the black river. “Needles” jets line noise across the slow ripples of a vast pool of inky water. Sounding like the slow drip death of an ancient radio as it is incrementally lowered into the tank of water, “Needles” combines the organic rhythm of Horchata’s work — the irregular beat motion of a vast circulatory system — with a mechanized swirl of noise, meshing the living with the dead in a manner that is simultaneously seductive and terminally creepy.
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:: Ernst Kessler disguises himself as No Artist and offers six tracks of micro-glitch cut-up music in Reise-Travel, a micro symphony about the cities and spaces we travel through. We lose our identities after awhile, becoming not much more than a stream of digital signals and pulse of energy. “Memories,” still filled with the percolating percussion of the micro-glitch hints at an identity with a sub-sonic rumble and the brief inclusion of some melancholic strings. “City Lights” twitches and coughs with electronic detritus, the noise of a thousand city lights all flickering in some arcane pattern; there may be an attempt at communication in all these flickering patterns (and some hints of melody and drone do rise up through the caustic cough of the click ‘n’ cut), but we are too close to the ground, too close to the individual light poles to see the large-scale composition being offered). “Anderswoher” fusses and chirps with static while the echo of an organ grinder’s song whispers beneath the groaning static noise, and “Reise” breaks free of the glitch for a moment, a brief breath of drifting organic ambience, and then is subsumed under a wash of white noise. Kessler is invisible in Reise-Travel, and it is just random patterns of sound that try to speak to you.
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:: Two long tracks make up Risen, an ambient record by Finnish artist Mika Bj&oulm;rklund. After a long day of active duty (read anything that requires you to be upright for longer than an hour), it is nice to bliss out for awhile to introvert music — tunes that are really meant for solitary headphone listening. It’s too damn bad that I can’t lie down and type at the same time. “Risen” flows through lengthy cycles, ebbing and flowing like celestial tides, with waves of solar distortion and radio signals. Miniscule bubbles of static ripple through a droning mix while an explorer stumps around behind the scenes, his footsteps like the heavy tread of an aged god ascending the back staircase to Heaven. Eventually, this deity reaches the layer of perpetual sunlight and, leaving the door at the top of the stair open, allows some heavenly strings to drift down to us.
“Harmaa Hiljaisuus” means “grey silence,” and whispers around Björklund’s fascination with clouds as a source of inspiration. While other see grey as dull and lifeless, Björklund sees it as a transition color — neither white nor black, simply waiting for the artist to impart direction. Filled with the sound of wind moving across cracked stone and rusted piping, “Harmaa Hiljaisuus” is more ambient than “Risen,” more filled with moving air, but is still an equally arresting ambient journey. Very nice.
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:: While wandering around Webbed Hand Records’ website, I got sidetracked by their Rain series (and, frankly, getting side-tracked on their website is very easy to do with the large amount of music they have available), a collection of ambient records based around, well, rain. I snagged Djinnestan’s Rain I and Rain II and lost myself for two hours in the pattering sound of natural water. Rain I obscures Twin Peaks type vocal loops (querulous whale voices that rise up like thought balloons through the murk of the mix), melodies of bell trees, the creaking of old wood, and hints of static loops with the ever-present drizzle of water from rooftops, river banks and stone buttresses. It’s the creaky part of town where you’ve wandered on this rainy day, and the shadows are filled with waterlogged ghosts and the porches are uneven, sighing with age and decrepitude with each rain drop that hits them.
Rain II is even more ghostly, filled with hints of rain that have been obscured by the mist that seems to bleed out of the sky and the low-crawling fog that coalesces along the ground. Even as the crickets take over, singing their stringed melodies across a field tinkling with tiny bells, you can’t shake the illusion that this foggy world is haunted, and it is the ever-present drip of water that keeps everything at bay. God forbid the rain would stop and the ground would dry up. Who knows what we would find if we could see the plains about us.
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Essential Band Links ::
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