For fifteen dollars, the price of cappuccinos and pastry for two, you get half a gigabyte of high-quality MP3s, which amount to nearly four hours of music if you played them end to end.
The first thing you should know about Tympanik Audio’s massive 42-track-long compilation celebrating their five year anniversary is that it’s a hell of a good value for the money. For fifteen dollars, the price of cappuccinos and pastry for two, you get half a gigabyte of high-quality MP3s, which amount to nearly four hours of music if you played them end to end. Even if only a meager quarter of the tracks were worthy of repeat plays, you’d be doing as well as any mainstream electronic album measured by the bangers-for-the-buck metric. So the second point about the compilation is this: as is inevitable in an assemblage of such breadth, some tracks are better than others, it does shockingly well by the hits-to-misses metric, too.
Finding highlights of the compilation took several sittings, going through it both sequentially and on shuffle, because it’s a rare day that my attention span and schedule permit four hours of uninterrupted listening. Even outside of a review-writing context I’d recommend taking a random walk through the tracks—there are some great pieces like Displacer’s trip-hoppy groover “Rattlesnake” that come on the back stretch and might not otherwise get the play they deserve. I like c.db.sn’s flirtation with vocals and Hammock-styled ambient guitar on “Athousandmiles” as well as the brutal industrial assault of ESA’s “The Shape of Hate To Come,” two tracks whose stylistic differences display the breadth of the label’s sound spectrum.
Some surprises lie in wait even for close Tympanik followers. I found Zentriert ins Antlitz’ 2008 release …No! tried so hard to be creepy it ended up instead in silly bombast, so the interesting variety of sound choices (jazz clarinet? horns?) and thematic development on their compilation track “Pasiphae” make it a real treat. r.roo, whose debut album I reviewed here at Igloo recently, also stretches out from his album’s style on “Heaven Drops His Stars On Our Heads.” While there’s still a touch of the violin work that was mgnovenie‘s centerpiece, here it plays second fiddle (sorry!) to the quick, clattering percussion and plucky Plaid-esque electric piano melody.
There’s more, much more, where that comes from. Hopefully this whirlwind summary is enough to convince you at least to explore what Accretion has on offer; the tracks are all streamable via Tympanik’s Bandcamp page. Highly recommended.
Accretion is available on Tympanik Audio. [Release page]
