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:: I got a brief email the other day from Makunouchi Bento pointing me towards their latest netlabel release and I eagerly scampered off to make the Internet give up its magic goods for me. A chattering ambient release that travels through the tiny mental processes of a microscopic creature, Balada Unui Creier Mic hums and chirps with crystalline sound. There are field recordings from lost hallways and decrepit underground tunnels worked into the looping insectoid music, recordings that are captured at ground level as if the listener were only a half inch tall. The final track, “Spanipig,” loops back around into “Circes” as the whole EP works as a Möbius strip of sound that easily lends itself to multiple listens. You are sitting in an underground station waiting for a train to arrive and just listening to the patterns of sound that echo through the tunnels, getting lost in the rhythms of humanity as its mirrors the same haphazard movement of small insects in their tiny burrows. Distant voices of children haunt the scattered electronic particles of “Licure” while “Usa Farmaciei 8” is filled with the rustling sound of locust wings and the off-kilter sound of childhood instruments being played by tentacled space creatures. This EP makes me feel like an alien, like an extraterrestrial listening to an illicit transmission from some foreign place. I have no reference points with Balada Unui Creier Mic and, for the brief moment of this EP, I’m completely lost, mesmerized by the sound of a strange place.
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:: Ren-ga offers a three-track EP from Mothboy, a brief introduction to an artist who leverages Scorn’s seismic bass as the monolithic foundation to a new breed of warped funk. The low end of “DIY Cord” cracks your tailbone as it throws you out on the dance floor while the squirming funk of “Selfish Plan” will make the toes of corpses twitch. Mothboy welds a love of jazz instrumentation and metallic noises to a slumbering basso behemoth. “Palace” deconstructs an Amon Tobin-style vocalized drum ‘n’ bass lick into a floor shaker that will pulverize stones. These tracks are damaged goods like drunken ex-boxers reeling about on the dance floor, pummeling each other in an effort to feel something. Rock the house with these and let the vibrations break stuff.
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:: A collaboration between two Russian composers, Cisfinitum’s Landschaft is an hour long work of emotional drones, filled with sonorous tones and ghostly electro-acoustic noises. E. Voronovsky and A. Tzarev build pliable loops that have been stretched like warm taffy and the resulting melodies unfold across aeons instead of minutes. In “Inland,” Voronovsky’s violin is captured as a tone machine, a box of echoes that weeps endlessly, and its long sobs are undercut by the whistles of ancient machinery and the groans of ruined foundations as they slowly decompose over the seasons. “Landschaft I” spills out of the speakers like a low fog, a boiling mist that seeps into the corners and taints your shadows. For eighteen minutes, a pernicious wind blows the mist about, making aural eddies and creating tiny whirlwinds of sound. “Landschaft II,” equally as involved, is filled with a more sepulcheral breeze, a faint wind that carries on it the creak of graveyards and the rusting decay of old machines. “District Delta” combines the drifting miasmas of the two-part “Landschaft” with the weeping violin notes of “Inland,” bringing everything full-circle to a point of echoing analog tones that simply drift away. This is dark ambience of the dead zones.
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:: The irony of the title of Underscore’s The Conspiracy of Silence is that I want to shout about this record from the rooftops. An electronic soundtrack for a modern thriller that is heavy on funky grooves and lots of percussion, The Conspiracy of Silence is what would happen if Paul Haslinger was brought in to augment Mark Snow’s creepy X-Files ambience. The layers stack up on “Protocol” as the tiny bell ambience of the beginning is taken up by acoustic guitar and a couple dozen drummers, building from an opening of tense interogation to a central movement of explosive action. “Protocol” veers again with analog synths masquerading as a string quartet as the cinematic reversals continue. And the last minute turns into a piano and wind pipe duet. “Protocol” is a complete soundtrack for a seven and a half minute spy thriller. Just get me Clive Owen, a BMW, a digital camcorder and a pyrotechnician for a couple of afternoons. I wouldn’t even need to worry about dialogue.
The rest of The Conspiracy of Silence is equally as spectacular (the Spanish guitar of “Oeuf d’ange,” the building textures of “Ego,” the tumultous drums and head-nodding melodies of “Falling Doors” — oh, it’s all such great fun). I don’t know how the guys at Enpeg manage to continually nab such great records for their digital releases, but if any netlabel is demonstrating that the old paradigms of the music industry are dead, it’s these guys. Underscore is a complete score and, for the price of two donuts, I’m in on the secret of The Conspiracy of Silence.
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:: An EP of ghostly glitch dub, Antiguo Autómata Mexicano’s Co.opt is a collection of echoes spawned by static-laced glitch beats. Each track is a series of decay patterns: “Second Imago” shuffles and whispers with its crackling static and light echoes while a tiny bird-like melody cries forlornly in the mix built by the glitch; “Metamistake” is a recursive loop that decays and distorts with each generation, and tiny breathless elements struggle to rise out of the cycle. A piano sounds its sonorous soundtrack in “Walter Schmidt,” vaguely noir theme music that strolls along back alleys with a studied indifference. A drum loop provides momentum and micro-melodies haunt the background, anchored in place by shards of glitch. “Co.opt” evolves from the primal ooze of a drone, an evolutionary excursion from glitch to dub to minimal techno. Each generation retains some vestigial flippers, the layered history of the sound providing a textural depth to the music as Antiguo Autómata Mexicano compresses evolution into five minutes and forty seconds. Gentle and amphorous, this EP is a panacea for the hard light of the day, a gentle tincture to pour into our ears as we lay down beneath the blanket of night.
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:: Deru’s Trying to Remember is one of my favorite recent IDM records and it is with some eagerness that I bite into Designed Disorder’s first netlabel release, Autonomous Addicts. Deru opens the compilation with “Blackboard,” a restless exploration of dusty spaces and noisy ducting. A slow melody echoes over a bed of writhing glitch and uncoiling static pops as if we were eavesdropping in on a tiny orchestral rehearsal of the chamber orchestra being put together by the macheriny down in the basement of the local elementary school.
Eight Frozen Modules contributes a surprisingly sedate breakcore track with “Table Faith.” The recognizable scattershot beats are all there but the surrounding melodic elements are more sonorous and temperate, making the track more downtempo than 8FM’s usual hyper-kinetic pace. Anon’s “String Theory” is a warbling concerto of synthetic stringed instruments gyrating back and forth across a spattering drum loop while eDit offers “Crashes,” a gin-soaked melody propped upright against the bar by heavily DSP’ed drum programming. Ben Milstein’s “Squeezah” somehow mashes cut-ups, a bit of jungle’s freneticism and a whole mass of glitch into something floor-friendly without requiring ADD on the part of the dancer. L’usine’s “Breed” slices down the vocal track from a wayward chanteuse and scatters it across a skipping, sputtering uptempo track, making a dance number riddled with hiccups of human voice. Richard Devine rounds out the collection with two tracks that show off his sample collection, though neither really have any sort of persistence in your head after they’re gone.
As an intial foray into the world of digital music distribution, Designed Disorder accounts well for themselves with Autonomous Addicts. The artists on the compilation, for the most part, do what they do best, and the result is a solid release that will do nicely to introduce these programmers to new audiences while not scaring off the old fans.
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Essential Band Links ::
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