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:: A twenty-six minute single track EP, Artuas Bumsteinas’ This Uniform winds up very slowly. A organ wheezes enough of a melody to make a loop and thin electronics sigh in the background. The processed notes of violin, clarinet and trumpet glide through open water like fat jellyfish and they trail sparklers of electrical fire in their long translucent tentacles. I’m waiting for something to happen and maybe it never does (or maybe it did — I took a bit of a nap through the middle). Glitch dust rides the echoes of the organ notes and, as the track winds on, the glitch attempts to stage a coup but is driven back by a more aggressive outpouring of long tones. As an experience in ambience, this singular track is definitely ready for the meditation rooms. Get your “OHM!”s on with this one.
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:: Thinner’s 71st delicious slab of minimal techno dub is Lomov’s Mounting Stags and, like a junkie falling off the wagon, I eagerly queue up this release and lose myself in the reverberations of Lomov’s beats. “Don Famato” drapes itself around you, a thick blanket of dub that keeps in the heat rising from the chin-thrusting techno pulse humming beneath this drapery. Excursions into melancholia (the state, not the mood — trust me, the distinction is clear when you hear Lomov’s music), these six tracks explore introspection and reflection, winding back on themselves like a house of mirrors. “HanusSen” catches the light with a bit of a “whockita whockita” bass beneath the four on the floor drum programming while “Harry McFly” slides in and does a bit of soft shoe around your kitchen, charming the appliances with his toothsome grin and deft footwork. “Kind of Pale” (an admitted nod to Miles Davis) lays down the conceit of Mounting Stags: everything has gradiations of tone and tint; it is our reflection and perception that bring the real color. “Kind of Pale” offers you a choice: the subtle movement of percussion — beats to drive you about the floor — or the gentle drift of dub ambience in which you can lose your mind. The trick is accomplishing both, and Lomov’s minimal techno dub dares to stretch for that goal.
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:: On the flip-side, Lomov’s Holzwege (offered through Thinner’s binary double, Autoplate) is definitely a head trip with little opportunity for butt wiggling. Launched from a discussion on reality by Martin Heidegger, Holzwege examines the forest from a musical perspective, attempting to show us a reality of trees through aural clues. Heidegger argued that one could never really know a forest as a whole and that one could only know the basic portion around yourself. “Weidenfels” hums with the tiny voices of birds while “Sommersumpf” eases and exhales with wind through the treetops, carrying with it a breath of scarred and pitted melody. Tiny chirps of sound like small animals routing through the dead leaves stirs up “Hochwaldregen” while the wind is stronger, blowing the leafy tops of trees into a streaming, swaying field of fluttering sound. I started off giving this one four stars, but in the end I was so lost in the woods, I had to pull one more out of my pocket so as to find my way home again by its light. Excellent.
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:: Sprightly squiggles of analog DSP noise dart like excited particles in Transient’s opener, “Ice,” bubbling IDM melodies that bely the placid nature of the track’s title. A rather abrupt turn after the ambience of Lomov’s forest, Be is all analog DSP action, filled with the fractured melodies of machines breakdancing on old circuit boards. Fun little tracks like “Pinnochio Jazzhands,” “Ace” and “The Triumphant Return of the Vigorous Chipmunk” will get your fingers tapping, but it’s all rather ephemeral in the end like soap bubbles that tickle your nose for a minute before popping.
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:: The phrase “textured flux” comes up in context of Audio_z’s first solo release on Surfaces and the phrase sticks with me while listening to these seven untitled tracks. Audio_z is Tautvydas Bajarkevicius, a Lithuanian sound artist and curator whose work floods glitch into a sea of warm ambience. Drifting particles follow warm currents of tone and swirl in the eddies of tide pools. Tiny voices like children riding sea horses haunt “x2” while “x3” blossoms from a repetitive loop into a generative system of sine waves and rolling frequency modulations. “x4” grows by degrees from an experiment in microscopic notes into a humming, gurgling soundscape with layered vocals. “x5” strays into Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas territory with a bit of industrial backlash threatening the minimal techno feel and “x6” throws together the tension of “x2” and the voices of “x4” into a claustrophobic ride in a submarine filled with nervous tourists. I feel like I’m at a sushi bar with [x]: “I’ll, ah, take a number two, a number four, a number five and a number seven.” Interesting experiments here but they feel like they’ve been composed with media installations in mind — transitory sound spaces that aren’t meant for sustained listening.
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:: Eh, decrepit software synth techno that would have rocked the house two decades ago but lies there like someone left the application running and a couple of mice came by and danced on the keyboard, triggering presets. Thankfully, these tracks aren’t interminable trance epics, but even at 4.00 minutes, I found myself opening other windows on my laptop and looking for text files to cut and paste together (the mobile writer’s version of re-arranging one’s sock drawer). Plosive’s “Inte Likgiltig Längre mix” of “Likgiltligheten” actually catches my attention as it slows down the relentless thumpa-thumpa into a sinuous serpentine rhythm that chatters and echoes with hidden depth. Skip the rest and go right to the end on this one.
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:: Somewhere on the relativistic light speed scale between space jazz, downtempo, and soft-core porn music is Kolibries’ Tales of the Circle. This six-track EP is filled with fat analog synth pads, gentle drum programming and elusive wind instruments born straight from the keyboard presets. If I was ever in a situation where I was bringing some nice ladies from Rigel-7 back to my 4-D space yacht and needed something that would set the mood without being obvious, Kolibries would be the easy choice. By the time the slap bass gets banging and space vixen starts crooning in “Radio,” you’ve already made your move and the space suits are coming off and the atmosphere mixers are driving up the nitrogen levels so that the ladies can breathe and you can get your auto-erotic asphyxiation on. “Tales of the Circle” brings us back into the upper stratosphere of the pleasure planet of Rigel-7 where I can drop my new friends off, purge all that sex-drenched nitrogen atmosphere and take on more supplies. Hit “replay” and swing out into deep space again, Daddy-O!
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Essential Band Links ::
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