14 posts tagged “electronic”

Fizzarum's Monochrome Plural is one of those secret gems, an album that came out of nowhere, sold out it's initial pressing, and basically disappeared, only to be spoken of in hushed tones by the true fans. Comparisons to early Autechre are the easiest and most accurate, especially in reference to that groups Amber and Incunabula albums. Melodic, with some spacious reverb and slowly shifting patterns of clicks and buzzes keeping time. Perhaps in the same vein as Telefon Tel Aviv as well.

It appears that the out-of-print album is available as a CD-R directly from Fizzarum, so if you like what you hear, you can order it online and get a bonus CD-R of rare material.

Let's hear it for educational synthpop!

This song is just complete giddy fun, packing in funky basslines, beat freakouts, found sounds and female vocals by Becky Jacobs, the sister of Max Tundra (AKA Ben Jacobs). It sort of sounds like a glitchier version of Prince remaking one of They Might Be Giants remakes of a song from an old educational record. It's typical of Jacobs' second album, Mastered by Guy At The Exchange, which is in itself atypical in almost every way. Carefree, playful, quirky, smart, and above all fun. Oh, and the album is named for its mastering engineer, a role that doesn't usually get much time in the spotlight. I can't think of another example of such a prominent shout-out off the top of my head...

MBGATE was originally released in the United States by Tigerbeat6, the notoriously weird and inscrutable label run by Miguel Depedro (AKA Kid606). Though Tundra's musical stylings are far less harsh than much of the Tigerbeat6 output, his spastic genre-hopping and restless pursuit of oddball ideas fit right in with labelmates like Cex, Numbers, and Blectum from Blechdom.

I think Disco Inferno is one of the best band names ever, especially since it belongs to a band that is completely undanceable and challenging on all levels, practically the opposite of all that actual disco music championed.

Disco Inferno is one of those bands that never really caught many people's attention, but made their mark nonetheless. They were difficult enough to repel casual listeners, yet had enough pop savvy to draw in those with an ear for the unusual. Equal parts nostalgic and futurist, they had a relatively brief career, featuring 3 full length albums and a smattering of EPs, starting from early-80s Manchester mimicry (in 1989) and ending with an odd fusion of experimental techniques and pop structure.

"Even The Sea Sides Against Us" comes from the 1994 album D.I. Go Pop (misleadingly titled, of course). Showcasing their love of sound collage, a loop of crowd noise and waves crashing against the shore fills the role of a percussion instrument, leaving bass, echoing guitar, vocals, and glittery keyboard fragments to flesh out the rest. The noise blurs and obscures in the same way that My Bloody Valentine's guitars do, with a roaring cascade of frequencies that mask other elements. The result is indistinct, yet lyrically more comprehensible than MBV. Many of Disco Inferno's techniques have been borrowed from other sources (MBV, hip hop, musique concrete and electronic music), and most have been re-borrowed by the handful of artists who have drawn inspiration from their pursuit of a singular vision.

Most remixes tackle the raw material of a single song, sometimes adding some additional elements of the remix producers creation, but generally keeping some relation to the original structure. But this remix by Sientific American gathers fragments from several tracks on the 1999 Red Stars Theory album Life in a Bubble Can Be Beautiful, and reassembles them as something entirely new, yet recognizable. It sounds like something the band could perform live, with the exception of a few stutter edits.

Red Stars Theory was an Pacific Northwest indie rock supergroup of sorts, featuring 764-Hero bassist James Bertram and Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, and a rotating cast of assorted other musicians. They made a lethargic and deliberate version of indie rock that bordered on post-rock, indebted as much to Mogwai and Tortoise as to their local contemporaries. This remix by Sientific American, a longtime fixture of the Seattle electronic scene, comes from the B-side of the Naima 7" single (yes, it's a John Coltrane cover) from 2000.

I think is the first time I've repeated an artist, so far. I'm trying to avoid that, although exceptions will be made.

The new Dntel album, Dumb Luck, has finally arrived! Jimmy Tamborello, the brains behind this particular operation, has had several full length releases and collaborations since the last Dntel album, venturing into different musical territories with each one. But it should come as no surprise that Dumb Luck picks up where Life Is Full Of Possibilities left off, with sweetly melodic acoustic instruments sharing space with synths that range from lush washes to stuttered blips. And of course, guests galore. Mia Doi Todd returns as a guest vocalist on "Rock My Boat", and everyone from Andrew Broder (Fog) to Jenny Lewis (Rilo Kiley) pitches in elsewhere.

To A Fault finds Ed Droste, of recent indie folk phenoms Grizzly Bear, joining Tamborello for a slow burning tune that picks up the detritus of the title track and layers it over a gentle acoustic pulse, gradually building to a tense and dramatic climax before falling apart again. The whole thing is hazy and dreamlike, with indistinct vocals cascading around the edges.

Still in a minimal mood? Good, so am I.

Mokira hails from Stockholm, Sweden, and is yet another prolific, multi-monikered producer. Aside from several Mokira albums and EPs, he has releases under his birth name, Andreas Tilliander, and as Lowfour. He also performs mastering services under the studio name Repeatle. His styles cross the spectrum from full-on dance stormers on his latest Tilliander album, World Industies, to barely-present wisps of deconstructed pop on some Mokira releases.

This track is from the first Mokira release, the seminal and aptly titled Cliphop. At a time when most minimal techno was stretching away from structure and exploring realms of abstraction, this album brought the swagger of hip-hop into the mix. Of course, it was hip-hop minus vocals and beats, reduced to the outline of a rhythm rendered in microsound clicks (hence the title) and some slow dynamic development, but it was a connection that few had made. While the style didn't exactly take the world by storm, plenty of attentive listeners were found among the avant-garde, paving the way for a wave of exploration that brought the world of minimalism a renewed sense of form. The next Mokira release, Plee would further develop this idiom, while later releases like the Album LP and the Sueismine and FFT Pop EPs, would loosen up the rhythmic pulse that had dominated, becoming a free-flowing, gauzy style of often-beatless ambience.

Technically, this track is untitled, but for ease of reference and organization, it is usually referred to as "2." This is true of almost all of Sheffield duo Snd's tracks, which are generally only listed as numbered, titleless tracks.

Snd takes the minimalist approach a step further than Jan Jelinek, stripping even more musical reference from their work until it is barely more than rhythm and texture. The pair's three albums on the influential (and defunct) Mille Plateaux label have charted a course deep into the heart of abstraction, yet have strangely revealed new emotional resonances on each release. While Jelinek repurposes existing material, Snd build their sounds and their sound-manipulating tools from the ground up, using contact microphones and custom-built software in their process. Like Pole, their music uses layers of noise as texture, but they push it further to the background, often making it a barely perceptible rhythmic element. Yet for all the theory and process involved in the making of their music, the result is often clean, bright, and inviting, with scraps of melody flitting past the barely-changing pulses that take the place of beats. It's like a placeholder for house music, with crisp clicks and distant bloops replacing the drums and synth lines of that genre.

Apart from releasing records as Pole, Stefan Betke also runs one of the definitive minimalist electronic labels, ~Scape, releasing records by Safety Scissors, Deadbeat, Burnt Friedmann, and others. But today, we are concerned with Jan Jelinek's first ~Scape release, Loop Finding Jazz Records.

Jelinek is a prolific producer working under his name and the pseudonym Farben (and occasionally as Gramm). Loop Finding Jazz Records is the first record he released under his real name, and its title is an apt description of its contents. The warm, meditative tones of these 8 tracks were created using a technique often referred to as "miscrosound," by sampling and manipulating fragments of old jazz LPs, stretching, layering and stuttering sub-second pulses of sound into new shapes. The result is a vaguely jazzy, deeply dubby, and cerebral approach to sampling. It's at once thoroughly modern and fondly nostalgic, using the tools of today to re-craft the sounds of yesterday.

What is this song, exactly? The beat has a sort of hip-hop feel, and RJD2 is known mostly as a producer of instrumental hip-hop. The synth lines are a little more harmonically complex and sweet than you usually get in hip-hop, more along the lines of some mellower IDM or downtempo electronic music. And then there's the vocals, sort of melancholy, with a very dry delivery that captures the feeling of those moments when you're waiting to be reunited with someone. RJD2 is alright generally, but this song really does it for me, especially right now.


His new album, The Third Hand, has more material with this sort of between-genres style, and lots of half-spoken vocals. It's more upbeat and odd than this one, and nothing is quite as good as this track, from his second album Since We Last Spoke.

I wasn't planning on making this an "All Glitch-Hop Week" or anything, but so far, that's how it's going.

My main impetus for posting "Slow Spines" tonight is the awful, tight feeling of pulled back muscles that I've been dealing with today. Seemed appropriate somehow. But aside from the autobio aspect, this is just a great track in general. Chris Clark (now going by his surname only) has been putting out IDM that's a little more aggressive than your typical laptop fare, but not to the point that it ventures into the realm of breakcore or anything. This track, from his second full-length Empty The Bones Of You, is unusually sedate for Clark, but still manages to hint at the directions he would head on last year's Body Riddle.