5 posts tagged “glitch”

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.

Ah, those experimental electronic musicians, and their disdain for track titles. Makes it hard for us music bloggers sometimes.

While there is no name to distinguish this track from the other 10 on the fifth Oval album, Ovalprocess, the surprisingly melodic structure does enough to set it apart. Your average Oval track is a far sparser affair than this somewhat stately piece, though the skipping samples and digital errors that are a trademark are still front and center. Most of the minimal electronic music I've posted recently makes some concession to accessibility and even, in some strange way, danceability. Mokira may have ventured of into abstract, arrythmic lands on later albums, but Markus Popp has been mining that territory since day one. Working with a mixture of custom built software and sound material compiled from scratched CD-Rs, Popp's music is, as the title of this album suggests, a result of variations in a well-defined process. One wonders if the clicks and cuts genre of electronic minimalism, or the digitally damaged electro-acoustic work of Fennesz and others, would have evolved the way they did without Popp and company's early albums laying much of the groundwork. Some would place a large amount of credit for the recent prominence of the glitch aesthetic at his feet.

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.

Covers can be done so many ways. There's the "faithful to the original" version, which is almost always the most boring approach. There's the "make it your own" approach, which is often nice. There's the "forcefully reclaiming/dramatically reinterpreting" path, also usually a good choice, if you can pull it off.

Austria's Christian Fennesz takes the last path here, and ends up with a charred and smoking, yet still strangely beautiful, version of the Beach Boys classic. His heavily processed guitar textures mimic the harmonic progression of the original, and somehow capture the mood without referencing the melody even once. In fact, there's very little that could be called melodic poking through the haze of granular synthesis and DSP. Rumor has it that he also created a version with the acapella vocal track (from the Pet Sounds Sessions box set, no doubt) dubbed on top, that was never released. You could probably recreate it at home yourself, if you had the proper source material. I've tried ti, and I have a feeling it would take a tiny bit of editing to get the timing right, but if you can focus in on those chord changes and fit it just right, something magical might happen.

(From the Plays single, which also contains a cover of "Paint It Black").