sixteen

122-129


Anandan/Goldstein/Wiens - Speaking in Tongues (Ambiances Magnetiques) 2003

I've been pretty lucky with neighbours for the decade-plus tenancy in my apartment. There was the guy who lived in the basement apartment who fell asleep after tossing frozen pizzas in the oven and letting them turn into charcoal over the ensuing 6-7 hours. There was the guy who lived in the back apartment whose alarm clock wouldn't wake him up so, consequently, it would blare on for 30/45/60 minutes at a time... and he'd set it for around 6am. It woke me up alright. But for the last few years it's been pretty peaceful, and even when there is noise late at night I'm usually pretty understanding about it... I was in my 20s and I made noise and got away with it... pay it forward, or whatever. The only exception comes when a fairly sleep-disrupted week rolls around and the 5-6 hours I have coming to me gets shot down when someone decides that 4am would be the best time to listen to gay-ass RnB... just below my bedroom. More to keep my sanity in balance than any real escalation of weaponry, my response was to get up around 8am the same morning and loudly do my dishes while listening to this free jazz at a "pleasant" volume. You should never use music as a weapon... and in a way I wasn't, because this is a great album from Montreal scenesters using instruments that aren't traditionally linked in improvisation. Seldom abrasive and often sublime. I wouldn't mind waking up to it after a night of drinking... hopefully they didn't either.
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Angel - S/T (Bip-Hop) 2001

This label skirts the edges of many established genres in electronic music: ambient, microhouse, drone, etc., without getting mired in what turns from genre to generic. Angel is a live entity with two heads: Ilpo Väisänen, who is a member of Pan Sonic and Dirk Dresselhaus, who records as Schneider TM. For the purposes of their live performance the artists combined homemade instruments (typewriter as synthesizer, broken guitar) and wits to explore the point where music becomes chaos theory.
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Animals on Wheels - Designs and Mistakes (Ninja Tune) 1997

Of the small but solid stable of artists who inhabited the Ninja Tune label in the 90s (Amon Tobin, Coldcut, Herbaliser), most stuck closely to a turntable/sample based sound that re-imagined 60s/70s jazz fusion as something denser and weirder than it had in reality been. Andrew Coleman was out on his own limb at this time. As Animals on Wheels his music had more in common with contemporary UK Drum N Bass than Bitches' Brew. With a greater emphasis on polymorphous beats and other obviously electronic sounds he crossed the threshold into the modernist stream of synthetic music.
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Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works v.2 (Sire) 1994


Aphex Twin - Drukqs (Sire/Warp) 2001

Richard D. James is one of those anomalies in electronics where he is miles away weirder than your average bear, but still manages to be one of the most recognized names in his field. Whether his eccentricities are contrived or earned is moot, his knack for making music across the spectrum from early Acid House to post-classical composition is inarguable. Selected Ambient Works V.2 is a two disc set that challenges through its sheer simplicity and minimalism. Tracks are often simple loops that repeat as to become hypnotic. His mastery of this is knowing how much work the listener will be likely to invest in either engaging or ignoring the sounds he presents. Drukqs is also a double set that wavers between twisted but concise explorations on prepared piano and more disorienting explosions of digital beats and squelches that verge on danceable before tying together all your shoelaces.
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Pierre-Andre Arcand - Atlas Epileptic (Ambiances Magnetiques) 2004

AM is a Quebec label whose sister imprint, Empreintes Digitales, does electro-acoustic music (essentially sound design recorded and mixed from any number of "actual" sources). This disc, which also has a visual component, runs closer to that end of things... though perhaps it is on the more "musical" of the labels for its employment of Max/MSP software in sound creation. Whichever... the result is a crisp and abstract product that I honestly have not yet found a way to fully absorb. As with many artists in this mold the work is dense and detailed and requires more than superficial attention to truly appreciate. So it's something I'll have to return to, later and extract its secrets.
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Martin Archer- Heritage and Ringtones (Discus) 2004

Martin Archer runs Discus records and the largest part of its output features his music... a move not uncommon but unavoidably trust-straining. This release is a little gem in his discography... with contributions by such luminaries as Ingar Zach (Huntsville), Simon H. Fell and Rhodri Davies... it combines original compositions (Ringtones) with covers of tried and true themes by folks like Duke Elllington, Bert Jansch and Annie Briggs. A neat blend of jazz/improv and folk ideas.
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Arkitekchur - Should (tbtmo) 2003

This one really worried me... I mean from the standpoint of pulling out of the envelope and seeing the cover, then moving on to the textual content. I thought I was in for some heavy dogmatic lifting. As it turns out the first piece is very gentle and beautiful delay-saturated guitar piece that stretches out over fifteen minutes of repeating figures... a far cry from the noise I was expecting. Without any overt post-9/11 reportage in the sounds of the album there is an "elephant-in-the-room" kind of paranoia that the listener brings into play, freeing the artist(s) to work from a much subtler distance. It doesn't all work to perfection... some of the shorter pieces lack weight... but the long tracks hit a wonderful balance between beauty and ugly truth.