Re: [microsound] any good releases lately?

[Øivind Idsø <plateaux@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> anything new out that has piqued people's interest?

Yes indeed (so very, very happy that someone´s actually talking about
new music again; incredible amounts of Crap has found its way to the
list lately; thinking about firing up the filtering engine in Netscape
to get rid of the offender)

How about the following:

* "Masses" by Spring Heel Jack is an excellent, freejazznoisey pileup of
massive proportions; it reminds me a bit of Supersilent, both their
full-on approach and their more recent, melancholic/quiet output (get
the latest on Rune Grammofon), though perhaps with less electronics and
more acoustics.

* "do" by T. Nakamura and Sachiko M; this was one of my first two
purchases on the Erstwhile label, and it´s really something; at first I
just thought the high frequencies and piercing sinewaves were annoying,
as I often do when I hear sounds that penetrate my ears without any
response from my pleasure principle, but a couple of more rounds in the
old CD-player washed off the initial scepticism and proved there´s some
thrilling microsound going on; lots of low profile squeaks and tiny
loops and fractured, yes, sinewaves.

* "la voyelle liquide" by Günter Müller/Lê Quan Ninh; ...which is my
second disk on Erstwhile, and my favourite of the two; with instruments
like "selected drums" and minidiscs and "surrounded bass drum" you know
you´re heading somewhere special; great, great improvisations that
bubble and breathe and come to a halt and then rewind to go forward
again; I wish I could program a Max patch that could do this (OK, that
joke´s on this list; sorry); seriously, though: seven pieces and
seventy-five minutes of fantastic scapes and hardly a dull moment;
that´s quite an achievement when most/many recent 60/70+ minutes could
easily have been reduced to half that length (Autechre´s three latest
being a case in point).

* "Radionik" by Klangkrieg; one of the absolute gems I´ve picked up in
recent weeks/months; brilliant conretish electroacoustics with some
soundscaping to go; with track titles like "Bremsen", "Kühlschrank" and
"Telegraph" you get a pretty clear idea of where the sound sources are
coming from, but they´re treated with such sublety and very often
radicality that it makes many microsoundish releases sound like presets
from, eh, Reaktor et al; very refreshing to hear an actual composition
where some/much thought has been put into what´s going to happen where
and when and for what reason (not that I mind random music -- not at
all; but give me all flavours, please).

* "Endless Summer" by Fennesz; summer in Norway has, as usual, been
nothing like endless, just very limited, but Fennesz helps; I don´t
think he comes quite close to the brilliance of that small Fennesz Plays
mini-CD on Moikai, which contains what must be two of the most beautiful
slices of digitalia since Oval´s Do While, but there´s enough hint of
deconstructed (sorry) popedelics to reward frequent airplay.

* "Constructions V-VII" by John Wall (CD EP); if there are people on
this list who still haven´t discovered John Wall, run (yes, run) out and
buy everything he´s done (OK, you don´t -have- to have "Alterstill", but
get it anyways); this one explores some of the thematics from the 1999
full-length "Constructions I-IV", but runs it through some advanced
reductionist patch, which I think is, mostly, Wall´s brain, which means
the quiet parts of the previous constructions have become dominant; so
delicate and well-crafted that every little blip and squeak and thump
comes with kilobytes and kilobytes of meaning, albeit in the form of a
..sit where all "unnecessary" (the eye of the beholder) information has
been deemed redundant; when you feel information overload breathing down
your neck, invert it by listening to this EP.

....and let´s not forget Radiohead´s "Amnesiac". Will they ever stop
surprising us/them? I hope not. What a ride!

/Øivind/