murmurations

I just got my hands on the new Kane Ikin record, ' Sublunar ', out on 12k. Knowing and loving some of his earlier work, in collaboration with others and as part of Solo Andata, the record held a surprise in the form of slow, sparse drum parts. Added to Ikin's worn-out analogue whirls and unfolding gongs and bells, the overall sound strikes me as heading toward the same musical landscape as some dance music artists but coming from a different, more ambient direction. To start from the dance musician's perspective: for a while now, I've been noticing a shared aesthetic among some more experimental artists that I like to call 'decayed dance music'. This is electronic music that takes house and R&B musical elements, tampers with their recording fidelity and then filters the results through a heady dub techno atmosphere which itself has been rendered less pristine in some way. For an aesthetic that is, as one reviewer recently noted , relatively limited i...

I've been wanting to write about Jan Bang for a while but despite having it in the pipeline for weeks there's still more I'd like to explore before drawing strong conclusions (plus it turns out university requires work too!). In particular there's been some academic work on musical ontology recently that I think might be relevant. But for now, some thoughts on Bang's ...and poppies from Kandahar . (Have a listen to bits of the album here ) What I find so exciting about this album is Bang's collective approach to sampling, field recording and found sounds. First off, there's a real physicality to the snatched recordings in each track, achieved largely through an emphasis on or 'sounding' of the production process of the recordings. So the layering of samples/recordings is made quite obvious to us, with different elements having quite different EQs, volumes and spatiality. The nature of their recording is also seemingly-deliberately man...

In the last post I looked at how metaphors attached to different musical elements can shape the way we listen to a whole track. Specifically I looked at Xela's gorgeous debut album For Frosty Mornings and Summer Nights , arguing that its music conveys the notion of human vulnerability juxtaposed with mechanised artificiality. This might imply that the mechanised part of that, the clockwork-style drums, somehow 'defeats' the vulnerable or empathetic elements, reigning over them in some cruel way. But what's so striking about this album is that the drums display little malevolence whatsoever. In fact there's a pleasing naivete to the drums and the synths, something quite emblematic of this style and period of IDM. This naivete is actually part of the emotional impact of Xela's early work; the pining melancholy I described in the last post is made up of musical metaphors, and this is one of them. The naivete of For Frosty Mornings... of course stems ...

In the realm of beat-based electronic music (acknowledging the beat-beatless distinction can be pretty arbitrary these days), one development that's been really exciting is the Los Angeles 'beat scene' , largely comprising young producers, working broadly-speaking from an instrumental/abstract hip-hop aesthetic. The best of these LA artists are genuinely experimenting with timbre and rhythm and their combination. This seems to be one of the main driving ideas for these musicians; as one of these new producers, Baths, puts it, “[t]he crazier it is, the more people are into it”. One of my favourite labels to emerge from this scene is Leaving Records (I was first mesmerised about a year and a half ago by dak's standthis ). The head of the label is Matthewdavid, whose album Outmind just came out on Brainfeeder (have a listen to it here ). I get the impression Matthewdavid is considered one of the more innovative and 'out there' producers to be linked to the L...