murmurations

[Part 3 of a series on sleeplessness in music - see parts 1 , 2 ] Sometimes sleeplessness need not mean no sleep. Twisting and turning feverishly, you find yourself able to drift away for a few moments. But it only takes the creak of a wall against the wind, or the weight of an image as it falls into your head - often you, falling, feeling the rush of air against your limbs - for you to open your eyes again to the dark. Those possibilities show how sleeplessness can blur the boundary between wakefulness and something else, as you lose a sense of how long you have been staring at the ceiling, if in fact you were dreaming a second ago, whether this place you call your room is exactly as you remembered it. The guitarist Eivind Aarset revels in this floating uncertain state in his 'Dream Logic' (2012), together with our old friend Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Like Biosphere's 'Insomnia' , Aarset relies on copious fade-outs to silence to indicate the night's expa...

One of the mini-essays in Mark Fisher's fractured but brilliant book Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books, 2013) discusses Grant Gee's 2011 film Patience (After Sebald) , where the film-maker 'replays' W.G. Sebald's walk along the Suffolk coast in his prose-work The Rings of Saturn . Fisher's interest in the film is reflected in the more general themes of the book: on forms of 'formal nostalgia' in today's popular culture, not so much feeling nostalgic for the past as endlessly recycling past cultural forms; and the traces of a 'popular modernism' in forms of pop and electronic music that push beyond this redundancy and lack of innovation. Gee's film, like Sebald's work, plays with the idea of memory being embedded in a landscape, and therefore with the question of how one confronts that past-in-the-present, what an ethical or political stance towards it would look like. Fisher was largely unimpressed with Sebald's writing and ambivalen...

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 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...

I've been thinking for a while now about what it is that I find so appealing, as a listener and composer, about techniques of sampling in music. Considering that sampling can be defined quite broadly – simply as the recording and then editing of sounds from one piece of music for use in one's own piece of music – it's interesting that the things listeners tend to identify as 'samples' (at least within experimental electronic music) often share quite similar aesthetic properties and cultural associations. The act of sampling does not in itself necessitate these particular associations and understandings. In contemporary EEM, the typical aesthetic characteristic of the sample is the audibility of its constitution as a sample. The very fact that the sound has been taken from another musical piece is something the musician-as-sampler often either tries to communicate or does not cover up. This can be communicated within the track in a variety of ways. The sampled elem...