Showing posts tagged beat music

On Tycho’s subtle and fluid Dive

Scott “Tycho” Hansen has been making wordless electronic music for years, building each piece with organic accompaniment that’s often treated to make it sound both warm and worn. The acoustic guitars that roll through Dive, his debut LP for Ghostly International, mimic the temperate folk progressions on the early Simon and Garfunkel LP Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Sea-spray sonics and unearthly keyboard squiggles splinter off into endless directions, sometimes finding their way around impossibly cylindrical basslines. Read more of my piece on the Tycho album at The Brooklyn Rail.

I wrote about HTRK, Walls, I Break Horses, Tropics, Max Cooper, Balam Acab, and Martyn for Blurt Magazine. Check out BEATS WORKING now.

I wrote about HTRK, Walls, I Break Horses, Tropics, Max Cooper, Balam Acab, and Martyn for Blurt Magazine. Check out BEATS WORKING now.

Infinitirock and library music

Brooklyn-based teenager Chester “Infinitirock” Anand’s beat music is jolting and scatterbrained — he follows audacious experiments in Asthmatic Kitty’s Library Catalog Music Series well with Music for Primordial Recollection. It’s one of the strongest chapters yet — a rich and divergent compendium of psychedelic, wordless grooves, and weighty sound collages. Read more of my piece at PopMatters.

In woozy synth swells and mangled vocal samples, Holy Other’s With U EP plays like warped house vinyl, each somber moment unrolling at a snail’s pace. The Manchester, UK-based producer’s debut for NYC’s hip Tri Angle Records is dense, uncomplicated beat music — there aren’t significant melodic shifts to speak of, nor are there grandiose, unexpected bridges. Read my review at BLURT magazine.

Downliner Sekt’s masterful sound design

Barcelona’s Downliners Sekt told Fact Magazine that they see music as a “language,” with “the capacity to translate a wide range of feelings, to create imaginary worlds.” They’re steadily developing a busy brand of romantic and dub-influenced electronic music similar to that which is explored on Machinedrum’s Room(s) or on Mount Kimbie’s Crooks & Lovers, and they’re handing it out for free. Meet the Decline closes the door on a trilogy of thematically connected releases from the act that launched last year. There are four tracks here of masterful sound design — hushed pitched-up vocal samples, crusty sections of acoustic guitars, and a balance of both knife-hack snares and percussive lows that threaten to swallow everything in earshot. Moody, often wonderfully bleak stuff here. Visit their site’s ‘Releases’ section to download the whole thing FREE.

In the headphones: Machinedrum, ‘Rooms’

Room(s) is rife with crackling vinyl grooves and tumbling garage beats — a gauzy and melodic electronic record coated with warbled vocal samples and fast-dissolving synth lines. While producer Travis “Machinedrum” Stewart might object to this characterization, Room(s) is the full-length I’ve been waiting to hear from Sepalcure, the project that he shares with Praveen Sharma. In fact, if someone were to discreetly spin this riveting set of jungle-inspired productions — in all of its stylish and stuttering beauty — I’d wager that we were hearing more of the Sepalcure work that I wrote about for PopMatters in early 2010 (“The Statue” sounds as if it should’ve landed on that EP, actually), rather than the solo stuff Stewart has been doing for years. Distorted vocal cutups bounce off a chaotic set of drum breaks in “U Don’t Survive” while organic-sounding rhythms underpin a dense and similarly-rumbling “Youniverse” on Room(s), and not unlike the work on Falty DL’s new one, it’s difficult to highlight even a couple of tracks on Stewart’s album. It’s probably not for heads who aren’t consumed by this stuff, but on a technical and structural level, this is a really fantastic record. Right-click for his “TMPL” from XLR8R and check out the interview at Little White Earbuds. The album is available digitally from Planet Mu on July 25th, vinyl/CD to follow.