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| Cantilever - Idalis/Hadalis (Square Root Records) Posted: 03 Mar 2009 12:32 PM PST Idalis/Hadalis is a conceptual work. A concept album in the avant-garde modernist sense, not the 70s prog-rock sense. The concept is a simple and very evocative one. A single piece of music, in this case a mellow, 10 minute IDM workout, is fairly simply spliced up the middle and presented as two separate pieces. Not spliced as in cut into two 5 minute pieces, but spliced as in two separate 10 minute pieces, each of which mixes in different elements of the original, while rejecting and mixing out others. These are presented back to back as the opening two tracks. The third track is the original, all the pieces left intact as the full piece. A last piece consists of elements of each of the first 2 tracks randomly cut and pasted back in different order and laid over each other. As previously stated, it’s quite an evocative concept. It plays on notions of the remix, of the ease of rework in the digital age, on the infinite derivations and spinoffs possible in Creative Commons culture. But Cantilever’s actual music, to a small degree, undermines the potency of his idea. Not that the music is at all bad - it’s actually quite lovely. Typewriter rhythms grow into gently glitching passages underpinning delicate monosynth melodies. What can undermine the idea is the actual abstractness of the sound. It almost feels that - with this almost generic use of electronic blips and beeps - as long as any two pieces were beat-synched, they would actually fit over the top of each other without any problem at all. There’s no sense of entanglement between the sections that make the fact of their separation interesting, no sense of the two pieces coming together to make something more than the sum of their parts. In fact, the sum of their parts ends up sounding pretty much equal to each separate piece. Which may be Cantilever’s point, but it seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to me. As pointed out, the music itself is quite nice in its use of established modes to create gentle, textural datasound. And listened to simply on those terms it is successful. But by making such a highlight of the process base of the music, Cantilever leaves me wanting to hear what music could sound like if somebody tackled the underlying intricacies of the concept and really ran with them. Adrian Elmer |
| Paradigm Shift Radioshow Playlist 2 Mar 2009 Posted: 03 Mar 2009 12:31 PM PST The Paradigm Shift is a weekly Monday night radio show presented by Sub Bass Snarl on Sydney radio station 2SER fm 107.3MHz - check the 2SER website for the live web stream! (may not be working this week as the station is moving to a new building) It airs Monday nights at the time of 730pm for 90 minutes (Australian Eastern Standard Time - GMT+10). Get in touch to send us your music (320s welcome!) - EMAIL: paradigmshift [AT] 2ser [dot] com 10-20 - Arcadeangle [10-20] (Highpoint Lowlife) [* = Australian track] |
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