#dagoretti

Great Corner Sound is somewhat cagey about exactly who is involved in ECOATM, though Larson has hinted (broadly, see photo above) that Michigan all-arounder Fred Thomas (of His Name Is Alive, Saturday Looks Good to Me, Tyvek, Idle Ray, Winged Wheel, etc.)is the man behind the curtain.If so, it’s a radically new look for him.ECOATM doesn’t sound like any of his previous bands. 

The disc starts with skittery “Deluge,” an antic skirmish of drums and synthesizer that erupts periodically into full-on battery.It moves quickly and lightly, rattle-stomping barrages of terse snare and cymbals like gloves on a speed bag.“Stimulus Check” leaves more negative space between its thumps and rattles, an altered voice popping up on off-beats like a stuttery ghost.You can feel a drummer’s sensibility (again, maybe Thomas, maybe not) in the way these cuts box up time in tight, inelastic packages, a music made of points and vacancies, no colors.

Yet not everything is a rush and a clatter.Some of these cuts run surprisingly lyrical, with long echoing synth tones that sculpt otherworldly shapes in the air.“Glass Yard,” for instance, flickers and glows, nearly rhythmless as its bright notes blink on and off. “Dawnless” moves ponderously, a big drum boom punctuating the end of glittering glass-bead guitar lines.And “As You Said” floats in a percolating unreal synth space, the thump of kickdrum anchoring airy iterations of keyboard motifs.

It's all pretty good, surgically scrubbed but not unwelcoming, the kind of clean well-lighted sonic space that invites cogitation rather than bodily motion.Whoever made it (maybe Fred Thomas!) was from Michigan, continuing a mighty tradition of electronic experiment.Roll on Motor City.

Peel by KMRU

KMRU, along with Uganda’s Nyege Nyege collective, is part of an expanding electronic scene in East Africa. The region has seen an exponential growth in software and internet access, especially Kenya which has one of the world’s fastest data connection speeds, exceeding the United States and South Korea. In turn, artists have adopted and incorporated music software into their music and developed their own ways of using them, infusing their productions with traditional rhythms and instrumentations of the area. In contrast to the energetic Nyege Nyege Tapes output and many artists sprouting from this scene, KMRU creates ambient music with slow beats and dub inflections in the vein of Detroit’s echospace label or early Andy Stott EPs, gleaning from his home country’s environmental sounds as much as it’s musical traditions.

opaquer by KMRU

Two weeks apart, KMRU releases the double-LP Peel and single-LP opaquer. Both albums, like the majority of KMRU’s catalog, contain deep and repetitive and captivating drone and sub bass sounds with subtle, microscopic inflections that rewards engaged listens. Although release within a month, the two have their differences. The pieces on Peel follow waves of repetitive, near-drones, surrounded by smaller outgrowths and separate, subtle manipulations. It could be analogous to a large whale swimming through a deep ocean with trailing schools of feeder fish living off the plankton its body creates. Opaquer also limits the bandwidth of its sound, focusing primarily on one reverberating sound source, usually a field recording, with smaller, electronic supporting tones. But opaquer alters its focus and doesn’t necessarily encourage the sensation of drone; the sounds, more decipherable however ambiguous they may be, live in the reverberations they leave behind, amplifying their contours and giving the impression of a whole, contiguous, solid sound mass.

Something that can define an effective ambient record is an ability to disintegrate the perimeter of the record itself and the outside world. Listening to either Peel or opaquer, say, outside at night, the albums are not met with too much interference, maybe the occasional passing car, laboring window air conditioner, or floating conversation from a neighbors’ windows. But these outside sounds incidentally bleed into the pieces and embed into what KMRU creates, becoming an unintended part of the composition. The wide-open nature of the pieces KMRU creates meet these outside sounds halfway, allowing a lively, tangible commingling, giving you an impression that the pieces on opaquer and Peel have an inherent generative property.