On Repeat: KMRU, Tasselmyer, Demo, Incense
I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I’ll later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ More on this release shortly, likely in the coming week, but I am really enjoying Kenyan musician KMRU’s new album, Dissolution Grip, which somehow does away with his trademark field recordings without losing their influence. The key — or legend, in this case — is the notion of a graphic score. Check out the liner notes for an explaination.
https://kmru.bandcamp.com/album/dissolution-grip
▰ Andrew Tasselmyer (from Baltimore, based in Philadelphia) plays with time in delectable ways. Listen (and watch) as he samples, slices, fractures, and delicately reconfigures piano recordings.
▰ More music technology could use examples, like this one, that you go back to listen to simply because the sounds are so pleasing. This half-hour survey of slowly emerging melodic and rhythmic elements is a demo of a “conceptual sequencer” — called Seqsual — for the iPad. It’s from Helsinki, Finland.
▰ There is atmospheric music, and there is kosmiche (or space) music, and somewhere in between is music that seems to float in the realm of satellites, the ionosphere. This is the realm of Simon James French’s recent album, Meditations: ionospheric music, all euphoric-yet-sedate sonic explorations. Apparently there’s a line of Japanese incense created to complement it. French splits his time between Japan and the U.K.
