When I first heard abc100′s Exit Site (Headphonica), I called it “the perfect experimental electronic pop album.” Almost a month and several listens later , I’ll stand by that statement. Exit Site isn’t like most of the albums you’ll find reviewied here at this blog. This album is more song-like with the 13 tracks running around the 1 to 2 minute mark. Some of them are filled with beats, but even with “standard” beats, the editing of the tracks with not-overdone sound effects and other process sounds give Exit Site a feel of the avant-garde or experimental.

Alexandr Sinyagin aka abc100 has written that he is bringing literature into music. About 18 months ago, Sinyagin released Cosmic Dance of Tanzania on Webbed Hand. For the Webbed Hand release and the latest release on Headphonica, Sinyagin writes that he is using the ideas of literature to help build “a fabric of sound”. These collaged pieces are put together very much like a sliding tile puzzle, though the journey to move the pieces and their correct placement, if any, is only known to Sinyagin.

Listening to Wixtes‘ Winter Light Burns (Feedback Loop) in 70°F weather is bit odd, but my comfort doesn’t take away from the rough edges of this ambient album. As a reviewer, one cannot help trying to tag a piece of music even with something like  Winter Light Burns that jumps between ambient, dark ambient, experimental and even ambient noise. But after many listens, Winter Light Burns was always different, it approaches a new genre/tag: angry ambient. This 26-minute track is filled with an angst and bitterness. This is not your comfy-cozy ambient album to go to sleep to. Even though Witxes uses several ambient hooks, long flowing drones drones, piano and guitar, the sounds at the edges of Winter Light Burns, though veiled, are filled with fury and dissension.

Though Acts of Silence has focused much in the genre of experimental electronic music, I have found myself drawn the improvisation (avant-garde, experimental, noise) of what many would consider more traditional instruments. I beleive the spirit of these two genres are very much linked and can be heard in many of the improvisational releases which combine laptops and these traditional instruments. So it should be no surprise that laptop listening jockey like myself would find solace and adventure in traditional instrument improvisations.

Somewhere in the shadows of Barcelona, El Pricto gathers other musicians around and let’s them lose. Over the last year, he has had his hand involved in many projects, some of which have been released on his netlabel Discordian Records. The latest of these is Això és gravíssim! which features Ferran Besalduch on Bass Saxophone, Joan Palacio on Contrabass Trombone, and David Parras on Tuba.  The album is broken up into two parts, the first half is made of improvisations of different combinations under the umbrellas of “Low Suite”, while the second half is made up of two composed tracks, one written by El Pricto and the other Roscoe Mitchell.

Això és gravíssim!  begins with whispers in “Low Suite: B-lowing in the wind”, horns are played with the purpose of incompleteness along with a bit of percussion and hidden voices. Then the next few tracks feature various instruments and players taking the lead and showcasing improvisation. Of these tracks, my favorite is the “Solo Tuba”, mainly because of misunderstanding of the tuba which I know has a rich history in American Jazz, though my knowledge of the instrument is extremely limited. As I have listened to Això és gravíssim!  several times over the last few weeks, I have been always impressed with the new sounds and nuances I have been able to take away from the album at each listen.

Voivat’s Khmer Rouge on the netlabel A.M.P. is the equivalent of a sonic roller coaster that only descends with sharp twists turns through audio assaults. With  ”Noïer” (mp3), the first track, Alex Valz aka Voivat blasts away at your ears with rough drones and high frequencies. But Valz doesn’t rest there as the second track, “Genocide” (mp3), continues to break the barriers between noise and drones. It is not until the third track, “Disintergration (mp3), that the drones slowly devolve as new sounds get introduced. And then finally, as we reach almost half-way through Khmer Rouge, we get a chance to catch our breath and rest our ears, but this — and it’s for the better — is only a brief respite until the fifth track, “Fa Bird” (mp3), which sends us back on Valz’s wild sonic ride.

I couldn’t find much about Valz or his alter-ego Voivat except for a few items. The first from the liner notes is that Khmer Rouge  is “sound experiments resulting from electromagnetic waves”. That’s description is nebulous at best, however as I’ve written before, it really doesn’t matter how the noise/music is created. The other item is several photographs that Valz has taken which show the human body, the skin in particular, as topography.

Khmer Rouge harkens back to the days of the double LP. The album is split into two parts, 4 tracks each, for a tool of some 70 minutes. The music is loud and, as I mentioned earlier, Valz seems intent on breaking though the barrier of drones and noise to good effect.

The second best thing about Creative Commons music is I am constantly being introduced to musicians from around the world — artists who would have been hidden from me only twenty years ago. (The best thing is the exceptionally great music that is available for free!) Zenapolæ, a netlabel from New Jersey and just a stone’s throw from AoS headquarters, released Im Tresor by PANZERKNACK last month. PANZERKNACK is made up of three German experimental musicians: the duo phase~in (Gunnar Lettow and Sylvia Necker) and Thomas Maos.

In June 2011, the three musicians played together for the first time in a bunker in Tübingen and the result is this special experimental album. With Letter on bass, live electronics and fx; Maos, dobro and electronics; and Necker,  raumstation and fx, they have put together thirty minutes of exciting and vibrant improvised experimental music.  Just a quick note regarding raumstation, it’s English translation is space station which brings to mind epic science fiction stories and such, but I’m a bit unsure if this is the case. But after seeing some of the pictures here, I’m am even more bewildered by what Neckler means by raumstation. A little mystery is always a good thing.

I have been listening to a lot of improvised electronic/ectro-acoustic music lately, but this album showcases engaged musicians at their craft. On many music releases, whether improvised or not, one gets the feeling that the musicians are just going through the motions, renewing their same old and tired cliches with every release. But with Im Tresor, there is something indescribable  going — whatever it is, whatever Lettow, Necker and Maos are doing, Im Tresor has stuck with me for many weeks and I am grateful I got a chance to listen in.

I’m going to hazard a guess that the electronic project known as Mons Jacet and the experimental musician and visual artist Martin Rach are one in the same. Mons Jacet’s Alcoholics Go Melachonic (Clinical Archives) was one of my favorite netlabel releases back in 2008. So we fast forward several years and I should not be surprised that I’m a fast becoming a big fan of Rach’s experimental work. I quite enjoyed last year’s Trash Piano (Modisti) — read the review — and I am equally enjoying two new releases by Rach: To Flame the Light of Love (Modisti) and Year of the Goat (Editora do Porto).

As Rach’s recent work is very different from his work as Mons Jacet, these two releases are also vastly different. Year of the Goat is buy Martin Rach and his Imaginary Band. This Editora do Porto release is drunken orgy of jazz and other musical idiosyncrasies which shows the capability/incapability of score a band on a laptop as the music travels in a chaotic improvisational manner. (Incapability in the being used in the context of experimental music is always a positive, well, for me at least.)

The Modisti release, To Flame the Light of Love, alternates between two instruments — a piano and a tenor saxophone — played on different tracks though each combined with various other sound objects/software such a aluminum foil, glass, and speakers. To Flame the Light of Love  is in its essence a true experimental work. Rach is not only pushing our limits as an audience, one can tell that Rach is pushing his own limits as well.

The image above is a detail of a visual artwork by Martin Rach. I believe this painting is called Virus.

As I read about how Sara Galán went about making Incidencias (Audiotalaia), I was taken back to the depths of December years ago when I headed out of the house at 4 AM with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket to buy the latest craze in the gaming – the Nintendo Wii.  Since that early morning, the use of gesture recognition software used primarily in gaming consoles has provided a slew of new and experimental uses. One such use can be heard on Galán’s Incidencias.

After several years of not playing the cello, the classically-trained Galán, finally picked the instrument back up again. When reacquainting herself with the cello, she teamed up with Edu Comelles to produce two live releases based on the cello and the laptop (Audiotalaia and Colección de Emociones) which were the result of a small tour of Spain. Since that time, Galán, working within Max MSP and Microsoft’s Kinect, developed new techniques in playing the cello that focus of the glitches of human performance. Here is a video of Galán playing the cello.

Now, I’m no expert in cello playing, but I’ll hazard a guess that Galán’s style is not considered normal. Other videos of Galán playing can be found on Vimeo.  Though not even 15 minutes long, Incidencias was an exciting work for me to listen to as it stretch my understanding of what the capabilities of the cello are. Equally impressive was that even though Galán developed her performance technique for Incidencias through the use of various computer software, the album was recorded live. But past all of these technical accomplishments, it is the music that matters in the end, and that music is absolutely the attraction.

Listening to The Euphoric Hum’s Flow (Vuzh Music) several times, I was thinking of multiple ways to describe the sound. As any blogger or netlabel curator can tell you writing about music, describing it in a way the gives one the feel of what the musician has accomplished, is extremely difficult. Yeah, I know, boo-hoo for me. This difficulty is why bloggers sometimes resort to genrification of albums but this has its own traps. Flow is an album that refuses the boundaries of language — it is just electronic music. Flow is everything you might think electronic music is and, at the same time, everything electronic music is not. Stephan Dragesser aka The Euphoric Hum writes, “Often my pieces are based on little loops, and the tracks are based on long sessions experiment with sounds, to bring the sound in a form, make a track, is always a problem for me, because I can basically get lost….” Getting lost is apropos of everything and nothing when writing about Flow.

Jared C. Balogh just had a slew of music released and good for us! With Detaching Realities Vol. 2 on Headphonica, Rhythm of Life on Happy Puppy Records, and Drifting Soul on 45 Echoes Sound, we are blessed with hours of interestingly good music. I’ve been listening to Balogh’s jazz releases consistently over the last week while trying to write a review about them, however in the review I wanted to stay away from any comparison to Frank Zappa, but as you can deftly see that turned out to be impossible. Take a listen to the following track from Rhythm of Life:

The two reasons I didn’t want to bring up Zappa in writing these reviews is that listeners how like Zappa might attribute too much importance on this comparison and not download the albums or listeners who do not like Zappa — there may be some —   might not download these albums. Regardless of your feelings towards Zappa, these are must have albums for your iPod.

Balogh creates a sonic world that is ever changing and pleasing to the ear even in it’s odd syncopation and nuances.  According to notes supplied by Balogh, these works are highly personal in their genesis. Whether or not this is the reason for such fine work, I don’t know. But these three albums start 2012 with some wonderful music.