In a short time span, this is the third release by Books on Tape (see also Vital Weekly 361 and 376), the solo project of Todd Drootin, who once more takes his punk attitude to the sampler and cooks up a nice meal of hip hop, punk and techno. Whereas the recent 10” was maybe a bit long, the balance here is right. The sixteen tracks are one long driving energy force of energetic pieces that breath the speed of punk, but takes it’s sampled sources from anywhere in history of music — jazz, blues, techno — but without sounding like that at all. Despite the title, Books on Tape may sing a lot of tunes, but definetely not the blues. Maybe it’s a more raw version of Moby at times. Freshly aggressive, raw and untamed. Quite an enjoyable effort.

I must admit I feared the worst, when I read the press blurb raving about ‘a wide range of chaotic sounds together into one sweeping smorgasbord of interpretations of disease and dysfunction’. It’s not that I dislike noise, even when it took me four years to hear all fifty Merzbow CDs that are in the Merzbox. Occassionally I even play a Whitehouse record, MB or Ramleh. But much of the noise music that is made by others are just a repetition of archetypes put forward by those I just mentioned and do not add something new. So when I got through this lengthy compilation of no-less then thirty-three tracks by as many artists, I can safely say: noise music is alive and maybe even kicking (despite it’s disease?). It has become an umbrella for many sub-genres, feedback inspired noise, guitar noise, dark ambient, plunderphonics and in some cases even techno oriented. Quite a pleasent trip. Not to mention the many unknown bands here, like Bomb20, Burmese, Iran, Persona, Mixel Pixel, Spin Laden, Cussycat, Berkowitz Lake & Dahmer (yes, some of these people have nice band names too) or Travis Bickle’s Mohawk. Prime noise makers — that is people who have gained a following already of their own — include Illusion Of Safety, V/VM, Zipperspy or The Evolution Control Committee. It’s the variety of music that makes it quite enjoyable. Short tracks, from various angles of noise (and related — he hastened to say) make this quite a vivid compilation.

Working tirelessly on the fringes of Canada’s music scene, Coin Gutter is emerging as one of the northwest’s premiere experimental outfits. All your dreams are meaningless’s uncompromising opener — featuring an immediate blast of cold, harsh noise — dares you to concur. Lift With the Knees, which first saw light in 2001 as a 36-and-a-half-minute EP, jumps from Merzbow brutality to Lull isolationism to Mille Plateau granulation within the first ten minutes. By the time this Vancouver duo (Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott) brings in the second movement (tick tock rhythms and creeping crescendos of industrial ambience), you’ll have realized that these two ambient/concrete composers have something special going. Actually, Coin Gutter tours quite a bit throughout Canada, so it’s reasonable they can craft such tight, eclectic arrangements so seamlessly. What’s surprising is that Lift With the Knees is hardly the best track on the disc.

One contender is Lullaby, which, with a twisted interpretation of its title, features an operatic performance of female singer and piano arrangement that we’ll assume has been lifted out of obscurity. Coin Gutter dissects it in glitch fashion, pitching things down, stuttering it, distorting it and layering it upon itself into a sudden maddening mash. Occasionally the two roast it with hot white noise like kids pulling wings off of butterflies, and you share in their delighted grins.

Terminal is another standout. The source material, masked by room effects and distortion, could be a choral hymn with organ accompaniment, but who knows? Transformed into a wall of sound, with tones and voices escaping the maelstrom, it’s powerful and borderline spiritual.

My favorite, Timewise, was recorded in 2000, before even Lift With the Knees. Featuring vocal narration by Tara Nelson and thick howling drones that you can cut with a knife, the track packs enough mesmeric punch to paralyze a bull, while emitting delicate pain and melancholy. Snippets of Nelson saying “He’s gone” and “She’s crying; She always wanted to go inside” send this one into profound hopelessness… but in a good way.

All your dreams are meaningless is one of the most exciting electroacoustic soundtracks I’ve heard in a while. I’m all for guys making a racket, but when I can see past the molested sine waves into something of depth, something that touches me in areas outside of adrenaline, I’m suddenly taking notes. It’s said that the inspiration of this release stems from Bauhaus architects; the round building featured on the packaging seems to back this up. (What was that Thelonious Monk quote, again?) For my next fix of oblique conceptual audio, I’ll be keeping eyes peeled for more Coin Gutter.

Prolific Montréal-based experimental label No Type hit the jackpot with the stunning CD debut of Dustin Craig’s newest alter identity. Oakland’s Craig, who records also as Elasticlego, delivers a thematically consistent, listener-friendly IDM gem with this 7-track release. At the risk of taking away from the originality of the EP, I might describe it as the genius offspring of Akufen’s short-splice sample methods and Timbaland’s catchy breakbeat production. Or, alternately, KRS-One meets Boards of Canada. Thick, heady hip hop beats flow under a perfectly textured barrage of staccato rap snippets. Missy Elliott on ketamine, perhaps? We Remain Faded’s only drawback is its 38-minute length, but sources inform us that Headphone Science’s full length, Consider The Problems, is due out later this year. Cutting edge Discman food.

Coin Gutter are a new duo from Canada, who play out a lot. Apart from some released CDRs, this is the first real CD, more widely available. They come round more in the No Type style of recentely, taking their inspirations from 80s industrial music and 90s glitch music. Lift With the Knees, the opening piece is a tour de noise in full force that slowly dissolves in a mighty drone and then adds some rhythms to it. This track takes up more than half the disc’s space here and is most of the times quite an ambient piece. Unlikely influences ranging from Merzbow to Zoviet France drop here. In the eight remaining short(er) pieces (I must admit that i don’t understand why they didn’t cut the first track in seperate tracks), Coin Gutter is more single focussed on sounds and atmospheres. Ending with a glitchy piece Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska), Coin Gutter manages to absorb many influences, from noise to ambient and glitch, but I must say that I was quite pleased with their mixture of these various influences. Maybe sometimes the small progress in music comes out of the right cross-over between various influences.

Two more releases on No Type, the label with some slight connections to empreintes DIGITALes. Upon until now most of the releases were rhythm based, the one by A_dontigny and Diane Labrosse is more along the lines of improvised, electronic music — dare I say, more along the lines of labels like Grob and Erstwhile? Of course, in matters like this, this is a live recording, of a year ago in the neat place of La Casa Del Popolo. It’s hard to guess what goes into the computer and sampler, source-wise I mean, but it’s all closely linked together. A broading atmosphere, sizzing drones open up here and only half way the more typical laptop sounds come alive, those that sound like tweaking sounds through max/msp programs. The two stay together throughout the entire disc, finding sounds that are alike, but each works on their own level. They work with a sound palette that is quite supplementary to each other. In the final track média tactique, they even offer a very slow dub piece that drowns in the use of the extra sounds. It’s good, sturdy improvised electronic music, with not much news under the sun, alas.