Blue vinyl piques my ears & this is weirdness indeed. Hey typical! furthers Todd Drootin’s exploration into his own unique mélange of IDM and country music. A dark, gritty feel rides dusky piano chords while drum-kit percussion plays background to obscure vocal & feedback samples. The flip is playable at either 33 or 45 breaks or d’n’b. Either way, the rolling paranoia found in the ubiquitous piano & Anton LeVay organ conjurs an American desert brimming with gun-toting rancheros. Perhaps Drootin is the Southern Twin to Canada’s Venetian Snares…

No Type has launched its first vinyl releases & they are keepers. Bonarelli investigates edgy, minimal beats with Consumer Culture and pays homage to revolution & Detroit on May ’68, with an electric-infused, beatless pattern of cascading & melodic rhythms (nods to Carl Craig). The flipside contains two further gems in the realm of atmospheric dub/techno. While Public Transportation is true dub BPM, the fade in-out of the 4/4 kick gives it a breathless pulse. Pop Summer Nights slices the ambient drones slowly, eventually brandishing its distant beats with a drifting mindfulness worthy of Chain Reaction.

If you can survive the first three minutes of the epic Lift with Your Knees, the first half of Coin Gutter’s All your dreams are meaningless, then the rest of the 36-minute opener is a much more pleasant experience. Coin Gutter are one of the new “landscape” groups to be coming out of Western Canada and their style of musique concrète is intended to capture their impressions of the physical landscapes of their environments. Songs about the air and sky and rocks and soil, when you get right down to it. What you hear are tracks which encompass the drone of subtle winds, the chirping song of fields of insects, and the tumultuous grating of rock against stone.

Formed in February 2000 by Emma Hendrix and Graeme Scott, Coin Gutter had released several self-produced CD-Rs before All your dreams are meaningless. The nine tracks here move like weather across unstructured plains — sometimes the wind is kind and gentle, other times it is harsh and cold. The landscape is beautiful and ripe in the spring, empty and jagged in the winter. Lift with Your Knees charts a year in the wilderness, a slow time-lapse recording of the passage of time. The rest of the tracks build off the theme of the opener; some are more chaotic, some less so.

The standout track is Lullaby, a song for a musique concrète child. It is a beautiful piano and soprano duet with jets of digital noise and CD artifacts. I love how it starts with these swelling drones like movements of rock under great pressure before being smashed under a brief deluge of white noise. In the aftermath, the piano begins. The operatic voice glides in and is completely tripped up by skips and cut-ups, the vocal line hiccupping and stuttering for a few seconds before settling down. The duet continues — piano and voice — and the bit signal mash up and the bleats of noise pursues the pair, threatening and snapping at them. There is a final chaotic moment where the piano is possessed by the sound of the static bomb and becomes a carnival organ for a few seconds and then all the avant garde elements slink away and we drift out with just two traditional instruments again.

All your dreams are meaningless isn’t necessarily easy listening. The opening of Lift with Your Knees is a howling storm of noise and the final minute of Southern Yukon / Northern BC (perhaps parts of Alaska) is just as abrasive. In between there are laments and drones and wistful landscapes. But, like all adventures out in the wilderness, you’ve got to keep an eye out for falling rocks. Keeping an eye on the sky (or, in this case, a hand near the volume knob) keeps you slightly on edge and Coin Gutter’s work asks that you not nod off while listening. It’s kind of like having the timpani player hurl a mallet at you during the adagio movement of the symphony when you start to doze.

Certains lecteurs de cette chronique n’étaient encore qu’à l’état de leur conception lorsque Diane Labrosse exaltait déjà (début 1980) avec énergie sa musique au sein de groupes féminins talentueux (Wonder Brass, Justine). Quelques années plus tard, on la retrouve négociant son talent avec génie en compagnie des marchands du temple de chez Tzadik (Ikue Mori, Martin Tétreault, Zeena Parkins). Vingt-cinq ans de proses musicales / combat, vingt-cinq ans d’une intraitable fougue de création pour venir jusqu’à nous sous la forme de ce duo, orchestré en compagnie de A_dontigny (membre de Napalm Jazz et morceaux_de_machines) pour un traité autour des perturbations électroniques et des effluves atmosphériques. Un ordinateur, un échantillonneur et voilà nos deux Canadiens disposés à refaire le monde à la mesure de leurs attentes et de leur talent. Un mille-feuille atmosphérique composé de nappes pesantes d’ambiant dark et d’entrelacs d’effets anesthésiants et où se superposent dans un croustillement auditif jouissif une floraison de glitchs abstraits, de disjonctions de strates mélodiques, de flux en inhalation, d’aspérités et de fractures numériques entraînantes. Une télépathie qui développe à bien des égards l’idée d’empathie entre les musiciens et avec le public tant chacun semble anticiper les réactions de l’autre, pressentir les mouvements et inclinaisons qu’ils souhaitent donner à leurs climats spectraux. Quand la musique devient un langage universel qui se suffit à elle-même sans avoir recours aux mots. Profond et exigeant.