But first things first: that playlist in its new iteration.

Now, for his part, Wicked Gloves specializes in a somewhat spooky variety of synthesizer music which he’s baptized with the name of “witch pop” (or at least I have not come across any such term before), I suspect more for the effect than out of any considered belief; although by way of elucidating his background hardly any information at all has been provided, yet on his Bandcamp page he placed a first EP, More Than I Can Take, last September, of which the four tracks have also been uploaded on his Soundcloud page: and from the information that is available, it’s clear that he’s performed live on occasion, so it could well happen that Wicked Gloves will take this act on tour beyond Seattle at some point in the near future.

As a foretaste of what he might have in store for his audiences, here are two tracks from the EP.

A sort of gloss evidently on the condition of love-sickness – or is it about a sad leave-taking after a preternatural night just before sunrise? – is the tune “Morning Sickness.”

Unfolding along somewhat similar lines, it seems, though slower in tempo and darker in mood, there is a track entitled “Troubled Mind” – which, no doubt intentionally, terminates quite abruptly.

Lastly, as a pièce d’occasion, this sonic sorcerer has brewed a mix of the sounds on the radio (“ADDJ Presents Claustrophilia the 3-Minute Mix”), and the result is both funny and potent.

In fact, it turns out that he has posted multiple versions of “Ru Meng Ling,” and one of them, produced with a little help from their friends, namely “Jarome’s Song Dynasty Refix,” definitely adds some extra finish to the work; so, by way of amendment, I’d like to embed it now.

Another of their collaborations, not quite as reflective or as slow as the other, is “Huan,” a song about the unsettling flux of life in the country’s largest cities today.

Similarly inventive musically, two other numbers, in which Mobidextrous goes solo, also ought to be mentioned.

Firstly, there is an instance of a genre he calls “folkstep,” “Gong Yan.”

Then an uncategorized and softly menacing tune, “Three/Four Time Noodles”:

First off is a new instrumental track, “Saturday Morning Blues,” by a guitarist in New Jersey, Justin Valente, posted by him yesterday.

Late last month, the classical mixmaster here in Amsterdam, Von Rosenthal de la Vegaz, posted a new compilation, whose title alone already caught my eye; the mix itself then fulfilled that implicit promise, and so here is the bold set “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?”

The last piece in today’s round-up is around a year old, though I just came across it; in this late-evening number, by the rough sensuous strokes of his phrasing, the Melbourne musician and singer Chet Faker (which is presumably only his stage name) lets it be known that “I’m Into You.”

The band, comprising the drummer Luke Fasano, the keyboardist Jen Goma, the singer and guitarist Steven Reker, and the bassist James Rickman, came together a few years ago in the interstices of music and dance for which a New York institution such as The Kitchen provides an arena; and in their live performances, judging from some of the information available about them on the Internet, they often aim to be not only a band but something like a dance troupe as well.

It is not so surprising, then, that for its part the music would be imbued with an especial degree of kinetic activity, the arrangements and even (albeit less noticeably) the vocals frequently bouncing martially-acrobatically; the leaps taken are particularly daring in two tracks from the band’s eponymous LP, “New June” and “Three Strangers” – and each time they land on their feet.

With the new EP released, where will this ensemble go next?

On his Soundcloud page, Sweet Random has also uploaded the EP in its brief entirety (it is around fifteen minutes long) and it’s from there that I’ll simply embed it whole here.

The arrangements of this music bring some distinctively bleak and even novel complexes of sound to bear, and that alone would furnish a reason to listen to the album; but it’s something else which really elicits one’s attention – the feeling that here one is transfixed in some confined space and, moreover, feels oneself to be nearly depleted, so that in the end there’s not much that could be done about it: so perhaps it’s this EP’s aim to describe a state of exhaustion that is more than a merely individual one.

That the musical referent is our present circumstances generally (note that here I am not speaking of conditions in any country in particular), seems especially likely when one listens to the last track on the EP, “Digital War”: for, if one concentrates on it, and then replays the other three as well, one might well register throughout something as definite as the sound of a wish or a hope, namely, that the decrepit impasse of today’s arrangements somehow be swept away by others that would at least possess the virtue of being new or younger – “qu’une sorte de flot irrésistible passera sur l’ancienne civilisation,” to cite one especially cutting sentence of Georges Sorel’s (Réflexions sur la violence, deuxième édition, chap. IV, pt. II) which remains, much like his book as a whole, as current as it was when first published, already more than a century ago.

The composer in Milan whom I’ve written about before, Giovanni Dettori, has just published a recording of a new work, “Quartetto Doppio,” on his Youtube channel, and this ensemble piece, with Feyzi Brera playing the violin and viola, Patrick Graziosi the first guitar, Laura Rotondi the cello, and Alberto Roveroni the drums, while Dettori, completing the quartet (or quintet), handles the second guitar and the bass, is fascinating; in view thereof I have added the video – helpfully equipped, as many of his other videos are, with the score – to the playlist.

(Like his EP Suite, the “Quartetto Doppio” too is available on iTunes.)

This composition begins by setting up a bifurcation: first the ensemble strikes off something like a theme, which then is not varied so much as it is sundered in two, both of the resulting parts, the one bristling with a loud guitar riff, the other holding its ground by an ostinato on the violin and viola, succeeding one another by turns whereby they defy one another audibly, the one nearly taunting the other and vice versa in each alternation – and in their very contrariety they together instantiate a musical contention that may well owe something of its parallelism to the art of counterpoint; thus, still at the outset of the piece, the popular and the classical modes are counterposed to one another, situated in opposite corners of this “double” sonic space, and here it is far from obvious whether ever the twain might meet, so definite does their mutual repugnance seem to be: however, largely on account of this same alternation, one can also fore… – forehear that they will soon be leaving those corners behind and advancing towards each other.

At this point listeners may well wonder where all this musical action may be supposed to be taking place: of course, it could be a dramatic or diegetic scene or scenes, in the usual sense of that term, which these musical means are sketching out, with the alternation of the two musical modes in his composition then replicating the cross-cutting montage technique used in the cinema to lend visual and narrative intensity to stretches of dialogue. Yet there also is another distinct possibility, namely, that all of this – the choice of musical modes, the distance virtually interposed between them, the rhythm of their alternation, etc. – would constitute an aural representation of the interactions between the several different kinds of music in the creative mind of a contemporary classical composer such as Dettori, who, as he himself has remarked, is concerned to circumvent in his work the narrowness of the old musical dichotomies; in that case, the setting of “Quartetto Doppio” would be in the interior of the composer’s mind itself, and the dramatis personae would comprise the different kinds of music that circulate within it, while, for its part, what the audience would be given to hear, are the ways in which the latter comport themselves and behave towards one another in that inner region. And, in fact, doesn’t this latter possibility seem a more plausible delineation of what Dettori’s composition is actually about?

How “Quartetto Doppio” then proceeds to unfold might lend this supposition further plausibility, for now the two modes, where in the first it’s the guitars that lead, and in the second, the other strings, do indeed leave their respective corners and move towards each other – the alternation between them is itself succeeded by sequences wherein contact is made – though in the first few moments of this phase, is the action akin to the exchange of blows between boxers in the ring, or, on the other hand, to the holds by which the partners in certain genres of dance come to grips with one another on the floor? – it is hard to decide, for these moments of music move in a manner that’s simultaneously pugilistic, martial, and sensuous; and thus, cognizant of this very difficulty, listeners may feel as though they are overhearing an inner creative process wherein the protagonists are the different kinds of music themselves as they jut up against each other and spar with one another in some usually by-invitation-only realm (and then the composer too may seem to be first of all an observer and only subsequently a transcriber of their interactions and altercations). Yet, as the musical idiom then swings towards Buenos Aires, we listeners soon find ourselves witnessing something like a tango, and that initial question is swiftly dispatched.

In his compositions Dettori has made thought-provoking use of tango music before, and this time around he incorporates it in a particularly striking manner; its usage here suggests, most obviously, that this particular genre is especially suitable when the compositional aim is to flesh out, to lend body to an encounter between modes of music that mainly had wanted to avoid one another (then the guitars stand in for rock music in its entirety, in the manner of a synecdoche, and the strings likewise for classical) but which now are thrown together (the old dichotomy in which both were content to abide having been replaced by their close contact) – joined in this musical mise-en-scène in a tense dance whose brutal refinement the tango elements express quite well. Yes, as a genre both of dance and of music, tango seems to illustrate, generally speaking, how brutal the application of refinement itself can be, and how refined brutality’s (for in practice neither refinement nor brutality excludes the other); thus it is – so at least it seems to me – that the drama, the rhythm, and the tone of tango have been invoked in the “Quartetto Doppio,” as though to underscore that something so new in music may emerge perhaps only when, with considerable daring in the composition, the old opposites are forcibly, kinetically, or even violently joined together.

Thus tonight’s excursion will not circle leisurely around Soundcloud, but will instead travel through it at a brisk clip – some stamina will be required – for during these several weeks when my attention was mainly focused on the format, the material has accumulated, and so by now, beyond the usual three, there are quite a few more tracks calling to be featured here.

Without further ado, then, let’s begin tonight’s long sonic sprint.

An alumnus of the Amsterdam conservatory, hailing from Ankara (by way of Uzbekistan), Emre Sihan Kaleli now works in this city as a freelance composer; his recent work, “[No.9:2] Seventeen Thoughts on a Chamber Concerto,” was performed last month at the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ by the Nieuwe Ensemble, with Ed Spanjaard conducting: and it’s a piece of dramatic music, interspersed with some lonely soliloquies, which will start things off nicely.

Next in the line-up is a new work by Rory Smith, whom I’ve written about before (and still some distance down on my agenda is another, longer text about his music and its significance), amusingly entitled “Plod,” which, as its ironic title already intimates it will, proves to be quite fleet on its feet; this composition turns his particular feeling for syncopated effects and slightly off-kilter piano in some unexpected directions: this is no mere accompaniment to a dance, but a piece of music which has incorporated it into itself – and dispenses it again as tap-dancing.

A pianist in California whose recordings on Soundcloud I just happened to chance upon, Kimdo Adear, offers some delightful performances of works by Beethoven, Debussy, and Chopin, but these unfortunately (perhaps in view of copyright or other restrictions) she’s marked as private, entailing that they cannot be embedded elsewhere: so by all means please listen to them on her page there! In lieu thereof, one of her piano variations upon some well-known pop-music songs, Tears for Fears’ “Shout,” recommends itself.

One work of classical music that lends itself especially readily to variation and adaptation is Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie” sequence (it will figure more than once in tonight’s tour), and from the Brisbane composer Henry Collins, who is known on Soundcloud by the moniker Light Bulb Sound Design (I do appreciate light bulbs, evidently) and the pianist Michael Manikus comes a rearrangement of the first of them, which limns the procedures by which it was made in its very title, “Mnédie Gyop 1,” without by the transpositions destroying the oblique mood of the original.

A new work by a composer in New York whom I wrote about some months back, Brian Petuch, much as (to my ear at least) his earlier compositions do, imparts aural form to one Manhattan or even more specifically West Side street scene after another, though this time with a greater utilization of electronic means. Imbued with the exuberant sound of mid-morning, this one is called “Bleeper.”

From Nature’s Jokes, the musical moniker of Chris Payne in Birmingham, whom I featured here once before, there comes an “Orchestron Version” of his new song “Who Are You?” – with an arrangement that’s more complex than the other’s, yet without sacrificing anything of the rhythmic appeal of a very catchy tune.

A singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer in Austin, Max Frost, has become something of an Internet sensation over the course of the last couple of weeks, on account of his new song “White Lies,” and, listening to it, it is not hard to understand why, as the arrangements are equipped with hooks in abundance, and then too there’s something about his phrasing, which is somehow both ingratiating and ice-hard all at once, that simply sticks in the mind. But it’s the companion tune that I’d like to feature here, for it is darker (a video has been made for it – a disturbing piece of work): it’s called “Nice and Slow.”

Another recent Internet sensation is the singer, composer, and producer from Bogatá, Humberto Pernett, whose several albums have explored and adapted various Caribbean and Columbian genres, some of which were scarcely known elsewhere. One song in particular, “La Galáctica,” may be recommended as a starting-point for those who want to learn and to hear more.

Now – perhaps after a brief intermission for the reader – tonight’s effort would not be complete without a cinematic score, and this is provided in the shape of the music for Steve Holzer’s short film Machine Deva (which I have not seen, though I attempted to locate a copy on the Internet) composed by his son Derek, a sound-artist residing in Berlin who goes by the moniker Macumbista. This set comprises five tracks of eerie electronica.

Turning again to Erik Satie and moving on to Paris, a trio there comprising, alongside the guitarist and saxophonist Romain Fitoussi, the saxophonist Olivier de Colombel, and the drummer Gregory Desgouttes, has uploaded a recording of a jazz interpretation of the third “Gymnopédie,” and it is inventive while yet preserving much of the form and the mood of the original work.

At this point, tonight’s trip will pause briefly to admire the “Mur sonique” recently constructed by an electronic sound artist about whom little is known other than his place of residence, Ottawa, and his profession by day as some sort of bureaucrat, as indicated with a certain ironic distance by his nom d’artiste, Beaucrat.

Venturing now southwards, to Salem, New Jersey, we encounter another electronic sound artist who calls himself the Constant Zombie (he is otherwise known as Jordan Livingstone), and his music, as one might expect, given the moniker, is quite a bit darker, calling forth by sonic means the scenarios in all our heads of non-human incursions, civil-defense maneuvers, desperate states of emergency, ultimate containment measures … all of which may be heard in his track “Stranger Than Fiction.” (One might also discern, towards the beginning, bits drawn from New Order songs, and so it is not surprising to find on his Soundcloud page that an instrumental cover of “Bizarre Love Triangle” was just uploaded.)

Another exploration of similarly dark regions is conducted by one number on last year’s album A Bond with Sorrow, “Traumspiel,” and the artist, the Berliner Christoph de Babalon, has not given it that title without cause: the apocalyptic scenarios in the manner in which they are outlined here, oneirically, most likely would never have become as well-established in our heads and at large as they indisputably are in general, were it not for the prevalence of such themes in the various modes of theatre and the sorts of games to which by now nearly everyone has been exposed.

Crossing now right around the world back to the antipodes, from the vicinity of Perth there comes yet another interesting Australian variation upon the first “Gymnopédie,” this one the work of Joshua Sweetman, who goes by the moniker of Yaqui Yeti: the hardest of the bunch, it unearths a metallic element in Satie’s composition of which one previously had perhaps at most some slight inkling.

A bleak ode to the element from which life came and which it could well be will swallow most of it up thalassically again, is delivered in a song, ominously replete with the sounds of submergence, which was recently uploaded by the Israeli singer and sound-artist Stella Gotshtein (she spends part of her time in New York), or as she’s also known, Stella Got; it’s entitled simply “Song to the Sea.”

Though it is instrumental only, “Vio,” a composition by Jan Hendrich in San Francisco, who’s active musically under the name Qepe, sounds as though it were conceived similarly, embodying an analogous effort to discern what a world (if the term itself would not then be hopelessly wrong) from which we all had been stricken out might sound like, if only somehow we were given a chance (per impossibile) to hear it.

In a somewhat similar way, in some contemporary musique improvisée one could hear glimmers of how a music that would – likewise hypothetically-impossibly – exist in the absence of human beings, both as the performers and the audience, might sound; in musical experimentation of this kind, we are perhaps given some faint taste of what the synthesizing operations might comprise whereby the elements of such a music would be assembled into wholes (again, assuming that this term itself would then not be utterly inapt) – would they not differ radically from those with which we are more or less familiar? An instance of this inquiry may be discerned in the improvised music for which Joel Garten is becoming known; of these pieces his “Piano Improvisation on the Keys and with Gamelan Mallet” may be taken as representative – and apart from any inquiry his music may or may not comprise, in its own manner it is also beautiful.

To register the impressions emitted by the Chicago composer Nomi Epstein’s composition “Trio for Flute, Cello, Piano,” one will have to listen very intently, very hard, for low volume and softness as such are in part what her music seems to be about; this is a thought-provoking subject or set of topics, to be sure, and it deserves further reflection: other of her works may well furnish an occasion to engage in the latter, but for the moment there is much to appreciate and to enjoy in this one.

Courage! Just short of twenty entries, tonight’s tour is nearly finished – we’ll end with the French composer we’ve encountered a number of times already, now in the form of “Ein anderer Satie,” which is a lovely homage to him by Thoralf Dietrich, with just the right amount of oddness mixed into the honor bestowed, in a fashion that he would probably have appreciated – this is a piece composed “for two hands and a finger (or toe).” (About himself Dietrich provides nearly no information, and so, apart from his location in some German-speaking region, he too remains enigmatic.)

I’ve pulled together three tracks from Soundcloud that seem to triangulate the event.

The first is a piano cover of New Order’s “True Faith” by Eric Daniel, a musician in San Diego.

Further afield still, from across the Pacific, comes a memorable remix of “Policy of Truth” by Depeche Mode, by the Auckland sound artist or artists known as West Coast Fruit Company.

The third of tonight’s tracks is a long live set of hard industrial music from an evening in April at the Rote Insel club in Berlin by the DJ No Name (other information is unavailable) – interesting even for those who generally eschew the genre.

Though I’m still in the midst of bringing this site up to grade, a video just crossed my path that’s remarkable, a rendition of Beyoncé’s “Halo” which, as Gabriel Cabrera and Chris Kennedy of The Shures say, is “epic” – or, in other words, it’s inspired in more than one sense of the term, and the duet just called out to be mentioned here, and to be the newest addition to their playlist.

(In their prefatory remarks, prior to the song itself, they let us know that Sophie will be joining them around once a month.)

For the moment take some time and tarry awhile among older articles, now provided with some visual appeal in the form of numerous “featured images.”

Comments are welcome.

Accordingly, I shall now turn my attention to bringing this one up to a comparable standard. Please bear with me while I do so over the next several days, and overlook the inevitable disorder in the interim. (No one is more eager to return to writing for this site than I am.)

Comments about the new shape of the other site are invited and appreciated!

Ilpo Jauhiainen is an itinerant Finnish artist who’s as at ease in traveling as he is in exploring different types of art, visual and acoustic; currently it seems he’s residing in Cotonou in Benin: tonight’s offering however is a sonic evocation of that old feature of the topography of Berlin, the Landwehrkanal:

About Jauhiainen I hope to write more in future; the albums available on his Bandcamp page seem promising indeed.

From Raphael Vanoli’s new band, so new that a website or other Internet representation is lacking – though it’s already been performing in well-known venues in Amsterdam and elsewhere, Stolpernova, comes a four-track compilation of some recent live sets, which he has loaded onto his Soundcloud page.

Stolpernova, I imagine, will be stirring up music in these parts for some time to come.

Finally, an electronic musician and producer in Brussels who’s been featured here previously, Analog 80, has posted a set of three pieces under the title “Return to the Moon,” and together and individually – especially the last of them, “Return to the Moon – the Dream Box (Cпутник-1),” delivers some energetic music for midnight.

In the week to come, I hope to round off the renovation of the Musicuratum LP site, and to turn my attention back fully to the musical side of things.

For ease of reference, here is the whole EP (which is also available on his Bandcamp page), embedded from Cuthbért’s Soundcloud page.

It’s entitled Dream World, and if this music “does” anything at all, it can be said to explore the nature of the relations of which a number of dream states, some on the more lucid side, others more oneiric, are composed – the synapses that have been relaxed or unlatched such that impressions and ideas in accordance with the objective order without, no longer are transmitted into the mind nor, once there, circulate with all due speed; how the quasi-muscular exertions to which particular mental operations, usually so well co-ordinated with each other in the waking state (that is their common raison d’être in daily life, after all), each contribute in some measure, can be halted, extend along other axes, or even set out in a reverse direction, is one of the things these tracks are concerned to place before our ears. For, most often in dream states all coherence is not gone, that fabric of intra-mental relations hasn’t been torn apart entirely; what happens instead is that the linkages are stretched out: and if one’s inclined at all to accept that by this sounds might be emitted (whether within the dream, or in some other, but likewise virtual manner), then it would not be mistaken to observe that it’s these which populate Cuthbért’s compositions: so in several of the sequences which recur characteristically throughout the course of the EP, what one can hear are the unclenchings of the mind while it is dreaming.

And indeed, how calm this music remains from beginning to end; while the disturbances in dreams are not entirely absent from it – from time to time one feels a certain sense of panic rearing up – the mind’s composure doesn’t once really falter: its inner coherence is loosened, not turned inside-out to expose things that never were meant to be seen or heard, and Cuthbért’s music in registering this relaxation does not turn away from beauty. Those who want a dream-music that’s out of joint, severely déréglé, “ver-rückt” (as Martin Heidegger or Prof. Dr. Baum in Fritz Lang’s Testament des Doktor Mabuse would say) and whose interest lies in its outbursts of strangeness, must seek it elsewhere.

Yet one might perhaps notice a peculiar inversion that’s brought about in the relation between a listener’s perception and memory; much more than in most music (how much more is an interesting question), in the case of this EP the music can call to mind certain aural memories from which new perceptions fill one’s ears: whereas usually it’s with memories that the acoustic experience as a sequence of perceptions either ends or is terminated, as the case may be.

On an earlier occasion I spoke briefly about “夢世界 Dream World” (and also, on another, about Cuthbért’s collaboration with Daniel Rhode, “Dropbox Bass Drop”) and I won’t reprise those remarks; instead I should merely like to note that, listening to the former piece now again, at around the 2:17 and 2:27 marks there was something about the timbre of the trombone – wielded by Cuthbért himself – which called a particular sonic memory to mind, namely the feeling elicited by the “Love Theme” in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film Chinatown, and specifically the manner in which Uan Rasey’s trumpet challenges the rest of that music; subsequently Cuthbért’s entire piece unfolded this time in a somewhat new way, the overture – which is what it now revealed itself as being, all at once akin to the opening of a piece of music for the cinema – began to resound with its labored breathing and something like an echo of soles striking the pavement, as though someone were running away, perhaps to evade something: as though in flight on foot from a pursuer and assessing the terrain at night in terms of the imperative need to take cover (which is an attitude vastly different than the deliberate or involuntary disorientation I mentioned before). In the ears of these and other perceptions born of an acoustic memory, a few other moments then stood out from the whole, while also at the same time underscoring its evident filiation to Goldsmith’s work, notably John Schuster-Craig’s impressive low piano notes at 2:41 and soon thereafter the plaintive sequence of five notes on Cuthbért’s trumpet at 2:47, answered immediately at 2:51 by the pianist and developed into a very moving passage through 3:44, when it was resumed again by the trumpet for a bit more than ten seconds, and then carried by both of them together to a close, at around 4:27, with the striking of a single high note on the piano: thus these crucial moments brought back the unease in that “Love Theme” (which is of course well-known but perhaps deserves to be fathomed better than it has been) in the form of a permutation.

Now, to perceive the relation between the two pieces of music, ears that had been opened oneirically to the mind’s own musical memories were probably required.

All this well exemplifies a disposition of listening that’s become stronger by being loosened up as it moves from track to track, a disposition which then affords the listener a more acute sense of the arrangement of the album’s acoustic environment as space, or as a set of spaces – in the full four dimensions of the term: to be sure, time does not get passed over by this music. The anxious feeling raised to perceptibility by memory while listening to “Yumesekai (Taiga)” (as he’s now renamed “夢世界 Dream World”), isn’t so much espoused as it is counterbalanced or even in some degree neutralized by his music; and this instance is representative of much that transpires over the course of the EP.

The album as a whole, perhaps just because it is so well-measured, not being cut too short nor going beyond a due length, has time enough to dispense; and so, however long its four rooms may have been built to last, listeners can find some piece of shelter in the “dream world” of Cuthbért’s calm music.

It will be a sight to see how their trademark self-made instruments, the “buke” (a largely remodeled six-string baritone ukulele) and the “gase” (half guitar, half bass) – their names too were evidently spliced together, much like the things which they designate – are deployed in action.

I have had no further chance to decipher or even to study the graphic code that Dyer and Sanchez, taking their inspiration from a Sol LeWitt exhibition, employed to create the jacket artwork for General Dome, or even to ascertain if they were all that serious in propounding it – or being simply playful; but on paper or on screen it beckons mysteriously, which is all that may be required, here, in the end.

In any event: to whet one’s appetite or to open one’s ears for what most likely can be expected from the album as a whole, and from Buke and Gase live on stage, three energetic tracks.

Firstly, “In the Company of Fish”:

Then, “Metazoa”:

And third, “Hiccup”:

Gabriel Cabrera and Chris Kennedy of The Shures, though once again without Sophie, the group’s newest member, have ventured an impromptu cover of Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” and the results come across surprisingly well – she’s one of the hardest acts to follow, of course – and so I’ve added the video to the playlist.

The last several days I’ve been working intensively on redesigning the Musicuratum LP site, in order, among other goals, to render it easier to navigate and to use; and not least to heighten its visual appeal, or to counteract the tendency to ocular monotony and tedium that is I’ve found one of the pitfalls in website design.

Some of what I’m learning in the process may be applied here at a later date, though in a quite different way (for why maintain two parallel sites if they do not after all diverge widely from one another in some respect at least?): time will tell.

With the end of that labor in sight, the advent of spring – and this winter has been a brutal one – should herald a burst of new articles, including a few longer ones which I’ve intended to complete for some months now.

In the meanwhile, may I recommend that delightful anthology of Morton Feldman’s writings (which I’ve been strolling through recently), Give My Regards to Eighth Street – it is wonderful and witty.

The song “Dead Crimson” – a collaboration with a rapper called Bar Code – is a paean to their own names, spinning out variations on them in an expense of boisterous virile bravado, which (the ominous sound of the title notwithstanding) might suggest, if only one has ears for it, that life and its own special poetic vigor may yet burst forth from the English language in years to come, slogging through trite masses of cliché in the process.

It, and the other numbers on the album, have been loaded onto Early Bird’s Soundcloud page. (The band also has a Youtube channel, though as of now only audio recordings have been uploaded there.)

On the instrumental side (though often supplemented with vocal samplings) a prominent role has been accorded to the wind instruments, as one would expect from members and friends of Forestears; here a number entitled “Bloodshed” stands out.

As does another, called “Little Dots”:

Where Early Bird will eventually land, it’s of course too soon to tell; but the sight and sound of the duo’s flight will be fun to follow.

To start with the mixtape, “1n+rødµk+1øn +ø §Y§+(3)m§ øf §øµnd§”: it’s the at times disturbing work of an anonymous outfit in South Africa, Åfr1kŧøµ+h rh1zømÅ+1k, whose aim is to provide a platform for experimental and electronic music there, and includes pieces by nineteen different artists (further information about them, for those who are curious, is provided under each individual track in the mixtape on Åfr1kŧøµ+h rh1zømÅ+1k’s Soundcloud page).

In addition to that first one, another somewhat more recent page has been set up by the same group, which also maintains a Facebook page.

The single track in tonight’s round-up is a fine example of the electronic music being made by Edouard Trolliet, a Frenchman from Tarnos, and is entitled “Never Look Back”: it too veers into disturbing territory musically speaking, evidently owing some part of its inspiration to a cinematic source, the genre of horror film.

Several albums are available on Trolliet’s Bandcamp page.

Traveling now across the Atlantic, two works by the name of “Traces” have been put together in a set by the “mysterious duo” (as they say on their Facebook page) of the Brooklyn sound artists who operate under the name Goitia Deitz, and their dreamy music is a nice find with which to conclude this voyage around Soundcloud.

The first, from the Soundcloud page of cellist Ashley Bathgate, is a performance she gave of a recent composition, “Empty City,” by the Israeli composer Yoav Shemesh, in conjunction with a choir comprising Tamar Mayzlish, Noa Atar, Chen Levy, Erez Elfassy, Amir Solovitch, and Shemesh himself (this information is drawn from his website).

Next is a new piece just posted, with a nice sense of the timing, after an extended Internet sabbatical, by David Grellier’s electronica project College; it’s entitled “Révélation” – and it lives up to its name.

The third of today’s celebratory offerings is a buoyant composition with a humorous title – “Don’t Work the Hustle If You Ain’t Got the Muscle” – by the Englishman Liame Dethridge (he may reside either in Ipswich or in London or in both, according to a quick Internet search), who makes music under the moniker Blue Murder Jazz.

But how much does it matter if Pak0 is something of a cipher, after all; the music is what counts, and amidst the pieces he offers on his Soundcloud page there are several which do stand out by virtue of their spare mix of elements (and also their rather abrupt endings), in particular a collaboration – a “northern alliance” they call it, and actually the sounds tingle in one’s ears as they waft by, akin perhaps to an icy breeze – with his fellow artist Snoe in Murmansk, “Dotted”:

Closer to the mainstream of house music, but still somehow redolent acoustically of large open spaces and a certain thin cool air, is the solo work entitled “No More Light”:

Moreover, from the EP, I’d like to mention a couple of tunes; firstly “Bristol” (here too, if one listens closely, one may hear gusts of wind and the brittle sound which things near to freezing might make when touched or tapped):

And then (made available on Bandcamp by his record label) “Hustlaz”:

The euphonium player Neil Jansen has recorded several performances of the “Melodious Etudes for Trombone,” drawn from Marco Bordogni’s “Vocalises” and arranged by Joannes Rochut, and uploaded them on his Youtube channel; and of these I’ve added the fourth, fifth, and seventh to the playlist.