Musique Non Stop | eMusic Electronica

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Various Artists, SMM: Opiate Posted: 18 Nov 2013 02:00 PM PST Expertly curated exclusives that color the mood of every room In an interview with The Believer a couple years back, Brian Eno explained how his ambient work — definitive albums like Music For Airports and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks — was inspired by everything from Erik Satie to Phil Spector. The latter’s painterly approach to pop music was particularly eye-opening, as it showed Eno the ways in which “sound had become a malleable material…music that was less linear and more immersive: music you lived inside.” The second entry in Ghostly’s SMM series follows suit with the first by doing just that: sharing nine expertly curated exclusives that color the mood of every room. More than just mere sonic wallpaper, these are set pieces, some subtle (Celer’s “Nothing So Mystical” and Fieldhead’s “37th” both infuse the air like monochromatic art installations) and some not-so-much (En’s “White” is actually quite colorful, merging a zig-zagging zither with the kind of transcendent drone tones Emeralds once excelled at). Then there are the outliers, like the scrambled radio broadcasts of Jim Haynes, the secular hymnals of Black Swan, and the bug-bitten bass lines of Pjusk, which sound like something a wild-eyed Trent Reznor used to bring his blood pressure down in the early ’90s. Or as Eno later said, “Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.” Attractive and essential.

Ron Morelli, Spit Posted: 18 Nov 2013 12:51 PM PST A hellish landscape traveled with a DJ's sense of ebb and flow Brooklyn-based label Long Island Electrical Systems (L.I.E.S.) has grown into a prominent voice for counter-cultural dance music in just a few short years, boasting an eclectic roster (Dutch house legend Legowelt and smooth shapeshifter Marcos Cabral, among others) and issuing limited white label pressings that up the ante on exclusivity. Their loosely-defined aesthetic is honed by founder Ron Morelli, a man whose grumpy anti-commercialism has become as reliable as the quality of his label’s output. Morelli himself records for L.I.E.S. under several monikers, including U-202 and as part of duo Two Dogs in a House, but for his debut full-length, Spit, he went to Hospital Productions, an imprint known for blackest-black noise. Having grown up as a hardcore kid in the New York area, Morelli sounds at home here, pairing a sadistic metal-tinged crunch with themes of isolation and anti-social feeling. The result is a hellish landscape traveled with a DJ’s sense of ebb and flow: “No Real Reason” sounds like a mad scientist’s reworking of the Miami Vice theme, and “Sledgehammer II” traps a pen of wheezing pigs in a warehouse of rusted, clanking machinery. When the industrial throb abates, it opens gateways for armies of trilling insects, renegade computer programs, and jabbering, unintelligible voices, unleashed like a series of plagues on nightclub revelers. It’s as much a rejection of community as it is another entry into the Brooklyn underground, a spiritual inheritor of the primitive, noise-loving No Wave artists that populated Manhattan’s downtown scene in the late ’70s. But the paranoia here is Morelli’s own — the album’s title refers to the expectorations of prostitutes working in Morelli’s neighborhood — and on the Suicide-like gallop “Crack Microbes,” he creates an alternate version of underground nightlife, a hypochondriac response to the crush of urban living.