Articles
2010 Top 10s and 20s
Will Long (Celer)

Albums
Bilxaboy
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Celer & Yui Onodera
Cepia
Dead Leaf Echo
Ferraris & Uggeri
Ernesto Ferreyra
Flying Horseman
The Foreign Exchange
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Ghost and Tape
Andrew Hargreaves
Head Of Wantastiquet
i8u
Anders Ilar
Quintana Jacobsma
Kaiserdisco
Leafcutter John
Clem Leek
The Lickets
The Machine
Magda
My Fun
Ostendorf, Zoubek, Lauzier
Part Timer
Phillips + Hara
RV Paintings
Set In Sand
Shackleton
Shigeto
Matt Shoemaker
Sun City Girls
Supersilent
Swartz
Ben Swire
Collin Thomas
Tomo
Upward Arrows

Compilations / Mixes
Exp. Dance Breaks 36
Fünf
Lee Jones
The Moon Comes Closer
Note of Seconds
Tensnake

EPs
8Bitch
Celer
Jasper TX
Jozif
Lerosa
Machinefabriek
Patscan
Pleq
Simon Scott
SHEMALE
Thorsten Soltau / Weiss
Jace Syntax & BlackJack
Weiss

Matt Shoemaker: Soundtrack for Dislocation
Elevator Bath

Soundtrack for Dislocation is the first full-length album for Elevator Bath from Matt Shoemaker, who has previously issued material on Trente Oiseaux, The Helen Scarsdale Agency, Mystery Sea, and Ferns Recordings. The fifty-seven-minute recording lives up to its title with three pieces that ooze dramatic portent and unease. Complemented by Shoemaker's own beautiful photography, the CD release was ‘assembled' by the Seattle-based composer in fall and winter of 2008. Though field recordings were used minimally, no production-related details beyond that are cited so whatever other sound sources Shoemaker drew upon to produce the three cryptic pieces remains a mystery. That sense of mystery extends to the settings themselves, which are allusive in the extreme, though what exactly is being alluded to is more suggested than spelled out. In this case, however, the inscrutable character of his creations works to Shoemaker's advantage, as the listener remains engaged no matter what. Absorbing the recording as pure sound proves to be a rewarding enough experience all by itself.

In “Arrival,” sine tones whistle and waver, arising and then receding into oblivion, amidst a gloomy backdrop of creaking and rustling. The persistent whirr of a cricket drone suggests that it's night-time while fuzzy outlines of activity hint at a human presence; though softly screeching hydraulic noises suggest that we're in an industrial setting, the material slowly builds into a nightmarish mass that leaves behind any singular associative context. “Fuse Error Phantom” plunges the listener into a maelstrom of blustery noise and radio frequency static for four minutes before abruptly ceasing, after which the track, phoenix-like, rises again in the form of accreting layers that swell into an ever more impregnable mass. The album's thirty-six-minute opus, “Circulation Within the Elemental Drift,” comes into being as a warbling drone whose pulsations imbue the material with a sense of urgency, until a state of crepuscular calm sets in, with machines thrumming peacefully and an airplane passing over. Of the three pieces, it's this one that develops more patiently in the way it gradually assumes shape as a thick, drifting field of percussive strikes and keening tonal blur. When the man-made presence withdraws to allow chirping birds and a barking dog to dominate the closing minutes, the unexpected appearance of natural sounds proves to be startling. Elevator Bath doesn't flood the market with releases, so when a new release from the label appears it's somewhat of an event, and Soundtrack for Dislocation is no exception.

December 2010