Music Arcades: Various: The Wire Tapper 20

I couldn't find this CD between Wire Tappers 19 and 21, or indeed anywhere on The Wire covermount shelf, so I went hunting in the pile of mostly unread copies of The Wire. Sure enough, the October 2008 issue was still in the plastic wrapper that it was mailed out in. In mitigation, may I point out that The Boy was only a month old when this issue dropped through our letter box? I think that's a reasonable excuse for not keeping up with my magazine subscriptions. Unfortunately it doesn't work so well for the other 15 or so unopened issues (with more, older ones in the loft).

So I'm kind of live-blogging my first listen to this CD. But I'm only half live, because the Boy is having his first, "settling in" week at nursery, and I'm short of time at the keyboard.

The first three tracks sound like fairly standard Wire-fayre. Only one has clocked up more than 10,000 plays (scrobbles, if you're a geek) on Last.fm. Then come our old friends Paavoharju — I downloaded this track earlier this year, unaware that I had a free copy just a few feet away; not the first time that has happened. Then it's back to the glitch (a word I'm doubtless using in very imprecise and inaccurate way, given the massive range and variety of sub-niches-genres in this area). The trouble with this kind of stuff is that it seems to sound the same no matter where in the world it comes from. Or perhaps it doesn't, if you listen more than once! Quite like the Richard j Valeo track: tagged as ambient, electronic, idm, Acid, minimal. Last.fm is no longer a poster-boy for digital music services (unlike Spotify, the labels don't own a slice of it, so they're trying to throttle it), but it remains far and away the most useful and reliable community of music fans and listeners. Having said that, Rarescale remain under the Last.fm radar — no description, no tags — but only 957 plays (958 once mine gets added) so that's not surprising. I rather like Rarescale, whoever they/he/she may be, as the flute-led weird atmospherics remind me of early Tangerine Dream. Uncannily, the following track is by Mike Osborne, and he also has precisely 957 plays — and no bio. But he's tagged as free jazz. Accurate again. What if 957 Last.fm members have played this CD and Messrs Osborne and Rarescale have received zero plays of their other recordings? …Right, zoned out a bit there, attending to emails and tweets, but brought back to 25% mindfulness by Micronormous. This track is all over the place, in a good way. Ah, the next one, by Pantaleimon, is good too, and, as she/they have done a few albums, I may explore further. On eMusic? Yes, good. Tertium Quid: as John Peel used to say, Where do they get those names? Probably from some Burroughs cut-up technique in this case. The MoHa! track sounds like it was intended to be annoying. Even I could probably succeed if I set out with that intention. The Anthony Kelly & David Stalling piece is evidently from a sonic art installation — often difficult to judge from the audio alone (is that a paradox?), but could be interesting. Wounded Knee? Barely scratched.

…

Also included with the same issue of The Wire was a CD called Phonorama. Just one 26-minute track. From the insert:

Phonorama as live event is a spatial redefinition of temporarily-used architectures: the electrical outlets as docking points, the sound system as a mobile and momentary reference, the stage nonexistent, in a constant reshuffling of positions and roles.

As such, this testimonial track is the perfect antidocumentary for a fiction readapted to the fixed narrative of a compact disc.

Only seven minutes in, at the time of writing, but it feels like too much fooking Foucault, not enough music.

Buy Wire Tapper 20 via Discogs.com
Buy Phonorama via Discogs.com