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Joining Ju-Jikan: Ten Hours Of Sound From Japan and Variable Resistance: Ten Hours of Sound From Australia, 33 RPM is the companion disc to the newest installment in an ongoing sound art exhibition series at SFMOMA. "Ten Hours" is part of the exhibition title and does not refer to the amount of music on this disc, which is a full length, non-mp3 sampler of different artists from the show. Like its predecessors, 33 RPM (thankfully) does not attempt a survey of its particular country's experimental music history, instead focusing largely on newer artists with a few older luminaries included for comparison and continuity.23Five
This approach is especially welcome here, as France, unlike Japan and Australia, has a widely-documented and much-publicized history of experimental sound craft, largely a result of government-funded arts institutions such as INA GRM, one of the world's most significant sources for electroacoustic music and the incubator for Schaeffer and Henry's pioneering studies in musique concrète. 33 RPM covers a large amount of ground, touching, albeit briefly, on a wide variety of today's sound art techniques. Former Art Zoyd member and art-rock orchestrator Kasper T. Toeplitz opens the disc with uncharacteristically noisy contribution, a whirlpool of crunchy static and shredded high frequencies that would've been at home on Ju-Jikan, alongside Masonna and Merzbow. Long-standing electroacoustic duo Kristoff K. Roll provide a track more in line with their exceptional past work, "Zócalo masqué" is a fascinating snippet of audio travelogue, splicing layered machine noises with recordings from a Mexican political gathering, in preciously-detailed collage. 33 RPM's biggest name belongs to Jean-Claude Risset, a student of Boulez and one of the fathers of early computer music; however, his three-part "Resonant Sound Spaces" piece pales in comparison to Lionel Marchetti's "À rebours," which develops out of similar acousmatic sound, sourced from strings and woodwinds, cut and reattached in a slowly sinister build that makes one of the disc's best moments. Other highlights include Christophe Havel's "excerpt/metamorphosis," a pointed sculpture of machine ambience and assorted bodily noises that showcases the effect of advancing computer technologies on musique concrète technique. The capabilities of new technology are certainly manifest in exhibit curator "Laurent Dailleau's processed theremin work "It Was Too Dark to Hear Anything," the instrument dropping a vast, aquatic drone, as spacious and effective as any of the artist's work as a member of improvisers Le Complexe de la Viande. 33 RPM closes with a track from ambient techno/industrialist Mimetic that feels somewhat out of place among so much sound art, though some intriguing similarities can be established between the song's apocalyptic swoon and the work of sympathizers like Art Zoyd et al. Taken as a whole, the compilation is a strong collection of some of today's most interesting French electronic musicians and one that makes steps toward connecting these artists with their rich heritage. If anything, 33 RPM, like Ju-Jiken and Variable Resistance, will provide listeners with many fruitful introductions, new and old, surely enough to stay busy until the next installment. 
- Kristoff K. Roll - Zócalo masqué
- Lionel Marchetti - À rebours
- Christophe Havel - excerpt/metamorphosis
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The most recent in an avalanche of new music taking a crack at resurrecting the dreamy, shoegazer pop of bands like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, Pluramon's Dreams Top Rock only distinguishes itself from the rest of the pack by not being quite as predictable. It helps that Marcus Schmickler has recruited Julee Cruise—the serene, childlike chanteuse of so many David Lynch soundtracks—to contribute vocals to the album. Julee's last album, the dreadful The Art of Being a Girl, was such a wasted opportunity that it's a pleasure to hear her placed in the hands of a producer who can wield her peculiar vocal talents properly.Karaoke Kalk
Schmickler has obviously schooled himself on Julee's best work, as tracks like "Flageolea" reproduce the languid jazz and lush pop sensibility of her classic Floating Into the Night album, which was produced by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Schmickler comes from a background of post-techno Powerbook composition, so much of Dreams Top Rock's sonic complexity derives from the careful overlay of laptop-treated instruments, aligned to created a densely packed architecture of guitar noise, feedback and subtle digitalia. Many of the tracks float by on pacific washes of beatific guitar noise, noise that seems at once unstructured and complexly detailed. Pluramon's overuse of stereo effects and multi-tracking can seem at times like a parlor trick, and an unoriginal one at that, but the richly nuanced storm of hazy psychedelic fuzz was enough to keep me engaged for the album's entire length. The album also has its share of good songwriting, especially "Time For a Lie," which appears twice on the album in radically different mixes. "It's a beautiful time for a lie," Cruise repeats, her voice wistfully lilting at the end of every line, each breathy refrain sending out a comet trail of echoes and reverberations which accumulate over the length of the song, like Phil Spector's wall of sound as envisioned by Loveless-era Kevin Shields. The lovely "Noise Academy" creates a complicated symphony of mutated and reprocessed vocals and instruments that radiates along with the druggy, minor-key guitar melodies. Marcus Schmickler's exacting, overly clinical, and obsessive reenactment of his obvious influences may the album's weakest aspect, but paradoxically, it's also the same inspiration that keeps the album afloat on a distorted cushion of nebulous fragility. 
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- "Sweet Sonk" v. Bhob Rainey
- "20012002" v. Dan Warburton
- "Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires" v. Kevin Shea
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