Alvaro Herran – Electric Counterpoint

With props to Jay Springett for this one.

When I was doing my Music Tech course those oh so many moons ago, one of our tutors did a quick demo of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music and got me to be the second person. It took hella concentration but it was really cool to do. I have, subsequently to the course, always retained a soft spot for Reich’s works (along with Terry Riley), so when I saw this I had to have a listen.

Despite the brevity of the EP, it is a fully immersive listen. I’ve moved my little studio around just a bit which has changed my speaker orientation to what I think is probably absolute perfection and as a result I can sink in to the music much deeper. Trancey works like this are, therefore, absolute heaven.

Poppy Ackroyd – Resolve

Everything happened at once. I couldn’t make sense of it all so I split it up into a series of events that seemed connected, which I tried to experience in succession in the hope that this would render it sensible, but the information was still too intense, so I fractured myself into myriad perceptual units so as to take in one little fragment at a time, but even these chunks were unmanageable so I had to imagine new and unheard of angles from which to perceive so as to widen the scope of the possibilities unto almost infinity as far as I could make out. Even then, I had to get the separate units to reproduce themselves at regular intervals, and still the information kept on coming. Indeed, it seemed it was expanding to fill every perceptual space I was creating. I needed to think of a new format.