Mike W.

Norscq - 5 Streams CD

'5 Streams', the newest offering from French musician/producer Norscq on the Optical Sound label (http://www.optical-sound.com), is a world away from its dance-drenched predecessor, 'Lavatronic'. Or more precisely, it's a few thousand miles away -- borrowing, remixing, and adding to his soundtrack material for two performances by the art initiative Compagnie Faim de Siecle. One of the performances, 'Baburnama,' used ancient Islamic and Hindu text for a meditation on world conflict and shared histories, while the other, '5 Streams,' employed sound, video, and installation to illuminate the complex cultural polarities at work in modern South Asia.

Maybe it's due to the duality in the source of the material -- or the duality in the sound of the material -- but there are two veins of sonic art flowing through this disc. The first is more abstract and electronic, and it runs stronger toward the beginning of '5 Streams'. The disc opens with 'Fall After Flight', which furtively bristles with static electricity, halting whispers, disembodied voices, and office-machine ambience. These qualities continue in 'As a Warrior, I Could Have Danced All Night', except that the mood becomes darker and murkier; the whispers become more like Diamanda Galas holding in her power before unleashing it upon all eardrums in range, while the machine whirling becomes more screechy and aggressive.

The second vein -- more visceral than cerebral -- is exposed toward the middle of the disc, and it is exemplified in the track 'The Man With a Plan'. The song starts in the midst of a 'junglesphere', with tropical animal noises resounding in the air, but it quickly travels toward an interplay of hypnotic guitar and chimes, like the interior ambience of some sultry, overgrown post-rock temple. Both styles run together seamlessly in 'The Holy Cow'; plucked guitar strings -- thick, slow, and reverberating -- overlay a series of drones crackling with wasp-like intensity until the recorded bustling sound of a New Delhi street drowns out the previous affair.

This vacillation between styles might suggest that '5 Streams' offers a disjointed listening experience. On the contrary, even with these shifts, there is a pervasive foreboding and anticipation throughout the tracks -- that the music could suddenly explode into indiscriminate violence or culminate into some kind of larger unity or reconciliation. The fact that it remains entirely in the purgatory of uncertainty and anxiety says much about Norscq's understanding about how art can mirror the real world.

Optimo 'How To Kill the DJ (Part Two)' 2 CDs on Kill the DJ/Tigersushi

Finally - a two-CD DJ mix for the ADD generation. Optimo's 'How to Kill the DJ (Part Two)' is a breathless adventure through numerous music genres and styles. It mashes up R&B and industrial, purees porn disco and rockabilly, drinks down experimental and pisses out classical - and the whole thing works, brilliantly.

The first disc is the most genre-blending. You have the persistent, threatening bass of the Revolting Cocks' 'On Fire' clutching at the electro-techno throat of 'Flying Turns' by Crash Course in Science. The Cramps 'New Kind of Kick' snorts coke in the club bathroom with Germany's Liaisons Dangereuses on its 'Los Ninos Del Parque', while the prog-rock funk and feedback of Nurse With Wound's 'Two Shaves and a Shine' rips into the late-night new wave of Blondie's 'Atomic'.

There are a couple moments when a song crashes into the next instead of merging into it. One such instance is when the CLS track 'Can U Feel It' smacks into the head of Gang of Four's 'Damaged Goods'. The change is startling and takes you out of the flow for a few seconds. But, frankly, it's easy to get back into the groove with such an eclectic array of music.

The second disc plays out more like a compilation; the tracks stand alone, not segueing into each other. But Optimo's versatility and taste are evident here as well. The first half of this CD could have easily been the weeknight background music at the One-Eyed Jacks roadhouse in 'Twin Peaks' - apropos, considering that Angelo Badalamenti opens the disc with his 'Mullholland Drive Theme'. The quiet nouveau classical of Arthur Russell's string and voice duet on 'Another Thought' and The Balanescu Quartet's cover of 'The Model' prefaces the smoking, sultry 'Some Velvet Morning' by Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and Nouvelle Vague's scorching cover of The Clash's 'Guns of Brixton'. Soon after, the sludgy rockabilly of Big Ned's 'Final Steps' takes a booze-addled walk down a back alley with Andre Williams, Hasil Adkins, and The Monks.

The mood does lighten a bit after this rock 'n' roll purging, getting back to the disco and glam with tracks by The Bush Tetras and The Only Ones, whose classic 'Another Girl Another Planet' closes the disc. Given how predictable and stale most DJ mixes have become, this set by Optimo may be from another planet as well - a world that has been collecting our musical miasma for years only to finally communicate with us using a deliciously skewed interpretation of our language.

Thank You (TRR50)

It's around mid- to late June when people start to talk about the year's crop of perfect summer pop songs - what to play in the car when driving out of the city to the seashore, or to have cycling on the iPod when walking home from work. Although the Temporary Residence label released its 'Thank You' compilation - a collective thanks to the faithful devotees who have helped the label reach its 50th release and eight years of operation - in early May, it's a disc that should be savored at the beginning of September. This is music for when the evenings cool down, shadows grow long, and the public beaches go back to the locals.

Explosions in the Sky captures this essence of a season slowly dying with its contribution, 'The Long Spring'. The song has that hallmark Explosions' approach - building and layering melancholy guitar meanderings on top of slow, almost military-like, percussion, twisting the mix into knots with persistent doses of adrenaline, and then tearing the whole structure down again. It aurally paints the portrait of the last holdout, the vacationer who defiantly waits until the last moment to turn his back on the ocean and head home, not wanting to return to the real world of rent and responsibility.

Kammerflimmer Kollektief's 'Eiderdaunen (Version)' shares this same sense of transition, though with a more experimental bent. Guitars caw like distant seagulls, an insistent tinny chiming along with added electronic effects play out like sounds heard in a boardwalk's broken-down penny arcade - all backed up by the lonesome draw of a slide guitar and deliberate drum patter.

Bands like Rumah Sakit, with its ferocious math-rock outbursts, and Sybarite keep the mood from getting too sentimental, but the compilation does end on a flawless sunset with Sonna's 'The Closer' - a warm, sheltering guitar ambience like the last few rays on the horizon radiating against your back. Before you know it, both track and disc are shimmering and fading away like the summer season - postcard-perfect post-rock for the post-summer.