A Year of Music

One of the many pleasures of the digital download revolution is that it means that people who like raw, tracky electronic music can get high-quality techno in a portable form without having to jump through hoops to get it. I haven’t ripped my vinyl yet, and may never get around to it, because doing it right is a lot of work. And a huge chunk of that stuff was originally available solely on 12” and 10” records which never made it to the west coast of the US. But who cares, when I can hit Beatport or Bleep and download acres of high-quality MP3s at more or less reasonable prices?

Especially when it’s stuff like Surgeon’s, or a release like East Light? East Light came out in the middle of Surgeon’s most fertile period of the end of the 90s, when he was running two labels (Dynamic Tension and Counterbalance) and putting out material on two others (Soma and the legendary Tresor). Upon first listen, it is a clinically dry collection of tracky dancefloor techno, unrelenting and very mechanically composed. All four tracks are pure percussion workouts, and this is precisely where their most appealing qualities lie: while they sound unremittingly electronic, almost all these tracks are made from carefully chosen samples of real percussion instruments, orchestrated into a smoothly ticking orrery.

Because these tracks were, after all, intended to be worked into a dancefloor set by a DJ, they don’t have the sophisticated progression and complexity of Surgeon’s dense, sui generis Force+Form, or the easy appeal of records by Model 500 or Underground Resistance, but first listens can be deceptive. I’ve had East Light kicking around my iPod for years, and it continues to grow more interesting and immersive each time I hear it.

While I was trying to find a decent link for A Sunny Day In Glasgow, I spied on their MySpace page the news that they put out a new EP, TOUT NEW AGE, sometime last summer, and that it was mostly available online, at a bunch of places.

iTunes is getting much better about making indie artists’ music available DRM-free, and AAC is technically a higher-quality codec, but the vast majority of my music is encoded with LAME, and I’ve come to trust LAME-encoded MP3s more than any other lossy format. Insound wants $10.49 for a downloaded EP. Ha. eMusic does have a download store, I think, but they really want you to subscribe to their service, and their interface confuses me. Other Music Digital it is! $5.99 and no hassle!

Other Music is a boutique record store in New York. I’ve always thought of them as being an east coast counterpart to my beloved Aquarius Records, but they’re clearly trying to differentiate themselves through their eminently competent digital download store. They even have their own download manager, a cute and unobtrusive application (for both Windows and OS X) that takes a lot of the sting out of downloading multiple purchased tracks from a web site (Beatport, by contrast, has an elaborate Flash interface that cossets and constrains you right up to the point where you need to download your purchases, where it forces you to download every track one at a time, and since it’s in Flash you can’t even use an in-browser download accelerator like FlashGot).

Total time from discovering TOUT NEW AGE’s existence to having it on my computer: 20 minutes. Nice.