Beat Research
Boston idm lives! Mondays at the Enormous Room.

Redlight Productions

The Streets are playing the Paradise in Boston on March 20th. Yes, a just God!

William Fields's Weblog
So Bill apparently lives across the street from me and makes beats. Maybe I'm his evil twin.

Exploit Boston!
(also)

Adhesive Records
Boston electronic label with a new compilation (with the best liner notes ever) out. Founded November 2001. Mascot is cyborg Dan Paluska. Free candy.

piekoz, narrativestructurez
I want to take a stab at explaining why I enjoy piekoz's album narrativestructurez so much, and why I think it's a great idm album. Creator Dave P was nice enough to send me the cd gratis, which doesn't often happen, so you're entitled to believe that my judgement is clouded -- but keep in mind that I have plenty of cds given to me by artists that gather both dust and moss. (Oh, not yours.)

On first listen, narrativestructurez may sound more like a downtempo album than an idm album. piekoz uses real instruments, human voices, and digital tweaking to create dark, smoky tracks about the speed of the human heartbeat. Really, it is a downtempo album, but there's more going on here, a restlessness that expresses itself as constantly evolving sound and melody. Every track, even the weaker ones (and the album does lose some intensity in the second half) keeps reaching to break out of cliche towards actual feeling. Nothing is static here, everything is morphing, moving in and out, varying.

The real achievement of this album is that it doesn't come out sounding prog. Somehow piekoz manages to have his cake and eat it too, twisting his sounds as much as any idm purist without destroying the delicate noirish atmosphere he starts out with. Calling something downtempo isn't a slam, necessarily, but if idm fans don't claim this album for their own, they'll be missing a beautiful example of sonic experimentation as a vehicle for emotional expression.

The obvious example of a group that's dared to evoke an environment that isn't industrial or mechanical is Boards of Canada. narrativestructurez is more subtle, though, and doesn't go for the cheap insights of psychedelia. It's just as good at putting a dizzying array of sounds into a coherent whole, but the song structures are freer (and I'm a total sucker for multipart songs). narrativestructurez hardly ever sounds self-indulgent, though, it just sounds, well, self-contained, self-defining, sui generis, new not for the sake of being new but because there's something new to express here, and I know it's a lot to lay on an album but that alone is almost enough to justify the existence of a genre focused on new sound.

piekoz's site is here, and you can buy it and listen to sound samples here

update: it's now, I dunno, six months since I wrote the above. I'm enjoying the album at least as much now as I did then. It's fucking great.

I'm playing at Hibernia tomorrow (Friday). In Boston? Come. Otherwise, I'll be recording, and posting the results, good or bad. (Yeah, didn't happen. The manager of the bar decided he didn't feel like opening that night. At around 9pm, apparently.)

Jorrit Dijkstra
Jorrit Dijkstra is an electronic musician a wind instruments player, saxophone mostly, who uses electronics to transform his sound and augment build his compositions improvisationally constructed pieces. He's based in Boston, miraculously. His live shows combine the spontaneity of instant improvisation (basically impossible for most laptop performers) with the expanded possibilites of electronic music. Needless to say, this is really weird shit. Recommended.

Hmmmm:

"I'd like to appologize for the lack of publicity regarding HOME recently. The city of Boston's licensing board issued a ruling in June which, in addition to turning An Tua Nua 21+, also stated that promotional flyers could not be printed to support the club. This decision has left me at a loss, as I really don't know any other way to promote this night. Anyone w/ any comments or suggestions, please email me back at hometuesdays(at)hotmail.com."

There's gotta be a way to do this.

• Instead of passing out flyers, someone could go to local events in a Home costume. Some exciting superhero outfit which coincidentally displays location and time information.
• Sidewalk chalk.
• Flyers that can only be read under blacklight. Ravers won't have a problem with it, city officials will be stymied.
• Soliciting suggestions in the comment section below...

Livesexact
It's Cambridge/Somerville electronic music producer day! Livesexact is Fischerspooner for geeks, crossed with Alec Empire on Ecstasy.

simpleasurez
Piekoz got a cd out.

"People call it experimental music, but I don't. I know what I'm doing." --Harry Partch

I'll be playing a super-experimental ambient set this Wednesday for Signals and Systems, at MIT's Thirsty Ear pub, right where Mass Ave meets the Charles. $7 pitchers of beer, $2.50 for a bottle of Sam. Here's a recent playlist if you want to check the flava:

Biosphere - Le Grande Dôme/Nook and Cranny/Grandiflore
Reinhard Voigt - Hier und Jetzt
The Firesign Theater - Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him
Peter Green - The Sinister Plot
Figurera - elehqn
Rhythm and Sound w/ Tikiman - Never Tell You (version)
Plaid - Eshish
Stravinsky - Round of the Princesses (Khorovod) - Arranged by Isao Tomita
Bola - W.i.K
Esem - Postledd
Boards of Canada - Everything You Do Is A Balloon
Prefuse 73 - 7th Message

And here's a 45-minute mp3 of the Sunday afternoon bedroom set.

Yay! A gig! May 21st, 11pm-2am, for Chasm at a Boston club called Vertigo. I'll be playing in the chill-out lounge upstairs. My set will be micro/tech-house, like the Cellar gig, but more relaxed and less quirky.

I wish I could say this was because I got off my ass and started promoting myself, but I just woke up yesterday and found the invitation in my inbox. Not that I'm complaining.

Boston upcoming: May 1st, Rennie Pilgrim at Home. May 10th, Anti-Pop Consortium at the Middle East.

zero g is a record label that a guy I know started. Huh? No, no, I like it over here on the sidelines. There are hot dog vendors here.

nuance recordings, Boston house label that puts out Morgan Page.

Boston-idm REPRAZENT! My boy Chuck been kicking the mad idm flava since back in the day, yo. First in a series.

Ben Recht is local fields, under which guise he produces excellent electronic music. Apparently his recent stuff is micro-house; I'm dying to hear it. Nice guy too. Boston boy; resident at the Cellar on Saturday nights.

I called the Mission Control infoline to get directions to my first rave. Sniff, sniff. Check out the events calendar.