The Rubber Room column is a weekly look at recent and notable releases that don’t fall into the rubric of traditional reviewed material—namely 7”’s, 12”’s, 3” CDs, EPs, and MP3 only releases.

Dave Miller
Grey Summer 12”

db
Aspern 12”

Repeat Orchestra
Red Dark Shed 12”
[Background, 2004]

Since 1996, Andy Vaz’s Background Records has produced top-notch minimal electronic music by an ever-expanding cavalcade of like-minded artists that includes Akufen, Sutekh, and Portable. The(se) releases commonly find the perfect balance between mind and body, with tracks rooted in the supplest of grooves but executed with conceptual elegance. Need proof?

Australian Dave Miller’s Grey Summer offers four cool slices of minimal glitch-techno. The curtain rises with “Dubbing Out On Lantana”, its disparate plummeting bass throbs, skipping drum patterns, and phantom dub sounds coalescing into a lurching groove. Miller’s beloved bass lines grow ever more cavernous amidst the Cologne shuffle beats and warm, coddling organ lines of “Unfortunate Interruption From Mr. Lewis.” On the flip side, “Cigarettes and Coffee” and “Backwards And Forwards” showcase more slinky grooves and deep bass lines.

Austrian Daniel Bemberger’s (db) Aspern features three examples of Bemberger’s crisp glitch-house style. Nuanced and meticulous, “Souled” exudes a faint African aura with its repetitive stomp and array of crackling shuffles and snare hiccups. The title piece is muffled micro-house peppered by insectile chattering, subtle percussive flavourings, and vocal cries. “Route 49” opens with random sounds—one evoking a braying animal braying or guttural elephant call—that settle into a glitchy groove of clicks, clacks, and whirrs.

Red Dark Shed offers an enticing foretaste of the Repeat Orchestra’s debut album The Original Dimensions. Ominous chords on “Red Dark Shed” are joined by layer upon layer of percussive flutter, sheathing sounds, hi-hats, and barrelhouse grooves until the track resembles a churning machine. Schwander’s other original “I Know The Darkness” is textbook minimal techno powered by down-turned bass throbs and chugging beats. Portable (Alan Abrahams, originally from Cape Town, South Africa) and db provide remixes, both drawing forth the African dimension of Background’s sound. In db’s “Red Dark Shed” remake, scattered bits and pieces gradually cohere into a semblance of the original, although snuffling sounds and shaker accents hijack it toward more exotic climes. In Portable’s skittish “I Know The Darkness (remix),” night creatures and fireflies emerge from the thick undergrowth until it becomes a swinging hoedown that recalls Abrahams’ inimitable Cycling.

Deep house? Minimal techno? Call it what you like, Miller, Schwander, and Bemberger offer three delectable arguments in support of Background Records’ classy brand of digital dance music.
[Ron Schepper]

The Caribbean
William of Orange EP
[Home Tapes, 2004]

Being horrible at writing about music this straightforward, I have no option but to make this as simple as possible: This EP is amazing. Unabashed pop with post-rock production and hints at alt-country twang, the five tracks here all hit the perfect note at least once, some holding it for the song's length. With lyrics like "...a name I got from asthma attacks" and "All the shops had sympathetic shrugs" as icing, it’s been in the heaviest of rotations since arriving at my doorstep. A perfect soundtrack for cooking, cleaning, making out, sleeping in, driving, sitting on your porch, counting stars, breathing, existing.
[Mike Shiflet]

Shyheim & Eamon
F*** It (I Don't Want You Back)
[Free Download, 2004]

Like many child stars (Shyheim a/k/a the Rugged Childwas released at the age of 14) it all went arse-over-tit for Wu-affiliated Shyheim; now 26 years old he’s just done 2 ½ years for armed robbery and has 2 albums of blustery gangsta-fried rubbish to his name. His fully matured voice is pretty unexceptional, but here he adds a touch of Ghostface, which lifts his discourse on sluts beyond instant dismissal. The problem is he sounds a little out of practice (and maybe out of ideas, hence the collaboration). C’mon Shyheim, it’s not like we’re bereft of underachieving Wu MCs at the moment.
[Scott McKeating]

Skullpture
2
[Haamumaa, 2003]

Black metal. It’s become so ubiquitous that recalcitrant operators like Kevin Drumm are releasing tribute records to the genre. Skullpture leave the near-opulent heroics behind and focus instead on the static wraith of sound that the best black metal expels. So this is still low-fidelity, muted-hum improvisation, but it’s been shaded in one hundred lustrous tints of black, the over-heated buzz of the guitar-amplifier configuration mapped obliquely through abrupt peaks and troughs, scarred by reverb-soused clatter. Skullpture’s random pan through untutored improvisation is pock-marked with stray notes and sudden bursts of electricity that constantly point outwards, into the night-sky.
[Jon Dale]

Redrot
Drunk On Cadaverine 3” CD-R
[Chondritic Sound, 2002; reissued 2004]

These four tracks of pummeling industrial-noise goodness richly deserved to be reissued, even if it is just another edition of 99. Get ‘em while you can, because this little disc outdoes even the mighty Wolf Eyes for fucked-electronics rhythmic sputter. “Schizophrenia By Numbers” is like a marching band from hell, all of them playing instruments made of charged scrap metal. “Fouled” is a head-banging propulsive loop of junkheap percussion, pounding into you hard, as metal-on-metal squeals and warped vocals echo incomprehensibly over the top. And the title track seems to take a dentist’s drill to a thunderstorm, with predictably harrowing results.
[Ed Howard]

Deaf Center
Neon City
[Type, 2004]

Only tangentially labeled “electronica”, the acoustic noir-jazz of “Dial” can be taken as much more reliable exemplar of the Deaf Center style. In general, DC eschew fashionable glitch effects for an evocative blend of acoustic and electronic sounds, much like City Centre Office’s Dictaphone, with a heavy emphasis on piano and guitars. The beat-based Helios remix found at disc’s end stands in clear contrast to the five Deaf Center pieces which sometimes omit beats altogether, leaving the tracks to unfold meditatively and seemingly drift—“seemingly” the operative word, of course, because there’s nothing accidental about how these carefully composed pieces develop.
[Ron Schepper]

Rakim
Run
[Exclusive Freestyle on Hot97, 2004]

Rakim was recently mistakenly arrested a matter of minutes before a scheduled performance at a Ghostface gig at NY's Roseland Ballroom for not paying child support (luckily, it was all a mistake). Rakim is still pissed enough to lay the whole story out over Ghost's "Run" beat . He's quick, articulate, righteous and even promises to make his non-appearance up to the fans ("Folks, we gonna do it again...word is bond, son / For those who came to Roseland I owe y'all one"); its reality rap that actually did happen. They call him the God MC; Rakim Allah. This is why.
[Scott McKeating]

Hive Mind
Cataclysmic Urge 3” CD-R
[Chondritic Sound, 2004]

Hive Mind is the synthesizer noise project of Chondritic owner Grey, and this disc is 19 minutes of sheer ambient drift. There’s a few recognizable keyboard notes at the very beginning, chopping out a melancholy melody, but then the piece floats away into droning waves of layered and heavily processed synths, dense and with lots of texture. These drones don’t just hang in the air, they actively pulse and massage your brain into malleable goo. Who knew noise could be so smooth and sexy?
[Ed Howard]

Alessandro Bosetti / Gregor Hotz / Kai Fagaschinski / Rudi Mahall
Berlin Reeds (4x3”)
[Absinth, 2003]

Predecessor to this year’s excellent Berlin Strings set (reviewed here last week), Berlin Reeds marks the first installation in Absinth’s franchise of four-CD sets offering glimpses into instrumental variation within specific locales. While the strings collection explored a sprawling terrain of timbral possibility—from electroacoustic skitter to raucous string scrawl—this compilation of reed-tweakers stays within narrower sonic confines, with only one disc straying too far from discernable instrumental tones. What a few of these discs lack in aural variety, however, they compensate for in compositional focus and sensitivity to the placement of well-crafted sounds.

Alessandro Bosetti opens the collection’s strongest and most radical piece, a shifting minefield of granular feedback chunks and splinters from soprano saxophone. Uncompromising in their extremity, the sharp edges on these strangulated tones prickle with cold intensity as they gather into odd clumps or dissipate into radioactive fogs. Gregor Hotz offers reserved counterpoint to Bosetti’s confrontational fare, stretching long bass sax multiphonics into tremulous whirlpools of overtones and close-pitched flutters. Long patches of silence present stark contrast to the luxuriant timbres that gently push through them, and Hotz molds a rich structural logic with their careful juxtaposition. Kai Fagaschinski follows a similar, if more spare, formal approach in stringing together a sinewy tissue of barely audible breath tones and pulsing tone clusters. Mournful quasi-melodic passages bleed into drifts of desiccated squelch, creating a palpable tension between subjective utterance and the objective reality of air rustling in a surrogate windpipe. Such tenderly degraded sputtering meets its antithesis on Rudi Mahall’s disc, a boisterous and jazzy piece of free blowing whose swoops and swoons refer to an altogether more conventional notion of musicality. Inoffensive and occasional charming in its buoyant good cheer, it’s a contrary but not damaging close to a collection challenging the staid boundaries of both reed technique and formal organization.
[Joe Panzner]