Various - No Idea Festival

Label : Spring Garden Music - 011 / Coincident Records - NI-001 / Ten Pounds To The Sound - 002
Country : US
Year : 2004
Format : CD

A thought popped in my head listening to this. Whether or not I can craft the right sequence of words to reflect this thought is anyone's guess. It goes like this, the best free improv/eai/etc. has a sound or timbre similar to that of the noises old rusty buildings or frameworks make.

Whether that was a fabrication can only be known to me, I never really consider releases like these to be especially memorable but that did stick in my head (not my craw) a bit. A compiling of various musical performances in Texas for the No Idea Festival in 2004, featuring my man Jack Wright and his various friends. One word I would use for Jack's brand of free jazz improvisation is vacuous, not in the sense that it is vapid or shallow but a timbral quality of his recordings. It just sounds empty, not in the sense of.... It sounds good, the saxophone is in its own little world in the space of the other noisemakers about around it. Stop and start.

Here

Damarge - Les Box Set (Sur La Plat)

Label : Equation Records - E=mc04

Country : US

Year : 2004

Format : Lathe Cut

What do you know?
I've decided to drop this behemoth here. Even a passing familiarity doesn't quite scratch the surface. OK, maybe not that esoteric an artifact, but it surely is strange. Lemme preface with a previous review:

A very, very curious document of a rather obscure 80s synth band. On land and on sea, these tracks never rose to the surface til the early 2000s. Snowboy got his bearings here, and the other guy dwelled in miscellany. What makes this box set so odd is the way it is presented: numerous lathe cut records from the King Peter himself, labeled with various appropriated animu and second life-esque images (looks like someone scraped the page of an '03 era imageboard), a CD-Rom (which, to my surprise, has not rotted one bit), and a bunch of pleasantries such as fridge magnets and pins and, of course, stickers.

The music itself holds up pretty well, surprising that none of these appeared on any cassette compilations over the years. A whole case history for the band itself comes with the whole package, and the package itself can be enjoyed digitally:

http://www.chronoglide.com/damarge.html

I was in danger of repeating myself (h/t Fad Gadget), but I don't care anymore (Fad). Yes, yes, yes, yes a peculiar amalgamation of lowfi synth madness. I swiftly thank the makers of the dead for the included CD-rom, making my job just a bit easier. All you would want in visual and textual form is in this measly .zip:

ici

Toutefois, me being a muzak blogger of some integrity, no matter how faulty, I know that the intrepid listener may find the 2004 era 128kbps mp3s found on the compact disc insufficient.
Have no fear: panacea!

Here

You may note while listening, this is not especially superior to the audiophile repellent above. As noted in the blurb above that, this is the work of the high King. That be as it may, each disc and its grooves which house each song fall prey to the inherent flaws of the lathe cut alternative. Plus, a ground buzz in the background I never got around to fully remedying. O'well. 

Vale And Year - Holy Music And Art / Field Recordings Vol. 1

Label : n/a

Year : 2004

Country : US

Format : CD(s)

A chance encounter I've found. Browsing the internet leads to strange discoveries at times, and on a fateful minute I found a post from the ancient days of 2013 talking about my blog. It had been posted by David Bernabo, a member of this odd little project. I had previously posted the first album served here back in those days, and I had not realized that I never reposted it after revitalizing this digital warehouse. So here we are.

I got both of these from a local library which supplied many a release from around these parts. Not a lot really sprung an interest from me, but these are exceptions. I want to say I first of this band from the Blastitude webzine, but apparently it was not where I had first encountered them. I think I might have first seen it be perchance on the fallen fakejazz superhighway xerox, though I never got much into that one so who knows. Anywho, this is an interesting admixture of noisy indie rawk with some experimental smatterings across the (maybe a bit unnecessary) 2 disc set. The other album is a collection of free improvs and maybe some field recordings. Maybe. I have not heard these in awhile and just now dug them up from the last remains of my old HDD. So enjoy. 

Here

Diagram A - Diagram A

Label : RRR Records

Country : US

Year : 2004

Format : CDr

Here 1
Here 2