Music

Data Breaker

A Night of Nasty Noise and Ambrosial Ambience

by Dave Segal

Brizbomb

PULSE EMITTER

Let us take a break this week from the ecstatic tyranny of beats and immerse ourselves in the briny whirlpool of drones. Thankfully, there's a bill happening at the Josephine on Wednesday, August 5, that's a beggars banquet of electronic abstract expressionism. A good drone has the ability to be a mental palate cleanser, a salubrious aural cushion on which one can meditate like a motherfucker, and a springboard for cerebral calisthenics—assuming you don't have the attention span of a sugared-up kindergartner.

Let's begin with Portland's Pulse Emitter (Daryl Groetsch and his modular synthesizer). In his compositions, he cultivates an aura of ascetic mysticism/lunar desolation with sputtering-motor bass hums and ripples, and glinting, curvilinear tone smears. "Meditative Music," oddly enough, is just that, although not in any standard new-age manner; rather, it soothes in a "we're cruising eight miles high" way, while "Charlemagne Palestine" presses a stubby finger on a black key on the far right side of the organ. "Unearthly" is aptly outer-spacious and vaporous, triggering thoughts of solar wind and a Cosmos episode's worth of sound effects.

Seattle's Prisonfood (aka Abraham Moses) disturbs the atmosphere with charred bass tones and thoughtfully spluttering static interference. His compositions are all about gradually ratcheting up the tension and orneriness of his tone torrents till you whimper in defeat. They're an endurance test, yes, but if you get through it all in a coherent mind state, you'll emerge a stronger individual. As for what he does to a San Francisco band's hippie anthem from 1967, well, that's just wonderfully sacrilegious.

Judging from the limited output of his that I've heard, New York's Grasslung (aka Jonas Asher) patiently plumbs the darker, more frigid end of the ambient-music spectrum, evoking the foreboding, charnel-house ambience of Final, Lull, and Thomas Köner.

Last but most, local duo Brother Raven (Jamie Potter and Jason E. Anderson) eschew their billmates' decibellicosity and strive for cosmic consciousness-raising, like many a highly evolved synth-sorcerer before them. Their cassettes Diving into the Pineapple Portal and A Sound Like Wailing Winds Is Heard (Gift Tapes) are primo chill-out soma, beatless balm that avoids crystal-clutching triteness and achieves a Zenlike state of calm (sorry for the rhyme, but I swear on a stack of Alan Watts tomes that it's true). Creating music that tranquilly bubbles, sparkles, and drifts without inducing yawns or eye-rolling is terrifically difficult, but Brother Raven achieve this exalted condition. Their tracks belong both in the academy and in the temples of holistic health.

Brother Raven, Pulse Emitter, Grasslung, Algiers, Prisonfood perform on Wed Aug 5, Josephine, 9 pm; see www.myspace.com/broraven for more information.

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