Joe Colley/Mike Shiflet - 'Meaning' (Gameboy)

Not a collaboration, but a split; Colley gets the A-matrix with 'Intentional Accidents for Microphone', a track with sounds as contradictory as its title.  Static and hum are the main tools, presumably being built from unadorned microphone (+ mixer + amplification, I'd guess) and it's incredibly composed, with long slow passages of almost-nothing that rev into static roars, only to be cut out by either mute-button inline editing or some post-processing.  My bet is on the former. It's an approach to electronic minimalism that sounds really indicative of the era (2004) but I don't mean that to be diminishing.  On the other side, Ohio noisenik Mike Shiflet starts '4 a.m. with Chris and Dan' in an ecstatic manner, and the emphasis is on the static.  This track is from a live radio performance on WFMU so it naturally sounds less controlled and tense than the Colley track.  There's a repeating thump, like a turntable that's finished, stylus bumping the run-out groove, and it adds a chilling momentum underneath the horizontal colours of the oscillations that stay constant throughout.  Both sides of this record are careful, even restrained; yet I wouldn't say delicate.  Both sides end in locked-grooves (of course!) but Shiflet's has a sudden menace that gives this a fond farewell.

Azucar / Noggin split (Sweet Baboo)

Almost four months of limbo while we waited for LPs and CDs to catch up, but welcome back! I'm not sure how this ended up in my 7" accumulation, but it's a fun little treasure. The side which is Azucar (I THINK - they are unlabeled) is a meandering instrumental gem of piano, guitar and violin. It's tender and melodic but continually falling apart and picking itself back up. It's kinda in the vein of one of those indie-classical groups like Rachel's, only if they were afflicted by Parkinson's disease. Whoever they were, they came from Brunswick, NJ, always a home of anti-aesthetic weirdos. Could today's gang of BoneToothHorn rascals be somehow affiliated? But from the West coast, Noggin take a different approach to the violin: manic and lo-fi, dancing around the perimeter of utter beauty but also falling away from it. It's like Malcolm Goldstein put through the laundry machine a few times - on the cold/cold cycle. This was 1996; I can only think about how this would have been received ten years earlier or ten years later. Records like this make me love the 7" format - a slice of visionary weirdness, eternally reproducible in a way the CD-R won't be. Will tomorrow's centurions of the obscure dedicate their bandwidth to finding out just who (or what) Azucar were (or was)?