CD – Bip Hop/Wide
This is the eighth volume of the Bip Hop Generation series, one of the most consolidated and interesting collections in the new electronic scene, this time focused on the iterations between acoustic and digital sounds. Six artists for ten tracks, someone with only one track, like Murcof, who opens this album with his ethereal “Constelacion”, almost twelve minutes of airy, fluctuating, orchestral and iterated elaborations over microsounds and sub-textures. Then Ben Edwards (Benge) and Douglas Benford (si-cut.db) together under the moniker “Tennis”, who articulate rhythms and oblique electronic sounds, with more accurate cuts and deconstructions in their first track, and more free-flowing in their second one, between abstraction and melody with rarefied atmospheres. Mitchell Akiyama, a renowned Canadian experimenter, tries to integrate different sound layers, with improvisations on rarefied percussions followed by sound bases reminiscent of classical instruments. All of this ends in infantile digressions, in iterated acoustics, in hues reminiscent of oriental sounds. Minamo, an electro-acoustic quartet from Tokyo, still wonders about the relationship between iterations, improvisation and melody, a recurring theme in these 74 minutes, conducted in a very different way compared to the italians Tu M’ (Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli), whose many stylistic influences (from jazz to post-rock and cinematic passages with digital arrangements) are more reminiscent of some sound-design. The last track is String Of Consciousness, truncated chords lightly repeated on a domesticated feedback, elegiac digressions and a melancholic atmosphere.