Twenty years or so ago it was a lot harder for a young musician, particularly in this area of music to get his or her music out into the world for people to hear, and even harder for them to get any exposure for it if they managed a release. If there was enough money to fund a vinyl or cassette release that still didn’t guarantee many people would take the plunge and purchase the music of someone they didn’t know well. Just as digital downloads have made the distribution of music cheap and easy for just about anyone, so online communities have given new musicians a vehicle to discuss their music and introduce their work to a wider group of interested parties. The limitations of geography no longer need to have an impact.

With these new freedoms come new problems however. Quality control is potentially the first thing to be threatened. If anyone can easily release anything who is deciding what should or should not be released? Can we rely on the musicians for this? Many would suggest not, but then could we rely on record labels and the class system that dictated who could or could not afford to release their own music in the past? Also, while online forums bring together like minded musicians that may not have come to know each other in years gone by, do they also generate a common group way of thinking about what is good or bad at the expense of individual creative thinking?

The I Hate Music forum’s annual free download compilation album tries to sidestep some of these issues by nominating a curator, whose job it is to select from submitted tracks to compile the album and arrange them into an order that makes for an interesting release. This year IHM selected Alastair Wilson, my old audition co-presenter. This was an inspired choice given Alastair’s wide musical taste and skill at arranging music (for audition while we each selected the music to play, Alastair invariably did the programming of the tracks to put together the show). I’m not sure though, in the case of this compilation as to whether Alastair merely took every piece of music he was given and organised them into shape, or whether he rejected any material he did not consider strong enough. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did, and I rather hope this was the case. Certainly the general level of quality here suggests some control was placed over what was allowed onto the two CDs worth of space the compilation takes up. Today I have been listening to just the first of the two discs. I will get to the other one tomorrow.

The first disc of the album opens (in typically Alastair style) with one of the briefest and most quirky tracks here. Eraritjaritjaka’s Childless Mother consists of a digitally processed, stuttering sample of an acoustic guitar riff that manages to get the feet tapping at the same time as sounding not quite right, while a massively timestretched vocal creeps out wordlessly across the tracks eight-one seconds until it all falls apart into a grimy digital splurge of sound. The track is too short to be able to make any great judgements about the music’s worth, or the artist’s capabilities, but as a cute little opener to an album of this kind it works very nicely; different, uncategorisable and intriguing enough to make me want to hear more. The second track on the album is by Lou Sterrett, a young American musician working with rough electronics, something of a common theme to IHM and this compilation. Waxy, his seven minute contribution here contains much of what I might expect, contact mic work, lo-fi crackles and scrabbles alongside a few sinewaves and other extended tones. The piece begins in somewhat predictable manner, small crackles and buzzes that don’t seem to go anywhere, but as it goes on it becomes much more interesting. Little bits of just out of focus radio and a nice stream of static-like pops and crackles, resembling fireworks sit over a throbbing background hum work really well, and although the sounds used here and how they are utilised isn’t anything particularly new there is enough musical spark in the work to suggest good things may come from Sterrett in the future. I suspect that Waxy was put together in post production using sections of music improvised separately. If I am wrong and this piece was made entirely on the fly then it deserves higher praise again.

The third track, entitled Document and Sentiment, by Matthew Mullane is one of my favourite tracks on the compilation. This one was definitely pieced together on a computer from pre-recorded elements. The track opens with a heavy droning sound that could have been made from treated recordings of stringed instruments, but could just as easily be something completely different, undercut by a just about audible high pitched sound, possibly a falsetto voice. Bar a few metallic rustles this is all we hear for a while until eveything cuts dead and we hear a slightly unnerving recording of what sounds like an out of breath old man on the toilet (but probably isn’t!) alongside a dreamy Eno-esque piano motif and the sound of keys or metal chains being rattled about. The vocal sounds continue to the end of the five minute piece and work really well here, their wordless, guttural nature having an oddly percussive role in the music, which doesn’t overstay its welcome, and has a well produced structure to it that stands out against the rest of the album, which for all its qualities suffers in places from murky recording quality and abrupt editing. The next track is the oddly titled For Meer Shakespeare is by Horaflora, the nom de plume of California based musician Raub Roy. Here we return to the lo-fi sensibilities, but again the music here impresses beyond what I expected to hear. There are strange rubbery vibrations and jingling percussion sounds used, all above a series of low volume background smears of sound that might be field recordings of some kind. If I am to be completely honest I do struggle to hear much structure and purpose in this piece beyond the compilation of nice sounds that work well together, but again there is good promise shown here. I think somewhere I have a CD of material sent to me by Horaflora. I can’t remember if it was a released album or a demo disc, and to be honest I have yet to play it, (so sorry!)  but on the strength of this taster track I will dig it up soon.

There then follows a lovely little ten minute piece by Massimo Magee, whose music I have written about before. We spent so much time arguing over what we should call what we did that we never got anything done! is the curious title of a very quiet little track that is performed mostly on a saxophone but seems to have some degree of post-production going on, or maybe just realtime processing, particularly as I am sure I heard some sounds repeated in places. The track’s main structure centres around a very quiet, continual slither of sound that is probably electronically produced. This continues throughout, only just on the edge of audibility. Here and there we hear little bits of soprano sax coming and going, somehow very distant, as if recorded from the room next door. These little bits of sound are glimpses of free jazz, just the odd second here and there, always played in quite a high register and subsumed beneath the whispery tone as fast as they arrive. Later in the piece the sax develops into more of a full blown work-out, but only for a few seconds, and the track gets very interesting as more than one sax can be heard, presumably overdubbed, but giving the impression that the microphone had been placed in a long corridor with different musicians placed at either end of it. At one point even a passing emergency vehicle can be heard. Delicate, fascinating stuff and as good as anything I have heard yet by Massimo.

Criticism & Self-Criticism is a characteristically ascetic piece of improvisation by Robert J. Kirkpatrick for harp and electronics (at least I am guessing it is improvised as he does often work from scores). The track consists of a series of isolated plucked notes that are allowed to decay away slowly. Accompanying these is a range of grey, gritty scratches and crunches, some the result I think of surfaces being rubbed and scraped, others the result of some kind of contact mic abuse. It is all very clear and precise, carefully arranged and well balanced, but for me, lacking any strong sense of emotional tension. The chimes of the harp appear when you expect them and there isn’t enough variation in the grittier sounds for my personal taste. The piece somehow falls between the minimal simplicity of someone like Malfatti or Sugimoto and the vibrancy and energy of modern improvisation without really tapping into the best elements of either. Sorry Robert.

Perhaps another characteristic of internet curated music is the tendency towards solo work, as same room collaboration still requires a degree of geographic good fortune. So it is then that this twenty track compilation only contains one collaborative track, from the New York based duo of Steven Flato and Corey Larkin.  The intensity of collaboration is immediately obvious after the solo pieces preceeding Six Month’s Night, their piece here. The track is mostly electronically produced, but electronics of the alive, analogue variety rather than digital. A pulsing bass-like tone sits underneath sheets of radio-like white noise and shortwave sounds that slowly evolve, thicken and become more aggressive in places, but generally float past without too much surprise. The bass sounds, and another occasionally repeated dull chime perhaps give the track too much of a rhythmic process that lets it slip a bit too much into sleepy, dreamy territory, but when the clouds of hiss and fuzz build into little peaks every so often this is broken up. Nothing fantastically groundbreaking here really, but a pleasant listen. Again I am not sure if this track is improvised (a common theme here) I suspect it is, as there is that intensity I first noticed in the music present, but who knows?

As if to confuse me further, Doug Holbrook’s three minute contribution is titled Not an improvisation… Or.  I sense again what we hear is little snippets of improvised tracks pinned together, this time quite loosely, as the track has a feeling of loosely collaged ideas flung together on a page about it. I think there is a guitar at the heart of this music, but there is also a lot of effects and processing and a fair amount of editing done. In the three minutes there are a lot of small ideas that come thick and fast and nothing really settles long enough to make it easy to judge the music’s qualities. As a finished work its a bit of a ragbag of everything squeezed into a small space and I would have preferred to hear more over a longer period, but as it is its a fun little track.

I have enjoyed Barry Chabala’s music a lot lately, and his Radio Quartet 1, while very different to what I have heard before is great. Essentially we hear four radios at once. Sometimes we hear little bits of radio shows, talking, music, adverts, sometimes we hear white noise, detuned stations, buzzes, radio squall, everything we have heard before, but the joy here is listening into and through the music, picking out little pieces we recognise before they are subsumed in the thick mess. A bit like looking carefully at old advertising hoardings, where posters have become torn and old colours and messages have come through underneath the fractured, fleeting nature of this piece is its real beauty. Listening deep into the mass of sound I hear things that might not be there, things that were there but have now gone, and other things made up from parts where different sounds from different radios merge together. once again it isn’t clear if the four radios were recorded at once and this piece was improvised live, or if each track is recorded separately and overdubbed, (I suspect the latter to be true) but it doesn’t really matter any more here than any of the other tracks. I like this a lot.

The closing track of this first disc comes from Wet Fur, otherwise known as Reed Rosenberg and one half of the Tandem Electrics duo with Richard Kamerman that I like a lot. Here he is in noisier mode, and after a few moments of audience chatter on the track Live at Surreal Estate 040409 we are suddenly hit by a wall of loud noise made up of dense electronic scribbles. The blast of noise varies a little throughout in texture and density but is always very full-on and physically aggressive. It suddenly stops here and there, and then comes and goes in tiny blasts, probably testing the venue’s speakers at the same time. There isn’t much of interest in the music here for me really. I quite liked the use of the sudden silences amidst the otherwise chaotic extremes but the idea wears thin quite quickly, on me at least. What does interest me more however is the audience sounds. Before the music starts it seems that a couple of the audience seem to be calling a dog across the room. Is it a dog? Maybe a small child? In many ways I hope it wasn’t a dog as it wouldn’t have been fair to have submitted it to such an audio assault. Later in the piece though during the moments where the wall of noise cuts out we hear tiny glimpses of people grabbing the opportunity to speak. Why does this happen at noise gigs when it would never happen at a quieter improv concert?

Anyway, overall the first disc of the Fourth IHM Compilation is a high quality affair, somewhat better than I remember previous outings. It is also (and I’m not just saying this because Alastair is a friend, believe me I’d jump at the chance of being critical! ) very well arranged, with a nice balance to the whole thing, from the quirky opening to the “thanks” that ends Rosenberg’s final piece. Looking forward to the second disc.

Download it for free here.

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One quick concert to mention if you are anywhere near Glasgow this coming weekend. The second Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra festival takes place at the CCA on Friday evening and all day Saturday, Included amongst several guest musicians this year are Susan Alcorn and Axel Dorner. Full details can be found here. Go along and support local music if you are able.