But what about a Mayan flute? Drawing a blank, huh?

Mexican-American DJ and producer DEBIT conjures up more than just music in her new album, “The Long Count.” Using obscure sonic material (archival recordings of ancient Mayan flutes, for example), DEBIT explores the sounds within sound.

The album’s eighth track, “4th Day,” is free of melody, beat, motif, and virtually any other musical component that one might expect. Casual listeners and audiophiles alike are forced to make sense of something different. Easy listening? Not at all. The experience requires feeling, not just active/passive listening.

Her newest work departs from 2018’s electronica-driven “Animus”, her debut effort, but they share much of the same DNA. From the beginning, DEBIT has strived to avoid repetitive tropes and canned sounds, instead finding unique sources of inspiration. In a recent article, The Guardian deemed her music “deliciously strange.”

Her polymorphous, soundscape, and ambient work challenges many Western music concepts. While you could compare her to some well-known ambient artists, like U2 or Moby, DEBIT occupies a liminal space that’s all her own.

DEBIT has DJ’ed across North & South America since 2010. She has appeared at Ghetto Gothic, MIXPAK, and performed with Kode9, ARCA, Nick Hook, Jubilee, and more. Join her at the James Theater in Iowa City at 7:30 p.m., Sept. 17.

The post Witching Hour Preview: DEBIT’s liminal sound appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The room was dark, but the vacant stage remained lit for a show, adding to the unsettling atmosphere.  As the two musicians worked the guitar and digital sound into not-quite rhythms and almost-harmonies, the majority of the crowd became transfixed on the spectacle playing out before them.  Though as soon as it had begun, it was over.  They only played for about 30 minutes but the stage was set for The Main Sequence, whose name is an astronomical term that refers to a band of “dwarf” stars.  The crowd was about to be taken on a tour of the universe.

The Main Sequence consists of Joel David Palmer and Joshua Alan Weiner.  They are both brilliant multi-instrumentalists, but at this show Palmer primarily played guitar while Weiner played a huge range of instruments and controlled an impressive array of sound modification equipment.  Palmer’s guitar style, it should be noted, is anything but traditional.  During a song that utilized a Theremin (!) Palmer used a guitar slide in a way I had never seen before.  He would play a chord, set the slide, and then let it roll down the neck.  Their hyper-experimental style contorts digital, electric sound into something that seems natural.  It would be a mistake to call their music purely deconstructive.  They don’t just tear apart music down to its bare chords and leave it at that, but start from a sort of bottom point and build skyward.  I wouldn’t call it “art-rock”, but it is most certainly artistic.  Their music is a feeling, more than anything else, and to even try to understand it, you need to see them create it.

The last act of the night was Iowa City’s own Alex Body. It made sense that his set was the last, as his style is the closest to what most would consider “main-stream” music of all that was on display at the Showcase.  This ordering gave the impression that there was an active progression throughout the night toward something more recognizably “musical” and less minimalist in nature.  It was as if the sound in the room had been sculpted into something that would allow for immediately determinable rhythms that backed vocals to tell stories.  When he played “Rules of Summer”, a Flaming Lips-esque track, a few audience members actually got up and danced in front of the stage.  Midway through his show, he left his music to loop and ran to make adjustments to the main mixing boards in the back of the room, by the bar, which reminded the audience that he is the Mill’s “sound guy”.  Arguably, the highlight of Body’s show was his last song “Bimini Road,” from his most recent record No Event.  It’s a song with sweeping harmonies that loop behind lyrics that reference a real-world underwater “road” in the Bahamas. Some believe it to be part of the sunken city of Atlantis.  This song, like most of his others, ended abruptly and the crowd cheered as he began packing up.

Maybe calling the evening a “progression” of sound is wrong.  Maybe it was just a movement of sound in a certain direction.  All three acts make audiences ask themselves just what it means to create music, and just what a “finished product” is supposed to sound like. Hopefully, Iowa City can expect to see more Ambient and Soundscape shows in the near future.

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