MetalJazz

Kraig Grady, "Crow on the Dark Side of Gloss" (Mode)
Australia-via-L.A. microtonal composer Grady's new music is like floss pulled through your ears. The sustained tones (created through precise sampling) and harmonies cleanse your thoughts, ease your breath and bring perception to the edges of your teeth, while occasional gentle coughs, booms and gongs shake the clench out of your chest. The music unfolds with the natural slowness of cloud formations through which light sometimes shines, different with each listening. No guru required.
Listen/buy here.



Steuart Liebig, "The Dusty World," "Ephemera"
In recent years, L.A. composer Liebig has been taking modular sythesizers into dark places and emerging with fascinating sounds, as here. Ominous wind chimes and distant thunder hardly disturb a relentless emptiness; where are we? Machines digest themselves; robot animals/humans moan and collide as helicopters hover over a static doomscape. Recommended after reading T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."
Listen/buy here.
Steuart Liebig exercises the live, collaborative electric-bass/electronics side of his personality in celebration of his 70th birthday at Highland Park's Scribble on Sun. July 19, at Sun Space on Mon. July 27, and at Pasadena's Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church on Sun. Aug. 2. Check MetalJazz's Links for details.