Crawl

Computers might not need an audible language to talk to one another, but I imagine that if they did, it would sound an awful lot like this. The disc’s track titles follow a recognizable path-awake, crawl, speak, glow, last-but listeners looking for concrete aural markers to guide them through might feel a bit lost in the code. Still, the language analogy could be an apt one. Half the quartet speaks Japanese and the other half Danish, and they were all having this particular conversation in Tijuana (just south of the border from Hans and Marcos’s adopted home of southern California). The core syllables at work here are built out of percussion, synthesizer, electronics, toys, voice, and PowerBook. The participants are polite in their interactions, careful not to trample over one another or cut anybody off mid-thought. And like sitting at a street café in Paris without a word of French in your vocabulary, you can absorb the arc of the conversation without any hint as to what anyone is talking about.

—MS