Beak has achieved that confoundingly difficult feat: originality and catchiness. He’s managed to integrate acoustic guitar with breakbeats and IDM in an ingeniously seamless way.
The first track of Amoral Mayor Earwig EP, how a hot air balloon works, starts out straightforwardly enough. Some quiet acoustic guitar plucks, repeating and slowly adding some more layers of guitar. Sure, there’s some digital delay but mostly it’s just guitar. Some bitcrushing distortion eases into the left speaker just enough to raise an eyebrow, but it keeps with the guitar thing. Oh nice, some drums. Maybe even live. Strange processed guitar in the background, almost voice-like. A single reversed cymbal, very quick. Drum break. Quite distorted. Wait, how did we end up here? By the time the second track, i saw two of me, starts our hot air balloon has caught the jet stream. No turning back now.
Amoral Mayor Earwig EP and Bishop-Whitney EP could be two sides of a single album. I tend to listen to these together. El Hacedor is perhaps a little more mysterious, a little mellower. All three are intriguing and highly enjoyable.
Links
Beak on MySpace (bonus downloadable track, Limozeen)
| Amoral Mayor Earwig EP: | Stream | archive.org | Monotonik netlabel |
| Bishop Whitney EP: | Stream | archive.org | Monotonik netlabel |
| El Hacedor: | Stream | archive.org | Monotonik netlabel |
Normally I avoid repetition in music. Usually my iTunes is randomly shuffling from my “Not Recently Played” playlist. Yet I find myself playing these two netlabel albums by Glander multiple times a week. Music that is highly repetitive, with long, sprawling arcs, and four on the floor kick drum. Reading a description of it, I wouldn’t have given it much of a chance. But this is one of my favorite discoveries of the year.
A couple of months after finding Heavy Weights, Vate (released on the 1 bit wonder netlabel) popped up in the archive.org feed. I literally cheered when I saw that there was more Glander to experience. Vate shows how dialed in to his technique Glander is, without at all being formulaic. The same masterful use of repetition is there but there’s a slightly grittier edge to the textures, and I almost get the sense that the camera has a wider angle lens, as bizarre as that is to say about music. These tracks are funkier, too. For instance, listen to the syncopation in the second track, Hmbrg, or the staccato gurgles in Drift. While Heavy Weights is a deep sea dive, Vate is a swooping flight through an urban landscape.
This is the way of Indie Mac development. Create a tool that either does something (one thing) new or does something old in a new, easier way. Make it beautiful and fun to use. Take advantage of the APIs Apple provides, like Core Animation. Make a slick web site with a forum, blog, and user-contributed content, put a screen cast showing how cool the app is, provide a demo and charge a reasonable price for the full version. Finally, create a silly, punny company name. Like 
Konterkonzept EP
Here’s a simple transport using the custom stop icon and the system-supplied NSRightFacingTriangleTemplate for the play button. Easy! We’re done. Wait. Something’s not quite right. Notice how the play button has a subtle grey tint to it, while the stop button is infinite black, like the 
Much better! Beyond simple tinting, the system will also create an embossed version of your template images for other button types, and create that blue glow around it for the active state of a button (for example, the View/Hide Mini-month button in iCal).
