va - Lowercase

Hyper-minimal hush, released in the throes of earnest Bernhard-Gunter-worship circa Y2K, when it seemed somehow revolutionary to make really quiet and fragile-sounding electro-acoustic music. Thankfully, "lowercase" as a name for a genre has gone the way of "hypnogogic pop", "New Weird America", "glitch", and "skiffle". There were some people whose music existed before the term was coined and got shoehorned into it, other artists who adopted a "lowercase" style in order to fit into the (nigh-inaudible) crowd, others who popped up when the trend began and either vanished when it ended or just became so EXTREMELY quiet that they hardly even left a trace on Discogs.

This double-disc set does a pretty nice job of collecting a representative sampling of artists from around the world. Alas, it wasn't not so diverse since all participants are male. One truly bizarre aspect of the album was that it included a second set of two CDs in every box, with an instruction to give those away to a friend and thus immediately making whoever spent money on this (i.e.: me) feel pretty dumb. Wait, I paid for this, but someone else could have given it to me for nothing? Why?? That carried the stench of evangelism; if you were excited by teeny sine tones then it was your duty to convert another listener. No thank you. Most of the music still stands up, though, and since it's long sold out and I'm putting it up on a blog in 2018, then you can think of this as the extra set of CDs that I'm giving away to not just one friend, but everybody.

Tracks by Roel Meelkop, Artificial Memory Trace, Richard Chartier, Bernhard Gunter, Jeph Jerman, Steve Roden/In Be Tween Noise, *0, Taylor Deupree, Oren Ambarchi, Lieutenant Caramel, Michael Northam, Kid 606, Pimmon, Ecclesiastical Scaffolding, Jos Smolders, and many others.

disc 1
disc 2