Jake Meginsky – Vandals

"Below a shuffling cabasa-like rhythm, a pair of taut drum patterns is punctuated by swirling electronic crackle and a deep bass drop. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, layers of spongy beats accumulate until they’re wiped out dub-style by an echoing sonar moan that suspends the track in a dark and undulating aquatic reverie, a lull broken by jittery bass tones and reverberant knocks that surge into an intricate percussive maelstrom.

Jake Meginsky’s music is distinctly low end and percussive. While nodding to minimal house, dub, and noise, Meginsky’s electronica bears ample evidence of his apprenticeship with fiery avant-jazz percussionist Milford Graves and his training in West African djun djun and djembe. There’s nothing rigid or mechanical here. On the contrary, Meginsky’s rhythmic sensibility is supple and flexible – rumbling, fluttering, and bouncing in elastic configurations of enchanting complexity.

All rhythm and squall, the pieces on Vandals can’t be called “songs”; but they’re too non-linear to be called “tracks” and too structurally unpredictable to be “compositions.” Rather, Meginsky builds little electronic ecosystems that seem to breed sounds in all their timbral and textural diversity, and to observe what results as they ally and skirmish with one another." - Christoph Cox

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Jake Meginsky / electronics

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Recorded April 2015 . Additional mixing at sonelab by Justin Pizzoferrato. Mastered by Carl Saff. 

Available as 320k MP3

Tracklisting:

1. Adze/Rasp
2. Uncredited Roles Interlude
3. Rabbit Devours The Luna Moth
4. Three Naga Uta (Last Loop First)
5. Human Grapes
6. Four Zopas
7. Vandals

 

Jake Meginsky

Composer/filmmaker Jake Meginsky, a New Music USA award winner and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in both music and film, has collaborated and performed with an extraordinary range of musicians including Milford Graves, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Kim Gordon, Vic Rawlings, Greg Kelley, Bhob Rainey, Joe McPhee, Thurston Moore, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Paul Flaherty, John Truscinski, Arthur Brooks, and Bill Nace.

Meginsky has been reviewed extensively in leading contemporary music, art and culture publications worldwide. In 2018 Artforum Magazine wrote, "On recent releases, Meginsky juggles off-kilter patterns of undulating bass, prickly sine pulses, and shards of white noise to build rhythmic worlds of dizzying density, depth, and textural variety." Art In America Magazine says, “Meginsky’s digital concrète takes percussion to outer extremes.” David Keenan called Meginsky’s 2014 solo record, L’appel Du Vide, “a hallucinatory electro percussion masterpiece”. Meginsky's debut solo album, L’appel Du Vide, was included in the WIRE Magazine's Top 10 Records of the Year for Outer Limits and his third release, Seven Psychotropic Sinewave Palindromes, was listed in FACT Magazine’s Top 50 Albums of 2016.