Resonance Theory | 02

"Teardrop" - Avishai Cohen, Big Vicious

"2" - Misled Children and Clutchy Hopkins

"The Big Sea (Instrumental)" - Funki Porcini

"Obscured by 5" - Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit

"Not The Destination" - 40 Winks

"I'm Not" - Panda Bear

"Pandora (For Cindy)" - Cocteau Twins

"Playing Parties (Yesterdays New Quintet The Stars Remix)" - Daedelus

"High Rise" - Al Stylus

"Urban Waltz" - Baby Mammoth

“Rainy Streets” - Blue In Green

"Yǔ" - Catching Flies

"Opus for Four" - The Art of Noise

"02-00" - B. Fleischmann

"Teardrop" — Avishai Cohen, Big Vicious

ECM Records issued "Teardrop" first as a digital single on March 13, 2020, then on the album Big Vicious on March 27. The session ran at Studios La Buissonne in Pernes-les-Fontaines in August 2019 with Manfred Eicher producing. Cohen takes the Massive Attack melody on open trumpet over Uzi Ramirez and Yonatan Albalak on guitars and a dual drum chair (Aviv Cohen, plus Ziv Ravitz on drums and live sampling). The cover harks back to the band's earliest days, when Cohen and his Israeli friends mainly played 90s covers, and the long tails and ECM headroom give the topline room to breathe. The trumpet stylings catch Miles Davis's electric period more than once, and the track marks an electric turn within ECM's late-period aesthetic.

"2" — Misled Children & Clutchy Hopkins

"2" is track two on Peoples Market, issued by Porter Records on July 22, 2008 after originally surfacing on the Mojave Desert imprint Crate Digler. The numeric track list is intentionally minimal, with dusty drum programming, a short modal bassline, and library-style keys drifting in and out. The relationship to Clutchy Hopkins is the kind of cultivated mystery the broader catalog feeds on. Hopkins’ discography leans on small-press issues, sparse credits, and a cultivated origin mythology. “2” sits early in the sequence, both a hip-hop passage and downtempo nod.

"The Big Sea" — Funki Porcini

James Braddell issued Fast Asleep on Ninja Tune in 2002, packaged as a CD plus a DVD of eight short films premiered at London's National Film Theatre. On Braddell's own account, he made six of the videos himself and his friend Rupert Small, working as Team Alcohol, made two, including the one for "The Big Sea." The track itself sounds like a late-night score, a slow build of strings and ride cymbal that holds a phrase long enough that your ear starts writing its own scene. Recorded at the Uterus Goldmine in the Wolverhamptons and mastered in Rome at Studio 9, Fast Asleep marked a moment when the label was committed to audiovisual companions and when Porcini's long takes and noir humor were part of the brand's identity as much as the turntable work.

"Obscured by 5 (Extended)" — Burnt Friedman & Jaki Liebezeit

"Obscured by 5" closes Secret Rhythms 1 on Friedman's Nonplace label, the first volume in a series where Friedman's percussive electronics meet Jaki Liebezeit's cyclical drumming. Friedman and Liebezeit began the collaboration as a rehearsal for a concert at Cologne Triennale 2000, then formalized their non-4/4, cycle-based approach across multiple Nonplace volumes. The Extended variant on this mix underlines the laboratory method, with Joseph Suchy's guitar drifting across Friedman's steel drum and kalimba while Liebezeit's drums hold the cycle. A Brainwashed review called the closing thirteen-minute stretch "the secret rhythm Friedman and Liebezeit have found and wish to expose to the rest of the world."

"Not The Destination" — 40 Winks

Antwerp duo Padmo' and Weedy closed It's The Trip with "Not The Destination," a seven-minute fadeaway floating on tape-softened drums and Rhodes keywork that nod to 1970s European film libraries. Project: Mooncircle released the double LP in 2011, four years after the duo's previous full-length and the German label's welcome to its roster, 2008's The Lucid Effect. The album title quotes itself in the album text: "Bring your music player and tell your honey you won't be home for dinner. It's the trip, not the destination." 40 Winks take their name from the expression for a short nap, which is roughly the listening posture the music asks for.

"I'm Not" — Panda Bear

Noah Lennox issued "I'm Not" first in 2005 on a small double A-side single paired with "Comfy in Nautica," then re-released it on Person Pitch on Paw Tracks on March 20, 2007. The sample lineage runs through Gothic Voices performing Guillaume de Machaut's rondeau "Rose, liz, printemps, verdure" from their album The Mirror of Narcissus, stretched and layered into a weightless pad that Lennox sings through an enormous stereo field of Gregorian smoke. Most of the album was built on a Boss SP-303 sampler that Lennox had been experimenting with after moving to Lisbon and finding his guitar held up in Portuguese customs. The single established the sample-collage palette and the reverb-as-architecture approach that defined the album's sound.

"Pandora (For Cindy)" — Cocteau Twins

4AD released Treasure on November 12, 1984, the first album with the band's canonical lineup of Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Simon Raymonde fully in place. "Pandora" is the Cocteaus at their most elemental, with Guthrie's guitar blurred into bell tones, Fraser's voice soaring throughout, and Raymonde's bass anchoring it all. The dedication for "Cindy" points to Cinder, the friend then known as Gordon Sharp of Cindytalk, one of the small cluster of figures who orbited the Cocteaus and 4AD in those years. Mid-sequence on the album, "Pandora" is a perfect 4AD object: Vaughan Oliver and Nigel Grierson's 23 Envelope wrapped the record in duotone photographs of lace and satin drapery around a headless dress form, with the result that the music and its sleeve arrive of a piece.

"Playing Parties (Yesterdays New Quintet The Stars Remix)" — Daedelus

Plug Research released The Quiet Party on January 28, 2003 as the companion EP to Alfred Darlington's debut LP Invention, with the Yesterdays New Quintet remix of "Playing Parties" at the top of the sequence. The track sits inside Madlib's Yesterdays New Quintet period, functioning as a one-person jazz group built from samplers, Rhodes, and brushed-kit time. The EP also includes Madlib's "Bonus Beats" and a High Priest (Antipop Consortium) remix of "Muggle Born," cementing the Daedelus / Stones Throw cross link during the formative early-2000s LA beat scene.

"High Rise" — Al Stylus

Robert Luis curated When Shapes Join Together 2 for his Brighton label Tru Thoughts on January 28, 2002, and "High Rise" sat among the early downtempo dispatches that introduced artists who would become central to the catalog. Al Stylus is Alex Cowan before the TM Juke identity solidifies, and you can hear the through line in his saturated drums, and the way a small vocal element is used for texture. The Shapes series functioned as Tru Thoughts' seasonal scouting report, positioning the label's downtempo and nu-jazz axis in the early 2000s alongside Quantic and Bonobo, and "High Rise" is an early snapshot of the broken-beat and jazz lounge sets the label would later make a house style.

"Urban Waltz" — Baby Mammoth

Swimming arrived on Pork Recordings in April 1999, with Mark Blissenden and Andrew Burdall credited on the music and Tom Harland on guitar on the three tracks that lean live, "Urban Waltz" among them. The time feel swings while the kick and bass make a straight line through the bars. In the wider Hull constellation with Fila Brazillia and The Solid Doctor, who met Pork label head Dave Brennand at a local club, this is a quietly canonical record, and Swimming was the album that pushed the duo to a wider audience.

"Rainy Streets" — Blue In Green

The Break of Dawn is an 11-track debut from Japan's Blue In Green, released August 3, 2011 on Cold Busted. The artist is an anonymous Japanese composer and guitarist with a penchant for bossa-friendly chords voiced cleanly, minimal ornament, and attention to negative space, and "Rainy Streets" leans on brushed snares, a laid-back bass, and a minor-key loop. The track's harmonic backbone draws from Jimmy Smith's reading of "Summertime" on Jimmy Smith at the Organ, Volume 1 (Blue Note, 1957), so the lineage points straight to organ-jazz language even as the arrangement stays resolutely downtempo. The label's art direction and production values also warrant notice, as Cold Busted under Derrick Daisey built a catalog where short-form instrumentals live comfortably next to design-forward sleeves, and "Rainy Streets" was later paired on a 7-inch with The Deli's "Flowers" as Emapea Re-Works, which tightened the drums and nudged the gait toward classic boom-bap.

"Yǔ" — Catching Flies

"Yǔ" (Mandarin for "rain") is the second track on Silver Linings, the debut album from London producer George King, released July 5, 2019 on his own Indigo Soul imprint. The piece features soft-focus arpeggios over downtempo drums. King has said the track was made in the mountains of China during a few days off from touring. A companion set, Silver Linings Remixed, arrived in April 2020 and includes a "Yu (Part 2)" with verses from Blu and Jehst.

"Opus for Four" — The Art of Noise

China Records released In No Sense? Nonsense! on September 28, 1987, by which point Anne Dudley and J. J. Jeczalik had reduced the band to a duo, with Gary Langan having already left after In Visible Silence. The "Opus" miniatures were always part joke, part craft, chamber gestures rebuilt from Fairlight synth shards, and "Opus for Four" sits as a track-five aside in the album's larger sequence. Session credits for the album include Dave Bronze on bass and Paul Robinson on drums alongside Ely Cathedral Choir under Dr. Arthur Wills, a small army of orchestral and brass players, and mixing by Bob Kraushaar and Ted Hayton. Dudley later reflected that the album was sophisticated and clever and didn't lend itself to having any singles, which is more or less the explanation for why it remains the great underappreciated AoN record.

"02/00" — B. Fleischmann

Bernhard Fleischmann released Welcome Tourist on Morr Music in November 2003, his second album for the Berlin label after 1999's Pop Loops for Breakfast. "02/00" opens the double set with a voice sample of Helmut Qualtinger reading Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, after which piano figures and percussive lattices slowly assemble into a quickening pulse. The Viennese drummer's polemic is set out plainly in the Morr release copy: an invitation to the listener that doubles as a critique of "a state of mind that subordinates human beings to a logic of economic utilization," with Thoreau enlisted as the album's opening voice. Closing the mix with this track delivers a hopeful glide and a quiet gateway to the rest of Fleischmann's catalog, from solo albums to film work.

Listen to: Resonance Theory | 03