If all the records that came in the mail were as cared for and visually appealing as this one, I’d probably listen to a lot more of them*:

The band is Decomposure, the album is Vertical Lines A. Decomposure is really just Caleb Mueller and here’s what he did to make the record:

With a stack of 60-minute cassettes and tape recorder in tow, Decomposure (spare time musician/art guy Caleb Mueller) followed his average day around to capture and preserve its unique sound signature that would otherwise have simply evaporated. Over the course of the year following that recorded day, he worked through a detailed process of digitally deconstructing each hour-long slur of sound into hundreds of individual clicks and thumps and pings. Then he built songs from them. Or song-ish things, anyway.

I’m still trying to decide how I feel about the song-ish things. It isn’t bad. It’s actually interesting. I just can’t say yet that it’s really good. There is a lot going on, as you could imagine—tons of various noises and beats all stripped down to be only a second or less of what they originally were and then pasted back together sometimes in patterns and sometimes what sounds like little whirls of free-for-all chaos.

It’s sorta Onelinedrawing meets the Postal Service meets some indie rapping/fast-talking thing meets Pris. You know, Pris, the local Burke Thomas sound collage disguised as pop rock.

You can hear the song “Hour 1” from Vertical Lines A by clicking here (via blanksquirrel.com). Decomposure has a website too, www.decomposure.com.

^{*Which isn’t to imply that I don’t listen to the majority of the music sent to me. I do. It’s just that I get a lot of this, which causes me to immediately go against the “Never judge a book by its cover” rule and throw them in the “free” bin by my desk before their stink can get on my desk or me.}