Jib Kidder is generally known for making lush, quick-witted songs that feel both immediate and backward glancing. His 2015 record Teaspoon To The Ocean was a set of sweet, idiosyncratic, slightly psychedelic music, with full-band arrangements, gentle melodies, lysergic guitar and keyboard lines, et al. It went down easy and left a good aftertaste.
Jib’s latest release, New Works for Realistic Mixer, is not like that.
Composed from samples of harsh digital noise and primitive — though engaging — beats, New Works feels like the drizzle-down of Jib’s creative process, the grease pit condensation of all the aggressive impulses that typically stay out of his music. Often jagged and high treble, sometimes seated in a murky ambience, it is a surprisingly dank glimpse into the mind of the songwriter that, despite its shift in style, somehow maintains the same good humor present on other Kidder albums.
This record is coming to us from Berlin-based Care Of Editions and their Negative Money series, which, as the label explains, “[uses] the profits from selling vinyl records to pay people for downloading the same albums.” (You can learn more about the label in this helpful essay by label director Gerhard Schultz.) As Jib puts it, when approached by C/O to contribute to this series: “[I] felt as though I was, perhaps for the first time, entirely allowed to make something unpleasant — or more specifically to bring something entirely unpleasant fully and beautifully into being.” He goes on:
I think at first, actually, the Negative Money concept resonated in me subconsciously such that I associated it with negative feelings, negative thoughts, negative appeal. The object you’d pay to not be given. And the project I came up with, in fact completed, turned out to be something like my own Game in the Sand (Herzog), the record that I birth and then believe it is my duty to prevent anyone from ever hearing. It took loops (Daniel Johnston singing “No one understands you”, Abner Jay singing “I’m so depressed”, respectively) and subjected them to cumulative mp3 compression data loss on a long time scale. By the end of a deep listen you’ve learned about mp3s what Alvin Lucier may have taught you about rooms but at the cost of a massive amplification of your darkest assessments.
Tiny Mix Tapes is happy to premiere album cut “04 Sechellia,” which you may stream below. New Works for Realistic Mixer will be available from Care Of Editions on August 1st. You can pre-order it here.
And as an added bonus, Jib Kidder has also shared a brand new “video poem” for his track “Advancer,” which you may watch right here:
New Works will also be the final release in the Negative Money series, and to celebrate, Care Of will be throwing a concert in their ongoing concert series in Berlin. The next show will occur on August 4 and include performances by Caterina Barbieri, Adam Asnan, and Carlo Maria. More information here.
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