Free Album from Greensboro's Workday/Schoolnight

One of the big surprises I received at the Cucalorus 14 launch party back in 2008 was a performance by Greensboro experimental rock band Invisible, a group that utilized ingenious homemade devices that produced beats from a variety of found objects. It was a fascinating performance, one that preceded a screening of a documentary made about the band, and kept me interested in what Invisible would do next.

Well, one of the members, Bart Trotman, has just delivered a free album under the moniker Workday/Schoolnight entitled Plastic Ocean. It's a sprawling work, combining minimalist glitch-pop with sound collages utilizing dozens of thrift store cassettes, including "self-help tapes, self-hypnotic tapes, daily affirmations, and vocabulary lessons." The songs alone are fairly interesting to listen to, but it's the ludicrousness of the samples Trotman uses to bookend each song that keeps me listening. I will say that the length of the album (70 min.) left me wishing some more editing had taken place before its release.

Still, it's hard to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when that gift horse has such a wide variety of interesting samples at his disposal. You can get the whole album for free on Megaupload or Mediafire, but only for a limited time.