Daily Download: “All Afternoon Part 2 (Dawn of the Dead),” Bird Show

Bird Show is a new project by Ben Vida, best known for his John Fahey-like guitar work in the wonderful new Chicago music group Town and Country. This record is something of a departure for Vida, with the pristine aesthetic of Town and Country replaced by a playful, almost goofy collage, perfectly described in a recent Stylus review as “a magical-realist tribute to North African and Pacific-Rim ethno-musicological field recordings.” It sounds dicey, I know, and in places it is — the marimbas are particularly hard to get past — but there’s something appealing about the way Vida treats these “exotic” sounds not as an end in themselves, but as a way to sweeten challenging sonic exploration in the style of Tony Conrad and Arnold Dreyblatt.