If you find a Buddha Machine sample amid the roiling moans of this album, take note of it. It’ll provide a sense of orientation amid the free-form noise, sonar blips, and general audio miasma. The six melancholy drones that make up Six Melancholy Songs by Restive Sonic are all deeply rich background tonics, as on the burbling thunder of “0507″ (MP3). The Buddha material serves as one of many sonic sources. As the Buddha samples get used more often in the work of abstract musicians, they are losing their initial inherent abstraction: becoming more and more recognizable, making the steady move from noise to signal. Get the full Six Melancholy Songs set at archive.org.
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The word is “stem,” and what it refers to in music isn’t — in this case — the narrow vertical shaft of a single note in a written score, but the separate audio elements that are later combined to create a single track.
These are the constituent parts of a studio recording, and they’re the sort of pieces provided as a set in various remix contests, such as the one listed here earlier this week for ace Nigerian afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (disquiet.com, tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com; due date: July 7).
That contest offers, in MP3 form, the 15 parts of the title track of Allen’s new album, Secret Agent. Not to be outdone, Senegal’s Baaba Maal has provided 29 separate parts of the title track of his new album, Television, recorded with New York’s Brazilian Girls. The files are all available in a Zip archive at baabamaal.tv (due date: August 10). All in all, it’s less music than the Allen set, because this batch consists mostly of 20-second riffs, bits of vocals, guitar, and percussion that were looped in the construction of Maal’s song. However, there are some highly recommended chunks of sound in there, loopable and listenable to on their lonesome, notably recordings of tabla and djembe. All files are in WAV format. (Found via twitter.com/timprebble.)
downstream / Raz Mesinai’s “String Quartet for Four Turntables” (MP3)
Closing the month’s Disquiet Downstream entries on a particularly high note: Raz Mesinai’s technologically mediated chamber music. Titled “String Quartet for Four Turntables,” it’s a shifting, elegiac piece that plays with the textures and tenets of classical music. The instrumentation is the standard: two violins, one viola, one cello. But if the individual parts appear to have a subtle yet clearly discernible give, that’s because the performers are not playing in tandem, at least not literally.
Mesinai composed the quartet and recorded it, but he produced a separate 12″ LP for each of the four parts, and then manipulated them as a group on a set of turntables (MP3).
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According to his June 24 post at razmesinai.blogspot.com, the piece had its debut at Lincoln Center in Manhattan in 2000 with a performances by DJ Olive and DJ Toshio Kajiwara. The version heard here, though, was recorded by Mesinai for the dqxt.org/dubwar podcast series. There is a fifth sonic element: an intense layer of distressed vinyl, the result of conscious lack of care that Mesinai took with the LPs. Though all vinyl can eventually take on this crusty patina, it seems especially fitting to the antique aura of chamber music.
The work serves as an intersection of many of Mesinai’s interests. Its appearance on Dub War cements its provenance with some of his earliest music, the electronic dub he did under the name Badawi, which occasionally he would shoot through with dramatic string arrangements. And in its use of live studio performances as raw material, “String Quartet for Four Turntables” resembles the manner in which he recorded the album Before the Law (for John Zorn’s Tzadik label), on which various improvising out-jazz musicians, including violinist Mark Feldman, committed short, sharp elements to tape, which Mesinai later put together into his own, arguably “unplayable” constructions.
I’d love to hear an album in which a half dozen different DJs take their turn with the material.
The masterminds behind the remix contest focused on famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (best known as the backbeat of legend Fela’s band) want us to download the 15 constituent parts of the single “Secret Agent,” the title track off his new album on World Circuit label. And no doubt the promise inherent in those tracks will draw in participants. But there’s much pleasure to be had in the raw materials — how often, when you think about it, do we get nearly six straight minutes of Tony Allen drumming, which is freely available here, a trenchant rhythm that’s liked the most stripped-down Meters metric you’ve ever heard? Likewise, amid the emotive backing (and foreground) vocals and syrupy-slick guitars, there’s a fine synthesizer line available all on its delectable lonesome. And for those truly looking to Zen out, there’s even five-plus minutes of a low-volume shaker, rattling along as steady as can be.
The contest is hosted at soundcloud.com, which provides the following handy interface for accessing the goods:
For those who want to make something of the available mixing-board tracks, the due date for the contest is July 7. More details at tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com. More on the release at worldcircuit.co.uk.
field notes / Image of the Week: Guggenheim’s Orbit
Photo shot during performance of late spatial composer Henry Brant’s “Orbits” at the Guggenheim in Manhattan a week ago today.
Photo by Robert Stolarik. It originally appeared in June 22 issue of the New York Times, accompanying an article by Times critic Anthony Tommasini (nytimes.com). The caption reads: “Neely Bruce, at bottom of photo, leading 89 trombones, a soprano and an organ in the East Coast premiere of Henry Brant’s ‘Orbits’ in the rotunda of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum on Sunday night, part of both the museum’s Works & Process series and the citywide festival Make Music New York.”
field notes / Quote of the Week: Hardcore of the Infinitesimal
How musician Christof Migone describes his conceptually driven, often microsonic music:
“A hardcore of the infinitesimal”
From an anecdote in a report by Carl Wilson on the belated reception of Mignone’s 2004 album Escape Songs, a collaboration with Veda Hille, in the Globe and Mail (theglobeandmail.com). More on Migone at christofmigone.com, and on Hille at vedahille.com.
If you find a Buddha Machine sample amid the roiling moans of this album, take note of it. It’ll provide a sense of orientation amid the free-form noise, sonar blips, and general audio miasma. The six melancholy drones that make up Six Melancholy Songs by Restive Sonic are all deeply rich background tonics, as on the burbling thunder of “0507″ (MP3). The Buddha material serves as one of many sonic sources. As the Buddha samples get used more often in the work of abstract musicians, they are losing their initial inherent abstraction: becoming more and more recognizable, making the steady move from noise to signal. Get the full Six Melancholy Songs set at archive.org. 
The masterminds behind the remix contest focused on famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (best known as the backbeat of legend Fela’s band) want us to download the 15 constituent parts of the single “Secret Agent,” the title track off his new album on World Circuit label. And no doubt the promise inherent in those tracks will draw in participants. But there’s much pleasure to be had in the raw materials — how often, when you think about it, do we get nearly six straight minutes of Tony Allen drumming, which is freely available here, a trenchant rhythm that’s liked the most stripped-down Meters metric you’ve ever heard? Likewise, amid the emotive backing (and foreground) vocals and syrupy-slick guitars, there’s a fine synthesizer line available all on its delectable lonesome. And for those truly looking to Zen out, there’s even five-plus minutes of a low-volume shaker, rattling along as steady as can be. 