Disquiet

downstream / Loren Chasse and Jason Honea MP3

The one free sample track off Music Heard Far Off by the Child Readers plays like a mixtape set on random. It opens with piercing, lo-fi accompaniment paired with a nu-folk vocal that’s buried in the mix (the album’s title couldn’t be more factually accurate), only to fade into a droney wisp of a sea shanty, replete with field recordings and bell-like scintillate. Then come deeply echoed elements of pop, and then a murky dub. The deeper the song, titled “Fortune (Incl. The Morningnight/A Hated Art),” gets into its three and a half minutes, the quicker the segments fly by, yet the slower the seeming overall pace (MP3). That incongruity is but one of the track’s mysteries. The Readers are Loren Chasse and Jason Honea. More details at softabuse.com.

downstream / Type Records Podcast Mix MP3

The Type label supplements its regular releases with a series of podcasts. That’s not unusual for a record label. What distinguishes Type’s series, as exemplified by a new mix by Aeioux (aka one of Type’s two founders, Stefan Lewandowski), is how a typical podcast may mix upcoming music from the label amid other recordings, like semi-random clips from the Smithsonian Folkways archive (here there’s a vocal experiment from Aldred Wolfsohn and office-setting field recordings), not to mention acclaimed individual electronic tracks, such as excerpts from Stars of the Lid and Tim Hecker (MP3). Filtered amid those and additional borrowed material are teases for Peter Broderick’s upcoming Something Has Changed, a noisy contraption of found sound and rough processing (which follows a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s spectral poetry), and Helios’s A Rising Wind, a contrasting slice of downtempo electropop. More at typerecords.com.

downstream / Venician Enrico Coniglio Field Recording MP3

There’s a gap between the Touch Music record label and its ongoing MP3 series, TouchRadio. While Touch album releases generally focus on processed sound, the sound on TouchRadio is generally unprocessed. The recent entries on TouchRadio have been raw field recordings, framed by the discerning ear of the recordist and by the broader context of the Touch cultural engine.

TouchRadio just released its 30th entry, a 23-minute audio tour of Venice, titled “Sapientumsuperacquis” (MP3). The microphone technology was in the hands of Enrico Coniglio, who describes the situation as follows in the accompanying text:

As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at “Riva dei Schiavoni”, not far from San Marco square.

Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic.

“Sapientum super acquis” is the title attribuited to the “Magistrato alle acque” of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ istituited on 1501 by the “Council of ten”, that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the “health” of the water.

Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.

The burbling of water provides a thick scrim through which are heard industrial noise, conversations, the creak of waterborne structures, footsteps and more. It’s the perfect background music for an afternoon spent reading a China Miéville novel, the sort of tale in which the dank urban setting exists thanks to a tentative compromise with the fetid mote that surrounds it.

The track was originally posted at touchmusic.org.uk.

field notes / Image of the Week: Steampunk Sequencer

This is the Sequential Resonation Machine, created by Joseph Casbarian:

According to the post at oddmusic.com, the machine is a kind of mashup of a sequencer and a pipe organ. Three MP3s on the site provide brief examples of what kinds of music it can make: MP3, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style note accrual; MP3, eerie horror shuffle; MP3, dopey cartoon waddle. (Via makezine.com.)

field notes / Quote of the Week: Roots Maneuver

From the title track of the brand new Roots album, Rising Down:

Look at technology they call it downloading
I call it downsizing somebody follow me
Does a computer chip have an astrology?
And when it fuck up could it give you an apology

The most accomplished rap act that consists of a traditional rock band lineup, the Roots are the rare group in hip-hop to generally forsake sampling in favor of live jams. Given hip-hop’s basis in non-traditional musical equipment — tape loops long ago, then beat machines, now digital sampling — it’s often interesting to listen for critiques of technology in their music.

In the liner notes to another song on Rising Down, “Becoming Unwritten,” Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the band’s drummer and producer, penned a critique of densely produced hip-hop: “Unless you’re working on a Bomb Squad production for the 20th anniversary followup to ‘[Public Enemy’s album It Takes a Nation of] Millions [to Hold Us Back’ then the rule of ‘100% Power!’ need not apply. Sometimes as a musician you have to play the back and supplement your main subject.”

downstream / String-Based Ambient MP3 Collection

The 22-track, various-artist String Ambient collection benefits from a more literal enaction of its title than some record labels may have elected for. There are, indeed, harps and ukuleles and acoustic guitars put into action on this set of varied atmospheric music. But there are also electric guitars, as heard on Djinnestan’s “C Plus A,” in which pin-prick texture is about as much amid the quiet that could be certifiably attributed to anything string-based, (MP3), and Glenn Brown’s “A Crystal Fascination I,” which works a melodious but retrained solo into its spacey system (MP3). Terge Paulsen employs an EBow to achieve the monolithic sustain of the richly industrial drone poem “Blues for Lhasa” (MP3).

Thanks to heavy use of electronic effects, the divide between acoustic and electric string instruments is a nuanced one on String Ambient. The detuned zither that serves as the sole identified tool on Jon 7’s “An Eerie Paradise” is plucked with the tentativeness of a kalimba, each note reverberating into a cloudy background of extended tones (MP3). Likewise, the hall-of-mirrors echoes that characterize “Cathedral (excerpt)” by Caleb Dupree originated on piano (as the liner notes state: “yes, a string instrument!”), which will surprise just about any listener (MP3).

More info, including track-specific instrumentation, at the releasing netlabel, webbedhandrecords.com. The individual tracks are stored at archive.org.

downstream / NIN MP3s: This Dub’s for You

The leader of Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, announced this week the release of a new NIN album, and it’s available entirely for free. He did so with a simple statement: “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.” The album, titled The Slip, contains 10 tracks, much of it in the mode of industrial-rock, a former niche genre that NIN helped push up the Billboard charts. The Slip follows quickly on Ghosts I-IV, a 36-track collection of instrumentals released by NIN back in March (disquiet.com, ghosts.nin.com). Though the majority of the tracks on The Slip are proper songs with vocals, three are heavily electronic instrumentals that continue the ambient effort that Ghosts I-IV initiated. The full set is available (as MP3s and in other formats) at theslip.nin.com (there are no direct links to individual tracks).

Before diving into a song that’s oddly reminiscent of the Kinks, The Slip opens on “999,999,” a minute and a half of tapered incidental noises and swelling electric pulses. Toward the end of the album, there’s a one-two lull in the form of “Corona Radiata” and “The Four of Us Are Dying.” Neither is an interlude. “Corona” is the album’s longest cut, at seven and a half minutes, and as the title suggest, it plays like the score to a documentary about the collapse of star systems. “Dying” is a low-key slocore pop instrumental, with guitars that sound like someone’s humming the melody absentmindedly, amid heavily echoed background tones and a sublimated guitar crunch.

And, as they say on infomercials, that’s not all. The entirety of The Slip has been made available for open-source, multi-track remixing at remix.nin.com, where musicians are invited to download the constituent parts of songs (encoded as individual WAV files) and to upload their mixes. This means, among other things, that you can download the songs on The Slip, remove Reznor’s serviceable but utilitarian vocals, and just listen to the instrumental versions — and, furthermore, you can reduce or excise the occasionally heavy rhythms and enjoy the album’s atmospheric touches.

downstream / Turntablism MP3 Megamix

The latest podcast from tablist.net — that’s “tablist” as in “turntablism” — collects about 20 tracks by the unsung home-studio strivers who are regulars on the tablist.net website, alongside some accomplished beatmaker players. The contents range from rhythm-heavy studio production to rap-ready instrumental hip-hop to goofy scratch-happy hijinks, leavened with the inevitable jokey soundbites.

As the tracks are mixed together seamlessly by Honna, it’s fairly easy to get lost in the sequence (a complete set list, with artist links, is provided), but so be it. In our current moment of precise, digitized synchronization, getting lost is a rare pleasure.

Tracks by Jurassic 5 vet Cut Chemist and X-ecutioners alum Rob Swift are mixed in with material by the ensemble Flowlife Bumz and the self-styled retro-futurist Airnino, just to name a few. The following link — MP3 — should lead to the hour-long file, but if not, just follow the tablist.net post through to the download page.

“I mean, records aren’t made the take that kind of a beating,” goes one of the many coy found-sound-bites dropped into Honna’s mix. Maybe not, but MP3s sure are.

downstream / 21-Year-Old Henri Chopin 7″ MP3

Courtesy of musician Steve Roden’s blog, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, a five-minute recording of Henri Chopin, the pioneering poet who passed away earlier this year. Roden has ripped to MP3 format the 7″ that accompanied the 1987 Chopin catalog published by Galerie J&J Donguy.

Roden describes the track: “made with mouth and tape, [it] resembles very much a typewriter’s frenetic/rhythmic activity. it’s a beautiful rhythmic stuttering presence that mimics the visual works.” Roden also notes that “if you listen quietly it sounds a bit like trickling water” — and, for that matter, like a pneumatic drill on concrete (MP3). Meet the late Henri Chopin, avant-garde poet and France’s premiere human beatboxer.

field notes / Image of the Week: Tales of Hofmann

This is the face — and, more to the point, those are the eyes — of Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who first synthesized LSD.

Hofmann passed away this past Monday, April 28, at the age of 102. According to the Telegraph obituary (telegraph.co.uk), which the above photo accompanied, he was “the first person in the world to experience a full-blown ‘acid trip.’” That would have been on April 19, 1943. (The photo, undated, is credited to the European Pressphoto Agency.)