downstream / Trip-Hop from Lenin’s Birthplace (MP3s)
68 from the Russian duo Abstracode is dense with swaggery rhythms, downtempo pacing, and dramatic little sonic gestures. Hailing from Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk, the duo of Mikhail Gurov and Denis Borisov manage to produce instrumentals that evidence no desire for a vocalist to claim them. Most hip-hop instrumentals can sound like short silent films in search of an actor. That’s not the case here. Perhaps the EP’s true keeper, “Deagital” is seriously blunted, its beat a study in percussive molasses (MP3). And “Eight” is the most cinematic of the batch, with piano and strings mixed in with the steamdriver-in-the-distance pounding (MP3).
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downstream / Chris Watson at the End of the World (MP3)
After some snow crunching, and a discernibly heavy breath, a voice emerges from the near silence: “This is certainly the remotest landscape I have ever been recording in.” The speaker is one Chris Watson (pictured above), long ago a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, and for many years one of the foremost field recordists, capturing audio from around the globe (MP3). “I’m about 78 degrees south,” he continues, “on this deep black tongue of lava and pumice, surrounded by ice and snow. This is Cape Evans on Ross Island in the Antarctic. And I’m just surrounded by the most remarkable, stunning, and daunting views I have ever seen, under this beautiful bright blue sky with a piercing sun. It’s 4pm. The sun’s not going to set. It’s not going to set for another two or three months.”
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Watson was in the Antarctic in January to record sounds for a David Attenborough television series titled The Frozen Planet. He collected some of this audio, along with his own commentary, for a podcast as part of the Touch Radio series. Reflecting on previous voyagers to this remote region, he notes, “The interesting thing is, unlike I guess virtually every other place on the planet, the soundscape here will have remained the same.”
Some of the most compelling sounds are those of the “creaking and groaning” (his words) of the ice he recorded with hydrophones, and they resemble whiny rodents under foot.
But in the end, the real aural experience of the South Pole is silence. As Watson reports, “And then the quietness — a really difficult place to record. There are some Antarctic skuas on a small freshwater pool of melted snow down the slope which I occasionally hear, but up here there is nothing else, maybe a two- or three-kilometer breeze just carrying over this slope, but apart from that, this is probably as quiet as it gets on this planet.”
One note of caution: after about 18 minutes, the sound of a whale surfacing breaks in with the surprise and force of a flare gun. The full recording is approximately 50 minutes in length.
More photos and other information at touchradio.org.uk. Photos by Watson and Jason Roberts. More on Attenborough’s series at bbc.co.uk.
field notes / Image of the Week: Greg Pond’s Vantage
The group show that closed yesterday at the Vancouver, Washington, art gallery Archer was titled Vantage, and it focused on “perspective – visually, contextually, and perceptually,” according to its brief description at the gallery’s website, at clark.edu. Among the pieces in the exhibit was Greg Pond’s interactive sound sculpture “That Intricate Never,” as shown in this detail of a photo from Pond’s own site, gregpond.blogspot.com:
Writes Jeff Jahn of the piece at the great Portland art blog portlandart.net:
Whereas, Tennessean Greg Pond’s sound sculpture, “That Intricate Never”, consist of two condenser mics and an octagonal array of speakers on a stand plus some other hardware in a fur trimmed wooden box. Here the piece is actually monitoring the sounds the gallery visitors make as they walk about. For example, a sharp clap of the hands was digitally reversed and rebroadcast 30-40 seconds after the intial event. It produces the oddly dystopian feeling of being monitored. A familiar feeling these days.
The description on the Archer Gallery site is as follows:
Greg Pond’s (Sewanee, Tennessee) sculpture shapes the ambient sound of the exhibition using constructed objects and the architecture of the building itself by reflecting, obstructing, amplifying, or attenuating certain sounds depending on their wavelength and volume. Pure Data, an open source programming environment, processes sounds and projects them back through speakers, expanding and compressing the sense of space and altering our experience of the place.
Here’s to hoping that Pond’s piece gets shown more widely in the near future.
A character in the opening chapter of Don DeLillo’s new novella, Point Omega (published this past Tuesday, February 2, in the U.S.), finds himself in a gallery that is showing a work of art by Douglas Gordon. The work is Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993). Gordon took the Alfred Hitchcock classic (which turns 50 this year), and slows it down so that it takes 24 hours to watch. The narrator of the novel observes the man in the gallery:
He walked backwards looking, always, at the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without sound. It had to be silent. It had to engage the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions, the things h supposes and presumes and takes for granted.
This is the DeLillo of the opening of Underworld, in which a baseball game is both compressed to the length of a single chapter, and yet suspended so that instances can be observed from all angles. It is the DeLillo of the under-appreciated Cosmopolis, in which crosstown traffic causes the book and its main character’s life to slow to a crawl. And it’s the DeLillo of White Noise, in which a single tragic event causes time to seem to stop for all afflicted.
It’s a DeLillo focused on the nature of time, and what art can teach us about its mechanisms. And it’s DeLillo himself, faced with a work of visual art — video that actively, consciously, dispenses with its audio component — that accomplishes his own philosophical and creative goals in a manner that is both elegant and almost impossible to fully consume, let alone comprehend.
More on DeLillo and Point Omega at the excellent ongoing dedicated-author site perival.com/delillo. (The covers at the top of this post art of the American, left, and British hardcover editions.) Still image below of an installation of 24 Hour Psycho, from the site rhizome.org, which links to two interview segments with artist Gordon.
downstream / Penultimate Avant-Hop Track from WHY?Arcka (MP3)
Philly-based avant-hop producer WHY?Arcka hit the penultimate this week: the 25th entry in his Exhibits A-Z series of tightly wound, conceptually circumscribed, left-field funky remixes. Each cut takes small slivers of existing songs and refashions them into sonic trinkets. The samples he selects are too purposefully limited to be radio-friendly, and too broad to fit into the abstract world of granular synthesis. WHY?Arcka (born Shawn Kelly) has, in the process of cutting up other people’s music, also fashioned his own special place in the world of sonic appropriation.
In the case of “Exhibit Y: Jones’ Wars: Episodes 1-3,” the source material appears to be rooted in the Billy Paul r&b classic “Me and Mrs. Jones,” though Kelly never fully exposes his tools. What he does, however, is stretch vowels until their internal waveforms become new melodies, crisscross string sections until they take on slasher-film intensity, and knit new beats from micro-filaments of the original.
Get the full set at arckatron.bandcamp.com. The final track in the series, “Exhibit Z,” should be out shortly.
Maybe the equation is this simple: SoundCloud.com = Twitter.com + BandCamp.com. But such cursory Web 2.0 mathematics doesn’t do justice to the resulting combination.
Thanks to a clean and smoothly functioning mix of friend-collecting, list-making, track-favoriting, and general music-uploading (and -downloading, including the ability to charge/pay for tracks), not to mention -listening, the SoundCloud music community has rapidly become a highly active international hub, especially when it comes to electronic music. One thing the Internet has yet to perfect is music collaboration, and given its clean engineering and emphasis on communal activity, if any site is going to become the Google Docs of music (especially in terms of share docs), it might very well be SoundCloud. And perhaps SoundCloud will expand further still, moving beyond its spartan focus and embrace video in addition to audio.
Then, musicians like Michel Banabila will have a field day. That transition came to mind while listening to “Harbour set (excerpt),” Banabila’s nine-minute trip through an evocative industrial sonic environment. The track moves expertly from a hazy atmospheric opening through a head-nodding, pneumatic-drills-on-pause middle, to an extended fade, but as it turns out, the audio is just part of the overall scenario.
Banabila’s piece is the audio to a collaboration with video artist Geert Mul — with visuals, such as the one below, available at a flickr.com, a site from which SoundCloud.com clearly drew information-architecture inspiration.
68 from the Russian duo Abstracode is dense with swaggery rhythms, downtempo pacing, and dramatic little sonic gestures. Hailing from Lenin’s birthplace, Ulyanovsk, the duo of Mikhail Gurov and Denis Borisov manage to produce instrumentals that evidence no desire for a vocalist to claim them. Most hip-hop instrumentals can sound like short silent films in search of an actor. That’s not the case here. Perhaps the EP’s true keeper, “Deagital” is seriously blunted, its beat a study in percussive molasses (MP3). And “Eight” is the most cinematic of the batch, with piano and strings mixed in with the steamdriver-in-the-distance pounding (MP3).
