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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Monthly Archives: April 2004

Gavin Bryars Interview Stream

[ April 8, 2004 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The fourth and final segment of a wide-ranging BBC interview with composer Gavin Bryars (Sinking of the Titanic) has been posted on its website (here). The occasion for the interview was provided by a formidable new Bryars work, From Egil’s Saga, which involves using technology to reproduce architectural acoustics. This portion of the conversation includes discussion of his earliest “auditory memory” (his mother playing the cello); the composer, living or dead, he’d most like a lesson from (Gesualdo, the Renaissance figure); his primo “desert island disc” (a Bill Evans Trio chamber-jazz set); and his current reading habits (largely detective fiction, plus Petrarch’s poetry, which he is setting to music). A former member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, Bryars compares a detective’s work with the research that goes into his own compositional endeavors.

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Free Remix MP3 Album

[ April 7, 2004 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Credit the Notype netlabel with a smart business plan. It’s released a free downloadable album of remixes, 16 MP3 tracks featuring Tomas Jirku, Claudia Bonarelli, A_dontigny and others being reworked by Books on Tape, Dick Richards, Infoslut and others. The set is titled The Freest of Radicals Remixed, but the trick is that the original tracks are available only on a commercial CD. So, if you want to know what in Jirku’s original track inspired the swinging, new-wave funk of Books on Tape’s “I Think I’m in Agony,” or what exactly is buried beneath the thick static that Chris Degiere uses to punctuate a remix of V.V. (“Momentous Achievements”), or whether the Bjork-like vocal on Alphacat’s dance update of Jirku (“Train Song”) was in the original — well, you’ll have to buy the The Freest of Radicals proper. (Notype at notype.com; Freest of Radicals Remixed downloadable here.)

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All Tomorrow’s Streams

[ April 6, 2004 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

John Peel, the legendary BBC radio host, is streaming audio from the recent All Tomorrow’s Parties events in the U.K. Up now is a set by Cex — and up this coming Thursday, April 8, is Kid 606. The streams are at Peel’s homepage, here. (More on ATP at atpfestival.com.)

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Casio MP3 EP

[ April 5, 2004 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Aaron McCammon is said to have recorded the entirety of his seven-track EP, APM, on a pair of inexpensive Casio machines: the RP-1 (“RP” being short for Rapman, which was aimed at kids) and the CA-110. The result is not a self-satisfied act of retro for retro’s sake, though the climax of “Night Tab” has the faux-orchestral breadth of a canned TV soundtrack. No, there’s far more here. “We Keep Our Prices Low Through Your Donations” has a lovely, trance-like spaciness. The brief “2003,” with its Pacman-ready rhythm track, features a topical Beatnik war-time newscast (“when Hummers fell through the air like rain”). And “Ohio River” has the pipsqueak pummel of goofy, nihilistic laptop punk. (Check the album out, on the kikapu.com netlabel, here. More on McCammon at plosive.net.)

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Monolake Stream (And More)

[ April 2, 2004 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The San Francisco-based Betalounge.com site is one of the oldest, longest-running webcast sources for electronic music. It has a special interest in dub, downtempo and underground hip-hop. And among the most recent treats in its streaming archive are (1) a set, dated March 13, 2004, by Monolake, the trenchant German minimal techno artist, and (2) another set, dated March 27, from an anniversary party for the Robotspeak electronica-equipment store, featuring the Broker/Dealer duo (Asphodel), Mochipet (Trouble) and others. For your listening convenience, the archive is located on the Betalounge site’s “past shows” page.

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