If digital dub is your thing, you likely already possess tracks by a handful of the musicians featured on Grow, a 15-song compilation of material drawn from the Agriculture Records catalog, featured currently on the home page of smart-music.net, which, like the Disquiet Downstream, focuses on “free & legal” downloadable music. If digital dub isn’t your bag, then Grow, which overflows with mechanistic echoes of otherwise slack drums, stringed instruments and keyboards, may just change your mind. The Brooklyn-based Agriculture label is a hotbed of contemporary dub, as represented here by such musicians as DJs Olive, Wally and Rupture, as well as Sub Dub (which features the great Raz Mesinai), David Last, Lloop, Mehmet Irdel, Nettle, Sporangia, Ladyman and Once 11. This isn’t the blunted dancehall party music that oftens passes for dub. Inevitably, the outlying tracks are the most interesting, like Irdel’s “Gut,” built from handclaps and percussion, and “Desplazados,” by the aptly named DJ Rupture, which flips the intent of the common dub reverb and uses it as a signal for sudden, disorienting splices. Olive, on “Rooster Rooster,” is more than happy to set a loop on repeat, and let it trace a mystic circle of its own. David Last’s richly sublimated melodies of “Push Pull” have been mentioned in this space previously. Sub Dub’s “Dawa Zangpo,” another favorite, is a particularly tangy treat, with muted vocal snippets that suggest a teamup of Muslimgauze and Public Enemy. The following link is an 80-plus-megabyte archive of the complete set, including cover art (link). More info on the Agriculture label at theagriculture.com.
Month: May 2005
Tangents (wordcount, science, remixes)
Quick Links: The website wordcount.org tracks the popularity of English word usage. As of today, “ambient” ranks at 22,001, “disquiet” comes in at 21053, and “electronica” doesn’t make the top 86,800, the number of words in wordcount’s database. There’s also a list of query entries, but they’re too obscene to detail here. … Schematic Records musician Richard Devine set his equipment on fire during a showcase at the recent Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, Calif. (link). (Thanks to the Warp Records email newsletter.) … Check out the Noise Shirt, “which has a microphone that measures the surrounding environments noise level and displays it as a vertical 5 step equalizer bar with the LEDs.” (Thanks to Engadget.) … Christian Doppler lost out to Charles Darwin when Los Angeles-based songwriter Timothy Sellers was selecting notable figures in science for his album 26 Scientists: Volume 1, Anning to Malthus, according to an article last Tuesday in the New York Times (“When You Wish Upon an Atom: The Songs of Science“). Sellers’ backing band, collectively known as Artichoke, includes a theremin player, the band’s only science professional (he’s an engineer). … Following on the remix projects of the Atlantic and Verve record labels, Motown has announced Motown Remixed, which features DJ Z-Trip, Jazzy Jeff, Mocean Worker and others remixing boomer classics. Several streams are available: two full tracks, Z-Trip doing the Jackson 5‘s “I Want You Back” (WMA, Real) and Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On” revisited by Paul Simpson and Miles Dalto (WMA, Real), plus a video documentary featuring some of the contributors (WMA, Quicktime, Real). More details at motownremixed.com, including additional streams and interviews. … New Releases: Among the CDs released this coming week are Meat Beat Manifesto‘s At the Center (Thirsty Ear), featuring Jack Dangers, Dave King (drums), Peter Gordon (flute) and Craig Taborn (various keyboards, including grand piano and Hammond B3), and Four Tet‘s Everything Ecstatic (Domino). More new releases at brainwashed.com/releases. … Quote of the Week: “[W]hat we’ve done has always somewhat depended on whatever technology was around at the time.” That’s Brian Eno speaking to the St. Petersburg Times (the one in Russia) about his work with Robert Fripp (“Another Day with Eno“). The article focuses on his collaboration with Algerian-born, Paris-based singer Rachid Taha, and mentions that Eno’s been working with Paul Simon.
Ian Fleming Remix MP3
Perhaps taking a cue from ccmixter.org‘s recent Wired magazine sampling competition, the folks managing the remix contest based on the contents of Penguin audiobooks (see the May 11 Disquiet Downstream entry for more info) have been listing their own favorites as the entries have streamed in. Among them is “Agent Oh” by Richard Baker, who works backward from a splatter of nonsense verbiage to a clearly spoken description that discloses the source material: a reading from Ian Fleming‘s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. It’s shaken, stirred and splintered, with echoes of Prefuse 73, and it develops its own syllabic funk before being layered atop a lounge-friendly dance track (MP3 here). More info at penguinremixed.co.uk.
Fripp-Eno-Hassell Podcast MP3
While lawyers sort out the legality of radio stations making copyright-protected music available for free download, the podcast-ization of FM proceeds apace. Today’s example: a May 18 program from the Australian radio show Ultima Thule, featuring material from what it describes as the “Fripp-Eno-Hassell creative nexus.” This means solo work by Brian Eno (much of it unhelpfully cited on the show’s playlist, available as a PDF file, as originating on the Eno instrumental box set, which was culled from various Eno albums), and tracks by Eno with Robert Fripp (from their recent reunion CD, Equatorial Stars, on which Fripp’s guitar is far more recognizable as guitar than it was in their earlier collaborations, like Evening Star and No Pussyfooting) and by Eno with trumpeter Jon Hassell (including the opening track, from their Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics recording). So, more to the point: Eno is the nexus. You can download the MP3 directly here, and subscribe to the Ultima Thule podcast here. Compressed at AM-quality 56kbps, the 36-megabyte file is an hour and a half long.
Dub-cast MP3
Some call it a “podcast,” while others simply call it a very large MP3 file. In either case, brainwashed.com’s latest podcast (file and, by extension, date: podcast050511.mp3), weighing in at almost 100 megabytes, contains a sequence of tracks by musicians and record labels whose websites are hosted at brainwashed.com. They’ve dubbed this entry the “dubcast” edition, because it focuses on music influenced by dub, including songs by the Tear Garden, Twilight Circus, Dome, Tortoise, Strategy, Greater Than One, Bomb the Bass, Meat Beat Manifesto, Sandoz, Annie Anxiety and Out Hud. The one long file is set up radio-broadcast style, with spoken intros and outros for the songs, and it includes the occasional slice of dead air generally associated with college FM broadcasts, but it’s all good stuff. These aren’t new songs, necessarily; the Tortoise entry, for example, “Goriri,” dates back to the milestone Macro Dub Infection compilation, now a decade old. The superb Greater Than One’s thunder’n’rain-laced “Dub Killer,” likewise, dates from 1990. The whole thing clocks in at a little over an hour. More info at brainwashed.com/podcast. Because they often contain previously unreleased music, these brainwashed podcasts are worth keeping an ear on.