Quick Links: (1) Charles Babbage would be proud. Check out the video documentation of a symphonic performance in Brighton, U.K., last month that involved a 16-ton steam engine and several laptop computers (link). The composer, Stuart Smith, shares details in this post. (Via createdigitalmusic.com.) … (2) Via the Music Thing blog (link), DJ Aptem (or DJ Artyom, via boingboing.net) is a Russian gearhead who built his own cassette-based DJ system. The sound of the variable-speed tape (“curvature,” as Artyom puts it) is a pleasing corollary to the skipping CD and scratched LP. There’s a 12-track mix on his site (link). … (3) Ironically, Aptem/Artyom’s lo-tech achievement circulated widely the same week that the BBC reported (link) on the diminishing sales of cassette tapes. (Via engadget.com, which mentions that U.K. cassette sales have dropped to 900 thousand, from 83 million in 1989, but neglects to note that the same BBC article says that combined sales in Turkey and India equal almost 170 million.) … (4) Check out the wooden porch swing that doubles as a xylophone, at musicalfurnishings.com (via i4u.com). … (5) Now, that’s slow. We’re 1/200th of the way through Jem Finer‘s 1,000-year-long music project, Longplayer (via Andrew Jaffe‘s Leaves on the Line blog). If you’re near London Bridge, you can participate in a related “slow walk” this coming Tuesday, June 31 (slowwalk.org). And, yes, that’s the same Jem Finer who used to be in the Pogues; heck, wasn’t Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook in the Housemartins before he went big beat? … (6) Soundtrack.net interviews video-game composer Jesper Kyd (who wrote the in-game portions of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory that Amon Tobin didn’t write) on the transition to working in film and television. … (7) Thanks to makezine.com, learn to record the sighs (and more) emitted by your Tamagotchi. … (8) And if you’re in Long Beach, Calif., on June 25 or 26, there’s an innovative SoundWalk event being held there. More info at soundwalk.org (no relation to slowwalk.org, presumably). … New Releases: New releases this week include (1) Nice Nice‘s EP Yesss!, which features remixes by dj/Rupture, Caural and Stars as Eyes (Audraglint), and (2) the DVD of The Jacket, with a score by Brian Eno. … More new-release info at brainwashed.com/releases and videoeta.com. … Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) A new 12″ off the State of the Arts (Decon) album from rapper Afu-ra (not to be confused with Japanese human-beatboxer Afra) includes two instrumentals: the excellent, DJ Premier-produced “Sucka Free,” which lays a Hitchcockian bug buzz under a thick lope of electric bass, and little sirens that suggest early Public Enemy and a goof on techno, plus the PF Cuttin-produced “Poisonous Taoist,” which is a bit of lightly reworked afrobeat. Info at afu-ra.com. … (2) Prefuse 73‘s Surrounded by Silence (Warp), released a few months ago, was uneven, its various vocalists (Aesop Rock, Ghostface, Kazu) not necessarily complementing each other. There are great tracks on it, in particular the loungey gadgetry of “Pastel Assassins,” the chaotic pieces recorded with Tyondai Braxton (“TV Versus Detchibe,” “Mantra”) and by far the album’s standout: the mashed up hillbilly funk of “Pagina Dos,” featuring the Books. Speaking of which, “Pagina Dos” and seven other tracks make up the superb new Prefuse 73 Reads the Books release (also on Warp), which is packed with his digital futzing with the group’s folksy raw goods. … (3) The trio of recent William Basinksi reissues (all unnecessarily barren in their packaging) are alike only in that their fluid ambience, like still waters, disguises its density and energy with grace. There are sample audiostreams at aquariusrecords.org: two from Melancholia (one, two), on which string instruments echo the work of Gavin Bryars, and one each from Water Music I and Water Music II. … Good Reads: (1) Composer and critic Kyle Gann reviews a CD on his PostClassic blog (link), which wouldn’t be news, except that the CD is his own, Long Night (Cold Blue), which he says borrows from Morton Feldman, Harold Budd, Terry Riley and Brian Eno (“this too is another Eno-esque touch: the isolated melodic figure as self-evident sonic icon, which Gann attempts to integrate into a structure more ambitious than Eno’s ambient vignettes”). … (2) From telegraph.co.uk, an overview of sound art (June 15). … Quote(s) of the Week: A new Brian Eno album (Another Day on Earth, out last week) means new Brian Eno interviews, conversation being one of his many art forms: (1) “lyrics are the only thing to do with music that haven’t been made easier technically” (telegraph.co.uk, June 16); (2) “I started to notice that you could buy keyboards of such complexity that you basically press one note on them and you’ve got a career as an ambient artist. I thought, there doesn’t seem much challenge in that any longer” (guardian.co.uk, June 7); (3) “I’ve spent a long time doing instrumental music but as the technology has got more advanced, it has become less and less interesting to me” (news.scotsman.com, June 5). Perhaps he should hang out with that cassette-tape DJ, Aptem/Artyom, next time he’s in Russia.
Month: June 2005
Live Greg Davis MP3
A half-hour live performance by musician Greg Davis is up on the website of Kranky Records, which released his Somnia album late last year. It’s the most recent in Kranky’s ongoing series of free MP3s. Recorded at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shortly after Somnia hit record stores, the set opens with rough, natural sounds, like pebbles being tossed across a table, small sticks being snapped, and water being slopped about. Layers of this mess eventually overlap, gaining a rhythmic currency, passing through a transition of relative chaos, and then melting into a haze that resembles the dronework that defined much of Somnia.
There are none of the literalist folkloric elements that defined Davis’ best known albums, the guitar-based Arbor (2002) and the more folk-revival-ish (folk-revival-revival-ish?) Curling Pond Woods (2004), both of which came out on the Carpark label. In essence, the Kranky concert (MP3) tracks the development of terse sounds into mellifluous ones, of harsh, tight little bursts of individual noise into long, held notes. It also displays the differences between the commingling of short sounds and of long ones, the difference between a jumble of action and the silken grace of horizontal motion.
Judging by the archive of performance dates housed at the website of the small label that Davis operates, autumnrecords.net, this concert occurred on November 18, 2004. Listeners intrigued by the set should check out Yearlong, a new live album he and Keith Fullerton Whitman have out on Carpark; it documents their 2001-2002 tour. More info at kranky.net and carparkrecords.com.
Two New Eno Downloads
So, Brian Eno, studio-as-instrument innovator, has a new album out, Another Day on Earth (Hannibal/Rykodisc). It’s his first full-length song-form album since his cantankerous collaboration with John Cale on Wrong Way Up, back in 1990. What little difference the time makes. It’s still Eno, still ambivalently axiomatic in his lyrics, half sung and half spoken, his voice a kind of neutral tone seemingly effortlessly in tune with his imagination, itself a kind of mantra engine. Ryko is promoting the album with two “podcasts,” which as always means little more than extended free downloads, in this case a 10-minute montage of portions of the album (MP3) and a 20-minute conversation about the recording with Danny Hillis (MP3), both the men being board members of the Long Now Foundation (more info at longnow.org). More info on the new record at rykodisc.com and anotherdayonearth.com.
Live Noise Netlabel Release
Waldchengarten is the first act to get a release entirely to itself on the Noisejihad netlabel, based at noisejihad.dk/netlabel. Noisejihad releases free downloads of live concerts, and previous entries in its series have paired the likes of Zbigniew Karkowski and Fl/ex’0, and Ryfylke and Danny Kreutzfeldt. The twofers have helped because noise is often so abstract and amusical (not that all Noisejihad albums have dispensed with rhythm) that having two sounds sit side by side puts each of them in some sort of context. Fitting, thus, that Waldchengarten’s 40-minute industrial ambient sprawl gets aural space to itself, because any such pairing or context might have risked diminishing its breadth, its magnitude, its sonic omniscience. Waldchengarten’s set, recorded live on May 26 at in Aarhus C, Denmark, moves from stage to stage like stark, emotionally neutral sound-design set pieces in some wasteland of a narrative, from suffering welps of static, to alien atmospheres washed on occasion by whisps of wind, to locked-down tunnels pummeled by unseen forces. More on Waldchengarten at waldchengarten.dk.
Space Improv MP3s
The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based record label Colour Sounds specializes, as it bills itself, in “avant, out, psych, improv and other interesting recorded musics.” The “Listen” page on its website, vorg.net/csr, features numerous excerpts, live tracks and otherwise unreleased MP3s, and a good point of origin into the label’s sound jungle is with the Beets. That’s the duo of John Dalessi and Adam Kriney, whose combined tools include “synthesizer, electronics, 4-track w/ cassettes” and “voice electronics” (a comma may or may not be intended to appear between “voice” and “electronics”). A live Beets recording, titled “Don’t Be Afraid of the Ghost That Haunts You,” is a thrift-store hodgepodge of drone-like elements that eventually find a kind of unison, which then takes its time coming apart; if there’s a tension in the music, it’s how it approaches but never really embraces the kind of epiphany that’s so common in drone-rock (MP3). A couple more examples of the Beets are housed on its “Artists” page on the Colour Sounds website, and particularly recommended is an edit of “Bird of Prey … Further Envelops You” off their Say Yes CD-R. It adds earthly elements like chimes and cymbals to an otherworldly, undulating sound, but manages to never touch the ground (MP3). That chimes and cymbals, which are usually elements of color in a drummer’s kit, are the most worldly sounds here says something about how far out the Beets like to wander.