Month: August 2005

Tangents (synaesthesia, ragas, Zvonar)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links and News: (1) The Hirshhorn Museum has posted a website to complement its current Visual Music exhibit (link), with soundclips from Olivier Messiaen and Alexander Scriabin, and images representing abstract painting, color organs, film, light shows and installation art. … (2) Work by Bainbridge Bishop is not included in the Visual Music exhibit, but he was an early theorist on the relation between color and sound. A short pamphlet he published on the subject in 1893, A Souvenir of the Color Organ, with Some Suggestions in Regard to the Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, is available as a free download in PDF form (link) from rhythmiclight.com. (The band Growing took the title of its recent Kranky Records album, The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, from Bishop’s essay.) … (3) Composer Stella Sung worked with sound designer David Wallace to produce a background-music environment for the M.C. Escher exhibit showing at the Orlando Museum of Art through October 30 (link). … (4) Other Minds Records announced in its email newsletter that it will release in 2007 The Complete Ragas of John Cage, thanks to a $12K grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Working on the project are Italian vocalist Amelia Cuni, percussionist Federico Sanesi and electronic composer Werner Durand. A world premiere is scheduled for the MerzMusik Festival in Berlin. … (5, 6) Via gizmodo.com, drum machines for the PlayStation Portable (link) and an “optical theremin toilet” (link). … (7) Speaking of which, a list of the “leading ladies of music of the air” (createdigitalmusic.com). … (8) Famed music technologist Bob Moog is being treated for a brain tumor. His family is maintaining a journal online (link). … (9) Why does the copy protection on my store-bought Who Is Mike Jones CD keep it from playing on my car stereo? Wasn’t it recorded with the intention of being played in cars? Maybe my 10-year-old Honda isn’t “street” enough for it.

… Good Reads: (1) Sound designers explain what they do, in BackStage magazine (link). “Music or sounds may comment on the last scene and set the tone for the one that’s coming up,” says musician David Van Tieghem, one of several sound designers interviewed for the piece. … (2) Scroll down to the July 26 entry on the news page at Matmos‘s website (brainwashed.com/matmos) for an overview of what they did on their summer vacation, complete with photos.

… Select New Releases: (1) Anticon Records regular Alias recorded the lovingly introspective electronic hodgepodge of Lillian with his younger brother, Ehren, who’s still in his teens (Anticon); the album is named for their grandmother. … (2) Steve Roach‘s two-CD ethno-ambient Dreamtime Return has been remastered (Projekt), plus Roach has two new albums: New Life Dreaming, which he has said was inspired by the re-mastering process, and Possible Planet, a textural album for which he ditched his computers, MIDI and keyboards entirely (both Timeroom Editions). … (3) The Japanese pair of funk-glitchy producer Aoki Takamasa and ingenue vocalist Tujiko Noriko have teamed for 28 (FatCat). The title is their shared current age. … (4) Venetian Snares (aka Aaron Funk) has a new full-length, Meathole, perhaps his hardest post-drum’n’bass set yet (Planet Mu). … (5) Live hip-hop band Breakestra‘s Family Rap 12″ (Ubiquity) includes an instrumental track and a Cut Chemist edit. … (6) The Kallikak Family‘s May 23rd 2007 (Tell-All) includes noise and field recordings. … (7) Mossyrock‘s The Zero to One Sessions mix loungey, often Herb Alpert-ish folk-pop with electronic touches (nice+smooth) … (8) Nybbl (aka Tim Quackenbush) releases The Path from a Point Is in the Shape of a Heart (Noise Factory) … (9) Jackson‘s “Rock On” (Warp) is expertly jerky and sample-laden.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) “Kirilian Auras,” off The Psychic Nature of Being (Kranky) by Lichens, aka Robert Lowe (of 90 Day Men, TV on the Radio and the Castanets), builds from low-sung syllables to embrace slow, gritty feedback and archaic acoustic guitar phrases. … (2) That untitled reworking of Seamus Cater‘s chromatic harmonica by Roddy Schrock (MP3) is the top Disquiet Downstream entry from last week (full entry here). .. (3) Bill Frisell credits “loops” right alongside his guitar on the back cover of his new live album, East/West (Nonesuch). While nothing here gets as abstract as on Smash and Scatteration, his ancient (well, 1984) collaboration with Vernon Reid, he really lets the digitally enabled music take over on a sweet cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The album’s due out this coming Tuesday, August 23.

… Quote of the Week: “What is this clicky stuff?” Text displayed as part of a background visual for a performance by the Hub, six composers improvising over a computer network on August 20, the third night of the sixth annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. The Hub that evening consisted of John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone and Mark Trayle.

… R.I.P.: Yesterday, while attending the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, I learned that Richard Zvonar had passed away. Zvonar was an accomplished musician and artist based out of Los Angeles. I never met him in person, but I helped edit a profile he wrote about composer Bebe Baron, best known for her work with her husband, Louis, on the soundtrack for the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet. The piece appeared in the third issue of e/i magazine, which was published last year. Zvonar and I spent numerous phone calls talking about the analog roots of Information Age culture, and with each successive conversation I learned more and more about his extensive career. What he didn’t dwell on was the cancer he’d been fighting for years. When the Baron piece was complete, he said his next proposed article, on composer Carl Stone, would have to be put on hold until he regained his strength. Richard Zvonar passed away on August 3. … Doug Wyatt, of Mother Mallard and Red Letter, reminisces on his website (sonosphere.com). Keith Snyder, who along with Zvonar was a member of the band Cosmic Debris, tributes Zvonar on his web journal (link), which includes a 10-minute MP3 of them improvising. … More info at zvonar.com.

Germanic Soundscape MP3 Album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In Traum (“traum” meaning “dream”), by the German act Seetyca, could very well take as its title the name of the netlabel that released it: Dark Winter. It’s nine tracks of near-lifeless, emotionally and physically remote soundscapes. Or is it? The closing piece, “Vielleicht Erlischt das Licht” (roughly, in English, “Perhaps the Light Expires”), shares with the hour-long album as a whole the same hovering clouds of white noise, and the nearly subaural rumblings of deep bass-line activity that root everything here. But it also could be heard as a kind of heavenly choir, albeit not one that brings to the mind’s eye images of sun-split heavens and rotund angels. The sense of awe is too intense, too existential, to allow easy resolution into joy. That confliction, along with an ever-present flicker of digital noises throughout “Vielleicht Erlischt das Licht,” makes it more than just an exercise in sonic despair. Most of the tracks do sound like field recordings from icy and underpopulated regions, but some have metallic touches that suggest interior spaces, like “Im Travergange,” and occasionally voices can be heard, though only as transmuted sonic elements. Get the full set at darkwinter.com.

Kettel Keys’n’Beats MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When is a light bit of studio-concocted radio funk-jazz more than that? Well, when it opens with a lo-fi heavenly choir, only to cut off the beatific vocalists unceremoniously. And when it shuffles by with a digital beat that, despite a steady stream of Herbie Hancock-style keyboard parts, can’t take three steps in a row without shifting about peculiarly, as if it’s continuously rethinking its metrical allegiances. And when it takes those Hancock-isms and layers them one or two, maybe three, deeper than he’s likely to venture. What is this confection? The latest entry from the kracfive.com collective’s monthly MP3 rotor: “One Foggy Ear” (MP3), credited to Kettel. The kracfive site, by the way, was recently re-designed and streamlined.

Staunch Austrian MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When Rifa, on Elevator Monkey (Prison Soup, a French netlabel), isn’t channeling Tom Waits (“Penetrate”), or ramming a disco chestnut through a carton of cigarettes disguised as a granular synthesizer (“Don’t Rush”), it makes for some bracing electronic music. “Timewarp” presents a uniquely staunch take on dub, with a beat that’s little more than a struck match and a compulsory echo that could be approximated with an old coffee can. Rifa humanizes the environs on “Timewarp” with a breathy trip-hop diva, and does the same on “M1,” but that track has a more elegantly rattled rhythm, slipping up on occasion in a manner too low key to be truly called glitch. “Tapemeserios” is of a piece with those tracks, but it also sounds like it was recorded on the Orient Express, with a contact microphone glued to the undercarriage; it’s both fuller and noisier. And then there’s “Bing1,” the album’s finest track, which blends in some hip-hop, but also messes with the rhythms as if the whole composition had been laid on a shifting bed of ball bearings. Rifa is described by Prison Soup as an Austrian musician and a member of a collective called Loop Logo. Download the full Elevator Monkey set for free at prisonsoup.com. More info on Rifa, albeit in German, at looplogo.com.

Postscript: This brief write-up originally had incorrectly listed the title of “Bing1” as “Bling1” and drawn conclusions about its hip-hop flavor from said misreading. Apologies for the error.

Sounds of Thunder MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What is it about high technology that makes everyone want to go back to nature? The Freesound Project (freesound.iua.upf.edu) is a massive public open-source file-trading database of sounds, from screams to machine noise to instrument samples, from trains to birds to the kitchen sink (and fork, and knife, and plate). It’s like a field-recording wonderland, and largely a high-fidelity one, to boot. And as of this typing, the top 10 most downloaded files (in the last week) are all either rain or thunder (that’s out of some 300,000-plus downloads since the site launched, back in mid-May of this year).

Well, why fight what’s popular? Check out what is, for the moment, the most downloaded of those thunder sounds, contributed by a Washington, D.C.-based audio engineer whose file uploads are tagged “RHumphries.” The file (link) is a clear tape of distant thunder, all sharp crackle and resulting drone and echo, heard through a scrim of light precipitation. Each Freesound file’s page includes a waveform image and a compressed preview version of the file. The compressed thunder track is just 1,545KB, but the uncompressed file is almost 40MB. Judging by the increasing distance between the thunder strikes clearly visible in the waveform, the storm is headed away.

Of course, Mother Nature is just one of Freesound’s many contributors. Head over to the site’s “Tags” page, in which the size of the 150 most popular tags’ typeface approximates their relative popularity, and you’ll see everything from “atari,” “chime” and “city” (tiny), “guitar,” “sax” and “water” (medium), “noise,” “drumloop” and, yes, “ambient” (large).