Disquiet Junto: Musician Invite: Join Communal Creative Restraint Group • Projects 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Projects: Instagr/am/bient • LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical
How To: Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud (Disquiet & Disquiet Junto), Facebook

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

Monthly Archives: November 2005

Tangents (XPC, 44, ZZ)

[ November 13, 2005 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) The big news in digital music this week was a piece of aggressive copy-protection software called XPC included on select Sony CDs. It drew such widespread and quick negative publicity that the label promptly put the program on hiatus. None of the 20-odd CDs reportedly sporting the software were notably electronic, but if you dig the Bad Plus, Trey Anastasio or Dexter Gordon, or like to keep tabs on Rick Rubin, who produced the new Neil Diamond album, check out the list of affected CDs (eff.org). … (2) Brian Eno is selling a bunch of his old gear at spheremusic.com (via musicthing.blogspot.com, which has more info on the items). … (3) Google’s advanced search (google.com/advanced_search) now has a “Usage Rights” pull down, which aids in searching for netlabel and other artist-sanctioned MP3 downloads, among other things (via google.blogspace.com). … (4) Snapshots of an Etch-a-Sketch music machine on flickr.com (via makezine.org).

… Select New Releases: A few releases of note this coming week: (1) Brian Eno‘s 14 Video Paintings DVD (Rykodisc) contains two video works, “Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan” and “Thursday Afternoon.” According to Ryko, “The music for ‘Thursday Afternoon’ is a different version than what appears on Eno’s album of the same name, while the music that accompanies ‘Mistaken Memories’ comes from two of his acclaimed ambient albums (On Land and Music for Airports) and features an unreleased track.” … (2) Screaming Masterpiece is the name of a new documentary about the Icelandic music scene, featuring Bjork, the Sugarcubes, Sigur Ros, Mum, Bang Gang, Mugison and Minus (screamingmasterpiece.com), soundtrack due on the One Little Indian label. … (3) Wim Mertens and Glenn Branca‘s The Belly of an Architect soundtrack, reissued (LTM). … (4) Aoki Takamasa and Tujiko Noriko team up for 28 (FatCat).

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) It may take a village to raise a child, but in the case of the Village Orchestra‘s Et in Arcadia Ego (Highpoint Lowlife), it’s a community of one. What sounds like an ersatz collective is, in fact, a single person: Ruaridh Law, one third of the electronic act the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. Law’s first full-length solo album on Highpoint, Et in Arcadia Ego is a feat of glistening epiphanies and flash-forward road music. At its best, it is everything one might attribute to Tangerine Dream on a generous day, and more. … (2) So much beat-oriented music sticks to a set metrical mode that, despite all the evident frenetic activity, it’s really going nowhere fast. Sickboy‘s Into Oblivion (Mirex) ventures where far too few beat-based albums dare: mixing it up every few bars, which keeps your ears, not to mention your feet, guessing. … (3) The Disquiet Downstream MP3 download of the week is Peter Koniuto‘s exercise in space music for the Stasisfield netlabel, Past Andromeda (link).

… Quote of the Week: “The novelty of new gear helps to lubricate those pitfalls.” That’s Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top guitarist, author of Rock & Roll Gearhead) speaking to the New York Times on November 10 (link).

[ Topics: , , / Leave a comment ]

Kitchen Music MP3s

[ November 11, 2005 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

This may or may not be what Erik Satie had in mind when he talked of a music that went well with the sound of silverware at a dinner party, but among the more recent field-recording remixes at the Freesound project (freesound.iua.upf.edu) is a one-second snippet (MP3) recorded by Freesound contributor harri (“taken from a random sampled tour of my kitchen with a microphone”), and a 25-second extrapolation thereof (MP3) that transforms the quotidian beat into an addictive rhythm (and makes the term “industrial house” literal). If those MP3 links don’t function, head over to the Freesound site’s remix page and look for harri’s entries “35_draw_close.mp3″ and “kitchen_beat_1_90bpm.mp3″ (link).

[ Topics: , , / Leave a comment ]

French Radio @ Luggage Store, San Francisco

[ November 11, 2005 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

When abstract music is performed live in an art gallery, the art can’t help but lend form to what is heard. When the trio French Radio played at the Luggage Store Gallery on November 10, the art didn’t just lend form; it provided commentary. The current exhibit at the gallery is all text-based: words scrawled on the walls, emblazoned like commercial signage, framed like art, dangling like mobiles. While French Radio played, words surrounded the group. Above them was written the following, in the same sort of bubbly script that might trumpet the weekly special at a corner store: “Every aesthetic detail considered, determined, emphatic and at the same time oddly diffuse.” Though attributed to the March 2005 issue of the magazine Artforum, it could easily apply to what French Radio accomplish. The trio consists of Bruce Anderson (of MX80) on guitar, James Kaiser (aka Petit Mal) on bowed bicycle wheel, and Andrew Way (a partner with Kaiser in the group NF Orchest) on turntable and microphone, all three of them processing those sounds until they become quite removed from their sources.

At times the noise the group produced sounded of a piece, just one enormous and sad whale song, a stunning kind of singularity that few improvising ensembles manage to achieve. At others the three men’s individual contributions to the whole grew more distinct: a shuddering guitar chord, a primordial foam of tone, a rich static of verbal cues. Kaiser wrenched deep notes from his unlikely instrument, a microphone stuck in the guitar wheel’s spokes like a dirty daffodil. Way alternately spun a cheap turntable by hand and uttered into his mic, directing the signals through a variety of processors that gave him the broadest range of the evening’s performers. Standing between them, Anderson struck a spartan figure.

The evening didn’t go off without a hitch. The start was delayed while Anderson employed the scientific method to determine which of his many foot pedals was impeding the route of his guitar’s output, and Way later dropped a large Heineken and risked saturating his equipment.

The night’s second act had only just arrived from L.A. as the half-hour improvisation came to a close, so French Trio performed a short encore in which Anderson’s guitar adhered to a more recognizable form. He played a mournful series of chords that suggested the most downtrodden country music, all the while Kaiser and Way framing it with a thick aura. Toward the close, Anderson set a fragment of a chord to loop in one of his many tools, drawing attention to the stark divide between the circular motion of his strumming and the mathematical precision of a loop. The coldness of that loop emphasized the naturalness of what had preceded it.

[ Topic: / Leave a comment ]

Nudge MP3

[ November 10, 2005 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The latest free download from the Kranky label is a live version of Nudge‘s “No Come Back,” the closing track off the group’s Cahced album, released earlier this year (MP3). Consisting of Brian Foote, Paul Dickow and Honey Owens, Nudge have produced something so majestically subdued that it sounds like it consists entirely of splices, its life blood the stuff between the samples and triggers, when bits of sound are extruded until they are mere suggestion. Coy beats linger long enough to trip you up, flanges rise like distant sirens, voices whisper just beyond the realm of intelligibility, the whole thing daring your ear to bring it into focus, and your foot to locate a downbeat. More info at kranky.net.

[ Topic: / Leave a comment ]

Underworld MP3s

[ November 9, 2005 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Underworld have come out from under. Today the duo, which brought conceptual restraint and a refined design sensibility to techno (or perhaps it’s vice-versa?) on such fine recordings as Beaucoup Fish and Dubnobasswithmyheadman, surfaced with a new retail download, “Lovely Broken Thing,” available from their website, underworldlive.com. The track comes packaged, in the virtual sense, with an HTML gallery of some 177 photographs, plus a PDF file that serves as the cover artwork. The track is seven new songs sewn together, on one of which, “Peggy Sussed,” Karl Hyde’s rant sounds like nothing so much as an electronicized outtake by John Lennon circa Shaved Fish. (Another track title, “Lenny Penne,” also brings the Beatles to mind, even if the music — a hard, remote, locomotive beat — doesn’t.) Membership having its privileges, one needn’t make a purchase to hear new Underworld. Though “Lovely Broken Thing” costs five quid, once you register (for free) at the band’s site, you have access to free video and audio downloads, including live MP3s recorded this year in Spain and Bulgaria. For now you can get just two chunks of each of those performances, though the band promises the complete sets in the neat future.

[ Topics: , / Leave a comment ]