Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code. / Page 3

Monthly Archives: January 2006

Solo Test Tube MP3 Set

[ January 20, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The opening cut on Simio Superior‘s Como na Radio (from the Portuguese netlabel test tube), simply titled “2,” is the sound of one pachinko machine rocking. Well, it’s the sound of one musician, Andre Abel (the label’s website translates his pseudonym roughly as “Simian Sapiens”), moving beats around in a hall of aural mirrors, as little blurps set off minor whirlpools of noise, banging against each other in freespace. It’s one of four cuts on the EP, which ranges from churning, percussive static (“Catabina, latrina”), to heavily processed vocals (“Tez morena”), to a mix of field recordings and expressly understated mumbling (“Laranja papaia”). Throughout Superior/Abel concentrates on small sounds that have heavy impacts, less focused on microsonic details than on the impression that individual elements can have over an extended play. Get the full set at monocromatica.com/netlabel.

[ Topics: free, netlabel / Leave a comment ]

Sakamoto Chain-Protest MP3

[ January 19, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Ryuichi Sakamoto, the peripatetic Japanese musician of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence fame, has been playing a game of telephone with various electronic-music luminaries, including Towa Tei, David Sylvian, Christian Fennesz, Hector Zazou and, most recently, Christopher Willits. Each sequential “Chain Music” participant in adds “on to the existing work vertically as well as horizontally, overlaying or extending the existing creation,” Sakamoto has said of the piece, which he intends as a reflective anti-war statement, marking the pace of the conflict with thoughtful, ongoing collaboration. The music, true to that theme, is both peaceful (its opening, with birdsong and bugsound; the light digital ambience throughout) and unsettling (muffled voices and the inevitable irritant of glitch). Check out the streaming sequence at sitesakamoto.com/chainmusic or download the most recent edition of the expanding composition here (MP3).

[ Topics: free, remix / Leave a comment ]

Film Score MP3s

[ January 18, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Like many composers in Hollywood, Jeff Rona has a far more complicated filmography than simply a list of major motion pictures and TV shows. Before scoring the Traffic mini-series, he contributed cues to the Traffic film. Before collaborating with Lisa Gerrard on last year’s A Thousand Roads, he contributed to Black Hawk Down, which also featured Gerrard’s voice, better known to pop fans for its centrality to the group Dead Can Dance (Rona conducted an orchestra for some recent DCD performances in New York and Los Angeles). His credits include full scores to dark fare, such as The Mothman Prophecies and Exit Wounds, and he worked, earlier still, on Powaqqatsi, one of Philip Glass’ collaborations with director Godfrey Reggio.

This range of work suggests why, perhaps, unlike such contemporaries as John Powell and David Holmes, Rona has a somewhat less than immediately recognizable style, though much of his work is marked by a mix of synthesizers and strings, and it’s not uncommon for a single, slight instrument to carry the main melodic line. More than many of his peers, he posts entire cues on his website, jeffrona.com, for free download. Key among the recent ones are the title cut of A Thousand Roads (MP3), on which an indigenous backing vocal is treated like a lo-fi sample, bringing to mind everything from Moby’s Play to Ennio Morricone’s work on The Mission, as well as two from the forthcoming Slow Burn: “Masks” (MP3), a delicate swath of cinematic foundation-laying, and “5AM” (MP3), a classic bit of thriller alarmism.

[ Topics: film, free, score / Leave a comment ]

Euro-Improv MP3 Set

[ January 17, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Vortex is the name of a French duo whose take on European free improv is so fragile that it approaches the quality of aural background happenstance. All its choppy breathing and clanky, purposefully awkward playing rarely registers above a certain baseline of low level, everyday aggitation. Sebastien Cirotteau‘s trumpet and Heddy Boubaker‘s alto saxophone are barely recognizable as such on the self-titled set they released late last year on the Stasisfield netlabel. The record’s appearance on Stasisfield, a label more generally associated with electronic, computer-generated or -mediated sound, focuses your ear on Vortex’s place in that realm. The fourth track in particular (all six cuts on Vortex are simply numbered, “Vortex 1″ through “Vortex 6″) has a slurry embouchure that to listeners more familiar with, oh, DJ Kid Koala’s scratching than with percussionist Han Bennink’s makeshift drum kits might suggest the delicate static of lo-fi electronic music, and the chance errors of haphazard field recordings (MP3). Check out the full release at stasisfield.com.

[ Topics: free, netlabel / Leave a comment ]

Live Kranky MP3(s)

[ January 16, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

When the brief write-up at the Kranky Records website, kranky.net, describes its most recent free download as “a live version of the song, ‘Coral Gables’” from Gregg Kowalsky‘s forthcoming debut full-length release, Through the Cardial Window, due out in April, the more ethereal-minded listener might fear that, well, you know, it’ll be a “song”: words that hint at a story through rhyme, a tune that treads the familiar path back and forth between verse and chorus, tossing in perchance a bridge. God forbid, ya know?

Fear not, fans o’ abstraction. This latest MP3 is true to the Kranky label’s strengths in rural atmospherics. Kowalsky makes his musical home in the remote fringes of headspace, even if the free Kranky track takes its name from a stately Miami suburb (Kowalsky’s bio states he was raised in Florida). “Coral Gables” (MP3) is a burbling brook of organo-electronica, and it adheres to, if not song structure, then certainly the single-sine-wave arc of much drone music, moving from near silence and back again, in between peaking with a hazy, textured moment that would only be considered loud relative to the quietude that bookends it. That texture at times sounds like a filtered waterfall, at others merely like you have water in your ear. And though the arc is singular, the sound is not; it is many simultaneous layers of airy noise, from quick rounds of digital riffs to more serrated, granulated material.

More info on Kowalsky at his website, ossobucco.net, where a second free track, from the same session that yielded “Coral Gables” (he describes the pair as “2 live compositions from the Ensemble Room, Mills College [Oakland, 2004]“), can be found. Titled “Into the Marshes They Drove Me,” it’s another essay into low-to-the-ground, murky soundscapes (MP3), but with the benefit of sublimated tribal drums that lend momentum. (I was hoping to see Kowalsky play at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco this past Friday, along with Birdshow and the duo of Greg Davis and Sebastian Roux, but a nasty sore throat, which I didn’t feel like sharing with some of my favorite musicians and their fans, kept me home.)

[ Topic: free / Leave a comment ]

Disquiet

ambient/electronica