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

Monthly Archives: May 2006

Tangents (installation, Surprise, Conniff)

[ May 21, 2006 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Ceal Floyer‘s third solo gallery show in New York, at 303 Gallery, includes a piece in which “a few seconds of a song pass back and forth between two CD players, forward on one, backward on the other, creating what sounds like different expressions of assent” (nytimes.com, 303gallery.com). … (2) From Matmos, a Quicktime movie (MOV) about the 10 profiles that comprise their new album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. … (3) Aphex Twin is among the anachronistic contributors to the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola‘s forthcoming film, Marie Antoinette (timesonline.co.uk) … (4) Interview with Warp Records founder Steve Beckett on the word “electronica” (“I never liked the term and I’ve never used it”) and more (japantimes.co.jp). … (5) For the first time, the Madrid Abierto is making “a specific call for sound works” (and for audio-visual works), says the 2007 exhibit’s curator, Juan Antonio Alvarez Reyes (madridabierto.com) … (6) Craigie Horsfield will have a sound installation when “Ideal City, Invisible Cities” opens in Zamosc, Poland, on June 18 (idealcity-invisiblecities.org). … Createdigitalmusic.com has great coverage of (7) E3 (link), (8) Cybersonica (link, link), (9) a proto-Wii sound-baton (link) and (10) the potential of the Wii itself (link).

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: Favorite listening of late includes the track “Wartime Prayers” off the new Paul Simon album, Surprise. You’d have to be living in a cave to not know it was produced by Brian Eno. Except that it wasn’t produced by Eno. The album lists Simon as the producer and credits Eno with its “sonic landscape.” (Eno also cowrote the lyrics to three of the songs.) And though it’s easily Simon’s best album since Graceland, the pairing of Simon and Eno is far less surprising than many have made it out to be. Simon and Garfunkel were among the more acoustically experimental of the folk groups of the 1960s; prog band Yes made a cover of their “America” one of its earliest singles; and it was Eno and Daniel Lanois‘ experience working with U2 that led U2′s Bono to recommend Lanois to Bob Dylan. Those Lanois-Dylan collaborations (Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind) are what Surprise often brings to mind, with its mesh of pointlilist guitar forming an abstract blues.

… Quote of the Week: “What was interesting about Ray Conniff was it was music as environment. It was an attempt to say, ‘What’s important here isn’t the tune, it isn’t the beat, all those sorts of things; it’s this beautiful sound.’” That’s Brian Eno, quoted in The Thrill of It All, a new biography of the band Roxy Music. (Thanks for the reference, Eric.) The quote brings to mind a moment in the book Tropical Truth by Brazilian legend Caetano Veloso, who describes Ray Charles as “the bluesman who brought together tradition and pop, whose singing was Nat King Cole‘s turned upside down (while Johnny Mathis was like the varnish on its polished surface).”

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Bush of Ghosts MP3s

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

Several months following the launch of the website promoting the re-release of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, David Byrne and Brian Eno‘s trailblazing 1981 essay into trance-inducing sampling and pop minimalism, the public-domain, communal remix portion of that site has finally gone live at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix. Download the constituent parts of two full-length tracks (20 for “A Secret Life” and 24 for “Help Me Somebody”), and upload your own version. There’s a lot of blank space in most of the individual tracks, though several, including the hyper-delicate, tremolo-heavy “Ambient Synth 1″ (MP3) and “Ambient Synth 2″ (MP3), both from “A Secret Life,” are listenable to entirely on their own. Note: registration at the site may be necessary for those downloads to function.

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Russian MP3 EP

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

Stud‘s I Saw the Future album, the Kikapu netlabel’s 93rd, puts its rhythms first, but it doesn’t worship them. They’re either slow enough to feel like they’re about to disintegrate at the seams, as on “Supertaeb” (MP3), or fast enough to suggest your MP3 player’s gonna blow a gasket, as on “Marchello (Bonus)” (MP3), which breaks between snippets with an erratic joy that’s more cut-up than mash-up, and on “Joyrexnme182″ (MP3), an unfortunately brief Aphex Twin hommage that has more downbeats than it knows what to do with. The best track, “Photon Map” (MP3), takes vocal samples as its main riff, layering them with chamber-pop efficiency and elegance. More info on Stuf (aka Alexey Devyanin, of the Russian duo Gultskra Artikler) at kikapu.com.

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MC Schmidt MP3s

[ May 15, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

There is little if any appointment listening on the web. Don’t let the phrase “webcast” turn you off. More often than not, a live web broadcast is archived, as with Matmos member MC Schmidt‘s April 30 appearance on the Shirley and Spinoza Internet radio show (compound-eye.org/radio). By day, Schmidt has been teaching a “Sound as Music” course at the San Francisco Art Institute, and he brought the class, dubbed the New Genres Orchestra (for the academic department in which the course originated), to S’n'S for a two-hour tour through various sound arts, from field recordings, to hazy noise-scapes laced with spoken word, to electro-acoustic miasmas. It’s available as a pair of hour-long MP3s (MP3p1, MP3p2). Amid the amorphous sounds are some spates of rhythmic wizardry one expects from Matmos, notably about 40 minutes into track one and early on in track two. The webpage promises a list of participants eventually. In the meanwhile, more on Matmos at brainwashed.com/matmos.

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Tangents (sculpture, Ghosts, Ubiq)

[ May 14, 2006 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Just closed at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, the exhibit “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body: an Exhibition about Sound Performance and Sculpture,” curated by Heike Munder and Raphael Gygax, and featuring work by Banks Violette, Dave Allen, Mileece*, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Peter Coffin, Seb Patane and the pairings of Chris Cunningham with Bjork, Delia Gonzalez with Gavin Russom, and Rita Ackermann with Agathe Snow (migrosmuseum.ch). The Mileece* piece involved using plants for sound data, and Dave Allen’s involved attempting to teach two white-rumped shamas to sing the birdsong-derived piano Catalogue d’Oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen. … (2) Brian Eno produced Paul Simon‘s new album, Surprise, out this past week, and the New York Times interviewed Simon (nytimes.com). … (3) The London Guardian spoke with Eno about the birth of ambient (guardian.co.uk). … (4) The remix site set up to celebrate the rerelease of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno’s 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, finally went live: bush-of-ghosts.com/remix. Download the multitrack material that comprise two cuts off the album: “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody.” And then upload your own rendition. … (5) The only references to Bush on Byrne’s blog (davidbyrne.com) appear to be the U.S. president. … (6) The exhibit “Eigenheim, everything but the kitchen sink,” running through June 4 at the Kunstverein Goettingen in Goettingen, Germany, includes a sound installation by Mungo Thomson “of the artist making music on wine glasses call forth a narrative about time spent alone within one’s space” (kunstvereingoettingen.de). …

(7) Mathieu Briand‘s exhibit “Ubiq: A Mental Odyssey,” running through June 18 at REDCAT in Los Angeles, includes “an installation of four turntables and a mixing board connected to a vinyl cutting machine where viewers can create their own aural expression by manipulating samples and etching their own vinyl records” (redcat.org). … (8) Four entries with sound are listed among the material in the current Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night”: Trisha Donnelly; Dan Graham, with Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger, Bruce Odland and Japanther; Dorothy Iannone; and Jim O’Rourke. … (9) Mark Bain, Yuji Oshima and Semiconductor are among the sound artists, curated by Daniele Balit, participating in the Prague Contemporary Art Festival, through June 27 (tina-b.com). … (10) The Sonambiente festival (sonambiente.net) will bring some 75 sound artists to Berlin between June 1 and July 16, including Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff, Terry Fox, Christina Kubisch, Helen Mirra and Carsten Nicolai. … (11) Speaking of Kubisch, there’s extended coverage at the website of MASS MoCA museum’s sound art exhibits by Ronald J. Kuivila, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, and Kubisch (massmoca.org). … (12) Speaking of Cardiff, there’s a great conversation between film director Atom Egoyan and her at bombmagazine.com. … (13) A music critic (Chris DeLaurenti) and an art critic (Carrie E. A. Scott) debate the usefulness of the term “sound art,” focusing on the artist Trimpin at thestranger.com. … (14) Watch a choir immitate the sounds of a Honda Civic (honda.co.uk/civic). (Thanks, David and Bart.) … (15) Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts author Douglas Kahn is using his Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his book Radio Was Discovered Before It Was Invented (ucdavis.edu). … (16) Also among this year’s Guggenheim recipients: musicians Paul Dresher and Scott Johnson, and sound artist Jeff Talman.

… Keeping Score: (1) Amon Tobin is credited with scoring the forthcoming film Taxidermia, directed by Gyorgy Palfi. Two clips are up on youtube.com (“Exhibit,” “The Taxidermist“), per pe7er.com. … (2) That drums-heavy, stripped-down version of Lalo Shifrin‘s theme for Mission Impossible running at the end of the third and most recent Tom Cruise movie is by Kanye West and Jon Brion. It doesn’t appear to be on the initial soundtrack album, released on Varese Sarabande. … According to IMDB.com, (3) David Holmes is aboard for Ocean’s Thirteen, due out in 2007; (4) Gustavo Santaolalla is working again with his 21 Grams collaborator, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, on Babel; (5) Philip Glass is on The Illusionist and The Reaping; (6) Clint Mansell‘s on Joe (Narc) Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces and Gregory Jacobs‘ Wind Chill; and (7) Cliff Martinez is on Mark Fergus‘ First Snow.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Pianist Daan Vandewalle‘s four-disc readings of Alvin Curran‘s Inner Cities (Long Distance), especially the glacially paced “Inner Cities 9 (For Reinier Van Houdt).” … (2) The “self-remixed” greatest hits of DJ Krush, Stepping Stones, which comes as two discs, one of vocal cuts and the other of “soundscapes.” … (3) The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks is Stephane Leonard‘s constantly shifting sonic data on tri, his set on the Luv Sound netlabel (link).

… Quote of the Week: “I can’t see all that gorgeous radio anymore… The stars have stopped singing like they used to.” That’s Lois Lane, coming down after a day of enjoying all the powers of Superman, his birthday gift to her in the third and latest issue of All-Star Superman (DC Comics), written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely.

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