Month: May 2006

Monome Crew MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Monome, a fresh new music interface, is in production. A programmable grid of of 64 buttons, it’s a smallbrew device. That is, the piece of hardware is neither a mass-produced corporate item nor a homebrew bit of weekend-invention happenstance. It’s a proper commercial release, albeit on a small scale. Half a grand will get you the Monome itself, which made strong impressions at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, as well as entry into the open-source community of musician-programmers who are devising software for the controller.

There’s enticing footage of the machine in action at the Monome website (monome.org), but while we wait for Monome-nurtured music to make its way online (and elsewhere), we can give a listen to music by the people who developed the Monome in the first place. Take Brian Crabtree, at whose nnnnnnnn.org is an expert, eight-track set, tomorrowperhaps, which features contributions by Monome staffers Peter Segerstrom and Kelli Cain, as well as by Corey Fogel. Crabtree records under the name tehn.

All the pieces are sample-laden and brief. With one exception, they’re all under two and a half minutes, and one is barely 45 seconds. The set opens with a mesh of haze and nonsense vocals (“Sixth and Market,” MP3), the soft vowels given shape with sharp cuts and stuttered edits. The entries are varied, from long, mellow tones to twinkling child’s play, but throughout there’s an emphasis on melding composition and field recordings, as on the mix of somnolent melodies and distant bird calls on “Article” (MP3) and the street noise leavened with bell tones on “Endof” (MP3). The full album is available for free download, and a “physical” edition is for sale (cheap: $5!) at flatflat.org.

Music and Comics Exhibit

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I co-curated an exhibit that opens today at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Titled Cartoon Tunes: Capturing Music in Comics, it features over 40 pieces of comic art, including a bunch of material I commissioned and edited, between 1992 and 2002, at the magazines Pulse! and Classical Pulse!

The exhibit’s ties to ambient/electronica are relatively few, though there is a biographical piece by Justin Green about Philip Glass‘ days as a cab driver (which I wrote, so blame me for the glaring typo, which Justin says was cleaned up for the piece’s inclusion in some upcoming film about Glass) plus an extended epiphany about a John Adams performance of Arvo Part‘s Tabula Rasa, written and illustrated by Dylan Horrocks. (Unfortunately, time didn’t allow us to include a whimsical piece Tom Hart did for me once upon a time about Brian Eno, nor the lovely collaboration that Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang did in memory of John Cage, nor a particularly harrowing piece that Jon Lewis wrote and Jason Lutes drew about a nightmare scenario at a rave. The piece I wrote about the history of the 8-track tape, which was also drawn by Justin Green, isn’t included, but it is in his collection, Musical Legends, published by Last Gasp.)

I also wrote the exhibition text, which means I got to connect the dots (and asterisks, and curlicues) between Gene Deitch‘s consummate jazz-fiend gag strips and the synaesthetic art of Joan Miro and Josef Albers. (Well, I haven’t been by the museum yet, so I can’t say for sure that made the final edit.)

Cartoon Tunes, whose other co-curator is the hysterical cartoonist Keith Knight, runs from today, May 9, through October 15. There’s a reception on May 23 from 7pm to 9pm. If you’re in San Francisco that Tuesday evening, please do drop by and say hello. More info at cartoonart.org.

Dolby-Abrams M:I-3 MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Thomas Dolby has posted on his blog a funky nugget (“Groksploitation,” MP3), a collaboration with JJ Abrams, who’s contributed to the music of his own productions, including the TV shows Lost and Alias and the new Mission Impossible film, M:I-3. It’s in the middle of M:I-3 that this little Dolby-Abrams team-up appears. Explains Dolby, “While in post production on MI3, he and I started bouncing musical ideas around. He picked up one of my grooves and added a funky bass part and synth riff; and he told me there was a small slot in the movie for it, apparently in a scene where Tom Cruise’s character is working on his car, and there’s a party going on next door.” Of Abrams’ music fixation, he says, “JJ … started collecting synths and drum machines as well as getting pretty adept with his laptop, Logic, Reason and Ableton Live.” In Dolby’s telling, “On sets and in edit rooms there’s a lot of downtime. JJ wrote the themes to Alias and Lost on headphones while sitting around waiting for something to happen.” More at thomasdolby.com.

In related news, the New York Times recently visited the recording sessions for M:I-3‘s score (“Michael Giacchino’s Mission: Make the Old Music New“), and in the process interviewed the composer of the franchise’s theme, Lalo Shifrin.

Monolake MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Monolake‘s music, at its best, is so subtle as to be easily missed. That’s as true of his most quiet work, often released under his real name, Robert Henke, as it is of his more propulsive techno, which is labeled Monolake. If his soundscapes often maintain a certain constant emotional state, his rhythmic work likewise has a world-weariness that stops well short of quickening your heart rate. He’s uploaded an hour-long set of this even-tempered techno, originally broadcast on Melbourne radio back in February 2005 (MP3). The best moments, such as the one about 30 minutes in, occur when he sets two of his Zen-state patterns against each other; he eschews proper beatmatching in favor of something that roils like a sea change. He’s also posted a remix commissioned by one of the world’s oldest living synth bands, Depeche Mode, “The Darkest Star” (MP3). More info at monolake.de.

Sonic Construct MP3 Set

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another release from Term, the free-MP3 sublabel of 12k, run by Taylor Deupree. The lag since the previous Term release, which was the subject of the March 20 Disquiet Downstream (link), may be Term’s shortest yet. Perhaps these gorgeously frail sound objects will become a more regular occurrence than they have been in the past. If not, at least the latest, a three-track set by Jodi Cave, is worth lingering over. It’s titled Absent.

Each track has the same contradiction at its core: music that might mistakenly be taken as lush is, in fact, comprised of prickly constituent parts. “Absent / Walking Backwards” (MP3) develops into a gauzy blanket, but the initial material is all tiny splinters of string instruments. (Cave credits the pre-processed material to a jam session with Sam Freeman and Sin Yi Law.) “Rara Avis” (MP3) could be a cow with wooden teeth munching its way through the day, but those rough scraping noises are eventually eased by a bed of gentle tones that might emanate from a child’s bedside mobile.

The least singular, which is to say most rangy, of the three pieces is “A Remix for Sawako,” Sawako being a Japanese solo musician currently in grad school in Manhattan, and who’s released music on 12k, and/OAR and other labels. Cave takes material from Sawako’s Ombinus EP, released on the Community Library label last fall, that album itself having been a collage of sounds lifted from Polmo Polpo, Tu’m, Yuichiro Fujimoto and others, according to the Community website (community-library.net). The game of sound-provenance telephone results in a matrix of small nuggets, clicks, clacks, rings, winding percussion, brushed surfaces and more. Think of the combination, rotating in free space, as an adult’s mobile. More info at 12k.com/term. More info on Sawako at troncolon.com.