The uploads to the Other Minds collection at the archive.org has a stellar new item. Well, new to the archive. Back in early 1973, Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian visited the Oakland Museum and recorded a walking tour of its exhibition, “When Music Was Mechanical,” curated by Gretchen Schneider. The hour-plus recording (MP3) features numerous examples of automated music, including the Lyon and Healy Empress Electric Orchestrion, the Wurlitzer Model 165 Band Organ and the Mira Music Box. Originally broadcast on January 25, 1973, on KPFA and KPFB, the exhibit ran from December 16, 1972 through February 4, 1973. Not only is there a lot of mechanical music recorded, but Amirkhanian describes in detail many of the instruments and Schneider talks about the show’s curation, which focuses on machines from the start of the 20th century, and she discusses the complexities of having multiple sound sources in a single exhibit (another name considered for the event was “Christmas Cacophonia”). She mentions two organizations to which most collectors, at the time, belonged: the Musical Box Society and the Automatical Musical Instruments Collector’s Association. Thirty-plus years later, of course, each has its own website: mbsi.org, amica.org. According to Schneider, the show was one of the museum’s most popular exhibits at that point in its history, with so many visitors that many had trouble seeing the instruments. More info, and alternate download formats, at archive.org.
Month: June 2006
Big-Eared DJ/Rupture MP3s
DJ/rupture is no reductionist, but he does sum up his one-hour, two-part “gold teeth thief” mix with some pithy accounting: “43 tracks, 68 minutes, mixed live on 3 turntables.” And for some additional numbers, he says of the files, “[T]he mix is encoded at 128 kbps. each part contains around 30 minutes of music.” Though it opens with Missy Elliot‘s “Get Ur Freak On,” part A of the set (MP3) is no ordinary mixtape, not when it veers into a bashed up reggae triptych, courtesy of the Greensleeves label. And part B (MP3) finds room for rap group Wu-Tang Clan and glitch progenitor Oval, not to mention Paul Simon off Graceland (who says Simon’s recent collaboration Brian Eno was a fluke?), which fits nicely between the digitized Middle Eastern inflections of Muslimgauze and a live track by by Miriam Makeba. Who else would segue from Kid 606 to Luciano Berio? Other highlights include a fully ruptured edit of “U Can’t Touch This.” Full track list at negrophonic.com.
Trans-Tokyo MP3s
Darren McClure and Hiroyuki Ura performed live at a spot in Tokyo, and in preparation to do so, they brought the outside in. According to the brief liner notes that accompany Content in a Void, a four-MP3 document of that performance, the duo “gathered field recordings from the area around the venue” and then improvised on a mix of various electronics. That real-world sound is especially evident on “Loop Line I” (MP3), which is close to six minutes of the urban audiosphere, from kids screaming to water dripping to whistles blowing, all sewn into a singular trip. “Loop Line II” (MP3) trades exteriority for its opposite, a fine thread of miniscule sounds, little fuzzy bits, with the occasional high-pitched bleep of a Morse Code machine on the fritz. “Loop Line III” (MP3) adds mechanical drones, which threaten to subsume those coded beeps. And the real keeper, “Loop Line IV” (MP3), locates a nearly melodic cohesion that deserves repeated listens; its lovely pulses approximate a developing musical pattern, even if they’re clipped and splintered like flashing images from an old zoetrope. Though the four tracks have their own inherent flavor, they are intended to be listened to straight through, and easily fade from one to the next. More info at the website of the releasing netlabel, standard-music.net.
Bush of Ghosts MP3
As of today, 119 remixes have been uploaded to the website set up in tribute to the album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno. Many of those remixes are interesting not simply because they filter Byrne and Eno’s raw materials through someone else’s taste-filter. Some of the best entries also bear the mark of other Byrne and/or Eno albums. There have been, for example, tracks that have the rumbling pop momentum of Eno’s work with John Cale and Paul Simon, and there have been tracks that reduce the Bush of Ghosts stuff to something approaching pure ambience. Stike‘s remix, titled “Help Me Design Intelligently” (MP3), was uploaded on the 11th of this month, and though it has more rambunctious energy than anything on the original album, its highlight is a sprightly guitar line that brings to mind the hijacked juju that Eno enabled when he produced Talking Heads albums like Remain in Light and Fear of Music. More info at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.
In Print
The seventh and, according to the publisher’s introduction, final edition of the print magazine e/i has been published, and it features my interview with laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits and a small heap of record reviews I wrote, including Battles‘ EP C/B (Warp), F-Space‘s Prelimary Impact Report (Mobilization), Gisela‘s Weib (Gruenrekorder), Johann Johannsson‘s Dis (The Worker’s Institute), Kettel‘s Through Friendly Waters (Sending Orbs), Magicicada‘s Everyone Is Everyone (Public Guilt), Somatic Responses‘ Pounded Mass (Hymen) and Jozef Van Wissem‘s Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (BVHaast), as well as Permanent Flow (Accretions) by Joscha Oetz, Andreas Wagner and Greg Stuart, and three compilations: Der Michel und Der DOM and AudioArt Compilation 02, both on Gruenrekorder, and Malpractice: A Fflint Central Compilation (Birdman). I’ll post all that material on Disquiet.com in a few months, once the magazine has had its time on newsstands. In the meanwhile, more info at ei-mag.com.