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

Monthly Archives: August 2006

Stark Dub MP3

[ August 8, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

More fine contemporary dub from theagriculture.com in the form of a slowly snaking bass line making its way through a warped labyrinth, more precisely denoted as “A Long Beard” off the Smile Hunter album by Once11, aka Ignacio Platas (MP3). It’s characteristic of the Agriculture label: bass-heavy without emphasizing a repetitive chorus, unafraid of the sort of stark silences generally considered an anathema to dub, ripe with acoustic nuance.

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Reich Remix MP3

[ August 7, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Per a recent post at electrodata.wordpress.com, the page at the bbc.co.uk‘s One Music subsite that hosted a remix contest built around Steve Reich‘s Music for 18 Musicians is no longer functioning, with no evident explanation for the absence. Oddly, the source file for the contest is still posted (MP3), and needless to say the proprietor of electrodata probably isn’t the only person to have cobbled together a remix and found the contest no longer exists.

What’s a minimalist to do? Head over to electrodata for a smart, tidy take on the Reich original, which might be called “Music for 18 ‘Music for 18 Musicians,’” in that it layers and pans a dozen and a half parallel but slightly askew tracks, leading to hallucinogenic beading that Reich would no doubt approve of, whether or not he approved of the BBC-sponsored contest itself (MP3).

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Schaeffer Tribute MP3

[ August 2, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

This is, to use a term from the world of avant-garde pranksterism, wack. Sourced from the podcast resources at Resonance FM (resonancefm.com) is a half-hour tribute to musique concrete figure Pierre Schaeffer, one of the original cut’n'paste composers (MP3). It’s described on the Resonance site, somewhat opaquely, as the “bibliography of Pierre Schaeffer as presented in musique concrete form by Tim Pickup.” What it is is 30 minutes of someone reading in French intermittently with a wide range of audio effects and field recordings. Schaeffer, no doubt, would be proud. It’s part of Pickup’s series Adventures in Science, Pseudoscience and Nonsense.

Other excellent entries in the series (some not by Pickup but by his cohort, Barney): music from ice cream trucks (MP3), emulated video game scores (MP3) and adventures in the realm of VLF, or “very low frequencies” (MP3).

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Drone MP3(s)

[ August 1, 2006 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The Drones Blog is what it says it is: blogs in drone form, regularly updated like audio diary entries, with little to no explanatory text. The site’s brief manifesto of an introduction states: “We do not want to know from where the sound comes. We don’t care about ‘projects’, ‘albums’, ‘releases and ‘formats’. We want to produce and listen to SOUND and let it penetrate our MINDS.” The emphasis is in the original, though the music featured on the website, which appears to emanate from France, opts for killing with dread, not volume. The most recent entry, dated July 26 (MP3), is an extended hallucination built from field recordings and production effects, not so much a drone as a steady stream of amelodic, arrhythmic, real-world noise tweaked until it sounds otherworldly. More info at the-drones-blog.blogspot.com.

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