Month: December 2006

Japanese “Room” MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” is one of the cornerstones of electronic music. Dating from the late 1960s, it is more a process than a composition. Famously, Lucier recorded the phrase “I Am Sitting in a Room,” then played it back, recorded that, and so on, the phrase dissolving as if in successive generations of photocopies.

More to the point, Lucier’s piece solidified the idea of process as composition. Earlier this year, Japanese artist Kanta Horio applied “I Am Sitting in a Room” to the feedback created by flat panel speakers (MP3). Information is posted at Horio’s blog (kanta.but.jp/blog). The track, in which near silence slowly becomes a woozy pile of circulating noises, speaks for itself. But a friend of mine was gracious enough to do a rough translation of Horio’s blog entry:

“Feedback with flat panel SP / Feedback experimentation using the flat panel speakers / [The set up] looks really desolate [lit. ‘cold colors’] but it was really [literally] so cold that my feet lost sensation. / I simply let it emit ‘feedback,’ using [a system programmed in] Max/MSP that resembled ‘I am sitting in a room.’ I didn’t process the seams between recording and playing well enough, so you hear some static, or noise, but I did various experiments. It was cool that the metals being heated up in the air conditioner made sounds from time to time. / This is the version started from no sound (3.2MB). / BTW, this but.jp [web address] is on a server that I rented from a company called lolipop. But no matter what browser I use, I cannot log into the page where I can make the payment from my Mac. The trial period is going to end soon!” More info, albeit largely in Japanese, at media.t-kougei.ac.jp/~horio/.

Pithy Noise MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The ten brief sound segments posted at the Polarity Records website (polarityrecords.net) by musician Haruna Ito bring to mind the Buddha Machine. Insectoid noises, termed “grainbugs” (MP3), sit side by side with metallic chatter, “shpfb” (MP3), and soft tones, “pohwomb” (MP3), just to point to a few. They’re independent little flavors, ranging from seven to forty two seconds in length. But unlike the little sounds that fill the Buddha Machine, Ito’s loops are intended to be savored in various permutations, not individually.

According to Ino’s bio, she was born in Japan but raised in the U.S., before returning to Japan in her teens. These days, in addition to crafting her own solo sound art, she’s in the band Skist with Samm Bennett. Bennett was arguably the most song-minded musician among the core figures in the early days of the Knitting Factory, the downtown Manhattan club that was once the epicenter of the local out-music scene. One full track from Skist’s latest album, Taking Something Somewhere, is also up on the Polarity site; “If There Is Any News” sets her light, half-spoken vocal above a buzzy, equally fragile foundation of mechanized noises (MP3).

Language Poetry MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Clark Coolidge doesn’t so much write poetry as build it with words. The latter may seem like an unnecessary recasting of the former, but there’s a difference. Check out the recent upload to the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org); it’s an hour-long survey of the collage minimalism that is his language poetry. The track consists of two pieces, each comprised of a series of individual words spoken in various sequences, sometimes overlapping. One is built from “once,” “harp” and “rice,” the other from “but,” “if,” “it,” “though,” “its,” “thus,” “is,” “what” and “and” (MP3). The result is a kind of literary riff on Steve Reich’s patterning.