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

Monthly Archives: January 2007

Cyber-Tuba MP3

[ January 16, 2007 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

In his effort to expand upon the tuba’s harmonic range, musician Benjamin Klein has paired it with a laptop, using electronic mediation to plumb the deep end as have few others before him. The result is A Hymn to Zoltan Abbassid, on the Luv Sound netlabel (luvsound.org). A rumbling, ruminative piece (MP3), it’s a single track that in nearly 25 minutes (or nearly 34 megabytes) moves from the sort of didgeridoo aura inherent in such a project to a sound far too buried in its own resonance to be comparable to anything but itself. And don’t imagine that this digitally enhanced tuba is merely an excercise in depth for depth’s sake. Klein is just as pleased to explore spacey zones that are more ethereal than they are earthy.

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Field Recorded MP3s

[ January 15, 2007 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Many netlabels are devoted to electronic music, and much of that music is based on field recordings, but few of those netlabels are devoted to field recordings. Enter wanderingear.com, the most recent release on which, Lori Beckstead and Dave Rose‘s Winanga-li: Australian Soundscapes, includes bird calls at dawn, frogs after rainfall and, the real keeper, the sound of the Sydney Orchestra Hall as the musicians tuned up (MP3). Also among the album’s 11 tracks is a “composite,” combining two different field recordings, both recorded at the same locale under different circumstances (MP3).

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Virtual DJ’ing Tonight

[ January 13, 2007 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

In the 10 years I’ve published Disquiet.com, I’ve been asked twice to DJ, both in the past month or so. The first was for an event featuring Annie Sprinkle, and I explained that my reluctance had nothing to do with prudishness, and everything to do with not feeling up to the task of playing music in front of people.

The second was for an event this evening in San Francisco, a book party for cartoonist Keith Knight, whose new collection, Are We Feeling Safer Yet?, is being published by Top Shelf. Again, I didn’t feel capable of DJing for an audience, but Keith suggested, as an alternative, that I put together some mix tapes of instrumental hip-hop for the evening.

So, I’ve programmed three hours of i-hop (three hour-long sets, really, each with an intended starting and closing), which will play in the background tonight at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, at 655 Mission Street, around the corner from the SF MOMA. I’m amazed regularly by the studio-forged electronica that pulses beneath rap, and tonight’s set list includes plenty of DJ Premier, Timbaland and Neptunes productions for various vocalists, plus some less often heard edits by the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Cypress Hill, and some hip-hop purposefully composed without vocals, including work by DJ Krush, just to name some of the material.

The event runs from 6pm to 9pm. Humorously enough, the San Francisco Chronicle included my name when featuring the event in its listings: “Music provided by Mad Marc Weidenbaum.” I am, apparently, the DJ; I am what I burn.

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New-Folk MP3

[ January 10, 2007 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Late last year, the five-strong Primordial Undermind released Loss of Affect on the Strange Attractors label. The album’s a triumph of less-ism, not so much minimalism, with its Zen patterns and often terse vocabulary, but music far more select and simple than its various contributors’ involvement might suggest. Specifically, on tracks like the freely available “Breathe Deep” (MP3), the group explores the revived folk-as-art realm with a heady, deeply strummed, lithe romanticism. Fellow traveler Douglas Ferguson guests on “electronics” elsewhere on the album. This is quintessential less-ism: music that is less than the sum of its parts, and all the better for it. More info at strange-attractors.com.

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Ambient Metal MP3

[ January 9, 2007 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Wondering what Disquiet.com’s humble suggestions as to the best commercial recordings of 2006 might sound like? Well, for starters, the Southern Lord record label’s “Listen” page includes a full track from numerous among its recent releases, including the dirge-rock of bands SunnO))) and Boris, who teamed up for last year’s Altar. “Etna,” presumably named for the active Sicilian volcano, is a voluminous, slo-mo surge of, well, darn near molten metal, all the energy of hard rock, but stripped of its rhythmic vertebrae, left to writhe on the ground fearfully, or sumthin’ like that (MP3). More on the bands’ collaboration at southernlord.com. More on Disquiet’s top 10 of 2006 at disquiet.com/new2006.html.

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