At the risk of suggesting anything akin to a rule, when it comes to electronic music the best ensemble work tends to add up to less than the sum of its constituent parts. Take this nearly half-hour improvised recording by …
Here’s an hour-long recording of two musique concrete pieces that should be required listening for anyone venturing into laptop music. Recorded back in 1971, it’s a textbook case of the effort required, in those days long before home-computing, to make …
This website was named for The Book of Disquiet (or Livro do Desassossego) by the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). There’s a somewhat hidden sub-site on Disquiet.com about Pessoa, viewable at disquiet.com/pessoa. It contains three sections: (1) an …
When your computer is busy downloading via a slow connection a 60-plus-megabyte file of a lecture by a German musician, there’s a lingering concern that the resulting document will, in fact, be in German. Fortunately for English speakers, the lecture …
The unlistenability of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the great overstatements of pop culture. Some 30-plus years have passed since its release, and we now live at a time when the noise of Merzbow and the Boredoms …
Two compact Roland speakers sit toward the top of the blank white walls. The speakers are set diagonally across from each other in the back room of the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in lower Manhattan. A voice, female and soft, doesn’t …
Once upon a time in the mid-1990s, the name Monolake referred to two people working in tandem: Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. Behles eventually took a leave of absence when the audio software company he founded, Ableton, makers of Live, …
The sequence of events goes something like this:
dripping water
heavy rain swallowing distant church bells
machinery in motion mixed with spoken instructions
objects moving in water
digitally clipped vocals
a voice transformed into something mechanical and menacing
Those are the apparent half dozen real-world elements that …
The Galapagos performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last night played host to two hours of installations, video shorts and music performances. I caught the L Line out from Manhattan with a friend. We went for the music (Bit Shifter on …
Three tracks trace a dawn-like arc on Pausal’s new self-titled net-album on the netlabel Highpoint Lowlife. The pieces individually move from near-silence through a creaky murmur through an enveloping warmth that grows and grows. This sense of a real-world soundtrack …