There are few musical pleasures as singular as listening to a remix side by side with the original. It’s a unique, even if increasingly common, experience to hear something and to then hear it reworked by someone other than the …
Another treat from the Other Minds archive at archive.org: a “text-sound composition” by Harold Budd, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno and with Cocteau Twins. Reportedly dating from 1970, it begins with him saying, “I’m in …
There are moments on William Fowler Collins’ album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality when the echo gets so deep that the original sound is lost in a well of reverberations, when the effects overcome the raw source material. It’s a remarkable experience to follow the familiar down the rabbit hole, only to come up in a terrain of abstraction and nuance.
Raised in New England, educated in the San Francisco Bay Area and now living in New Mexico, Collins has a penchant for grounding even his most expansive gestures. He never quite loses sight of where he’s coming from. The sound may be a surreal wind chime on the album’s “Evening,” but it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the original guitar within the figment — likewise the harmonica on “Night Watchmen.”
Though Western Violence was released in 2007, after Collins had relocated from San Francisco to Albuquerque, its rural appeal is, according to him, something of a coincidence. Much of the album was recorded before he ever left the West Coast, which seems fitting. All that aural expanse and all that seeming soundscape-as-landscape artistry is, in the end, the result of his imagination.
Collins took time in the early fall of 2007 to talk about the album’s construction, his pursuit of an MFA, and the difference between rock and experimental audiences, among other things.
Marc Weidenbaum: One of the things that strikes me foremost about the album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality is the balance of field recordings and the mesh of instrumentation and effects that you impose on the field recordings. Do you seek out field recordings to serve a sound you already have in your head, or do you take a field recording that intrigues you and then work on it?
William Fowler Collins: I think in actuality I only use field recordings prominently on one piece, “Untitled Dream 1,” but there is a good possibility that there are more buried deeply in the layers throughout the album. But on that piece, and throughout the album, I manipulate and mix the electronics to suggest sounds such as explosions, helicopters, rain, etc. In that sense I have created the illusion of field recordings. In “Untitled Dream 1,” I included a stereo mix of two different urban environments that I had recorded. One was the busy street outside of my apartment in San Francisco; the other was of the bus terminal downtown, where all the buses would pick up and drop off passengers. I believe there is also a recording from rural Ashland, Oregon, where I recorded some evening sounds with my laptop. My purpose in including those in the mix was to give the listener a sense that there were multiple environments within the piece. I was also working on two particular electronic pieces that seemed to mimic the sound of bombs exploding and helicopters flying overhead. So, to answer your question, I do take field recordings that intrigue me and work them into the mixes and I also create sounds that seem as though they might be field recordings.
The Disquiet.com links page — aka Elsewhere — just racked up its 101st netlabel. Netlabels are websites that distribute original recordings for free download, with the full consent of the musicians. The 101 netlabels currently listed (with more to …
The Crate Kings website (cratekings.com) has been holding hip-hop Beat Battles online. If you’ve been following the often whimsical Iron Chef of Music competition series held over at kracfive.com, this is similar, but the Beat Battles participants have …
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) An illustrator has taken the concept behind Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and applied it to his daily self-portraits (snooks.livejournal.com). … (2) The Wild Beast is the name of …
Film composer Elliot Goldenthal has been an underscorer worth keeping an eye on at least since 1989, when his Drugstore Cowboy and Pet Semetary both saw release. Of course, he’s not afraid of bombast, as his Titus with his partner, …
End the week on something both upbeat and frazzled, say “We Push Up On Frenchies” (MP3), a remix by Fujasaki of the electro act Lovely Chords. The original, which is streaming at the Lovely Chords’ myspace page (myspace.com/wepushuponfrenchies), …
There are few sounds as sedate as that of rain — except, perhaps, a sample of rain recorded in the city of Utrecht to which is applied “the EVOC filterbank (vocoder) from Logic Pro to filter the sound file in …
If the overture to a symphonic work can be understood to prefigure what’s to come, then how about the sounds the orchestra makes before it even gets to the overture?
That’s a question implicit in Favorite Intermissions, a recent release by …