Disquiet

downstream / Tim Dwyer/Off Land’s Guitar-Infused MP3 Album

After several listens through the eight tracks on Encounter Point by Off Land (aka Tim Dwyer), set your MP3 player to a minute or so prior to the end of the album’s final …

field notes / Oliver diCicco’s Sirens Sound Sculpture (San Francisco)

An installation by Oliver diCicco, titled Sirens, filled the large hall at the gallery and performance space SomArts (somarts.org) in San Francisco from January 10 through February 14 of this year. I missed the opening, but was fortunate to be almost entirely alone when I stopped by a few days later. Sirens consists of 11 free-standing, drone-emitting sculptures. Their hemispheric shape brings to mind the horns of some mechanical beast, while their purpose suggests oversized tuning forks, and they move with the lilt of a human-proportioned metronome. When turned on, they filled the room with rolling, gently overlapping layers of long, held tones.

In diCicco’s telling, the work was inspired by the ocean — the title comes from the Sirens of mythology, the motion from the waves. An artist’s brief statement, pinned to one wall, includes the following excerpt from the Wallace Stevens poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”:
An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean
The following images show from afar how Sirens was situated in the SomArts space:


And these two show, close up, some of the construction. The top image is the device that emits the tones, while the bottom is the counterweight system:


For the first time ever, I used the movie option on my camera to capture some video, complete with sound. For some reason I can’t figure out how to get this embedded youtube.com video to center horizontally in this post, but that probably won’t bother anyone but me:

field notes / Quote of the Week: Assayas & Eno

New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis on Boarding Gate, the new film from director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, Clean, Paris Je T’aime):
I was again struck by how he uses music to amplify reality, almost as if he were inviting …

downstream / Glistening MP3 EP by Nodepet

The four tracks on Decay by Nodepet sound like the work of some otherworldly glass harmonica, a massive structure that expands to fill whatever room you choose to play …

field notes / “Szabad” as in Netlabel

The netlabel is among the purest expressions of the Internet’s ability to function as a frictionless environment for art and culture. Netlabels distribute music freely, with the enthusiastic support of the musicians they promote, and while most netlabels focus on …

field notes / Stockhausen, Spiropoulos, Steiger @ Yerba Buena (San Francisco)

How many cities on a Monday night can come close to selling out a chamber concert that’s built around a tape-music work dating from the Kennedy administration? Count San Francisco among them.
The performance earlier this week, on …

field notes / Site Upgrade in Progress

Still having some minor issues following the upgrade of the WordPress backend to this website. Nothing major, but the archive page is not functioning. The search functionality is, so everything should still be “findable” in the meanwhile.

downstream / Doom-tastic MP3s from Portugal’s Cancro

Over at the MiMi netlabel (clubotaku.org/mimi), Cancro is giving desolation a good name. The six tracks on his new self-titled, freely downloadable release are, in a word, doom-tastic. From the static-to-roar of the opening cut, “A sala das máquinas” (…

downstream / Classic Tellus Noise MP3s (Controlled Bleeding, Merzbow, etc.)

Another volume in the classic noise audio-journal Tellus (volume 13, “Power Electronics,” from 1986) has gone up for free download at ubu.com — 17 tracks of aggravated textures and general sonic investigatory work. Highlights include the richly squelchy opening …

downstream / NIN MP3s Leave Listeners Speechless

Following quickly on the heels of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, another band with a strong following and abstract-electronic leanings has posted its music online as a sliding-scale download. Nine Inch Nails has made available …