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

Monthly Archives: December 2008

Have a Very 8-Bit Christmas (MP3s)

[ December 23, 2008 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Tis the season for blippy, retro fun. The 8-bit mode has infected everything from toys to fashion, so why not seasonal favorites? Enter Doctor Octoroc‘s 8-Bit Jesus: Classic Christmas Songs in the Style of Classic NES Games, a compilation of 18 Christmas songs rendered like something likely to emanate from an arcade game in which Santa has to deliver presents via ever more complicated chimneys. The song titles hint at the provenance of the sounds: “Have Yourself a Final Little Fantasy” (MP3), “Joy to Commando” (MP3), “Silent Knight Man” (MP3), etc. There’s also beautiful cover art, in the colorful pixel mode, by Jude Buffum (judebuffum.wordpress.com). Get the full release at doctoroctoroc.com, and, due to the set’s popularity, various mirror sites (located via twitter.com/ario).

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Free Jonathan Coleclough Performance MP3

[ December 22, 2008 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The musician and “sound organizer” Jonathan Coleclough takes small sounds and amplifies them. As a result of his careful, artful alchemy, it isn’t just the sounds that are expanded, but the spaces within the sounds. The Rare Frequency podcast (rarefrequency.com/radio) recently posted a live performance by Coleclough, recorded November 20, 2008, for WZBC (wzbc.org) while he was in Boston, Massachusetts, for the Brainwaves Festival. His instrumentation is reported to have consisted of laptop, fishing twine, and an oud (MP3). The work is a plaintive, spectral journey, marked by watery waves of sound, string resonances, and casual percussive elements. The strings undergo the most striking transformation over the course of the piece, moving from rough textures to a chiming presence. It’s a bit hard to imagine in advance that something as common and utilitarian as twine might have sonic complexities as rich as those evidenced here, but such is the wonder of Coleclough’s exploratory art.

More on Coleclough at his website, coleclough.plus.com.

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Tag Clouds: Ambient, Noise, Plurality

[ December 21, 2008 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Finally got around to cleaning up the tags that are attributed to this site’s posts. The “tags” are terms such as “turntablism,” “classical,” “gadget,” and the ever popular “free,” which help categorize the coverage.

There had been a lot of redundancy, due to sloppiness over the years. Several categories were listed in both the singular and the plural (gadget, gadgets; field recording, field recordings; score, scores; etc.). Those now all have been reduced to the singular.

I removed the “electro-acoustic” tag, as it seems in retrospect like it could refer to just about anything on this site. That’s the reason, by the way, there’s no post tagged “ambient” here: everything should, by definition, fit that descriptor. I may do the same with “noise” down the road. It’s intended to refer to outright noise, but noise arguably is in the ear of the beholder, and I’m not sure relative volume/amplitude should be a requisite when employing the term.

As a result of this effort, the “tag cloud” on this site’s archive page (disquiet.com/disquiet-archives) is now more useful.

Oh, and for the record, as of today, the tags for the site are as follows, in alphabetical order: classical, comics, copyleft, field-recording, film, forum-digger, free, gadget, i-hop, installation, live-performance, netlabel, noise, remix, science-fiction, score, site-maintenance, software, sound-art, turntablism, TV, video, video-game, voice.

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Image of the Week: Sky Eavesdropper

[ December 21, 2008 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

From artist Steve Roden‘s deep bag of sound-related esoterica:

Writes Roden, “a detail from a 1940′s ‘linen’ postcard (so called because of the texture of the paper), of some military men with an incredible listening device to hear approaching airplanes. i suppose it is the equivalent of a telescope for ears.” More at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com.

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Quote of the Week: Cage Space Tokyo

[ December 20, 2008 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

This is Roger McDonald, co-founder and deputy director of Arts Initiative Tokyo, describing the city:

    This sense of physical impermanence makes Tokyo something like a huge, ever-evolving John Cage composition, whirling itself through chance procedures and the interventions of its inhabitants/users.

That’s from McDonald’s essay “A Huge, Ever-Growing, Pulsating Brain that Rules from the Empty Center of a City Called Tokyo,” from the recently published book Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World, an excellent window on the city’s art scenes as expressed through interviews with curators, artists, and other cultural figures, as well as essays and neighborhood maps.

More information at chinmusicpress.com and artspacetokyo.com. Visit McDonald’s Arts Initiative Tokyo at a-i-t.net.

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