Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code. / Page 4

Monthly Archives: November 2009

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

[ November 14, 2009 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Evening sounds: footsteps, bus, house rattle due to bus, hard drives, refrigerator, airplane, bum fluorescent bulb. #
♫ Afternoon audio-stream: Grateful Dead (yes, the Dead) at their most spacey/experimental, titled "Infrared Roses": http://is.gd/4TwIN #
Reading about composer Carl Stone in the 11/9 New Yorker — part of a story about LA-trotting chowhound Jonathan Gold: http://is.gd/4Tpwp #
♫ Audiostreams for the afternoon: sneak listen to excerpts from forthcoming @robinrimbaud 'Conversations with the Dead': http://is.gd/4SP9e #
RIP, Albert Elms (b. 1920), film & TV composer (notably for the trippy Patrick McGoohan thriller series The Prisoner): http://is.gd/4SBDb #
♫ Afternoon free audio-stream: a 10-minute exercise in glitchy dub from DJ Erase (aka Daniel Troberg): http://is.gd/4RYJh #
A: "The hum of time." Q: What did Nabokov's unpublished work need to survive before his son felt it was publishable: http://is.gd/4RTD4 #
Morning sounds, post-sleep/pre-wake: muffled helicopter coming by from distance resembles, for extended time, an off-kilter foghorn. #
MP3 Discussion Group: Is new John (Ultravox) Foxx & Robin (Cocteau Twins) Guthrie album shoegazeriffic or too new-agey? http://is.gd/4R9J5 #
Morning sounds, in sequence: alarm (ancient-school hip-hop), alarm (snooze-breeze r&b), refrigerator, garbage truck. #
Morning sounds: hard drives, shower, free MP3 of Jack Dangers remix of Terry Riley's "In C" — via @richard_kadrey: http://bit.ly/4ApBIR #
Gym music: a whole lot of Stones Throw Beat Battle renditions. #
In the mail today, three albums: one LP, one 7", one CD — what year is it? #

Quote of the Week: The Illogic of Cage

[ November 14, 2009 / Department: field notes / Comments: 7 ]

New Yorker critic and The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross visits the John Cage exhibit currently at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, and writes, in part:

The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan. The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.

The conclusion that Ross draws has its parallel in the argument that is the substance of David Stubbs‘s recent book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko but Don’t Get Stockhausen. The photo of Cage, above, circa 1958, by Aram Avakian, is taken from the free downloadable brochure for the exhibit (PDF). Cage had his own battery of defenses, and one such axiomatic comment opens the PDF: “If this word, music, is sacred … we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.”

Full Ross post: newyorker.com. More on the exhibit at the museum’s website: macba.cat.

[ Topics: classical, silence, sound-art / Comments: 7 ]

Dank Latvian Synth MP3

[ November 13, 2009 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]

There’s nothing that unusual about synth washes that sound like scores to late-20th-century Italian science-fiction films, all artificial winds and overly cool, domesticated breezes. Nor is there anything special about rough, urban soundscapes that emphasize water-drop textures and other little noises that suggest the audio equivalent of an old, damaged film strip. What is unusual is when those two sounds are combined, as they are on the Kurland album, recently released by the Latvian act Astrowind on the Resting Bell netlabel. There are 15 tracks on the album, and given the ever expanding zone of freely legally downloadable music, a little guidance might be in order. To wit, the recommendation goes to the track “Buran,” which grounds the wavering synthesized tones in a dank midtemo slurry of blipping, dripping effects (MP3).

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Get the full release at restingbell.net.

[ Topics: free, netlabel / Comment: 1 ]

Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument (MP3)

[ November 12, 2009 / Department: downstream / Comments: 2 ]

The ubu.com sound archive of the avant-garde has uploaded five tracks by Ellen Fullman, the composer-inventor whose Long String Instrument is one of the marvels of non-electronic ambient sound. Many first heard her and the instrument on the Asphodel Records collection A Storm of Drones, which was released in 1995, and these ubu.com recordings predate that compilation by a full decade — making them, to some astonishment, a quarter century old, though they sound as fresh as ever. They originally comprised the album The Long String Instrument, released (and long out of print) on the label Het Apollohuis/Apollo Records.

Fullman has described her instrument succinctly as one in which “rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, fifty or more feet in length,” and her factual and pithy description fails to do justice to the rich, complex sound that arises from those strings. Seen in person, the Long String Instrument suggests some Brobdingnagian guitar — or a hyperlinear web in which the performer is a spider navigating its construction. This recent image from Fullman’s website gives some sense of the instrument:

Heard in these 1985 recordings, the instrument produces a mix of bellows-line intonations and percussive strums. Each of the five tracks emphasize one element of the instrument’s sonic properties over the others: “Swingen,” for example, is percussive (MP3), while “Woven Processional” (performed with Arnold Dreyblatt) is psychedelic in its swirling, sitar-like reverie (MP3).

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More on Fullman at ellenfullman.com. Details on the tracks at ubu.com.

[ Topics: free, installation / Comments: 2 ]

8bit IDM MP3 (“Bingo Speedmath”)

[ November 11, 2009 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

To listen to 4mat‘s “Bingo Speedmath” is to hear the recent past through the distant past (MP3). Specifically, it is to hear the IDM (that is, the late-1990s mix of elastic beats and shoegazer melodies) filtered through 8bit (that is, the early-1980s computerized sound of a video arcade). The transition works well. The beats, in particular, serve to elevate the shopworn Asteroids/Galaga percussion to something more sinuous, jerky, and random — the ecstatic changes give a little life to what is, inherently, arguably self-consciously, mechanical. And the melodies, while bereft of much tonal nuance, are much more subtle than the average gamer cue. The track is very fun, though its worth as a cultural mash-up may not be fully appreciated by people who don’t already have affection for both zones that 4mat has chosen to plumb for material. The whole thing is sort of like playing a round of some early Mario game, only to discover that the next level’s boss is a pixelated Aphex Twin.

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Apparently “Bingo Speedmath,” which 4mat uploaded on November 7, is the seventh of thirty tracks he intends to upload over the course of the month on a daily basis. 4mat is Matt Simonds: 8bitcollective.com, twitter.com/4mat_scenemusic, myspace.com/4matchipmusic, and ihearthesoundofwaves.blogspot.com. (Found via twitter.com/nobuooo.)

[ Topics: 8-bit, chiptune, free / Leave a comment ]

Disquiet

ambient/electronica