Month: February 2010

Brazilian Electronic Music, Circa 1970 (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Funky glitches? Check. Latin American vibe? Check. Found-sound texture? Check.

Dateline circa 1970? Now, hold on a second.

Welcome to the sound world of Brazilian composer Jorge Antunes (born in Rio de Janeiro, 1942), three tracks of whose music were recently made freely available at that Area 51 of avant-garde culture, ubu.com.

The collection is titled Musica Eletronica, and the tracks range from gurgling effects (“Cinta Cita,” MP3) to a mix of heavily treated vocals and a wind-up turntable (“Auto Retrato,” MP3) to abstract stereo noise (“Para Nacer Aqui,” MP3). It’s a minute or so into “Auto Retrato” when a very contemporary mix of archival sound and downtempo beat kick in; DJ Kid Koala wasn’t even born when this was recorded.

[audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/Antunes_Jorge/Musica_Electronica/Antunes_Jorge-Musica_Electronica-1-Cinta_Cita.mp3|titles=”Cinta Cita”|artists=Jorge Antunes] [audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/Antunes_Jorge/Musica_Electronica/Antunes_Jorge-Musica_Electronica-2-Auto_Retrato.mp3|titles=”Auto Retrato”|artists=Jorge Antunes] [audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/Antunes_Jorge/Musica_Electronica/Antunes_Jorge-Musica_Electronica-3-Para_Nascer_Aqui.mp3
|titles=”Para Nacer Aqui”|artists=Jorge Antunes]

According to liner notes posted separately at mutant-sounds.blogspot.com, “Cinta Cita” means “meeting with the tape,” which explains its rigorous surface-level attention. The post also clarifies the content of “Auto Retrato” (full title: “Autro-Retrato Sobre Paisaje Porteño”), noting that the tango heard on the piece is by Francisco Canaro (toward the end, a pause-tape approach lets a baby’s crying punctuate a dramatic orchestral ending).

More on Antunes at jorgeantunes.com.br. The above photo is from another great Antunes source, americasnet.com.br. The image reportedly shows Antunes in 1970 at the Laboratório de Música Eletrônica do Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

Images of the Week: Enter the Makers Market

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Make empire continues to expand, this time with its own take on the do-it-yourself gadget/fetish entrepreneurship that already has a substantial consumer culture going over at etsy.com. Enter the Markers Market (makersmarket.com), which has a section set aside for music-related objects, including these three instruments, from top to bottom the “Atari Punk Console Kit” (makersmarket.com), the “Wicks Looper” (makersmarket.com), and the “Mooftronic” (makersmarket.com):

It’ll be interesting to see how the Maker Market comes to distinguish itself from not only Etsy but from its own Maker Shed, which specializes in the raw and semi-raw materials of the D.I.Y. movement. The “Atari Punk Console Kit” was already in the Maker Shed before it popped up in the Market, where it costs a buck less. The other two pieces are by a longtime Etsy dealer, who goes by the name Rare Beasts; both those devices cost about 10 bucks less on Etsy, at least at the moment. (Via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com.)

Quote of the Week: Obsolescence & Engagement

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In his latest Robair Report entry, Gino Robair ponders the divide between physical and digital instruments:

“I have an original Oberheim SEM (35 years old, serial number 100) that I used for an A/B comparison in the article. I certainly don’t regret the $600 I paid for it (used), as it continues to serve me well. I wish I felt that confident when I buy software.”

This may sound like a concern primarily for working musicians, and the bedroom tinkerers who aspire to be them. And certainly, matters of cost and technique — that is, of depreciation and the benefits of long-term engagement with a specific instrument — are of particular interest to musicians, but the implications of Robair’s consideration are no less significant for listeners. (I fully appreciate that the divide is a specious one, but for the sake of this thought, I’m putting aside, for the moment, that ongoing blurring of roles.)

On the one hand, musicians who are coming of age on laptops will not, necessarily, have the sort of benefits at age 45 that, say, musicians who dedicate themselves to piano, or to clarinet, might have.

On the other, there is a new realm of association between musician and instrument developing in the digital world, one in which the instruments are improved iteratively as the musicians themselves age. There is, certainly, precedent for this in the pre-digital era, but the extent to which collective experience will feed the development of single instruments is a promising one. In addition, we are seeing more and more software instruments developed by musicians (in such environments as Max/MSP and Processing) for their own use (as well as for commercial gain).

At the risk of the appearance of equivocation, I certainly hope that musicians, professional and amateur, continue to pursue both paths, experiencing lifelong engagement with one instrument, while watching another, virtual instrument evolve over that same lifetime.

Full Robair post at emusician.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The social contract one agrees to when signing up for the @stonesthrow message boards: "No hate, harassing, or bootlegging." #
  • Evening sounds: hard drives, fridge, bus (and attendant house-rattle). #
  • Belated RIP, Austrian sculptor Alfred Hrdlicka (b. 1928), who designed sets of Luigi Nono's first opera, Intolleranza: http://is.gd/888d1 #
  • Long walk home, across San Francisco. We talk about how light differs throughout a year, and I found myself wondering whether sound does. #
  • It'd be great if the mobile app for @evernote had a pause button on its audio recorder. #
  • Love the description that pops up on IRC when you join the @rjdj (well, the #rjdj) channel: "Sunglasses for your ears." #
  • Counting the number of languages spoken on the bus today: 7, including the bus's own beeping alerts, and its Spanish-translation intercom. #
  • Perfect background reading for the new Don DeLillo novel, Point Omega: Beethoven's 9th Symphony, stretched to 24 hours: http://is.gd/7SR1r #
  • RIP, saxophonist Sir John Dankworth (b. 1927), composer of, among other things, the theme to The Avengers, and the score for Darling. #
  • So quiet this morning that after a year in the house I realized not two but all four of the small fluorescents in the kitchen emit a whine. #

Tangents: Gordon’s Psycho, Gordon’s Miami, Albers’s Covers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The winner of the Northern Arts Prize for 2010 is Pavel Büchler, whose recordings of applause were the subject of an entry here back in October 2008 (disquiet.com). Büchler’s works in various media, and his “You Don’t Love Me” is “an installation that uses a reel to reel tape deck, a bottle of whisky and a loop of found audio tape” (northernartprize.org.uk, via aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com):

Following up on the Chris (Cabaret Voltaire) Watson South Pole entry earlier this week (disquiet.com), here’s streaming audio from below the Antarctic ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. (sic) … Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA, an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf”: awi.de/en/research.

A visual interface collecting numerous radio stations from around the world that stream their signals, from ABC Classic FM 93.9 on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific to Africa No.1 106.7 in Yaounde, Cameroon: bcdef.org/antenna (via appscout.com):

Forget the “Funky Drummer” sample and the “Amen break.” Check out the folk music that Béla Bartók used as compositional launching points: “The composer’s vast archive of Hungarian folk music has been digitized,” writes The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross, and a fair number of his phonographic recordings have been uploaded in MP3 format”: db.zti.hu (via newyorker.com).

Oddly old-fogyish comment from Geoff Dyer in his New York Times review (nytimes.com) of Don DeLillo‘s new novel, Point Omega: “This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix ‘conceptual.’”Which begs this question: “Rare”? The subject of his comment, and of DeLillo’s book, is “24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon, who has produced a vast body of work that employs similar approaches to retooling existing familiar film — an approach that is, while often humorous and sometimes revelatory in Gordon’s hands, a fairly common approach in video art, and needless to say an even more familiar approach in remix- and appropriation-friendly contemporary music (witness the 24-hour rendition by Leif Inge of Beethoven‘s 9th Symphony, aka “9 Beet Stretch”: park.nl).

Cory Arcangel, Sam Durant, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), and Pipilotti Rist are among the artists participating in this project of using the Frank Lloyd Wright‘s interior design of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to their own ends. The show Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum will allow them, and many others, to “imagine their dream interventions in the space for the exhibition.” Also part of the show is Hypermusic: Ascension, a March 11 rotunda collaboration by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie (guggenheim.org).

Documentary coming this summer on industrial-rock band Ministry, titled Fix: fixtheministrymovie.com. (It doesn’t appear to be listed in the IMDB.com database yet.)

An album of music made on the Monome, created to raise funds for Haiti (einpuls.bandcamp.com).

Review of Kenneth Kirschner‘s album Filaments & Voids, for which I wrote the liner notes, alongside Radu Malfatti‘s Wechseljahre einer Hyäne. The author suggests, quite rightly, that the “the importance of silence can easily be overstated here”: tokafi.com.

New blog from the prolific creator of Palm Sounds: mobilemusicmarketing.blogspot.com (via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com).

A lot of coverage coming out of New York on the Unsound festival, including this review of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio: “Their shared improvisation only hinted at the dance floor. It was sci-fi ambient music, with a background wash of pink noise like interstellar dust and puffy tones, pitched and unpitched, arising out of the static”: nytimes.com. (Previous Unsound overview: nytimes.com. More recent coverage of Andy Warhol footage set to music: nytimes.com.)

Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon reflects from a very personal perspective on his return to his native Miami for a concert of his work, as part of the New York Times’s blog (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com). … Another Bang on a Can associate, composer Peter Wise, has posted streaming audio for a project at MASS MoCA (muziboo.com, via blog.massmoca.org).

First podcast from the creators of RjDj: more.rjdj.me. … A petition that Apple allow audio-file sharing for music apps. I strongly support this initiative: petitionspot.com.

Art critic Joseph Masheck on an exhibit at Minus Space in Brooklyn (minusspace.com) of Josef Albers‘s album covers for the old Command Records label. The exhibit ran through the end of January: “Albers was doing a job, and took it seriously.” (brooklynrail.org, via tommoody.us). I’m not sure Masheck does justice to how well the geometry and implied motion of the Albers covers reflect the ecstatic stereoscopic experimentation (by lite-music star Enoch Light) contained on the records they adorn.

The Lifehacker.com website has been including background sounds as part of its ongoing attention to improving work productivity, including recent posts on whether its readers “use ambient sounds to concentrate” (lifehacker.com) and a Mac-only piece of software titled Ommwriter that combines a blank writing space and ambient noise (lifehacker.com).

The netlabel astorbell.com/remix has set a May 1, 2010, deadline for its open-source remix project.

I’ve finally got proper vimeo.com/disquiet and youtube.com/mwd1 channels going, with “favorited” recommendations popping up on a regular basis. Twitter, as always, is at twitter.com/disquiet. More social-network coordinates at disquiet.com/faq.