Month: March 2011

What’s Finnish for Downtempo?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

They are likely intended as interludes, even if they equal the number of vocal tracks. The album is The Travelers Ghost (no apostrophe), credited to Skipless. The tracks in question are all downtempo excursions into instrumental hip-hop, the beats wobbly and often pleasingly off-kilter, the mood smokey, The surface noise right in your ear if not your face. They’re also quite consistent. A lot of netlabel instrumental hip-hop albums feature one, maybe two, standout tracks, and a whole lot of material that either could have used more time in the sampler-cum-incubator. One of the tracks acknowledges its interlude status, including the word in its title, parenthetically — “Time (Interlude).” It’s all looped bass and drums, sodden vocal snippets, and dubby echo (MP3). “Vibe” trades the water-logged effect for something closer to heat-damaged, its samples slowing and speeding like a piece of warped vinyl, and making a smart contrast to the precise drum patterns (MP3). The other standout is the title track, which balances a piano that appears as little more than a trill and a shard of a split second, and a guitar that’s strung as loose as spaghetti — well, a spaghetti western (MP3).

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK083/01_Skipless_-_The_Travelers_Ghost.mp3|titles=”The Travelers Ghost”|artists=Skipless] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK083/04_Skipless_-_Time_Interlude.mp3|titles=”Time Interlude”|artists=Skipless] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK083/06_Skipless_-_Dark_Matter.mp3|titles=”Dark Matter”|artists=Skipless] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK083/09_Skipless_-_Vibe.mp3|titles=”Vibe”|artists=Skipless] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK083/10_Skipless_-_Outro.mp3|titles=”Outro”|artists=Skipless]

Get the full release, for free, at dustedwax.org and at archive.org.

More on Skipless, who is from Ikaalinen, Finland, where he says he works solely from vinyl and an MPC, at skipless.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The http://resonancefm.com/auction is like the back room at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie: Moore, Collins, Ra, Oswald. #
  • Morning sounds: hard drive, baby kicks, shower, hail-like rain, ice crackling in coffee. #
  • Tonight’s Fringe included Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Tribute to Brubeck drummer Joe Morello, who died this week? #
  • This morning, a small tornado a mile away, just off the coast. Now, serious thunder. Serious thunder in San Francisco. #
  • Note in March 17 update to Bloom (Eno/Chilvers iOS ambient app): “Improved polyphony (although Bloom is at its best when it plays sparsely)” #
  • â–º Nick Drake gets the super-slomo treatment: http://t.co/DZvjYWI Background: http://j.mp/gdAVGo #
  • Ah, the guy (Paul Leonard-Morgan) who did the music for Limitless also did some stuff for the BBC series Spooks. #

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Singing Like Cage’s Radio / The Temporal Equivalent of Jet Lag (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Among the four tracks on Neil Milton‘s White Spring, Black Cloud is one rich with the chance interplay of radio signals. Milton credits the format to John Cage, who famously composed works based on what was currently floating about in the radio spectrum. (Cage also had a hysterical conversation once with Morton Feldman about Feldman’s distaste for public use of portable radios.) In this track, “Variations on ‘Radio Music’ by John Cage,” you hear voices male and female, young and old, in numerous languages — what may be a snippet of Neil Young at one point, enough Slavic languages to lend the whole thing a Cold War vibe, and countless snippets of white noise.

At first the noise is just that, a natural — well, a technologically inherent — aspect of turning the radio dial. But in time it serves more purposes: its flavor varies, it fades under the signal like background instrumentation, it hints at a fraying of coherence. The recorded signals aren’t all verbal. There is plenty of music, some of it so antique that it gives the radio the aura of a time machine, as if it were picking up waves from long ago, and the white noise comes to suggest temporal interference due to the time-travel equivalent of jet lag.
Continue reading “Singing Like Cage’s Radio / The Temporal Equivalent of Jet Lag (MP3)”

Noise from J Lesser (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Noise from J Lesser — a mix, as he explains on the track’s page, of two devices: the MeeBlip (“the hackable digital synth) and the Skreddy Echo pedal (“tape-like” delay). Those quotes are not from Lesser, but from the promotional pages for the individual pieces of equipment. Lesser’s noise is like that of a private BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a science fiction soundtrack, all hovering UFOs and robot-overlord alarmism, rendered with the lo-fi charm of a 1950s movie lightly glossing on Cold War concerns with pancake makeup, silver overalls, and threats of alien invasion.

The specifics of the equipment would mark this as music-for-gearheads a decade ago, but the facts of the web are that simple searches yield clues about not just make and model, but culture and context, in this case a match-up between the small-brew tech world of DIY engineering, and the old-school world of shredder footwares.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/lesser. More on the two devices at meeblip.noisepages.com and skreddypedals.com.

The Un-Googled Recording (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is much that Google has yet to google. Just as for every book in Google Books there are countless personal handwritten journals moldering in attics, so too for every MP3 are there countless home recordings.

The ephemera that resulted from the novelty of recording, of hearing one’s voice, of emulating recording artists — not as karaoke, but simply through the modest yet powerful act of having committed one’s voice to tape — is the subject of “Untitled,” a piece of sound art by Graham Dunning from 2010 (MP3):

The recording is a composed collection of sounds from discarded reel-to-reel tapes dating from the 1950s to the 1970s: people singing nursery rhymes and popular songs alongside hiss, hum and crackle from the analogue recording process. The installation features three tape machines paying these disembodied sounds, calling into question the function of archiving and the relationships between sound, memory, loss and nostalgia. ‘Untitled’ was first exhibited in April 2010 at ‘Lost Language’ at Kraak gallery in Manchester, UK, and most recently at ‘Time Pieces’ at the Peter Scott Gallery at Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts in March 2011.

[audio:http://ia600403.us.archive.org/15/items/modisti_21/modisti_21_GrahamDunning-TapeGhosts.mp3|titles=”Untitled”|artists=Graham Dunning]

It consists of two sounds: voices and technology. Lyrics are sung with a masked bravado, and then people are heard joshing each other about their undertaking, their affect, their talent, or purported lack thereof. The technology is all surface noise and rusty machinery, the deep sonic thumb print of a far less frictionless era than our current one.

More on the work at the releasing netlabel, modisti.com.