Disquiet

[ March 3, 2010 / bookmark ]

Ambient Procedures in the Light (MP3)

Birmingham, UK-based Mark Harris’s “Duo (The Intension Becomes Masked)” is a bit of ambient procedural music. The procedure in question is quite simple:

The composition is based in a series of eight pitch shifted loop’s of each tone (14 loops). which are then time stretched four times which give us fifty six loops in the piece all running at different times so the composition is in a constant state of flux

The result is a long, still, shifting collection of hushed textures, all interacting in various ways. There is a sense of slowly increasing density and drama, but that may have as much to do with the ear’s need to lend narrative as it does with any compositional strategy on Harris’s part. At 10 minutes in length, it has more than enough space to stretch out in — space in which the listener can get pleasantly lost.

More on Harris at phasestudies.co.uk.

[ March 2, 2010 / bookmark ]

The Controverted Contrabass (MP3)

Michael Bullock does terrible, wonderful things with his contrabass. He rattles its thick, braid-like strings until they come to resemble a cyclone fence doing battle with a ferocious wind. He bows it with a quiet intensity that brings out every fiber of its physical being. He attacks it with alternative materials, leaving the bow aside like so much antiquated performance history. He takes the proud beast of an instrument and uses it to make expressly quiet noises. He takes an instrument capable of deeply sonorous experience, and turns it — mischievously, perhaps, but also concertedly — into a tool for sonic abbrasion.

All of this, and more, is heard in a performance made on February 18 on Rare Frequency, a weekly show at the great Boston radio station WZBC 90.3 FM (MP3).

Original post at rarefrequency.com.

And here’s a video of Bullock performing solo, albeit accompanied by trumpet loops, two nights later at Third Life Studio in Somerville, Massachusetts:

More on Bullock at finenoiseandlight.net.

[ March 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Bridging Drone & Glitch (MP3)

Writing in brief about his six-plus-minute swath of sound recently uploaded to soundcloud.com/vourtsis, musician Tom Vourtsis described it as “drone/glitch.”

That’s a bit like saying “inside/outside” or “yes/no.” For while drones can be glitchy, and a stream of glitches can suggest a drone-like sound-field, the terms are more a matter of contrasts than of commonalities.

Drones are long held sounds that have the feeling of nearly sub-aural experience. Glitches are the noises that disrupt. Drones are background, glitches foreground. Drones are comfortable, glitches abrasive. Drones are the sound of inaction, glitches of something that’s broken. Drone suggest stasis, glitch crisis.

Which isn’t to criticize Vourtsis. He is correct, and the track is enticing for exactly that reason: the sounds are contrasting, but not incompatible. The glitches are eventually subsumed in “Brown,” as the track is named, but it’s certainly not clear from the start which element will be the victor. The opening drone is like some distant port noise, the sound of ships passing in the fog-muddied night. And then the slow wax and wane of the fog-sound gives way to Morse-code blips; the track moves from business-as-usual to urgency. In time the urgency fades, and the disruptive audio relaxes back into a drone, but even as it comes to a close, it bears the hint of continued threat: the glitch on the horizon.

More on Vourtsis at soundcloud.com/vourtsis and at radioamor.tumblr.com.

[ February 26, 2010 / bookmark ]

Amon Tobin Takes Noisia Down the Rabbit Hole MP3)

Dutch electronica trio Noisia managed to get Amon Tobin to remix a single from their forthcoming album, and it’s available for free download through March 8.

The song is titled “Machine Gun,” the album Split the Atom. Tobin, true to form, extracts spare elements from the original and refashions them into his own piece — in the process, he takes the original and makes it considerably more abstract, largely ditching the club-friendly beat, and along with it various pop flourishes. His revision is also about half a minute longer that the song from which it’s derived.

Noisia’s “Machine Gun” sounds a bit like if Daft Punk did the theme song for a James Bond movie. I can’t link to streaming audio of Tobin’s expert reassembly, because you have to go through this whole registration rigmarole to get the MP3, but it’s worth it (in part because the registration process allows you to opt out of future emails). The track’s online through March 8 at noisia.nl/free-download.

The original version can be heard in this video:

Noisia are Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen, and Thijs de Vlieger; more on them and the free MP3 at noisia.nl. More on Tobin at amontobin.com.

[ February 25, 2010 / bookmark ]

The Light Pleasures of Dark Drones (MP3)

“Nicely ominous” — perhaps no other phrase can so well sum up the conflicting emotional effects of a well-crafted drone. Those words were part of a comment a few days ago, responding to a track by Hoist at soundcloud.com/hoist.

Appropriately titled “Bleakscape,” the track is a lightly meandering, slowly circulating drone that doesn’t so much progress linearly as seap outward as time progresses. It could be the sound of an infant’s crib-mobile slowed to an extreme. It could be the score to a planetarium installation, each newly introduced sound timed to the appearance of a star.

Throughout, this undercurrent of tension, a tremulous if distant rumbling, is set against the glints that comprise the most prominent aspects of the composition. It’s quite a lovely thing, overall, in particular how the various different elements change how your ear perceives the work’s pacing.

Hoist is Boston, Massachusetts–based Charlie Hoistman.

[ February 24, 2010 / bookmark ]

Cello-tronic Pop MP3

The electronically enhanced, endlessly looping cello of Ted Laderas, aka Ooray, makes regular appearances as part of the Disquiet Downstream series of recommended MP3s. His latest, “Marzo,” makes a somewhat surprising but nonetheless welcome departure from his by now formalized approach to thick, reverb-drenched walls of cello-derived sound, which often come to take the appearance of massive, improvised clouds of music.

“Marzo,” by contrast, feels fully composed, in part because the layering of cello never gets to that point where you can’t see the trees, only the forest, and also because it introduces a steady rhythm, which Laderas says he got by “beating the strings with the wood part of the bow.”

Original track at soundcloud.com/ooray. More on Ooray/Laderas at 15people.net, from which the above photo is borrowed.

[ February 23, 2010 / bookmark ]

Infinite (Bass) Strings MP3

Website URLs are not unlike vanity license plates. You can tell a lot from how an individual chooses to label him- or herself. URLs do no have the attendant cheese factor of personalized license plates, because there are no non-vanity URLs; there is no “F38BC” nor “43HLJ2″ of URLs. In the world of music, even those who park their recordings are communal hubs like bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com, those inheritors of MySpace’s music-sharing momentum, have to assign their account a name, whether it be their own, or an adopted one.

Jacob Newman makes his modest home on the web at capturedspace.org, and the phrase is an apt one for his sounds. As previously heard here last year in a collection of works based on the Buddha Machine (disquiet.com), the straightforwardly titled Buddha Machine, Newman has a penchant for meditative sounds that are magnificently still and contemplative. His No Midpoint to Infinity, which was released last November, doesn’t veer from that course. And as with Buddha Machine, Midpoint’s conceptual core is a procedural one; it takes a single sound generator as its source, in this case a Fender Precision bass.

Though it’s exceedingly brief, the album’s open track (“Elusive,” MP3), at under a minute, may be its strongest moment — in retrospect, with knowledge of the bass, you can hear in it string-like features, such as plucking and slow strumming, but it’s more than anything a glorious shot of ambience, given depth with an echoing effect that suggests an impossibly large, and impossibly quiet, orchestra.

Full album at archive.org, where it is housed, and at the releasing netlabel, earthmantra.com.