Disquiet

[ July 2, 2009 / bookmark ]

Buddha Machine–Infused Drone MP3s

If you find a Buddha Machine sample amid the roiling moans of this album, take note of it. It’ll provide a sense of orientation amid the free-form noise, sonar blips, and general audio miasma. The six melancholy drones that make up Six Melancholy Songs by Restive Sonic are all deeply rich background tonics, as on the burbling thunder of “0507″ (MP3). The Buddha material serves as one of many sonic sources. As the Buddha samples get used more often in the work of abstract musicians, they are losing their initial inherent abstraction: becoming more and more recognizable, making the steady move from noise to signal. Get the full Six Melancholy Songs set at archive.org.

More info on Restive Sonic at restive.za.net and myspace.com/restivesonic.

[ July 1, 2009 / bookmark ]

Baaba Maal Remix Contest Elements

The word is “stem,” and what it refers to in music isn’t — in this case — the narrow vertical shaft of a single note in a written score, but the separate audio elements that are later combined to create a single track.

These are the constituent parts of a studio recording, and they’re the sort of pieces provided as a set in various remix contests, such as the one listed here earlier this week for ace Nigerian afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (disquiet.com, tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com; due date: July 7).

That contest offers, in MP3 form, the 15 parts of the title track of Allen’s new album, Secret Agent. Not to be outdone, Senegal’s Baaba Maal has provided 29 separate parts of the title track of his new album, Television, recorded with New York’s Brazilian Girls. The files are all available in a Zip archive at baabamaal.tv (due date: August 10). All in all, it’s less music than the Allen set, because this batch consists mostly of 20-second riffs, bits of vocals, guitar, and percussion that were looped in the construction of Maal’s song. However, there are some highly recommended chunks of sound in there, loopable and listenable to on their lonesome, notably recordings of tabla and djembe. All files are in WAV format. (Found via twitter.com/timprebble.)

[ June 30, 2009 / bookmark ]

Raz Mesinai’s “String Quartet for Four Turntables” (MP3)

Closing the month’s Disquiet Downstream entries on a particularly high note: Raz Mesinai’s technologically mediated chamber music. Titled “String Quartet for Four Turntables,” it’s a shifting, elegiac piece that plays with the textures and tenets of classical music. The instrumentation is the standard: two violins, one viola, one cello. But if the individual parts appear to have a subtle yet clearly discernible give, that’s because the performers are not playing in tandem, at least not literally.

Mesinai composed the quartet and recorded it, but he produced a separate 12″ LP for each of the four parts, and then manipulated them as a group on a set of turntables (MP3).

According to his June 24 post at razmesinai.blogspot.com, the piece had its debut at Lincoln Center in Manhattan in 2000 with a performances by DJ Olive and DJ Toshio Kajiwara. The version heard here, though, was recorded by Mesinai for the dqxt.org/dubwar podcast series. There is a fifth sonic element: an intense layer of distressed vinyl, the result of conscious lack of care that Mesinai took with the LPs. Though all vinyl can eventually take on this crusty patina, it seems especially fitting to the antique aura of chamber music.

The work serves as an intersection of many of Mesinai’s interests. Its appearance on Dub War cements its provenance with some of his earliest music, the electronic dub he did under the name Badawi, which occasionally he would shoot through with dramatic string arrangements. And in its use of live studio performances as raw material, “String Quartet for Four Turntables” resembles the manner in which he recorded the album Before the Law (for John Zorn’s Tzadik label), on which various improvising out-jazz musicians, including violinist Mark Feldman, committed short, sharp elements to tape, which Mesinai later put together into his own, arguably “unplayable” constructions.

I’d love to hear an album in which a half dozen different DJs take their turn with the material.

[ June 29, 2009 / bookmark ]

Super-Refined Afrobeat MP3s (Tony Allen)

The masterminds behind the remix contest focused on famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (best known as the backbeat of legend Fela’s band) want us to download the 15 constituent parts of the single “Secret Agent,” the title track off his new album on World Circuit label. And no doubt the promise inherent in those tracks will draw in participants. But there’s much pleasure to be had in the raw materials — how often, when you think about it, do we get nearly six straight minutes of Tony Allen drumming, which is freely available here, a trenchant rhythm that’s liked the most stripped-down Meters metric you’ve ever heard? Likewise, amid the emotive backing (and foreground) vocals and syrupy-slick guitars, there’s a fine synthesizer line available all on its delectable lonesome. And for those truly looking to Zen out, there’s even five-plus minutes of a low-volume shaker, rattling along as steady as can be.

The contest is hosted at soundcloud.com, which provides the following handy interface for accessing the goods:

For those who want to make something of the available mixing-board tracks, the due date for the contest is July 7. More details at tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com. More on the release at worldcircuit.co.uk.

[ June 26, 2009 / bookmark ]

8-bit MP3 Michael Jackson Tributes

No better way to close the week than with some 8-bit renditions of hits by suddenly deceased, long troubled pop legend Michael Jackson, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 50. There’s a handful of such covers floating around, and no doubt more will surface in the coming weeks and months. 8bit versions turn anything into a video game, which is to say, in the case of a dead public figure like Michael Jackson, they turn the subject into a video-game character.

This seems particularly fitting for someone who, like Jackson, spent his life in a self-imposed exile from reality and adulthood. 8-bit covers also fit Jackson because the retro technology was state-of-the-art back when Jackson he himself making some of his biggest records; thus, the arcade sounds have a fitting temporal association with him. (Truly diligent computer-music fans can dig out copies of the old Sega game Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.)

Songs like ShnabubulaEX’s blippy little take on “Man in the Mirror” (MP3, at 8bdaily.blogspot.com) render the legend in pixelated amber. That same blog page links to an 8-bit “Billie Jean” version, by 486, that layers Jackson’s a cappella over a brittle little video-game rendition of the instrumental track (MP3, at 8bitcollective.com). The contrast between Jackson’s hyper-articulated singing and the antiseptic funk of the backing music is striking, and despite the potential for irony, pretty darn effective.

[ June 25, 2009 / bookmark ]

Stones Throw Beat Battle MP3s

Last week’s Beat Battle at stonesthrow.com/messageboard yielded a victory for a newcomer to the ongoing audio-mixing throwdowns. The participant named biz20 had only joined the boards on June 17, a few days after the battle began. Nonetheless, his slurry, loping entry won best in class. Perhaps he got extra credit for having done what so few other beatmakers do, especially in contests such as this one, which is that he crafted an opening and a close to the track: it begins like a piece of vinyl slowly being brought up to speed, and ends (in a mirroring moment) as if someone had yanked the plug from his turntable.

Streaming audio and direct-download MP3 links aren’t functioning, but you can check out the original sample and over four dozen entries, including biz20’s, at drop.io/stmbbattle120; the initial discussion at stonesthrow.com; and the final votes at stonesthrow.com.

[ June 24, 2009 / bookmark ]

Holzkopf Covers Soft Cell, Breaks Sound Barrier (MP3s)

The group Soft Cell is best remembered for its languorous, metronomic pop, a precursor not only to minimal techno, but more broadly to the giddily presumptuous nonchalance that infuses much of the Internet’s amateur musicianship. There was always something in the musical rudimentaries of Soft Cell songs that suggested a flouting of traditional pop categories of quality — like, say, instrumental facility. Holzkopf opens its Credit Card Ache, a short album of hard noise, with a cover (MP3) of Soft Cell’s “Memorabilia.” The new rendition’s saw-tooth beats and static-heavy atmosphere bury the original’s lyrics — and so, even if you can’t quite make them out, someone presumably isn’t just singing, but also took to heart, its closing lines: “Go turn the beat around, got to hear percussion, turn it upside down.” Turning things upside down is Holzkopf’s modus operandi. Just check out “OK Times,” a broiling of beats if ever there were one (MP3); the song turns the beat around by showing, as did Alec Empire and so many other early chaos-friendly industrialists, that computerized rhythm and randomness aren’t incompatible — or, more to the point, that their seeming incompatibilities are the very source of the magic that occurs when they are combined.

Get the full set at notype.com.