Disquiet

[ May 14, 2008 / bookmark ]

Type Records Podcast Mix MP3

The Type label supplements its regular releases with a series of podcasts. That’s not unusual for a record label. What distinguishes Type’s series, as exemplified by a new mix by Aeioux (aka one of Type’s two founders, Stefan Lewandowski), is how a typical podcast may mix upcoming music from the label amid other recordings, like semi-random clips from the Smithsonian Folkways archive (here there’s a vocal experiment from Aldred Wolfsohn and office-setting field recordings), not to mention acclaimed individual electronic tracks, such as excerpts from Stars of the Lid and Tim Hecker (MP3). Filtered amid those and additional borrowed material are teases for Peter Broderick’s upcoming Something Has Changed, a noisy contraption of found sound and rough processing (which follows a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s spectral poetry), and Helios’s A Rising Wind, a contrasting slice of downtempo electropop. More at typerecords.com.

[ May 12, 2008 / bookmark ]

Venician Enrico Coniglio Field Recording MP3

There’s a gap between the Touch Music record label and its ongoing MP3 series, TouchRadio. While Touch album releases generally focus on processed sound, the sound on TouchRadio is generally unprocessed. The recent entries on TouchRadio have been raw field recordings, framed by the discerning ear of the recordist and by the broader context of the Touch cultural engine.

TouchRadio just released its 30th entry, a 23-minute audio tour of Venice, titled “Sapientumsuperacquis” (MP3). The microphone technology was in the hands of Enrico Coniglio, who describes the situation as follows in the accompanying text:

As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at “Riva dei Schiavoni”, not far from San Marco square.

Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic.

“Sapientum super acquis” is the title attribuited to the “Magistrato alle acque” of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ istituited on 1501 by the “Council of ten”, that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the “health” of the water.

Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.

The burbling of water provides a thick scrim through which are heard industrial noise, conversations, the creak of waterborne structures, footsteps and more. It’s the perfect background music for an afternoon spent reading a China Miéville novel, the sort of tale in which the dank urban setting exists thanks to a tentative compromise with the fetid mote that surrounds it.

The track was originally posted at touchmusic.org.uk.

[ May 9, 2008 / bookmark ]

String-Based Ambient MP3 Collection

The 22-track, various-artist String Ambient collection benefits from a more literal enaction of its title than some record labels may have elected for. There are, indeed, harps and ukuleles and acoustic guitars put into action on this set of varied atmospheric music. But there are also electric guitars, as heard on Djinnestan’s “C Plus A,” in which pin-prick texture is about as much amid the quiet that could be certifiably attributed to anything string-based, (MP3), and Glenn Brown’s “A Crystal Fascination I,” which works a melodious but retrained solo into its spacey system (MP3). Terge Paulsen employs an EBow to achieve the monolithic sustain of the richly industrial drone poem “Blues for Lhasa” (MP3).

Thanks to heavy use of electronic effects, the divide between acoustic and electric string instruments is a nuanced one on String Ambient. The detuned zither that serves as the sole identified tool on Jon 7’s “An Eerie Paradise” is plucked with the tentativeness of a kalimba, each note reverberating into a cloudy background of extended tones (MP3). Likewise, the hall-of-mirrors echoes that characterize “Cathedral (excerpt)” by Caleb Dupree originated on piano (as the liner notes state: “yes, a string instrument!”), which will surprise just about any listener (MP3).

More info, including track-specific instrumentation, at the releasing netlabel, webbedhandrecords.com. The individual tracks are stored at archive.org.

[ May 7, 2008 / bookmark ]

NIN MP3s: This Dub’s for You

The leader of Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, announced this week the release of a new NIN album, and it’s available entirely for free. He did so with a simple statement: “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.” The album, titled The Slip, contains 10 tracks, much of it in the mode of industrial-rock, a former niche genre that NIN helped push up the Billboard charts. The Slip follows quickly on Ghosts I-IV, a 36-track collection of instrumentals released by NIN back in March (disquiet.com, ghosts.nin.com). Though the majority of the tracks on The Slip are proper songs with vocals, three are heavily electronic instrumentals that continue the ambient effort that Ghosts I-IV initiated. The full set is available (as MP3s and in other formats) at theslip.nin.com (there are no direct links to individual tracks).

Before diving into a song that’s oddly reminiscent of the Kinks, The Slip opens on “999,999,” a minute and a half of tapered incidental noises and swelling electric pulses. Toward the end of the album, there’s a one-two lull in the form of “Corona Radiata” and “The Four of Us Are Dying.” Neither is an interlude. “Corona” is the album’s longest cut, at seven and a half minutes, and as the title suggest, it plays like the score to a documentary about the collapse of star systems. “Dying” is a low-key slocore pop instrumental, with guitars that sound like someone’s humming the melody absentmindedly, amid heavily echoed background tones and a sublimated guitar crunch.

And, as they say on infomercials, that’s not all. The entirety of The Slip has been made available for open-source, multi-track remixing at remix.nin.com, where musicians are invited to download the constituent parts of songs (encoded as individual WAV files) and to upload their mixes. This means, among other things, that you can download the songs on The Slip, remove Reznor’s serviceable but utilitarian vocals, and just listen to the instrumental versions — and, furthermore, you can reduce or excise the occasionally heavy rhythms and enjoy the album’s atmospheric touches.

[ May 6, 2008 / bookmark ]

Turntablism MP3 Megamix

The latest podcast from tablist.net — that’s “tablist” as in “turntablism” — collects about 20 tracks by the unsung home-studio strivers who are regulars on the tablist.net website, alongside some accomplished beatmaker players. The contents range from rhythm-heavy studio production to rap-ready instrumental hip-hop to goofy scratch-happy hijinks, leavened with the inevitable jokey soundbites.

As the tracks are mixed together seamlessly by Honna, it’s fairly easy to get lost in the sequence (a complete set list, with artist links, is provided), but so be it. In our current moment of precise, digitized synchronization, getting lost is a rare pleasure.

Tracks by Jurassic 5 vet Cut Chemist and X-ecutioners alum Rob Swift are mixed in with material by the ensemble Flowlife Bumz and the self-styled retro-futurist Airnino, just to name a few. The following link — MP3 — should lead to the hour-long file, but if not, just follow the tablist.net post through to the download page.

“I mean, records aren’t made the take that kind of a beating,” goes one of the many coy found-sound-bites dropped into Honna’s mix. Maybe not, but MP3s sure are.

[ May 5, 2008 / bookmark ]

21-Year-Old Henri Chopin 7″ MP3

Courtesy of musician Steve Roden’s blog, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, a five-minute recording of Henri Chopin, the pioneering poet who passed away earlier this year. Roden has ripped to MP3 format the 7″ that accompanied the 1987 Chopin catalog published by Galerie J&J Donguy.

Roden describes the track: “made with mouth and tape, [it] resembles very much a typewriter’s frenetic/rhythmic activity. it’s a beautiful rhythmic stuttering presence that mimics the visual works.” Roden also notes that “if you listen quietly it sounds a bit like trickling water” — and, for that matter, like a pneumatic drill on concrete (MP3). Meet the late Henri Chopin, avant-garde poet and France’s premiere human beatboxer.

[ May 2, 2008 / bookmark ]

Nine Industrial Drone MP3s from Quiet Covenant

Nine extended industrial drones comprise the album Underneath, credited to Quiet Covenant and made available for free download courtesy of the estimable netlabel Dark Winter. Each track is a decaying sine wave, a dreary call signal, a wavering thing that seems well on its way toward dying.

The sound is mournful, sorrowful, not dark so much as dim. None of the individual tracks have anything to distinguish them, which is sort of the point; these are generic noises, the sort of things we ignore, the sort of sounds through which we hear the world. Here, undisturbed by the world, the sounds are still distant, out of reach, ambiguous to the point of transparency.

However, as a group they work as a fascinating, even enticing, study in minute contrasts — like how relative silences interrupt the otherwise resolute, if wan, “Within” (MP3), and how the standard spectrum of white noise thickens noticeably for “Upon” (MP3). More info at darkwinter.com.

[ April 30, 2008 / bookmark ]

Communal Fourth World Chat Room MP3s

Chat rooms have a bad rap. They’ve gained a touch of the aura that used to hover around the word “hacker.” Though today it means something closer to “entrepreneur,” hacker used to be equivalent to “dangerous anti-social malcontent.” Chat rooms are social by definition, so they can’t be truly anti-social; but they still are saddled with a reputation as a locus for, if not a downright contributor to, anti-social behavior.

As a descriptor, “chat room,” however, has a broad reach, and it includes countless places where musicians meet up with like-minded peers for advice, support and, in this age of network art, even semi-anonymous collaboration. Cases in point are the em411.com community, the comment tags on posts at createdigitalmusic.com (and the forums at its sibling site, createdigitalnoise.com), and the Music Cafe section of the forums at kvraudio.com, the latter an “information resource for open standard audio plugins.”

A typical new post at kvraudio.com might have a subject line like “Topic: anyone wanna add to my ambient trombone thing?” Earlier this month, a longtime kvraudio.com member who goes by bernhardtjeff used that line to head a post of a lengthy bit of Fourth World dub, a lulling bass end that seeps out to the end of the horizon, with muted trumpet layered atop (MP3). After some discussion among other forum mates, a member named thokay posted an update. The first thing one hears in the thokay version is a clubby beat that the original had willfully avoided, but thokay has a plan, and in time the beat merges with the deep bass of the original. Thokay folds in keyboard chords and trims the piece to pop-song length. In the end, that clubby rhythm can be heard to lend a framework that helps showcase the horn while not jeopardizing the lazy quality of the original (MP3). View the full forum thread at kvraudio.com.

As one forum member responded, “It is quite remarkable how much difference another person’s ideas can make to a tune.” It’s equally remarkable how much of this sort of virtual collaboration is occurring in so-called chat rooms.

[ April 28, 2008 / bookmark ]

Stephen Vitiello/Beta Collide Tape MP3

In the current moment of hybrid music, of field recordings mixed with live performance, of remixes that can pass as first-draft compositions, of laptop-enhanced traditional instrumentation, it can be informative, not to mention entertaining, to listen before you look, or read. A case in point is “First Vertical/First Horizontal v.1,” a tape work collaboration between composer Stephen Vitiello and the new music ensemble Beta Collide, and which Vitiello has posted on the generously stocked “sounds” page on his website (MP3).

Even that is too much information for a true blank-slate listen — from the work’s opening industrial rhythm, to overlaying tones that suggest a duet for bass flute and distant fog horn, the dimensions and construction of the piece are difficult to fathom. Better to take the sounds at face value and observe how they interact: how a murmur of found noises serves as a bed for the deep, resonant tones; how those tones move between close sonorous proximity and stark contrast; and how the tones themselves become a kind of found sound in the mix as their extended tapering off emphasizes texture over melody. Tape work generally tends to fall into one of two categories: that which emphasizes the cut-up procedures of splicing, and that which seeks to erase any sign of seams amid the constituent materials. “First Vertical/First Horizontal” falls resolutely into the latter.

The work was performed at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in April 2008. More info at stephenvitiello.com and betacollide.com.

[ April 25, 2008 / bookmark ]

Abstract Japanese Turntablism MP3

A fifth anniversary entry from the Turntable Radio podcast features Japanese figures DJ Baku, Exsample (Ken-One, Naoki and Shige) and Miyajima. Like the best abstract turntablism, the work captured during a Shibuya-district session emphasizes texture as much as it does beat-matching, with cut-up vocal samples, droney underlying melodic patterns, and dynanic counterpoint (MP3). The Turntable Radio host gives some details on the session:

The session also coincided with the release of Baku’s second album, Dharma Dance … and so Baku, who was using Serato and a Pioneer 909 mixer, primarily used sounds he had made and produced for his album, including drums, guitar melodies and synth lines. For the majority of the tracks you’ll hear in the podcast, Baku provided the backbone for the track with the Exsample guys adding on top, with melodies and vocal cuts. On a couple of tracks the roles were reserved with Naoki and Ken-One taking the lead on drums, and everyone else filling in. So for those who haven’t yet heard the album, this session should give you a pretty good idea of some of the tracks’ moods and influences.

More info at turntableradio.com, including photos from the session. More on Ken-One at myspace.com/djken1 and DJ Baku at myspace.com/djbakujapan.