Disquiet

[ August 25, 2010 / bookmark ]

Manga / Video-Game Program Music (MP3s)

It’s kinda funny that it’s called “program music,” given what such a term suggests in our age of computer-assisted cultural activity.

That’s the term for the classical tradition in which an instrumental work has an inherent but unspoken (that is, unsung) narrative. Perhaps the best known, and best loved, example is The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by Paul Dukas, which, as the Beatles might have put it, is based on a poem by a man named Goethe. We all have in our heads the Apprentice imagery — those animated mops and buckets — from Disney’s 1940 animation Fantasia (if not the more recent Nicolas Cage film), but Dukas’ music had been around for 43 years before that. Part of what made Fantasia such a fitting tribute to Dukas’ piece is that while the film provided an intoxicating, and indelible, stream of images, it didn’t add dialogue.

Music scholar Nicolas Slonimsky suggested the alternate term “descriptive music,” to allow for a phrase that more comfortably encompasses a broader range of less narrative-driven pieces, like Gustav Holst’s The Planets (not to be mistaken, of course, with Dr. Dre’s recently announced celestial hip-hop project — which it’s worth noting is reported to be instrumental, i.e. rapping-free) and Modest Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as covered famously by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer — which brings us back, via prog-rock, to electronic music, circa the 1970s.

Last year, chiptune/8-bit figure Moldilox performed his own bit of “program music,” producing a score to a video game that had never existed, based on the great manga Drifting Classroom by Japanese genius Kazuo Umezu (see disquiet.com, thejosephlusterreport.blogspot.com). With tongue, and game controller, still firmly in cheek, he’s now followed that up with a lesser-known Umezu series, Fourteen, a sprawling future-fiction work starring the tragic poultry-human hybrid Chicken George (shown up top, alongside one of Fantasia‘s anthropomorphic mop buckets).

Moldilox’s faux-score for the faux-game has the following narrative, as he describes it:

“‘The Birth of Chicken George’ and ‘The Liberation of Chicken George’ follow the first and second stages, respectively. The first finds the player controlling the lump that will become Chicken George, maneuvering past scientists in the lab, and eventually making it toward a series of computer terminals while fighting off attackers and growing piece by piece. Stage two has George free at last, and running rampant through a zoo filled with scientific horrors, releasing them all and unleashing them on the unprepared masses.”

Both are performed in classic 8-bit sounds from the Pliocene era of video games, as developed in the audio-software program Milky Tracker (milkytracker.org). The song “Birth” (MP3) has a suitably eerie opening section, with industrial noises, as well as rises and drops in scales that suggests some serious shoots’n'ladders action. And “Liberation” (MP3), with its disco-Beethoven motif, ups the pace, with a more complicated melody, and a lot more zooming around, including moments of dramatic pausing. As with pre-Fantasia Dukas, you’ll have no trouble picturing the action in your head.

More on the project, for which Moldilox provided the game-cartridge image shown above, at beepcity.com.

[ August 24, 2010 / bookmark ]

3D Music (MP3)

Stereoscopic play is a common trope in computer music and, more broadly, electronic music. The power to move sound right and left — and to a somewhat lesser extent forward and back — in the spatial stereo spectrum is an enticing one. It’s the DJ’s equivalent of all the stop-motion, physics-freezing hyperrealism that made those Matrix scenes so fresh.

To control sound on the dance floor, or on the home stereo, is to exert dominion — a la the opening credits to the old sci-fi TV show The Outer Limits: “There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not adjust the picture. We are now controlling the transmission. We control the horizontal, and the vertical.” To play with the stereo space is about control, about sonic elements as a kind of fetish — perhaps in both senses, not just as a enticing object of fascination, but as a metaphysical totem.

And isn’t that what psychedelic music is all about? Cinchel (aka Chicago-based Jason Shanley) recently posted just such a stereo-spanning bit of computer-music psychedelia, titled “20100721,” the date it was posted (and, presumably, given the casual nature of the Cinchel blog, and the way the track ends somewhat suddenly, the day of its making: MP3).

For about four and a half minutes, it’s all flanging wonderment. At first it has the gummed up density one experiences when one leaves one’s tickets to the rave at home, and is left to experience it from outside. But then, bright sharp sounds appear, little elements, spritely ones, that at first blip with a coy, semi-sentience, before becoming part of the rhythmic content — for this is nothing if not a beautiful pulsing series of intersecting patterns. Sounds occur in Cinchel’s music that cause you to look left or right, or to pay attention as they zip across the room. You respond physically, especially when listening on speakers, in contrast with headphones. That said, this is firmly in what radio DJs, long before the rise of the rave, called “headphones-only” music.

Cinchel doesn’t say much about the track in his post at his site, cinchel.com (which is named “When the Sky is Full of 0′s and 1′s …..”). He just says, “i am going to keep making … this stuff until someone tells me to stop.” I’m certainly going to do no such thing.

[ August 23, 2010 / bookmark ]

What the New Brian Eno Album Might Sound Like: Video, Free Jon Hopkins MP3

The news is circulating that Brian Eno‘s new full-length record will be released by the British label Warp. In many ways, Warp is itself the news — there’s much anticipation for any new Eno album, but especially so now that he’s aligned himself with the home of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Flying Lotus, Battles, and Prefuse 73, just to name a few of Warp’s roster who break new ground as a matter of course. This will be his first solo record in half a decade, since 2005′s Another Day on Earth, which was released by Hannibal. Small Craft on a Milk Sea, as the new album is titled, is due out November 2 in the U.S. and November 15 in the U.K.

Eno recording with Warp is like when Tom Waits or Merle Haggard signed with the label Anti-: a godfather joining up with a label whose very outlook on culture he’d helped inspire in the first place. Venturing into alternate history, it’s as if Miles Davis had switched from Columbia Records not to Warner Bros. but instead to ECM. The latter comparison is particularly apt, because of timing. Davis’ first record for Warner Bros. was the 1981 The Man with the Horn, released barely 20 years after the launch of ECM, which put out its first record in 1969. Warp was founded just over 20 years ago, in 1989.

We know what the new Eno album will look like, thanks to a series of promotional pushes from his new label, Warp. As is increasingly common in the record industry, various versions are coming: a limited-availability box set, a collector’s edition box set, a CD, and several digital-only downloads. Here are images of some of those editions:

But what will it sound like? Some of the clearest indication is in its personnel. Small Craft on a Milk Sea is credited to Brian Eno, but also states “With Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams.” In fact, it was a mention on Abrahams’ blog that resulted in premature coverage at guardian.co.uk, a leak for which Abrahams later apologized. Both Hopkins and Abrahams have worked with Eno in the past, Hopkins on the score to The Lovely Bones, the Peter Jackson film, and Abrahams in a variety of capacities (he appears on such albums as Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, Another Day on Earth, and Surprise, the Eno-produced Paul Simon project). Eno guested on Abrahams’ The Unrest Cure.

Hopkins and Abrahams have numerous mutual associations beyond Eno. Both are alumni of David Holmes projects. Holmes remixed Hopkins’ “Light Through the Veins” last year. Abrahams played on Holmes’ scores to Oceans 12 and Code 46 (the latter is especially under-appreciated, and I recommend it highly). Abrahams’ Scene Memory is an EP of remixes, featuring Hopkins and Holmes, as well as Eno associates Roedelius, J Peter Schwalm, and Jan Linton. Hopkins also contributed a remix to Abrahams’ EP1, a follow-up to the Abrahams album Honeytrap. Abrahams played on Hopkins’ Opalescent.

All of which is to say, Hopkins and Abrahams bring not only experience with Eno to Small Craft, but also a considerable amount of mutual experience, which should provide meaningful cohesion. (Anyone who read Geeta Dayal‘s recent book on Eno, Another Green World, was reminded that it isn’t unheard of for Eno to throw together musicians who have little prior experience working with each other.) Both Hopkins and Abrahams emphasize a certain unemphatic approach, often beat-driven, but still background-able, ambient music with a populist sensibility. Abrahams is a guitarist, and guitar is often discernible in his work.

In May of last year, rcrdlbl.com posted this free download of the Hopkins gently upbeat instrumental track “Wire,” off his solo album Insides:

 

Neither Hopkins nor Abrahams have much in the way of free (legal) downloadable music online, but there is a lot of streaming audio: Hopkins at jonhopkins.co.uk, myspace.com/jonhopkins, dominorecordco.com, and soundcloud.com/jonhopkins; Abrahams at leoabrahams.com, myspace.com/leoabrahams, and last.fm/music.

And here, in closing (via createdigitalmusic.com), is video of Eno in performance with both Hopkins and Abrahams, along with Karl Hyde (of Underworld) and the Necks, on Sunday, June 14, of last year at the Sydney Opera House:

 

More on Brian Eno’s forthcoming album Small Craft on a Milk Sea at brian-eno.net and warp.net.

[ August 20, 2010 / bookmark ]

On the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound

There must be a third round coming. These things come in threes, don’t they, like celebrity deaths and blockbuster movie franchises?

The “thing” in this case is the mass popularity of — the sudden mass consciousness of — what, generally speaking, is a matter of sonic composition relegated deep in left field, in the outer margins of music-posting hubs such as bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com, and archive.org, where avant-gardists are known to ply their trade in the after hours and share it with other out-sound listeners.

And so it’s especially appropriate that it was on soundcloud.com that Justin Bieber, the peculiarly youthful Canadian 16-year-old, was revealed to be utterly angelic … when one of his songs is slowed to the glacial pace of 800% its original length:

 

As of this writing, the Bieber art-prank has garnered over one and a quarter million plays, and almost 800 comments, the latter of which have turned the elegant Soundcloud waveform interface into block of harsh striations that look like what might happen if Paul Smith were given half an hour to art direct an issue of Benetton’s Colors magazine. Those comments tend toward the comparative: a user named Seefreund says “sigur ros on helium,” and adds a smiley face, while one named Precipidate noted: “Reminds me of John Tavener / Ben Frost.” Of course, it’s quite likely that all songs sound like a Sigur Ros sound check when slowed to eight times their intended pacing. What we do know is that when Sigur Ros is sped up by 800%, it resembles nothing remotely like Justin Bieber (for this we can, again, thank the struggling servers of soundcloud.com). What Predipidate is getting at is that ancient and contemporary music have, alike, strived for the angelic by using stasis as a compositional tool. We can expect more of these slow-mo mixes shortly — the question is whether early-polyphony experts like Anonymous 4 or Tallis Scholars will get in on the action. As a measure of the impact of the GBM (glacial Bieber moment), the usually practical-minded website lifehacker.com has run a how-to on what software can be employed to make one’s own “slowed-down ambient epic.”

And this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, at the risk of extending the glacial metaphor. That honor would go to Inception, from director Christopher Nolan. Only a few weeks ago, it was discerned that the artfully attenuated main theme by composer Hans Zimmer for the brainteasing film is, in fact, an orchestration of a maudlin Édith Piaf pop song heard elsewhere in the film, slowed down almost beyond recognition, the key word being “almost”:

 

This Eames-ian matter of degrees fits tidily with Nolan’s narrative logic, which posits that dreams occur much more quickly than real life, so that hence a dream within a dream will happen all the more quickly — which is to say, will feel like it lasts all the longer. Nolan made his name with another kind of time-shifting, in the backwards-told tale Memento. (Summer 2010 was something of a bonanza for experimental orchestration. Shutter Island, the pulpy Martin Scorsese psychological-horror enterprise, featured slow-music masters like Ingram Marshall and up’n'comers like Max Richter. Both films star Leonardo DiCaprio.)

To think, a year and a half ago, I’d merely hoped that the latest Nintendo DS system — whose microphone allows for slowing and speeding of recorded audio — would spark sonic play among gamers. This current zeitgeist is deeper than mere concerns about sound for its own sake. Leif Inge’s “9 Beet Stretch” got a lot of attention six years ago (disquiet.com, villagevoice.com, nytimes.com) for its slowing down of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 to 24 hours, but it never seemed to tap into some broader cultural desire.

So, what’s the cause of popular attention to slow sound? What have Nolan and Bieber, the latter unwittingly, tapped into? Is it the drawn-out wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the extended recession, the Kurzweil-ian hyperbole about incipient immortality, the way rapid changes in technology have us half-living in the future, or how concerns about global warming suggest that we may in our lifetimes witness the sort of change previously comprehendable solely by geologists?

Whatever is going on, time is most certainly on our minds.

Now, all this activity is unlikely to suddenly welcome the music of an Alan Morse Davies (check out numerous examples of his work: disquiet.com, at-sea.com) or a Thomas Köner (whose recently reissued 1993 album Permafrost — note the pertinent title — was the subject of debate earlier this month in the Disquiet.com “MP3 Discussion Group”) to the Billboard classical charts. But if the sonic properties of the Bieber opus are previously unfamiliar to you, and strike your fancy, please do track down what Davies has done with the sounds of pygmies and old jazz standards, among other source material, and what Köner can majestically summon from that most stasis-infused sound of all: static.

[ August 19, 2010 / bookmark ]

Electronics + String Quarter = “Glitch” (MP3)

If merely the list of ingredients entices you, then know in advance that “Glitch” by Daniel Wohl does not fall short, does not disappoint, and if anything is more than the sum of its equally spare and excellent parts. Those ingredients are the musical elements “string quartet” and “electronics,” plus the tantalizing “and” placed in between them, all of which is wrapped in that succinct title, which promises all manner of lovely brokenness. The promise is delivered, and Wohl has made three of the piece’s four movements available for free download.

The highlight may be the piece’s final movement, in which slowly bowed violin plays against Morse-Code-on-Quaaludes beeping, the two strains drawing together into a sluice of stuttered eloquence
(MP3). This gives way to a Michael Nyman–esque bounty of bright-skies melodicism, heard against a persistent — ingratiatingly grating? — industrial pulse.

More details on the music page at Wohl’s website, danielwohlmusic.com.

[ August 16, 2010 / bookmark ]

‘Determinism’ Score (WAV Files)

The model for the independently produced film Determinism isn’t unfamiliar: turf battle, racial firestorm, class-crossing love triangle, domineering kingpin, addled drug-runners. Part of what makes it different — more to the point, what makes it tick like a time bomb — is that all these things play out on a suburban college campus.

To some extent, that contrast between action and setting brings to mind Brick, which starred a pre-Inception (and, for that matter, pre-500 Days of Summer) Joseph Gordon-Levitt in what was essentially a film noir shot at a high school. What Brick played for deadpan meta-shtick, though, Determinism does with realism. While drug deals in dorm rooms are nothing new, the mingling in Determinism of homework and guns is palpable. This is a movie where returning to the straight and narrow after a drug-fueled walk on the side means hitting the books, though in a way that’s more “AA 12-Step” than it is “ABC After School Special.”

Adding to the interesting mix is the very nature of those racial identities. The film is the creation of twin South East Asian brothers Sanjit and Ranju Majumdar. Sanjit also edited it (and stars as its anti-heroic protagonist, Alec), and Ranju was its cinematographer. (There’s a bit of knowingness to the “filming within the film” in Determinism, which features Sanjit recording video diaries as he tries to extricate himself from family ties and school ties, and ends up digging himself a deeper and deeper hole of trouble.)

And, to top it off, Ranju also composed the Determinism score, which puts him in the small but elite category of filmmakers who contribute the music to their work, among them JJ Abrams, John Carpenter, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Twykker. That music is what really stuck with me after several viewings of the film, and I eventually suggested to Ranju that he post the score, which he has done (for free download) at soundcloud.com/determinism. (Full disclosure: A relative of mine was a producer on Determinism, and I saw its rough cuts at various stages of development.) One favorite cue of mine is the “Determinism Closing” theme, which is a characteristically haunting mix of drones, sonar beeps, field noise, and occasional percussion that is all dread, all anxiety.

And here’s the film’s promotional trailer:

 

More on the movie at determinismthemovie.com. Get the full score as a set of WAV files, or stream them, at soundcloud.com/determinism.

[ August 12, 2010 / bookmark ]

Orchestrated Drones (MP3s)

Saiph‘s Diffusion limns that space where electronic drone and classical orchestration meet. There is no doubt, in “Einsames Element” (MP3), that those are, indeed, tremulous strings amid the woodsy percussion, even if the strings are playing a role more likely to be handed to a synthesizer these days. And even on repeat listen, the knowledge of those traditional, symphonic materials doesn’t make it any more clear what, exactly, is the source of the light gusher of white noise, the fizzy wonder with which begins “Der Letzte Mensch” (MP3). Saiph’s melding of these elements puts guesswork aside, in favor of a contemplation of the inherent narrative, as when after-dark ambience, brush fire, footsteps, and horror-show voices collide late in “Mensch” for a truly filmic enterprise.

Get the full set, which includes a third track, and additional information, at darkwinter.com. More on Saiph, whose real name is Andre Faupel and who is based in Weimar, Germany, at saiphmusic.de.