Disquiet

[ August 10, 2010 / bookmark ]

Live Clapan / Denis Korsunski Set (MP3)

All it requires is a bit of repetition and a little echo to take a diva — all that throaty virtuosity, all that institutional training, all that inherited performance technique — and turn her into one element among many. The Russian musician Clapan (né Denis Korsunski) accomplishes just that early along in an hour-long live set posted at the start of this month. The vocalist arrives as something of a surprise; it’s just been electronica ease until that point. We hear her, and then we hear that same phrase again — repeated not by her but by Clapan’s equipment (which is to say, the repetition is mechanical), and soon after we hear the extended phrase, of which her earlier utterance is shown to be just a segment. Clapan’s signal is clear: he controls the materials, and the context in which they are to be heard. To add to the subsumed nature of her role, she isn’t even the only vocalist to appear in the performance, and the brief echo that she encounters later appears as a full-on dub-fest (MP3). She is heard among clattery percussive textures and nominally danceable beats. To listen to Clapan work her into his performance is to hear him ably juggle his various pieces, and to do so with the intent of a storyteller. She’s only there briefly, but when she’s gone we remember her.

More details at broque.de. More on Clapan/Korsunski at myspace.com/clapan and clapan.com.

[ August 9, 2010 / bookmark ]

Train Train, 2:32 Long (MP3)

When does a field recording of sound constitute a performance? Perhaps when the field — that is, perhaps when the environment in which the sound itself occurred — serves a role that might be likened to that of a traditional instrument. Phillip Wilkerson posted a recent recording of just such an instance, that of a train circling the base of Stone Mountain in Georgia (MP3). As he notes in his brief description of that train, “You can actually hear the train’s bell echoing off the mountain at about the 1:06 minute mark.”

Long before that echoing effect, the train comes into (aural) view. At 26 seconds into the recording, following a welter of level-setting ambient noise, a whistle announces the train’s arrival. In retrospect, perhaps we’ve been hearing the train all along, a more ambiguous sound of rail chatter that only comes into focus with the train’s whistle. Whatever comprised the earlier stage, from that point forward (“forward” being the operative term when talking railroads), the train is the recording: not just the occasional whistle, but the rail rumba itself, and the train’s bell that eventually sets to clanking like a metronome. The extended denouement, just downtempo bell pulse and field noise, is one of the track’s distinguishing features, such a slim sound signifying so much vehicular energy being expended.

The echo that Wilkerson points out is the track’s other most remarkable moment. The echo is a brief part of the overall recording, but the repeats quickly bring to mind Steve Reich’s pulse-based counterpoint in a manner that is deeply pleasing, perhaps all the more so due to the lack of authorial intention.

Original post at philwilkerson.wordpress.com. Wilkerson identifies the train as the EMD FP7 diesel locomotive (picture above from wikipedia.org). The below photo shows Stone Mountain, and was taken by Wilkerson — photography to complement his phonography.

[ August 6, 2010 / bookmark ]

Melodrama, Beats, and Noise — Rykard MP3s

To listen to Beacon Radio by Rykard is to wonder if your Internet browser has multiple tabs or windows emitting audio simultaneously. Not a single track goes by without some incongruous melange occurring — such as the remote megaphones and clangy percussion of “Sulphuric Arqived,” or the canine grunts and distended orchestrations of “Orchids,” not to mention that latter track’s girlish laughter, which gives way to a steady, loungey beat. After a rough landing, the album opens (on “Return to Hewn”) with what could me mistaken for (or purloined from) ’80s new wave. And then, he’s off. What’s astonishing about the collection is that it never seems random. This is no mere radio-dial-spinning tomfoolery, even if a melody straight out of The Nutcracker (in “Javo Is Ded”) sits close by harsh white noise (the start of “Forget Me Ginny”). Perhaps what ties the work together is a regular return to antiquated, melodramatic forms (The Nutcracker has more in common with new wave than just velor uniforms with over-sized epaulets), filtered through a noisy sensibility, which in turn only serves to amp up the drama quotient.

The work isn’t available for streaming here, but it is over at the dedpop.co.uk netlabel, where it’s also downloadable as a Zip archive. Particularly recommended is the album’s briefest track, “Walton Sky,” at a mere half minute a downtempo fusion of sinuous melody and thick, minimal-techno dub (the remainder of the tracks range in length all the way up to an epic 1:33)

More on Rykard, who’s based in Lancashire, England, at myspace.com/rykardmusic.

[ July 30, 2010 / bookmark ]

Death, Sound, Words (Scanner MP3s)

A car honks twice, and then what follows is an inundation of descriptions of a grisly automobile accident that has taken the life of a loved one, as well as of the detached bystanders who snap mobile-phone pictures of the splattered corpse.

A rector talks at length about the intense, the unknowably demanding, emotional requisites of his funeral work, and as his measured tones come to a halt, church bells seem to ring out in the distance, muffled by solemnity and space — and, no doubt, by some manner of digital processing.

The processing is courtesy of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), who produced the work, titled “Sighs, Wonders,” with writer Sukhdev Sandhu on a commission from the Spitalfields Festival London earlier this year. Two versions are available for free online. There’s a nearly 20-minute “instrumental” take (albeit with a few brief spoken passages) he posted yesterday:

And there’s a shorter excerpt (MP3), about half that length, at the website of the sponsoring festival:

Scanner and Sandhu previously collaborated on the hypertextual “nocturnal journal” nighthaunts.org.uk, with visuals by the digital studio Mind Unit. For “Sighs, Wonders” they again plumb matters of urbanism and mortality. As Scanner’s characteristic ambience unfolds, voices are heard intoning about the history of the land, matters of flesh and spirit, of “Roman bones” and “paupers’ bones” and everything in between.

Scanner’s early career involved using words he snatched from the ether (hence his name), the candid words of others unwittingly sewn into his sound art, but he also works with dramatic efforts, such as these texts. In one of the many “Sighs, Wonders” spoken bits, the following is uttered:

“For the upscale slummer, it’s a peepshow picturesque. For the missionary, it’s a chance to play imperial redeemer, tamer of beasts, a human chandelier radiating the darkness.”

Sandhu could be speaking of the unwashed masses of an urban setting. Or he could be speaking, more self-consciously, of the tension inherent in Scanner’s practice. The instrumental version of “Sighs, Wonders” is a lovely thing, a mix of moody synthesized noise and occasional field recordings, punctuated by brief utterances. The spoken version, naturally, brings the narrative concerns to the fore. The rector’s words are spoken not by Sandhu but by an actual local Shoreditch rector, whose presence blurs the space between documented and constructed reality. (Such a quintessentially British place name, Shoreditch, the sort of deeply mundane, semi-oxymoronic term that had it not existed, surely China Miéville would have created it for one of his novels.) We experience the piece (in either its instrumental or verbalized editions) simultaneously as a virtuous art, and as an archive of deterioration.

The instrumental track is at soundcloud.com/scanner (from which the above photo is taken). The track with extended vocals is at spitalfieldsfestival.org.uk. Scanner announced the instrumental’s availability at twitter.com/robinrimbaud and facebook.com/scannerdot. More on Scanner at scannerdot.com.

[ July 26, 2010 / bookmark ]

Stephen Vitiello’s Collage Enviroment (MP3)

All field recordings are alien, even the most familiar. A close-up recording of a bug or an ice cube has sonic resonances, inherent threat, surprise facets, that are utterly apart from daily experience. To bring a microphone close to something is to witness it at an unprecedented level of detail, and to listen to it closely is to hear things that one simply doesn’t associate with the object at hand.

This is no less true of environments than of objects. As an experiment, record your daily commute and listen back to it later; you’ll be astounded by the sounds you hadn’t noticed. In many ways, the more familiar the place or object recorded, the more dissociated the experience, because as time passes we take sound for granted; we listen through the familiar, and our ears focus on the occasional unfamiliar.

Stephen Vitiello, the musician and sound artist, frequently employs field recordings in his work, both sonic and visual. For an exhibit earlier this year at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he took sounds from three diverse locales — “Australian outback, the Canadian wilderness, and New York City’s streets,” according to the museum, as well as “Virginia marshes” according to a story in the local newspaper — and created an installation score that is all of those places and none of them. Elements of the real world are ever-present, from rough noise to ambiguous jangling to industrial whines to what may be moving water andor traffic, but they’re less snapshots or documentation than they are just that: elements, parts of a whole given meaning through manipulation and context. The work is a collage lent a semblance of constancy thanks to what appear to be added effects, tones like those from a dying organ, and whirring buzzing like the sound design of a science-fiction film.

The idea of sound design is central to the score, because it served as part of an immersive environment, titled “Something Like Fireworks.” The Vitiello music was composed to be played in a lit space designed by artist Jeremy Choate (see the photo above). Theirs is a staged place, an unreal place, a fictional reality created by artists.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello.

More on the exhibit at davismuseum.wellesley.edu and metrowestdailynews.com.

[ July 23, 2010 / bookmark ]

Real World v. Composed World v. Interior World (MP3)

That’s not how the rules are supposed to work, right? If you’re combining natural sounds and electronic ones, there’s an inherent contrast, the noisy chaos of the “real” world set alongisde the considered organization of the “constructed” one. The real world is the one outside our doors. The constructed one is the one inside our minds.

Yet treehouses, which is to say Mike Rotondo, ingeniously — and, perhaps of more important, both tunefully and delectably — messes with such categories on “Goodbye Mission Dub,” a track he uploaded earlier this week to his soundcloud.com/treehouses account.

The track opens with street noise, and soon we’re faced with a handful of elements. First there’s an off-kilter rhythm that sounds automated but has a purposefully sloppy, slightly-off-the-beat thing going for it. Then there’s a woodwind, winding its way in and out of the rhythm. And finally there’s clanging percussion, what may very well be pots and pans.

The latter component seems to inherit the spirit of those field recordings, which come and go in the mix — they sound like happenstance, but they’re thoroughly functional, no less a part of the “music” (in contrast with the field-recording audio document of “real life”) than is the woodwind. And that semi-mechanized beat, with its odd metrics, is less dependable, less sturdy, than any of the other parts of the piece.

The song’s slow beat matches the San Francisco neighborhood of its title, and the dub is much more a matter of spirit than of what’s traditionally thought of as dub. There’s no heavy delay, no dank cavernous echoes. “Goodbye Mission Dub” situates itself as living-room music (or, given those pots, maybe kitchen music), a social space halfway between the outside world and the interior one. You’ll want to put it on loop and play it all afternoon.

More on Rotondo at mrotondo.tumblr.com and mikerotondo.com and, for that matter, twitter.com/mrotondo.

(Photo of Mission District mural by Wendy Harman via flickr.com.)

[ July 22, 2010 / bookmark ]

Surachai & Justin (MP3)

Beat-driven instrumental electronica often builds as it goes along — following a disorienting bit of opening noise, there’s a rhythm track, then some half-broken sound that’s treated like a lead instrument, then a sinuous unknowable that adds flesh to the bones, then variations on that sequence, one after another, perhaps one or another dropping out, momentarily, but ultimately moving forward, and gaining in dimension. The elements gather force. The overall structure may bear the hallmarks of, or otherwise hint at the structure of, the pop song — the verse, the chorus, the repetition thereof interrupted by a bridge — but the strength of it is how those elements join up, get confused, reveal something about each other as they come into conflict.

In “The Pain” by Surachai and Justin, the sounds get heavier and thicker as they move along (MP3). Patterns come into view as the piece makes its way, splintering occasionally, like a module’s short circuited or a plug-in has crashed, until the monotony becomes its own force, and then the splintering comes back for real, and the whole thing just collapses, beautifully.

The track’s part of a two-piece set at trashaudio.com.