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Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Topic Archives: downstream

The Ringing in Zeus’ Ear (MP3)

What it would sound like if tinsel caused feedback


As heard later in an MP3, the performance is cut short. Not by the arrival of the fire marshall, or an electrical outage, or an assault from a member of the audience. The performance went on, but it’s cut short for those of us who didn’t make the April 21, 2012, event at the YU Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon, when Daniel Menche played two-plus hours of deep glisten, of intense sheen, of high-decibel sheer. There’s an MP3 document of the event, a rousing, swelling mass of what it would sound like if tinsel caused feedback (MP3). Apparently it’s shorter than the original performance due to a recording failure. What we miss must be even more resplendent noise, because the hour and a quarter in the sizable (110+ KB) MP3 is nothing but resplendent noise, occasionally dipping into everyday-level but often in a sonic stratosphere of hazy clanging, the ringing in Zeus’ ear. Apparently the performance was itself cut short (“The amplifiers also blew out at the end,” we’re told) but the MP3 doesn’t get that far. The MP3′s failure is an unintended simulacrum of the one that ended the show.

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More on the performance at touchradio.org.uk. More on Menche at danielmenche.blogspot.com. More on the performance space, which has a remarkably designed website, like the Periodic Table of Contents, at yucontemporary.org.

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Music from London’s Linear Obsessional (MP3)

"This piece was devised for boiling water, hot fat, synthesizer and sopranino saxophone."

Mark Browne‘s Malapert and Erratic is an expansive and ambitious project: seven tracks, one over twenty minutes in length, none shorter than six minutes, all with lengthy titles somewhere between a Dickensian subtitle and a Fluxus manifesto, such as “Adjusting the Windows in the Loneliness of My Car so That the Wind Whistles Through at an Ill Defined Pitch and Volume.” But the true mark of the album’s broad goals is the way it mixes such seeming disparate elements as improvisation, jazz, field recordings, and noise into one rich associative endeavor. The strongest track may be the longest, “From the Diaries of the Too Numerous Cursed Poets.” It is a deeply coded narrative of dark intonations and frazzled nerves. Browne’s sound may be abstract, but he isn’t uncomfortable explicating his maneuvers in text. Accompanying the album is a lengthy PDF, with track-by-track notes. This is what Browne says of his “From the Diaries”:

This piece was devised for boiling water, hot fat, synthesizer and sopranino saxophone. This is the second piece I have recorded using this instrumentation and approach and is largely the result of finding the appeal in listening to Noise Music at low volume levels. The piece uses four frying pans initially containing only water. Variation is created by allowing the pans to nearly boil dry, adding and melting fat into the water, and adjusting the gas. The synthesizer uses a touch pad that can be operated using a small stone allowing the saxophone to be played.

Get the full album at linearobsessional.bandcamp.com. It was released by the London-based netlabel linearobsessional.weebly.com. This is the first Linear Obsessional release to be featured on Disquiet.com.

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Rawore, Playing Around (MP3)

A bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus

Burble, burble. This is “Finally Sunny,” a nearly four-minute piece by Rawore uploaded to his soundcloud.com/r-37 account. It’s a bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus. The melody takes the form of occasional tones that move up and down and up again in a manner that suggests a loose, genial structure. What makes the melody especially enjoyable isn’t the tune itself, though it is a lovely fragment of a tune, but instead the manner in which the motion of the tune resembles the ping-ponging percussive effects amid which the steadily bounding tones appear. The blurring of foreground and background is splendid.

For his part, Rawore provides only the slightest of contextual information, a description that clearly suggests its intended readership — true to the workshop nature of so much of SoundCloud — is soleley his fellow musicians: “playing around with audio damage tools. phosphor synth and ronin effect.”

More on Rawore, aka Bob Phillips, at raworeb.blogspot.com.

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Autechre on Guitar (MP3)

15 years later, an abstract beat gem revived on a six-string

The songlessness of experimental music is often overstated. Autechre’s distressed digital inventions, for example, gain from their cover art an association with impossible architectures, things that CAD software can imagine but no general contractor could actually build. XYZR_KX of Chicago, aka Jon Monteverde, took the challenge upon himself to transform the turntable-laden, scratch-infused, murky wonderment of “Goz Quarter,” off the 15-year-old Envane EP by Autechre, and turn it into something playable — playable on guitar, no less. His resulting work trades the subsumed hip-hop of the original for something closer to dub, and while hearing the melodyishness of “Goz Quarter” is a pleasure, the real richness of the track is how the dubby environment has the echoed strings and bits of percussion swirling around each other and never … quite … coming … into … sync. By mimicking the song’s melodic path, XYZR_KX has produced a cover; by re-engineering the piece’s inherent complexity, he has produced a tribute.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/xyzr_kx. More on XYZR_KX/Monteverde at xyzrkx.com.

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Alan Morse Davies, Circa 1984

Where the action was — or, more to the point, the enjoyable inaction

Alan Morse Davies has been posting some of his earliest work recently. He’s associated with the process of slowing down, though his work is often more complicated than simply the mechanical action of reducing the pace of his source material. A single dating from 1984, released under the moniker AED, shows him on the gentle side of things from early on. By his telling, the single made it onto the John Peel show, and sold some 17,000 copies. The A side, “Infer Ships Sink,” has a British folk feel to it, with hints of Robert Wyatt and, perhaps, Syd Barrett. The B side is where the action was — or, more to the point, the enjoyable inaction. Titled “Emporium Halls Pt. 4,” it’s described by him in his post briefly as “layered slowed down birdsong” (MP3). The overall effect is gothic and funereal, and delectable. The layering yields a cycling pattern that manages to be both anxious and muted.

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Track originally posted at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com. Image of the cover of the single, above, from the great resource that is discogs.com.

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