Disquiet

[ July 18, 2008 / bookmark ]

Community-Filtered Beat MP3s

Not all charts are created equal. The wisdom of crowds can be a lot more convincing on a message board than on a sales chart. The top 10 albums of a given week, according to Soundscan, can be more a reflection of conventional wisdom and reactive consumerism than of individual taste or the state of the art. By contrast, on Internet forums where musicians post their own music for peer input, the accumulated number of comments can be a dependably solid sign of some solid work.

As of this morning, for example, the most commented upon entry among the 20 most recent threads in the “Beats/Instrumentals Showcase” forum at cratekings.com is a pair of grimy, artfully crafted rhythm tracks by one panamacanal. The thread is titled “New Beat Plz Check Out.”

The first and the real keeper, “Introducing … Intro” (MP3, zshare.net), is, as the producer says in his brief note, a Public Enemy-flavored flare-up, opening with that hip-hop trifecta: gunshot, hi-hat, strings. It doesn’t have the density commonly associated with the best Bomb Squad productions for Public Enemy, but it does have the ambient filigree, dramatic tension, and earnest vibe. “Life Hell” has a similarly classic opening: orchestral grandeur that drops, vertiginously, to downtempo swagger, a sweet lope of a loop played under some period spoken soul (MP3, zshare.net).

And both are, frankly, better — more interesting, moody, and detailed — than just about anything on the new Nas album, aside perhaps from its opening track.

(If the above MP3 links don’t function, just use the zshare.net service.)

[ July 17, 2008 / bookmark ]

21st-Century MP3 Variations by Adrian Kowalczewski

The collection of “short” pieces on Adrian Kowalczewski’s seven-song EP Short Dance Songs aren’t all danceable — except in the “intelligent dance music” sense of the word: jittery, blurpy figments of digital pop that mess with beats as they go but have a syrupy, sweet, yet engaging sentimentality to them. They range through a series of 21st-century variations, including “Short Movie Song” (MP3), which is moody and understated, and “Short Vocal Song (parts 1 + 2)” (MP3), which works in vocoded bits of android yammering. The highlight is likely “Too Short 8 Bit Love Song” (MP3), which is more blippy than blurpy, more emotionally remote than the remainder, like a soundtrack to your life, if your life were an old arcade game. Get the full set as the estimable netlabel Test Tube, monocromatica.com/netlabel.

[ July 16, 2008 / bookmark ]

MP3 Single by This Is Output / Krister Kalin

There is continuing evidence that the netlabel may be, at its best, a singles medium. As the network of intentionally free music downloads has grown, the expanding listening options have inevitably complicated the selection process for consumers. (Yes, the material, usually available in MP3 form, is free, but why must the word “consumer” necessarily imply a direct financial transaction?) Amid all the album-length and even EP-sized releases, the presence of a single-track release can be a gesture of welcome restraint, such as those at the excellent if less than prolific Yo Yo Pang netlabel (ambulatore.com/yoyo).

Now, a single MP3 needn’t be lonely. Over at the excellent Goodbye Cruel World netlabel (cruel-world.org), the most recent release, a watery, morphing, way-down-tempo but still melodic piece titled “Loss” (MP3) by This Is Output (aka Krister Kalin), is accompanied by a video, credited to L.Nystrand. The video, a grainy suburban landscape that shifts between day and dusk, it is reminiscent of early Bill Viola work and lends some additional, artful rust to the decaying pleasures of Kalin’s track.

[ July 15, 2008 / bookmark ]

Audio Bliss MP3 from Ryonkt

The slowly circulating drones of “Gray Sky,” a free download by Ryonkt, supply 17 minutes of audio bliss. Layers of sound appear occasionally with some suddenness, only to be absorbed immediately into the cloud-like whole (MP3). Brief pulses surface above the bellows-like sine waves, but there’s never enough of a pattern to them to approximate or otherwise suggest a proper melodic structure; they’re more like accent marks than notes, mere glints on the sonic windshield. This is a beautiful track, far more detailed than might initially appear to be the case. It’s likewise more dynamic: there are moments when sounds quickly spiral off into the distance, and when swells of tone play with your ear drums. There is modulation down and up, and a quieting toward the end that provides a natural, soothing close. More info at the releasing netlabel, restingbell.net, and at myspace.com/ryonkt.

[ July 14, 2008 / bookmark ]

Helena Gough’s Un-Real-World MP3s

A British musician and sound artist living and working in Berlin, Helena Gough likes to say she makes something from nothing. She takes field recordings of our real world and creates new audioscapes from them, thanks to microsonic manipulation and an empasis on a narrative-like song structure; there may be loops involved, but each effort feels through-composed, even improvised.

Perhaps that means that the twinkling sonics that flitter toward the end of an excerpt of “Liq” (MP3), housed at her website (helenagough.net), are birdsong, and that the subsequent echoes are water drops enlarged to water falls through digital transformation. Perhaps the toot toot that appears toward the opening of “Was Kein Engel Weiss” (MP3) is a passing train and the scratchy crackle that follows is that more rudimentary invention, fire. Whatever the process, the pieces never really suggest themselves as guessing games; they’re more like scores to movies of the mind.

[ July 11, 2008 / bookmark ]

Scanner Rendition of Bryars’s Sinking of the Titanic (MP3)

It’s long been a central conceit of the music and art of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) that when a human utterance is impacted by the envelope of a thick, electronically produced soundscape, the result isn’t a suffocation of the human element but, in fact, clarifying insight into the subsumed source material — insight that might not have been gained had that same material been left on its own.

This is especially the case in the work he’s done in which he purloins conversations from the air (usually courtesy of the device from which Rimbaud takes his Scanner moniker, though he’s also done interview-based research and employed archival recordings), and drapes them in synthesized, occasionally danceable scores that lend drama and backstory.

So it’s no surprise that Scanner takes so well to The Sinking of the Titanic, by British composer Gavin Bryars, as evidenced by a free download of a 2007 performance available on Scanner’s website (MP3, scannerdot.com). Originally released on Brian Eno’s appropriately named Obscure record label in the mid-1970s, Bryars’s Titanic is slowly becoming part of the 21st-century standard repertoire. Bryars’s conceit for Titanic is that the band played on as the ship famously went down, and he set up a musical circumstance in which the hymn they might have played is heard amid sounds that suggest submergence. There’s none of the thrashing one associates with a shipwreck — instead it’s a triumph of maudlin. This is not James Cameron’s vision of disaster; sometimes a whimper carries a lot more emotional heft than a bang.

Scanner’s version was performed in Philadelphia in February 2007, and it is a more dynamic rendition than what Bryars originally committed to disc (and than the version he recently released, on the Touch label, with turntablist Philip Jeck and the ensemble Alter Ego). It opens with creaky boards, a literalist salvo that soon yields to artfully muddied string playing (by violinist Todd Reynolds) that closely recalls the original. But then come martial percussion and strong playing by Reynolds that are more robust than any version of Titanic I’ve heard before. Putting the performance squarely in Scanner’s mode, there’s also audio documentation of a Titanic-disaster survivor, whose words put this more arguably more more hopeful version in perspective: “I believe instead of being submerged by the Titanic, I might say I’ve been floated by the Titanic.”

[ July 10, 2008 / bookmark ]

Freebie Beat MP3s from Crate Kings Forums

The forums at cratekings.com continue to be a great place to dig for excellent electronic music in the form of beat-heavy, sample-based solo work. Recent faves include Grimeshine’s “Hangover,” with its old-soul strings, punchy funk touches, vocals reduced to moany vowels, and a hot little minimalist piano riff (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com). More on the Seattle, Washington-based producer at myspace.com/vinylfreeway.

Also worth a listen, Dyllemma’s “New York Shit,” in which the vinyl surface noise lends some serious grit to a florid piano line and a soul-vocal snippet that’s truncated just in time to match the cut’s title (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com) — and, also by Dyllemma, the extended (three and a half minutes, which by Crate Kings standards is equivalent to a concept album) “Melon Chollie Strings,” which lays some scratchy violin-bowing over a mid-tempo groove and one majorly psychedelic break (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com).

If the above direct MP3 links don’t function, just go to the zshare.net service. The cratekings.com links go to where the artist first posted the work for public critique.

[ July 9, 2008 / bookmark ]

1996 Monolake MP3 Revision

Fans of techno, and even those simply intrigued by its android beats and cool emotional palette, needn’t fear repeating history due to any absence of learning. Monolake (aka Robert Henke), one of the founders of techno’s most remote schools — the willfully barren zone known as minimal techno — has been posting ancient artifacts for free download at his website, monolake.de. Well, ancient by popular-music standards. The latest such artifact, “Index II,” is a revised mix of “Index,” a 12″ he released in the Pleistocene era of 1996. As Henke says in his brief write-up, “If you have no turntable, never mind, here it comes via the magic internet.”

“Index 2″ has the slowly fading drum patterns and the caffeinated, pixelated percussion that characterized his more danceable efforts; what distinguishes the nearly 12-minute track from other (un-minimal) techno is the relative absence of frippery: no diva-esque vocal, no flesh on the bone, no billowy synths. Just beats.

Per the Monolake website’s rules, there’s no direct link in this post to the MP3; just head to the URL link above to locate the file. Monolake posts a new free file each month, so grab this one before the calendar bumps us to August.

[ July 8, 2008 / bookmark ]

Thea Farhadian’s Digitized Viola MP3

Composer Thea Farhadian teamed up with viola player Katrina Wreede for Farhadian’s 2007 piece Improvisation No. 7, a song-length excerpt of which is available for download (MP3) from her website, theafarhadian.com. (That is to say, it’s an excerpt substantive enough to be listenable to on its own.)

String instruments are a popular foil to the machinations of electronic composers, perhaps because they’re capable of adequate chordal playing as to be sonically complex, yet they can still serve as a distinct solo thread in a performance. Here, Weede’s viola is heard in various contexts, at times surrounded by electronic detritus, at others reflected through some algorithmic mirror. The most ear-catching moments involve the near-simultaneity of the viola’s multi-note runs being contrasted with the digital crunch of data caught mid-process. The opening of the recording is especially fine — the electronics sound like sparks shooting from the viola while Wreede plays.

More info on Farhadian at theafarhadian.com and on Katrina Wreede, a former member of the Turtle Island String Quartet, at katrinawreede.com. (I’m not certain if she was in the Quartet at the time, but Turtle Island committed to disc some of the best digitally-accompanied string music when they performed Gary Chang’s score to the 1990 film Shock to the System.)

[ July 7, 2008 / bookmark ]

Remixed 78-RPM MP3s from Alan Morse Davies

We know what Alan Morse Davies did to construct The Last Summer. The brief liner note on the project’s home page (at archive.org) states it plainly enough: “An album of manipulated recordings from 78RPM records recorded between 1905 and 1931.” He’s taken outmoded recordings of once popular music and transformed them, courtesy of the creative license inherent in the public domain, into his own deeply felt renditions. The shortest of the three tracks, a version of the Debussy favorite “Claire de Lune,” is extended to over 17 minutes, at which point it is almost pure choral gossamer (MP3); each of the other two, “The Last Rose of Summer” (MP3) and a rousing “Ave Maria” (MP3), clock in at over 23 minutes.

It’s a testament to Davies’s approach that he doesn’t get hung up on the needle-in-the-groove clicks or dusty residue of the 78s. He doesn’t need to reproduce the rough surface texture of the original medium in order to telegraph to today’s listeners that this stuff is, plain and simple, old. His versions don’t merely extend the content of the originals until that material is ready to evaporate into thin air; they amplify both the richly melodious songs that were a dominant style of that period, and the archaic echoes inherent in that time’s sonic-reproduction technology.

Get the full set at archive.org. More on Davies at his website, at-sea.com.