Disquiet

[ October 21, 2008 / bookmark ]

Taut Drum’n'Bass MP3s from Cycom

The new four-track release by Cycom, titled Isotope, packs in a compressed set of drum’n'bass that despite some occasional asides for moody filigree tends to favor of spare, hard beats — and at a time when more florid d’n'b has long since become standard TV-advertising and cop-show background music, that’s a gesture worth applauding. Isotope doesn’t have the gristle and anger of more contemporary drill’n'bass or the fetid, subterranean pleasures of dubstep, but it distinguishes itself with single-minded intent and some delicate touches. “Isotope” (MP3) opens with a glitchy salvo but dives headlong into rapidfire switchback rhythms that are accented by electronic tones; kudos to Cycom (born Thomas Fleischer) for the unexpected breaks. It’s the strongest track on the set, followed closely by “Funky Giraffe” (MP3), which does its best to locate a common ground between d’n'b and fusion jazz, with warm modulations and natural drum sounds. None of the tracks are new. “Isotope,” for example, dates from 2001 and “Giraffe” from 2004, but are previously unreleased. The closing track, a “bonus” entry titled “Down the Drain,” was first was heard on an Alphacut Records release back in 2006. Get the full set and more details at the website of the releasing netlabel, plainaudio.com.

[ October 20, 2008 / bookmark ]

Fennesz Interview MP3 (And Video)

The Red Bull Music Academy continues to be far more than just a quickie marketing tool for the beverage manufacturer. Up recently on its website is a series of interviews recorded this year in Barcelona. Among them is one with ambient figure Fennesz, whose first release was back in the pre-laptop days of 1995, and he talks to the RBMA audience about making the transition to digital production from analog, the importance of guitars in his work, his collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, how David Toop trainspotted his rare effort in proper sampling, and much more.

Many people around me, many colleagues around me, were doing really abstract electronic stuff at that time, and melody was kind of forbidden [laughs] — and I didn’t agree with that at all.

The podcast edition (MP3) puts the Fennesz interview alongside entries with great backpacker hip-hop act James Pants and industrial-pop mainstays Front 242. The video versions of the Fennesz, pictured below, is longer than the MP3 excerpt, and include musical interludes (redbullmusicacademy.com).

[ October 17, 2008 / bookmark ]

Pavel Büchler Audience Mashup MP3

About a year back, I mentioned in this space an album (and related MP3) by Christopher DeLaurenti (disquiet.com) consisting of field recordings made at classical music concerts before or between performances. As the Resonance FM website earlier this week noted (resonancefm.com), a solid precursor to DeLaurenti’s effort exists in the work of Pavel Büchler, whose album Live compiles the sound of audiences excerpted from the artist’s collection of live recordings of concerts (reportedly jazz concerts, though I could swear I hear Stevie Ray Vaughan in there).

That collection consisted of 351 albums, and thus 351 became the number of limited-edition copies of Büchler’s Live committed to vinyl. Fortunately for the approximately 6,699,999,649 rest of us currently living on this planet, a Resonance FM podcast back on November 10, 2006, presented Live in full for free download (MP3). The premise of Live is initially off-putting; applause is generally a distracting element in a live recording, probably the second least beloved element after an extended drum solo. The applause is so tied up in the ego of the performer that for the listener it can be the equivalent of watching a slide show of someone’s vacation with too many pictures of them in it. However, the sounds on Live successfully put the performer aside for the moment, and posit the audience front and center, a mass of humanity that, at its best, has the vibrancy of a great musical performance. (The MP3 file of the Resonance FM recording is housed at archive.org.)

The images below are from two others of Büchler’s sound-related works: an Istanbul installation titled “The Castle” (2005) featuring speakers designed by Guglielmo Marconi, and the gallery installation of a work similar to Live, the piece “3′34″ (2006), a recording comprised of the sounds between tracks on 10 vinyl recordings of music by John Cage.

More on Büchler at the website of Manchester Metropolitan University (artdes.mmu.ac.uk), where is is a Research Professor.

[ October 16, 2008 / bookmark ]

LCD Waterfall MP3s

For the second time this week, a long dependable but also relatively quiet netlabel has released something of note. A few days ago, it was Yoyo Pang!, which celebrated its one-year anniversary with yet another in its series of single-song issuances, a presentation of lightly digitized guitar by Ann Deveria (disquiet.com). Just yesterday it was Panospria, an acomplished netlabel that put out its first sets of freely downloadable music back in February 2004, but which this year has thus far posted only three (the second most recent of which, Psychwolf by Primes, was the subject of a disquiet.com entry back in July). The most recent is Marijn Comes’s LCD Waterfall. One highlight is a track titled after the soundtrack composer Jack Nitzsche (MP3), where pizzicato strings blur into a rough cluster of white noise that bring to mind the anarchic guitar symphonies of Glenn Branca.

Rough sounds filtered into an uneasy yet still beautiful quietude are a common refrain on LCD Waterfall, but the album is anything but samey. On the title track, a thick column of droning turmoil makes significant modulations over the course of its eight minutes, taking on the feel of a Olivier Messiaen organ solo (MP3). And where “LCD Waterfall” moans, a track titled “The Rainbow Eater” (MP3) glistens with chiming rounds of notes, like some 21st-century carillon heard amid luxurious held tones against a pinprick beat (MP3). Get the full set (five tracks total) at notype.com (which is home to Panospria and several other netlabls) or archive.org (the massive digital-asset repository that is the cloud-base of countless netlabels). More on Comes, who is based in the Hague, Netherlands, at myspace.com/martijncomes.

[ October 15, 2008 / bookmark ]

Ann Deveria’s Guitronic Yoyo Pang! MP3 Single

Great news. Not only is there a new release on the very occasional Yoyo Pang! netlabel, but it’s a delightful layering of acoustic guitar, understated percussion, and light digital effects that only make themselves fully apparent as the nearly seven-minute track draws to a close. Yes, that’s “track,” as in singular. Yoyo Pang! releases excellent music in small doses, one song per release, and often months go by between them. The latest, “Patio de Luz” (MP3) by Madrid, Spain-based Ann Deveria, is just the label’s sixth. Yoyo Pang!’s website doesn’t list release dates, but judging by the timestamps associated with the entries for its RSS feed, during the year since Yoyo Pang! was launched (a Luis Solís piece was the label’s debut, on October 7, 2006), as many as five months have passed between YYP singles. To its credit, precision has served its followers well, because every one of those six releases comes highly recommended. Additional good news, the song is available as an MP3 (release number five from YYP was only available in the less commonly supported OGG format). More on Deveria at her MySpace page, myspace.com/anndeveria.

And to note the netlabel’s one-year anniversary, here are links to entries on this site regarding three previous Yoyo Pang! singles: Bacanal Intruder (disquiet.com), Joseba Irazoki (disquiet.com), and Fubsan (disquiet.com).

[ October 14, 2008 / bookmark ]

Four-Track Shoegazer MP3 EP from Elisa Luu

There is a balance of songness and sound, of an experimentalist’s emphasis on texture and a composer’s on tone, that makes Elisa Luu’s Floating Sounds (Phantom Channel) one of the most immediately awarding and arresting netlabel releases of the year thus far.

The track sure to garner the lion’s share of initial listening is “Starry Night” (MP3), which mixes in fragments of Luu’s softly employed voice, tweaking it with bits of layering and stereo play, breaking it into syllables, but eventually allowing full phrases to be heard. In the world of netlabels and, more broadly, of electronic music, voices are in short supply, more often appearing as raw source material (think Scanner or Alessandro Bosetti, and countless other field-recording enthusiasts) than as center-stage participants alongside the instrumental elements, as they might in a traditional band setting. Luu finds a point of continuity between a pop song and the cut-up manner of much electronic music by emphasizing vowels over consonants, and never letting the seams of her sampling show.

There’s a shoegazer quality to the results, and the lush, dreamy quality of “Starry Night” should get new listeners to check out the three other, vocal-free tracks on Floating Sounds. All four tracks let small melodies proceed, often abetted by tiny multi-channel efforts in minimalist production touches. Generally speaking, these melodies don’t so much develop as they do repeat through a variety of different settings. There are glistening, cloud-like guitar patterns against pneumatic percussion on “Arteline”(MP3), and a more immediately recognizable six-string on “R3Son8″ (MP3), heard amid a bed of synths. The title subject of “Slow Bass Flute” (MP3) is never self-evident in the track, which proceeds like a sweet little bauble. Likely it’s simply been transformed beyond recognition.

More on Luu (aka Rome, Italy-based Elisabetta Luciani) at her myspace.com/elisaluu page, and at the releasing netlabel, phantomchannel.co.uk.

[ October 13, 2008 / bookmark ]

Japanese Abstract Turntablism MP3 from DJ Sniff

There is DJ’ing, and then there is turntablism. The former lends context to existing music by putting pre-recorded sounds into a sequence, sometimes locating parallels through the creative use of layering. The latter takes the medium itself as its subject, working with familiar tools but often driving into abstract territory that provides a unique vantage point.

Take, for example, the bracing work of DJ Sniff (born Takuro Mizuta Lippit and pictured above), a Tokyo-educated musician who is associated with the experimental music labs at STEIM in Amsterdam. He has posted numerous files of his work up at djsniff.com, including “drum studies1″ (MP3), which is an exemplary window onto his musical tactics.

The track bears the hallmarks of a DJ in action — the backward motion, the surface texture, the way that familiar sounds are distorted by tactile techniques, and the use of variable speeds. The result, though, is a work that at first sounds chaotic, yet slowly reveals its own sense of responsibility to the listener, building up bountiful noises that verge on the orchestral, but always bringing it back to the basics, rarified bits that bring to mind funky gears. More details, video, and music at djsniff.com (from which the above images is borrowed).

[ October 10, 2008 / bookmark ]

Gastrophonique: Sound-of-Food MP3s

“Le Menu Gastrophonique” is a series of podcasts recorded in and about kitchens. The concern of “Gastrophonique” is, according to its recordists, “the sounds of food, digestion, excretion.” Produced by Coraline Janvier, there have been 10 episodes thus far, though only the first two appear to have popped up on the Resonance FM RSS feed (more info at papier.brouillon.free.fr). The first had all the clanking and frying of a visit to an Indian market, followed by the making of pakoras (MP3), and the second celebrates the random noises of the kitchen, as if — notes the posting — concrete legend Pierre Schaeffer were a cook (MP3).

[ October 8, 2008 / bookmark ]

Kalte MP3 Album on Stasisfield

The name Kalte is utilized by two Toronto-based musicians, Deane Hughes and Rik MacLean, who traffic in dramatic electronic sounds. Their album The Lanthanide Series, from the excellent Stasisfield netlabel, collects five instrumental tracks that are quite distinct from each other, including the opening drone of “Shallow Approach” (MP3) and the swaying noise of “Bremsstrahlung” (MP3). The pieces each have an admirably through-composed feeling, despite their evident construction from loop-based components. The result is a kind of compositional circularity, in which materials surface on a kind of schedule, even if the work as a whole has the substance of something that grows and changes over time. Get the full set at stasisfield.com.

[ October 6, 2008 / bookmark ]

Monolake v. CERN MP3

To celebrate the newly launched Large Hadron Collider — i.e., the massive scientific experiment in subatomic particles that gained notoriety as some began to fear its activity might lead to the end of the world — minimal techno maven Monolake (aka Robert Henke) has released a track for free download.

Monolake has taken his song “Cern” (which first appeared in two slightly different forms in 2003, on the single Cern White II and the album Momentum) and mixed in snippets of interviews with scientists from the CERN website (among them Mike Lamont, Verena Kain, Lucio Rossi, Laurette Ponce, Andrej Siemko, and Lyn Evans).

The result is a complete transformation of both sets of source materials. The “Cern” music — a rising tide of beat-driven activity — lends drama to the voices, and the voices lend a sense of narrative to the music.

Henke posts these free tracks with certain rules, including an admonition against linking directly to the MP3 file, so just proceed to monolake.de/downloads. This one should be up for the full month of October. (Photo, above, by Valerio Mezzanotti for nytimes.com.)