Disquiet

downstream / 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.

downstream / 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.

downstream / 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.)

downstream / 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.

field notes / Image of the Week: Child’s Play

Initial images of the AMK, a modular sound toy intended for children:

More info at the site of the manufacturer, pknts.com. (Found via synthtopia.com.)

field notes / Quote of the Week: R2-D2’s Descendents

Sound designer Ben Burtt on his work on the film Wall-E:

Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around.

Read the full interview with Burtt, who was also responsible for the voice of Star Wars’s R2-D2: moviesonline.ca.

downstream / Early Tamara Albaitis MP3

How does one pronounce the given name of sound artist Tamara Albaitis? Well, the answer is buried in the audio of one of her early works, in which she recorded herself saying her name three different ways and then mixed and matched the various pronunciations (MP3). There’s the correct way — “TAM-ara” — and two common but mistaken ways: “tam-era,” “tam-ARA.” As she explains in a brief description of the track, “I also included ‘ahh’s’ and ‘no’s!’ which is normally my response to their attempts.”

Albaitis is perhaps best known for her scupltural work, which often involves speakers, such as the one pictured here, the seven-speaker “Drop” (2007), which included a four-minute soundtrack and brings to mind the spidery forms of Louise Bourgeois:

As for the earlier, auto-biographical sound work, which dates from 2002, it focuses on audio at a syllable-by-syllable level, contrasting various content, from fly-buzz syllables to recognizable words and word fragments, with small amounts of post-recording transformations, like stereo play and effects that emphasize the electronic nature of the process. More on Albaitis at her website, burnthebox.org.

downstream / Tom Lawrence’s Irish Forest Field Recordings

The latest podcast from the Touch label is a brilliantly detailed documentary recording by Tom Lawrence, who’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dublin City University. Titled “Donadea Forest,” after the Irish location where the sounds were recorded, it captures, in a languorous half hour, bird calls, breezes, and the rain amid the trees.

One especially appealing segment introduces more traditional musical elements into what is otherwise a collection of field recordings. This is accomplished by working in chimes at play in the forest. Also complicating that portion of the overall piece is the presence of traffic noise — it’s a smart moment, as humankind makes its presence heard simultaneously as tone and noise, as organized musical sound and unintended aural presence.

To assist in the listening process, Lawrence has helpfully provided a time-code guide to the work’s five constituent parts:

00:00-04:27 Castle Crow’s Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am)
04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics)
10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding)
14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and the ‘carbon chorus’ [surrounding motorways]).
20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)

The set of recordings was made between December 2007 and May 2008, and was just released on Touch’s Touch Radio series. The entire piece is available for download: M4A. More information at touchradio.org.uk. And more on Lawrence at his website, tom-lawrence.net.

downstream / How Drones Redeem Melisma (David Tagg MP3s)

Contemporary r&b has given a bad name to melisma. Once upon a time, that mode of moving a single vowel around the octave and back was an emotive rhetorical tool in popular music. These days it’s just sung and otherwise employed by tools, showy vocalists and instrumentalists whose emphasis on their own virtuosic prowess has the unintended effect of leaving listeners doubting their sensitivity. So, leave it to drones, of all things, to rejuvenate the melisma. Now, much drone music is more akin to static, an investigation of random data and texture. But there’s a growing field of drone-like music that has a melodic soul.

Take for example David Tagg’s Skin Diagram, a free download from the archaichorizon.com netlabel. All six of its tracks are built in one way or another on a steadily flowing foundation of thick, tubular drones, like the nearly subaural tone that threads through “Life Drone” (MP3) and the gentle cloud-like patterns that inform “Deep Breathing” (MP3). In all the tracks, a single sound can be followed as it snakes its way — or slowly swells and wanes, or otherwise is transformed without losing its essential quality — around the composition.

Tagg is credited on the album as having played “electric guitar, low pass filter, ring modulator.” Perhaps explaining the high sound quality, Skin Diagram also includes a credit for a mastering, which is not the norm for the often low-budget projects that appear on netlabels (the credit goes to Brian Grainger, who records elsewhere as Milieu). Get the full set at archaichorizon.com.

downstream / Freebie Beat Dimensions MP3

There’s a fairly solid new compilation out of purposefully instrumental beat-music, mostly hip-hop and dance but some verging into other areas, from lounge to flat out electronic. None of it is waiting around for someone to lay down a vocal; it’s all beats for beats’s sake. The set’s titled Beat Dimensions Vol. 1 and was compiled by Cinnaman and Jay Scarlett, with contributions from a host of drum-machine mavens. Cinnaman and Scarlett call the stuff “beatstrumentals”; on this website, it’s all categorized as “i-hop.” Fifteen of the album’s 23 cuts appeared over the course of three previous Beat Dimensions 12″s. It’s all a little far on the r&b side of the funk continuum (these producers learned a lot more from the Time than they did from the Bomb Squad), but the best of the material includes Aardvarck’s slowly stomping “Nose” and Simon Muschinsky’s funky “Activate,” as well as cuts by Super Smorky Soul and Pursuit Grooves.

To celebrate the collection’s release, its label, the Netherlands-based Rush Hour, had a little fun. At the promotional web page rushhour.nl/beatdimensions there’s a spinning little star burst, inside of which it reads “try to find the hidden beat.” And if you click on the correct elements in the album cover, it lights up like a pinball machine and a tasty, eminently loopable 41-second beat MP3, credited to SirOJ, is made available for free download — with synthy key swells, 8bit blips, and de rigueur modal flute elements. (SirOJ contributes an 8bit-influenced track to the album as Slumgullion.)

Other participants on Beat Dimensions Vol. 1 include , including Dimlite & Ill Dubio, J Todd, Up Hygh, Mweslee, Morgan Spacek, Hudson Mohawke, Dyno, Byron & Onra, Tom Trago, Hearin Aid, Flyamsam, Black Pocket, Veebeeo, Mike Tibbert, O. Boogie, and Sepalot. Liner notes were provided by Rafael Rashid, who was behind the book Behind the Beats. More info at Cinnaman-Scarlett’s myspace.com/beatdimensions. More on SirOJ at myspace.com/slumgullion.