Disquiet Junto activity really took off in advance of the mid-April concert in Chicago, and as a result I’ve fallen behind in two particular aspects: one is getting instructions to translators in advance of the projects’ start date; the other is post-project summaries. Instead of doing these summaries after the projects are complete, I’m going to experiment with creating a post here coincident with the launch of a new project, and occasionally update it throughout the project’s development. A new project launched today, this being a Thursday, and it will run through 11:59pm this coming Monday.

There’s a number of interesting projects coming up in the Disquiet Junto series: music + 1, animation, the blues, recycling, water, instrument construction, storytelling, and the 100th anniversaries of the births of both John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow are among the forthcoming themes. But before moving forward, it’s good to take a glance in the rearview mirror. For the 21st project we’re revisiting several distinct previous themes, this time in combination; among them are original field recordings, sonic transitions, and shared samples.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, May 24, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, May 28, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0011-4seasons. (They will take a little while to populate.)

These are the instructions that went to the participants. To receive them via email each Thursday, sign up at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0021: 4 Seasons

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, May 28, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

For this project you will employ four distinct samples. Each sample will individually represent one of the four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. You will either construct your own field recordings to represent these seasons, or you will use the following provided samples:

Spring: Birdsong

http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28312/

Summer: Thunder

http://www.freesound.org/people/Erdie/sounds/23222/

Autumn: Walking in dry leaves

http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/33207/

Winter: Walking in the snow

http://www.freesound.org/people/Spandau/sounds/30833/

Once you have collected your four samples, you will construct one single track from them. The track will be between two and four minutes in length. Each of the four seasonal samples will be highlighted in sequence for one quarter the length of your track, and there should be discernible transitions between the four segments — that is to say, each sample/season should slowly transform into the next. The underlying sonic bed should be constructed only from the four samples in combination — and in that role, they can be transformed as much as you desire. There should be no additional sounds. While a given sample is in the foreground (that is, during its prominent quarter of the overall track) it should remain at least somewhat recognizable.

Length: Please keep the length of your piece to between two and four minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0021-4seasons” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post your track, please include this information:

If you use any of the four provided samples, please include the source link as reference (per the Creative Commons agreement).

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/tracks

The image up top shows Vivaldi, composer of the original The Four Seasons.

The radio is multipurpose: there’s an alarm clark, FM radio reception, an alarm, and an auxiliary jack to allow you to pipe in your laptop or MP3 player. On the top of the clock is a large, central snooze button, and five additional buttons, each a small circle denoting, with one exception, a genre. The exception is a button marked “MP3 / line in / AUX.” The four genres are “rap,” “oldies,” “soft rock,” and “classical.” This is what it sounds like when you hit the classical button:

It’s rough radio static with an evident cyclical beat. Perhaps the beat is the result of a rhythm inherent in the source of the distorted signal. Perhaps the beat exposes a fault in this radio’s own technology. Either way, what plays is not “classical” by any common understanding of the word. Clearly, whoever’s job it was to tidy up the room before guests arrived had neglected to (re)adjust the radio’s settings. Or perhaps doing so isn’t stipulated by the Hilton’s own internal systems — perhaps the exposed fault is not a matter of the radio’s technology, but of a gap between the hotel organization symbolized by an H and its sister consumer-electronics arm symbolized by an H.

All of which said, the sound of the static begs the question: What is “classical”? Is there any particular commonly agreed upon subset that still wouldn’t be so broad as to make that term virtually useless in this technological context? “Soft rock” is the most self-contained of the genres listed on the radio, because it includes an adjective that confines the material (thus confirming my longheld belief that genre is meaningless, and only tags are useful). “Rap” is fairly broad, but still suggests a certain realm of common elements: voice, beats. “Oldies” is almost as meaningless as “classical,” because “oldies” simply means that music prior to a certain era is considered valid. As for “classical,” given that this might mean a Beethoven piano sonata, or a Wagner opera, or a Bach cello suite, or Ravel’s Boléro, the word is virtually useless. Use is of concern because the radio’s construction suggests genre as having utility. And while “classical,” like “oldies,” is a term that suggests the past, it is less the case with “classical.” There is new classical music produced every day, and on occasion contemporary works find themselves fitting comfortably along with the canon.

I like to think that this particular hotel radio is tuned to sounds leaking back from the future, a time when this kind of electronic noise, this light industrial piece, this static-laden minimal techno, is considered classical music.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

At 79, Morton Subotnick is by no means resting on his laurels, as substantial as those laurels may be. Several years ago, Subotnick, one of the co-developers of the first analog synthesizer, which Don Buchla constructed in 1963, started using Ableton Live in his own performances and recordings — which is a bit like if Les Paul had started using an iPad in his weekly sessions at the Iridium. But the fact that Subotnick did fiddle with and then embrace the Live software is an emblem of his trademark curiosity and creative energy. I had the opportunity to talk with Subotnick in advance of a pair of upcoming Colorado events — one at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and the other at the Communikey Festival in Boulder. He’s touring and performing with Lillevan, the German visual artist. My interview appears today in the Colorado Springs Independent. Below is one back’n'forth from the Q&A. I will post more of the full transcript here at Disquiet.com at a later date.

Marc Weidenbaum: Does new technology help you achieve old musical ideas, or does it introduce new musical ideas?

Morton Subotnick: When my mother died, I got some boxes of old stuff and I found an essay I had written, I think, in high school.

It was a short story that described a time in the future when I came into a concert when they were doing a late Beethoven string quartet. The four musicians were on the stage with no instruments. They were sitting in chairs and they had bands around their arms and chests, attached to their chairs, and they had their music in front of them — and with their bodies and their minds they were playing their parts.

There was no sound in the auditorium. It was not quite like brain waves, it was more a physical thing; they were able to project the music through the electric currents in the room.

So, I’m still struggling to realize the ideas I had in 1960 and 1961. And I’m getting really close.

More on the Colorado Springs event at the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at uccs.edu and on Communikey at communikey.us. Read the interview (“Patch Cord Godfather”) at csindy.com.

The above video, from youtube.com, shows Subotnick and Lillevan performing live at Bregenzer Festspiele in Austria in 2010. (And many thanks to Ethan Hein, of ethanhein.com, for an assist in getting the interview to happen.)

I usually wait until the end of a Junto project to comment on it, but this one is special, so I want to get some thinking out while it is still in progress. It is is worth thinking of the Chamber Symphony as a remix unto itself, because the symphony is an arrangement by another man, Rudolph Barshai. With Shostakovich’s blessing, Barshai took the contours of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 and expanded them into something orchestral. Likeiwse, with the full permission of the Los Angeles chamber ensemble wild Up, the Junto participants are extrapolating from the wild Up recording of the Barshai’s symphonic version of Shostakovich’s quartet. If that sounds meta, then I am accomplishing at least part of my goal.

This 13th Junto project is a particularly special one, because it’s only the second time we are working from not only a commercial release, but from constituent parts of a track on that release. (The previous time was when Marcus Fischer, for the fourth Junto, provided stems — that is the music-production terms for individual subparts — of a song off his Collected Dust recording.) This is an essential distinction. Much “remixing” these days means working with the commercially released version of a piece of music, a single track: cutting it up, moving pieces around, transforming it, adding to it, subtracting from it. But in the case of both the Fischer project and, now, the Shostakovich project, the Junto participants were provided the pieces from which the commercial track was constructed. The wild Up recording of Shostakovich was done live, so the “parts” are in fact 10 simultaneous recordings of the symphony, recorded on variously placed microphones. The folder containing these parts looks like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2293299/WildupForRemix.zip
http://junto.havesomemusic.com/WildupForRemix.zip
http://lownote.net/audio/WildupForRemix.zip
http://vuzhmusic.com/junto/WildupForRemix.zip

To hear the performance 10 times from different vantages is to get a Rashomon version of the piece. In part, it is simply an opportunity to hear it akin to how the performers hear it: if you listen to the woodwinds, then you’re hearing it sort of how a member of the woodwind portion of the ensemble heard it while it was being performed. But more importantly, to listen to it is to hear different parts of it come to the fore. Because it was recorded live, there is no clear “isolation” between parts. In each of the tracks you hear the entire work, just with different sections given different relative prominence.

Listen to the original recording, also streaming below, at: wildup.bandcamp.com

And for comparison’s sake, here is a performance of the String Quartet No. 8 by the Kopelman Quartet, via youtube.com:

The remixes are unfolding at this very moment at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

More on wild Up at wildup.la and wildup.tumblr.com.

(Stencil of Dimitri Shostakovich up top generously provided by Chris Hutson, of chrishutsonart.com. He is based in Peoria, Illinois.)

Rob Walker, who looks even less like Elvis Costello than I do, digs into the subject at his designobserver.com blog, and rightly summarizes the key deficiency in the “dancing about architecture” slight. The notion of it being a slight is a matter of perception. The whole idea of “dancing about architecture” is, as he puts it, “fairly awesome.”

He digs further into this deficiency by taking issue with a telling comment from a piece, published earlier this year, in the Telegraph:

Writing about music has a serious built-in problem, which is that the only thing worth doing is also nearly impossible: to convey something of what the emotional experience of listening is like.

The Telegraph story was written by a classical pianist, Jonathan Bliss, on the occasion of his first ebook publication, a Kindle Single titled Beethoven’s Shadow. It’s a kind of musical memoir, a study by Bliss of his involvement in Beethoven’s music.

Walker, a friend since my New Orleans days, dissects that above sentence thusly:

Okay, this is the problem. An attempt to describe architecture via dance does seem obtuse; so does choosing dance as a medium to express the three-out-of-five stars or thumbs-up-thumbs-down version of “criticism.” But “writing about” something, music included, can obviously mean something beyond description paired with a judgment rendered. (In fact, even “criticism” ought to mean a lot more than that.) So I reject the restrictions that the above definition implies.

I was going to take some polite issue with the “obtuse” matter, but Rob shortly thereafter kind of did so himself, when he introduced, in a subsequent post, the concept of “ekphrasis” to the discussion — it’s the Greek term for a dramatic description of a work of art. The term is useful in various ways, in particular by making clear a long history for cross-medium interaction if not downright cross-pollination, and especially for a literary tradition.

It also brings to mind another Greek term essential to the consideration of borders between mediums: Laocoön (pictured below), the mythological figure from which Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (in his landmark Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) derived his stricture that the arts, like the muses from which they borrowed their names, are distinct from each other. It’s a formidable text, but my interest in synaesthesia, the mixing of the senses, pretty much precludes me from fully agreeing with it. (As does my interest in comics. From a literary perspective, Lessing’s Laocoon can be read as a sort of a formalist version of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent.)

But mostly, the sheer Greek-ness of ekphrasis reminds us of that modern mythological figure: Iannis Xenakis, the Greek genius who was equally accomplished in music and architecture. The clear parallels — geometric, aesthetic, philosophical — between his work in both fields evidence the extent to which ideas move back and forth between them. Lessing may have written the book on the perceived distinction between art forms, but it was his countryman, the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, born a few years before Lessing died (and, it is worth pointing out, a contemporary of Beethoven), who contributed a significant correction by famously describing architecture as “frozen music.” To look at Xenakis’ scores and at his buildings is to observe forms take similar shape. (At the top of this post are, side by side, Xenakis’ score “Metastasis” from 1954, and a photo of the Philips Pavilion from 1958, which Xenakis designed while working for Le Corbusier.) It’s arguable that Xenakis worked back and forth between music and architecture in pursuit of some elusive singular goal, each alternating effort akin to lifting one foot after the other on his way up a ladder.

Now, back to the Telegraph story by pianist Jonathan Bliss that Walker quoted above. There’s an interesting moment in the Telegraph piece that reveals some of Bliss’ thinking. It occurs in a sentence that happens to immediately follow the one Walker quotes. It goes like this:

This is so extraordinarily difficult because to write effectively you need to be direct, clear and specific, whereas the glory of music lies in its abstraction – its nearly infinite malleability according to the listener’s psychological state – and if you don’t embrace that, you are sure to miss its essence.

What’s worth focusing on is Bliss’ sense of what he terms “abstraction.” Certainly there is an element of abstraction in music, but I’d push back on Bliss’ comment a little. Much perceived “abstraction” is still in pursuit of something; there’s often what musicians refer to as an “idea” at the heart of the compositional activity. To write about a work of music can be a parallel matter of pursuing those ideas. One might not, as a result, express the ideas in abstract terms, but like Xenakis on his way up the proverbial ladder I have depicted, the ideas remain the goal — arguably a willfully elusive goal — in both situations. Indeed, such writing may not “convey” the “emotional experience,” as Bliss puts it, but it may bring its own pleasures to the pursuit.

There is much to enjoy and appreciate in So Percussion‘s freely released remix project, Amid the Noise Remixes, a collection of reworkings of their album Amid the Noise enacted by three of the four members of the group: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, and Jason Treuting (only member Adam Sliwinski isn’t credited on the collection’s dozen remixes). The first remix on the record makes for helpful comparison with the original, because the original is also available for free download, from cantaloupemusic.com, the website of the releasing record label. The original record came out toward the end of 2006. The remix collection came out in December 2011.

The original, “June,” is a percussion (but not percussive) exploration of tone, thick ringing globules of tone that announced Amid the Noise as something other than So Percussion’s listeners had come to expect. To upend expectations, they opened the album on a track essentially lacking in plosives: in verbal terms, it’s all extended vowels, virtually absent of consonants (MP3). Even at a narrative level, it is willfully remote, a stretch of concentrated stasis in place of thematic development. It is splendid.

The remix, by So Percussion member Quillen, upends the upending. It takes the original and gives it the jitters, and then once the jitters have set in but good, it adds a heavy thud of a beat that builds over time. If the original version refuted development, this one welcomes it, altering as it proceeds, transforming at a swaggering and geometric pace. Like the original “June” on the original album, the “June” remix announces the remix album’s intentions. In this case, that would be a fun night out.

Get the full set for free at sopercussion.bandcamp.com. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.

The keyboard isn’t the only participant here with a retro quality. There is, to the pulsing rhythms and emotionally distant chant-like singing, something reminiscent of Steve Reich of that same era, especially his wonderful Tehilim. Distinguishing Haber’s piece is a daring sparseness. It may be scored for a mid-size ensemble, 16 total instruments and voices combined, but at any given moment it sounds more like only two or three might be playing, and even then the demands placed on them are more about a virtuosity of attention and rhythmic restraint than about anything remotely like show-stopping flair.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound. More on Alarm Will Sound at alarmwillsound.com. More on Haber at yotamhaber.com, including the complete score of “We Were All” as a PDF (from which the above image is excerpted). The work was commissioned by the Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund. The recording was made live on July 16, 2011.

When just that happened, when 58 different musicians participated, the question was what came next. First came an email announcement list, so that rather than having to check the Info tab on the Junto’s Soundcloud.com page, members of the Junto could have each assignment delivered to their inbox (if you’re interested in being added to the list, send a request to marc@disquiet.com). Then came an FAQ, which is housed on the Info tab. And then, with some consideration, came the second assignment.

The first assignment had asked the participating musicians to produce their own samples, in this case of the sound of ice in a glass. For the second assignment, the more traditional approach of using a shared sample was employed. But instead of one sample, there were two. These are the instructions to the second assignment:

Create an original piece of music under five minutes in length utilizing just these two samples:

Fog Horn: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/

Train Whistle: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

You can only use those two samples, and you can do whatever you want with them.

Deadline for finished tracks is midnight (wherever you are) on Monday, January 16.

When posting your finished track on Soundcloud, be sure the include the following two sentences, in order to abide by the Creative Commons license:

Fog horn sample by Schaarsen: http://www.freesound.org/people/schaarsen/sounds/69663/

Train whistle sample by Ecodios: http://www.freesound.org/people/ecodios/sounds/119963/

The suggestion of a fog horn sample was not a surprise to anyone who had spent more than a day or two observing my twitter.com/disquiet feed. I live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, where we are serenaded, when the climate is right, by deep fog horns that sound like Zeus left his phone on vibrate (and dozens of other haze-induced similes). Fans of contemporary classical music will associate that sound with the field recordings that form the basis for the Fog Tropes of composer Ingram Marshall, and Marshall’s masterwork was indeed very much an inspiration for this project. As for the train, it had no particular consequence sonically, except that the sample I located seemed aesthetically compatible with the fog horn sample. Instead, the train was intended as a cultural contrast, the implied rhythm suggesting rock’n'roll against the classical element of the fog horn. None of this was described in the assignment. It merely informed the dimensions of the project as it was being developed in advance of its announcement. No, the real crux of the assignment is this portion of the instruction: “You can only use those two samples.” If all the participants were to share the same source material, then the real challenge was to see how they would make that source material their own, and how better — in the spirit of constraint — than to limit their palette to that source material?

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 16, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0002-duet. As of this writing, there are 50 tracks associated with the tag.

Visit, listen to, and consider joining the group at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

A full list of Junto projects is housed on Disquiet.com.

(Oddly apt photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/j33pman/5245441632. It was attached to the Junto entry “Bumpy Ride” by Doug Laustsen, aka douglownote.)

When the excellent Kikapu netlabel announced a return from extended hiatus, there was reason to be excited. One of the earliest netlabels, it was in existence from 2001 to 2008. In an interview here after the label was shuttered by its founder, Brad Mitchell (aka the musician Pocka), he said the idea of closing it down had been on his mind for close to two years. Mitchell is an innovative musician and proprietor who considers things thoroughly. He isn’t one to bring the label back lightly. And now, four years after closing, Kikapu is back — albeit at kikapu.org, a new URL. Its first release speaks of its newfound energy and adventurous spirit. The release, a single MP3, is in fact a fully original score to a 1928 silent surrealist film by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac: La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). The music is by Roto Visage, who was apparently hired by Transflux Films to create the score, though the project was shelved. He recorded two versions, this being one of them. In addition to providing the MP3 for free download, Kikapu shows the full film with the audio synced. It’s a dense and haunting score, with a voluble mix of orchestral and noise-based approaches, putting front and center the dread inherent in the film’s eerie goings-on.

More on Roto Visage, aka Jason Popejoy, at rotovisage.com.

The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.

Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.

Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”

Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)

Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Elec­tronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of elec­tronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where some­thing had hap­pened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.

Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.