Let us now praise generous podcasts, especially those featuring original, otherwise unavailable content. The Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, which is currently hosting monthly concerts, has two archival performances up in its newly launched podcast series. Both are time-warping ventures into tension and release, and into the more languorous realm of group improvisation.
A November 7, [...]
You can’t get much more minimal than a song in which a slight twitch in the downbeat is as close as the piece comes to a hook. And that’s exactly how Mark Hamn chose to begin his phenomenal Function Buttons, on the Hungary-based netlabel Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod). Above a gaggle of light-industrial textures, his little [...]
This is 2005’s final Downstream entry. Seems appropriate to end on something from the test tube netlabel, based out of Portugal. In less than a year and a half, test tube has earned a reputation as a key locale for original, freely downloadable music. Even those test tube releases that are not explicitly electronica, like [...]
Koji Asano, the prolific, self-published electronic musician, hasn’t just posted a free download on his website, kojiasano.com. He hasn’t just interrupted the steady flow of commercial recordings for a free one. He hasn’t just taken the heavily processed abstractions of his recent Spring Estuary CD (his 39th album, by his own count) and reduced them [...]
Like many electronic musicians, John Kameel Farah posts MP3s of his work on his website, johnfarah.com. Unlike most, he also lists in detail the classical piano repertoire that he’s mastered, from such cornerstones as Bach’s toccatas and Beethoven sonatas, to modern works by Satie, Webern, Messiaen and Cage. Few of the Farah MP3s evidence his [...]
Jack DeJohnette, born in 1942, is one of the great living jazz drummers, beloved in electronic circles for, among many things, his role in trumpeter Miles Davis’ transition from bebop to fusion. DeJohnette has a new outfit, Ripple Effect, which teams him with Ben Surman. The duo perpetrates a fairly rarified realm of fusion, and [...]
For all the evening’s sonic ingenuity, the harmonica took top honors. Two Fridays back, on August 5, Seamus Cater played as half a laptop duo with Roddy Schrock. It was part of an extensive bill held by the Drum Machine Museum some four or five stories up in a brick building in San Francisco’s always [...]
Bay Sounds: In response to the recent trio of Disquiet concert reviews (”Beyond Laptops”), I got a request for info on how to find updates on San Francisco concerts of experimental/electronic music. These are some good resources: (1) the somewhat East Bay-oriented bayimproviser.com calendar, (2) the noise/rock-oriented thisactisnoact, (3) the S.F. e-flyer from flavorpill (sf.flavorpill.net, [...]
The loopdiary.com website collects a fairly steady schedule of guitar-based soundscapes, 20 so far this year by a single musician who goes by the name Disproduction. These are loops, but not loops as in brief presets that you can download and use as patterns in your home audio-production setup. No, these are long-form loop-based performances, [...]
If the pastel clouds of Harold Budd and La Monte Young strike your fancy, then float over to the Electronical netlabel for the Piano Versions. Credited to Twocker, its five tracks of minimally — strike that, minimalismistically — enhanced and filtered acoustic piano are caught in an interesting limbo between sound experiments and composition. Chords [...]