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 […]
Sounds sourced from the real world and transformed into something either unreal or hyperreal serve as the foundation of a new compilation from the furthernoise.org netlabel. It is titled Explorations in Sound, Vol 3: Music of Sound and was curated by Roger Mills. Field recordings subjected here to digital modifications include rubber bands (yanked and […]
On Turns in the South, his recent two-CD set, Aaron Ximm delivers raw and filtered documentation of his travels. The highlight is a 40-minute track titled “Madurai Mani Fold” (MP3). Described by Ximm as an “epic of introspection,” it is an exercise in minimalist process. The lengthy track is built from but a mere few […]
A new collaboration between Rutger Zuydervelt and Stephen Vitiello has been released on the 12k label. It’s a collaboration in, with one exception, a purely conceptual sense — but since creative collaboration often has more to do with casting than with curation, more with people than with process, their innovative approach is especially appreciated.
The album, […]
Solo albums by pop musicians are gauged by their guest stars. Solo albums by field-recording artists are gauged by their source material. On Realms, newly available for free download from the estimable wanderingear.com netlabel, those source materials include the sounds of boat masts, voice, rain, amplified room ambience, fireworks, a refrigerator, flies, birds, street noise, […]
On her website regarding her Soundbook One project, soundbookone.com, composer Jennifer Stock describes the process behind her effort, which places the laptop in an ensemble setting, including electric guitar, cello, drums and, occasionally, vocals:
The idea of a “Soundbook” was to process a specific set of found sounds in Max/MSP and then to notate the acoustic […]
The one free sample track off Music Heard Far Off by the Child Readers plays like a mixtape set on random. It opens with piercing, lo-fi accompaniment paired with a nu-folk vocal that’s buried in the mix (the album’s title couldn’t be more factually accurate), only to fade into a droney wisp of a sea […]
There’s a gap between the Touch Music record label and its ongoing MP3 series, TouchRadio. While Touch album releases generally focus on processed sound, the sound on TouchRadio is generally unprocessed. The recent entries on TouchRadio have been raw field recordings, framed by the discerning ear of the recordist and by the broader context of […]
The drone in the background of a sample excerpt from Totstellen’s recent Tunnel Brücke CDR has a sonar quality and the sublimated buzz of distant industrial activity (MP3). In fact it’s an augmented field recording, taped in a tunnel below traffic. The tunnel reverberations reveal a sound many times removed from its source — first […]
Due to some impending travel, I could only stay for the first set at Friday night’s Meridian Gallery triple bill in San Francisco. Meridian co-founder Anne Brodzky opened the show by commenting on how the evening’s performances served as kind of a fourth partner in the current exhibit that Lawrence Rinder, Dean of the College […]