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 […]
From Steven Millhauser’s short story “The Next Thing” in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine:
And I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a […]
The tape work “Dreaming in Darkness” was performed at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco last month — and already at the festival’s audio catalog at archive.org there’s a downloadable MP3 (and OGG) of the piece, along with six other works performed that evening, March 7, 2008, plus a panel discussion, all as separate […]
The marble blocks that hold up the railings at One Bush Plaza in downtown San Francisco always look to me like sheet music:
Forget the proverbial best of both worlds — courtesy of the latest free download from Touch Radio, the spinoff of the eminent Touch label, you can have a 22-minute artificial soundscape comprised of elements from at least four audio worlds: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil; Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece; “Vibrations from the bridge which connects […]
Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: The avant-garde rises to the surface in Internet sales of classical music, reports Justin Davidson, guest-blogging for Alex Ross at therestisnoise.com. He’s discussing the charts at emusic.com:
No. 2 is Gavin Bryars‘ The Sinking of the Titanic, a minimalist portrayal of slow-motion calamity that caused one Floridian subscriber’s spouse to ask: […]
Two complete tracks off Autistici’s Volume Objects album, released in January, are up for free download at the website of its label, 12k, 12k.com. The mix of field recordings and computer-generated sound is transformed with an emphasis on a kind of listening that requires attention moment by moment — the pieces are more akin, in […]