Aeris Ash has a recent four-track release, the comically titled !@#&%!, which zigs and zags, jumps and bounds, from one short sound snippet to the next with such vitality that the overall effect resembles an old Carl Stalling score, one of those hyperkinetic orchestrations that so perfectly matched on-screen cartoon antics.
To hear Ash’s music is […]
The album Grains by Oakland, California-based musician Kristin Miltner is full of fidgety algorithmic chaos and patches of soft noise. The five succinct tracks that comprise the set manage to be rambunctious and sedate at the same time — for all that activity, when taken in stride, becomes a highly textured flow.
The ease inherent in […]
The Buddha Machine is a collection of loops that keeps on giving. The original device, a cheap little plastic box available in a variety of colors, was developed by the China-based duo FM3. It contains nine short loops of sound that are rendered with lo-fi grit thanks to the machine’s thrift-minded construction. Since its release, […]
Walden Pond is the Galapagos Islands for English majors. The transcendental musings of Henry David Thoreau are rooted in his experience there, and those writings made him something along the lines of America’s version of William Wordsworth, both of them having limned the place where not town and country so much as human and nature […]
Composer Carl Stone has been writing a column — that is, he’s been blogging — for the newmusicbox.org website since August of this year. He’s posted on such topics as the use of a turntable in advertising, the end of the Osaka Festival Beyond Innocence, the sound art of Yukio Fujimoto, Curtis Patterson’s score for […]
There are moments on William Fowler Collins’ album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality when the echo gets so deep that the original sound is lost in a well of reverberations, when the effects overcome the raw source material. It’s a remarkable experience to follow the familiar down the rabbit hole, only to come up in […]
If the overture to a symphonic work can be understood to prefigure what’s to come, then how about the sounds the orchestra makes before it even gets to the overture?
That’s a question implicit in Favorite Intermissions, a recent release by composer, musician and phonographer (that is, field-recording artist) Christopher DeLaurenti. The album contains six […]
A year ago today, I uploaded a project called Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 26-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off […]
Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, […]
At the website of Chris Watson — a founder of the experimental pop band Cabaret Voltaire — there are several free downloads culled from now out-of-print samplers from the Touch record label. One is titled “Out of Our Sight.” Watson’s brief description, pulled verbatim from the original sampler, reads: “Motionless anticipation, along the dry sandy […]