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 […]
Ever downloaded a hefty video to find only the audio portion functions properly? Then the frustration inherent in following the two-part recording Plano Vertical, by musician Juan José Calarco, will provoke some serious déjà vu — and some pleasure.
The major difference, of course, is that Calarco’s imposing disorientation is entirely willful on his part, […]
Here’s an hour-long recording of two musique concrete pieces that should be required listening for anyone venturing into laptop music. Recorded back in 1971, it’s a textbook case of the effort required, in those days long before home-computing, to make electronic compositions built from found sounds. Now that audio-processing software comes preloaded with countless transformative […]
The sequence of events goes something like this:
dripping water
heavy rain swallowing distant church bells
machinery in motion mixed with spoken instructions
objects moving in water
digitally clipped vocals
a voice transformed into something mechanical and menacing
Those are the apparent half dozen real-world elements that serve as the foundation for the six tracks that comprise Kim Cascone’s The Astrum Argentum. […]
Three tracks trace a dawn-like arc on Pausal’s new self-titled net-album on the netlabel Highpoint Lowlife. The pieces individually move from near-silence through a creaky murmur through an enveloping warmth that grows and grows. This sense of a real-world soundtrack is abetted by cricket chatter on the opening entry, “Heroes=Dogs,” in which rich, long chords […]
High atop the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Tokyo sits the Mori Art Museum, a contemporary venue with a global vision. It floats 53 stories above the city, but before you even get to see the art your eyes have a feast in store for them. And it’s the sort of visual display that might […]
The subtitle to Dark Matters, the new exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, is “Artists See the Impossible.” Many of the featured artists employ sound in an attempt to achieve this end. But perhaps the real lesson of Dark Matters is that it isn’t a matter of what’s possible […]
The passing of film director Michelangelo Antonioni this week brought many things to mind, many of them sound-related. This is in part due to Antonioni’s pop instinct, as exemplified by the rollicking soundtrack to his film Blow Up (1966); in part due to Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow Up, the film Blow Out (1981), […]
While visiting Tokyo for 10 days in late May of this year, I kept a “sound diary.” I didn’t record sounds, except, so to speak, with my pen and with a digital camera.
1. The Tokyo Dome roller coaster sounds exactly like there’s a military jet flying overhead. I wonder if it has speakers playing a […]
Been a while since the Downstream has included an entry from the ever expanding “Remix! Tree” at the Freesound website, freesound.iua.upf.edu. The site is a trading place for recorders and admirers of raw field recordings. The Tree is where folks go to tweak sonic reality more to their liking. Take, for example, a trio of […]