Chiptune musician Matthew Applegate (aka Pixelh8) doesn’t make all his music out of 8-bit technology — he goes even further back, as the punchcards on the cover of his recent Obsolete? album show. He also weighs heavily on the question mark in the album’s title, employing various ancient computers to purposes (1) for which they [...]
If you find a Buddha Machine sample amid the roiling moans of this album, take note of it. It’ll provide a sense of orientation amid the free-form noise, sonar blips, and general audio miasma. The six melancholy drones that make up Six Melancholy Songs by Restive Sonic are all deeply rich background tonics, as on [...]
Apparently these “top-10 posts” are useful, because the most popular post in June was … (1) the top-10 list for the month of May.
Six of the top-10 posts for June were for Disquiet Downstream (i.e., free legal download) entries. The most popular was (2) Durán Vázquez’s terror film for radio. The other five were (3) [...]
The word is “stem,” and what it refers to in music isn’t — in this case — the narrow vertical shaft of a single note in a written score, but the separate audio elements that are later combined to create a single track.
These are the constituent parts of a studio recording, and they’re the sort [...]
Closing the month’s Disquiet Downstream entries on a particularly high note: Raz Mesinai’s technologically mediated chamber music. Titled “String Quartet for Four Turntables,” it’s a shifting, elegiac piece that plays with the textures and tenets of classical music. The instrumentation is the standard: two violins, one viola, one cello. But if the individual parts appear [...]
The masterminds behind the remix contest focused on famed Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (best known as the backbeat of legend Fela’s band) want us to download the 15 constituent parts of the single “Secret Agent,” the title track off his new album on World Circuit label. And no doubt the promise inherent in those tracks [...]
No better way to close the week than with some 8-bit renditions of hits by suddenly deceased, long troubled pop legend Michael Jackson, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 50. There’s a handful of such covers floating around, and no doubt more will surface in the coming weeks and months. 8bit versions [...]