At this rate, Neal Stephenson may be the first science fiction author since L. Ron Hubbard to found a self-propagating religion — he already has the ritual music completed. As mentioned on Saturday here (disquiet.com), not only does Stephenson’s new book, Anathem — a science-fictional, nearly 1,000-page riff on the Clock of the Long Now […]
The Noisejihad netlabel is back in action, returning with uncharacteristic quietude. Its most recent release, a beautiful trio of live performances by soundscape guitarist Aidan Baker, is arguably the label’s most peaceful offering yet. Noisejihad’s stock in trade has long been, true to its name, destructive recordings along the lines of a sonic equivalent of […]
The annual process of selecting a Disquiet Downstream entry for September 11, anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, always brings to mind one thing — the eerily prescient sound recordings by Stephen Vitiello, who had an artist’s residence in the World Trade Center in 1999 for six months and […]
Musician Jessica Rylan’s enterprise Flower Electronics makes small-brew noisemakers, including the Little Blue Boy, pictured below.
The Little Blue Boy contains a handcrafted assortment of electronics, including two voltage-controlled oscillators, which get a work out on several sample MP3s located at the company’s website, flowerelectronics.com. A “testdrive” (MP3) by Tara Rogers (aka Analog Tara, safety-valve.org) is […]
The image to the left plays with perception of scale. That circular saw diving headlong into the white dome is not, in fact, a saw at all, but a tiny exposed contact microphone whose sharp metallic edge has cleanly sliced through a halved eggshell. What that mic, along with others like it, located in such […]
There are specialty netlabels, and then there are truly fixated netlabels. There are, in other words, those netlabels that select to focus on a clearly named aesthetic (noisejihad.dk/netlabel), on field recordings (wanderingear.com), or on individual songs (ambulatore.com/yoyo), for example. And then there is Hexawe (hexawe.net), the releases on which have just one simple thing in […]
Who says noise-makers don’t have a sense of humor? Prolific death-ambient figure Carlos Giffoni has posted the first track of his forthcoming album, The Absence of Essence 2×7 (Ann Arbor Records), as a free download. Titled “The Absence,” it’s five and a half minutes of white-noise onslaught, the thick industrial groan of some massive factory […]
It’s quite likely that Monolake, aka Robert Henke, couldn’t set expectations lower for the latest “Free Download of the Month” at his website, monolake.de/downloads (the track should be up through September). The recording, which features him and Deadbeat, was made live at a Spanish festival this year, and these are among the concerns that Henke […]
There’s no datestamp to the entry, but up on the website of composer Aaron McLeran are examples of granular synthesis methods that he has applied to a sample of solo piano. The original is a slow, romantic piano piece (MP3). Following that are five digital etudes, each applying a different transformational technique to the original. […]
The cello-tronic rituals of reverberation that are the stuff, the modus operandi, the trademark of Ted Laderas’s OO-Ray get a thorough workout on his maximalist “If We Aren’t Blind” (MP3). It’s a sample cut off a forthcoming album, reportedly titled Magnifcations, and the result is less drone-like than it might at first appear to be. […]