Disquiet » netlabel http://disquiet.com Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code. Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:07:59 +0000 en hourly 1 On the Persistence of the Wind Chime in Instrumental Hip-hop http://disquiet.com/2012/02/08/thirdpersonlurkin/ http://disquiet.com/2012/02/08/thirdpersonlurkin/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:51:42 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16843 The wind chime is not the most likely percussive instrument in a hip-hop track — nor a likely melodic component, for that matter. It is slight, and prone to inaccuracy, and has all the swagger of a mid-nap pixie-dust sprite. But in the hands of Third Person Lurkin, a characteristically old-school member of the roster at the Bulgarian netlabel Dusted Wax, the chime serves multiple purposes. (It also, truth be told, may be a tiny bell and not a chime, but the effect is the same.) It initially appears in the track “Over Forgotten Places,” off the Cloud Mirror album, as an accent, one sound among many. Even when it initially repeats, it seems more like a flourish than a building block. But as the track proceeds, that’s exactly what it is: the key enabler of swing in the track, a swing that’s as fragile as a dust-laden cobweb in an afternoon breeze, but a swing nonetheless (MP3). In its own way, it is just as much a sonic irritant as once were the sirens that bled through Bomb Squad productions for Public Enemy, but here it’s an irritant along the lines of near-subaural “mosquito” tones that are used to shoo teens from convenience stores.

Get the full album for free download at dustedwax.org; there’s some beautiful echoed horn in the track “Sun Domes.” More from Third Person Lurkin, who’s based in England, at thirdpersonlurkin.bandcamp.com.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/02/08/thirdpersonlurkin/feed/ 0 Drones Are a Beach (MP3) http://disquiet.com/2012/02/07/summons-of-shining-ruins/ http://disquiet.com/2012/02/07/summons-of-shining-ruins/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:02:32 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16836 The beach is a useful metaphor for a drone album. It offers images and associations including stasis, a blank horizon, an abyss-like edge, the threat of undertow, the white noise of natural occurrences. The metaphor provides the title for the latest from Summons of Shining Ruins, aka Shinobu Nemoto. Titled On the Beach, it is five tracks of lightly layered drones. The hiss on “It Was a Tragedy of Microscopic Proportions” in particular sounds like distant surf, a persistent low-level whir that suggests some massive outbreak of tinnitus. Beneath and above it all is a cantilevered melodic pulse, an ebb and flow of church-organ gravitas that has the feel, again, of a wave coming and going. The deep horn-like sound in turn comes to figure that of a warning to ships in a deep, unforgiving fog (MP3).

Get the full set for free download at restingbell.net. The site provides these two links for reference to Nemoto: moufu-rokuon.net, magneticmnemonics.bandcamp.com
His music was covered here previously in 2011, 2010, and 2009.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/02/07/summons-of-shining-ruins/feed/ 0 The Drone-Industrial Complex (MP3s) http://disquiet.com/2012/02/05/the-drone-industrial-complex-mp3s/ http://disquiet.com/2012/02/05/the-drone-industrial-complex-mp3s/#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:26 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16817 You can, indeed, have your UI cake, or at least your UI eye candy, and eat it, too. And sometimes the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to relegate the two different tasks to two different online locales. The netlabel Pocket Fields, for example, is lovely, as is often the music that it releases. Each page on its Tumblr-powered site (pocketfields.tumblr.com) for a given album displays a slender vertical band, and allows a single MP3 to be streamed as a teaser. There is a link, then, to the archive.org hosting service, where a Zip archive of those MP3s is resting, waiting to be downloaded, unlocked, and listened to. But, just about every archived sound object at the latter site has a public face, which means that after, say, enjoying the single Tumblr-based stream off Jonas Ruchenhever‘s Machines & Corners, you can proceed to archive.org and listen to them in full, one at a time, before deciding whether or not to download all 98.3 megabytes of them — or select them a la carte. Either way is recommended, but the album definitely is intended to be listened to as an album. The tracks range from metallic drones to evasive percussion, and the collection revels particularly in these haze-like zones where the ear listens through a wavering sound. But there are beats and disruptions as well. For all the slowly layering, sinuous tones of a “Corner V” (MP3), there are the complex industrial-tribal cross-patterns of a “Machine IX” (MP3). This contrast is at the heart of the collection, whose 10 tracks are almost evenly divided between these two types, each track siding with either the “Corner” or “Machine” tag.

More on Ruchenhever, who is based in Belgium, at jonasruchenhever.be.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/02/05/the-drone-industrial-complex-mp3s/feed/ 0 Two Musicians, Less Than as Much Music (MP3s) http://disquiet.com/2012/02/04/two-musicians-less-than-as-much-music-mp3s/ http://disquiet.com/2012/02/04/two-musicians-less-than-as-much-music-mp3s/#comments Sun, 05 Feb 2012 02:32:09 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16806 In a clear case of more allowing for less to occur, the team-up of powerhouses Karlheinz Essl and Hans Tammen is a rich improvisation between the former’s laptop and the latter’s computer-processed guitar. To listen is often to hear neither, and to forget frequently that anyone, let alone two people, is playing. The opening track, “Brutz,” is often little more than flittering nuances. The guitar evaporates in the laptop’s processing, and the dual computers yield slivers of sound, drones that might just be the result of an ungrounded line, effects that could be artifacts in the sound recording. There’s a moment, for example, in a track titled “Prelock” when it sounds as if we’ve left the concert hall (the work was recorded live at Harvestworks in New York City back in May 2010) and wandered down to the subway. Elsewhere, there’s a point in “Nomisola” when piano chords are heard, but they drift away, subsumed in the nether-absence of obfuscating noises and general compositional entropy. Later, in the same track, what might be a guitar chord but resembles an archival orchestral recording gets tossed here and there like seaweed as it nears a shore, where it will soon dry and, soon enough, flutter away.

Get the full set as a Zip archive. More information, including helpful liner notes, at the modiste.com netlabel. More on Essl at essl.at, and on Tammen at tammen.org.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/02/04/two-musicians-less-than-as-much-music-mp3s/feed/ 0 The Disquiet Junto http://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-junto/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-junto/#comments Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:17:38 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16588 The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.

The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. (I was reminded that the Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com were also an influence on my thinking. They were for many years a big part of the Downstream department here.)

The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.

The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.

If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”

Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.

This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:

Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30

Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23

Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16

Disquiet0001-ice
Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.
Start: 2012.01.05 … End: 2012.01.09

And this is the initial post I made on Disquiet.com, announcing the project on January 7, 2012: “Sneek Peek.”

As of January 31, 2012, this is a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: twitter.com/nofi/disquiet-junto.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/01/27/the-disquiet-junto/feed/ 1 Piano Minimalism (MP3) http://disquiet.com/2012/01/26/mizati/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/26/mizati/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:30:50 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16576 Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (MP3). Pushing the album beyond being a straightforward experiment in minimalist pop are tracks that flirt with raspy techno, and others that employ unusual elements, such as saxophone and guitar.

Get the full set for free download and streaming at tonatom.net, the releasing netlabel. More on Mizati, aka Andreas Groll, at mizati.de.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/01/26/mizati/feed/ 2 Reclaiming “Industrial” (MP3) http://disquiet.com/2012/01/25/mon0-test-tube/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/25/mon0-test-tube/#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:55:57 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16561 Among the many good things that have come from the increasing prevalence of drone-based music is a clarification, a realignment, of the word “industrial.” Thanks in addition to the rise in field recordings as broadly produced and consumed sonic media, the word “industrial” has ceased meaning simply a pounding nightife nihilism akin to an ersatz jackhammer beat, and come to mean a sonic aura akin to or actually resulting from a mechanical process. And that why it is a term that can be applied to much of Colliding Textures, a four-song release by Mon0 on the great Test Tube netlabel. The album’s initial two tracks, “Cathedral of the Lost” (MP3) and “Marching into Desperation” (MP3), in particular seem to document some unimaginably vast industrial process. (The album comes with a humorous if, based on personal experience, hyperbolic warning: “Beware of the heavy use of bass frequencies, because these tracks might break your living room windows if you put your amp volume too loud.”) They are monotonous in all the right ways, which is to say to an extent that veils their underlying urgency, their sense of intense inward momentum.

Get the full set at monocromatica.com. More on Mon0 at mon0.de.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/01/25/mon0-test-tube/feed/ 0 Movie with and without a Movie http://disquiet.com/2012/01/24/kikapu-roto-visag/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/24/kikapu-roto-visag/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:02:22 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16536

When the excellent Kikapu netlabel announced a return from extended hiatus, there was reason to be excited. One of the earliest netlabels, it was in existence from 2001 to 2008. In an interview here after the label was shuttered by its founder, Brad Mitchell (aka the musician Pocka), he said the idea of closing it down had been on his mind for close to two years. Mitchell is an innovative musician and proprietor who considers things thoroughly. He isn’t one to bring the label back lightly. And now, four years after closing, Kikapu is back — albeit at kikapu.org, a new URL. Its first release speaks of its newfound energy and adventurous spirit. The release, a single MP3, is in fact a fully original score to a 1928 silent surrealist film by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac: La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). The music is by Roto Visage, who was apparently hired by Transflux Films to create the score, though the project was shelved. He recorded two versions, this being one of them. In addition to providing the MP3 for free download, Kikapu shows the full film with the audio synced. It’s a dense and haunting score, with a voluble mix of orchestral and noise-based approaches, putting front and center the dread inherent in the film’s eerie goings-on.

More on Roto Visage, aka Jason Popejoy, at rotovisage.com.


]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/01/24/kikapu-roto-visag/feed/ 0 The Long Listen (MP3) http://disquiet.com/2012/01/23/crash-duo/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/23/crash-duo/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 05:24:08 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16505 The so-called “long read” is a symptom of our time. It isn’t called the “considered read,” because anything, long or short, can be read with determination and attention. And it isn’t called the “long write,” because for one thing short pieces can take longer to write than do long ones, and for another phrases like “long read” are more likely to take root as common utterance if they flatter the audience.

In any case, the concept of a long read begs the question, What is a “long listen”? Arguably, the thing doesn’t exist — at least not as a willfully anomalous media form. Long-format is the longstanding format for music, in the mode of the full-length recording. Even if the “album” is fading in favor of individual songs, the fact remains that the majority of those songs are still being released as part of a larger parcel. Most singles are still tails trying, in vain perhaps, to wag a full-length dog. In other words, while long reads stand out as peculiar objects in our written-soundbite time, music continues to appear on the market in a manner that is inherently time-consumptive.

And that’s speaking of commercial music. In experimental improvisational music, the long performance is the norm. Pieces often veer toward the realm of an hour in length, in order to give the musicians space to get lost in. Take Crash Duo, a French duo, whose “Crash au Pôle” recently appeared on the netlabel Amplified Music Pollution, which is based in Guadalajara, México. It’s a sprawling work, moving from spare techno dread, through guitar-drenched reverb, to freeform space of broken radio signals, to folktronic reverie (MP3). It’s to the piece’s credit that it manages to both retain a certain dub flavor throughout, and still wander through impressively varied subsections. Crash Duo consists of Orléans-based Ayato, who plays “prepared guitar, cassettes, turntable, sanza,” and Paris-based Anton Mobin, who plays “prepared chamber, tape head, cassettes, radio, axololt,” and whose name looks like a play on Amon Tobin.

Track originally posted at archive.org and amp-recs.com. More on Crash Duo at crashduo.blogspot.com, on Ayato at ayato-sn1984.blogspot.com, and on Mobin at antonmobin.blogspot.com.

]]> http://disquiet.com/2012/01/23/crash-duo/feed/ 0 Post-Soviet Turntablism (MP3s) http://disquiet.com/2012/01/18/tab-anitek-project-monarch/ http://disquiet.com/2012/01/18/tab-anitek-project-monarch/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:45:45 +0000 Marc Weidenbaum http://disquiet.com/?p=16449 Someday we’ll learn — likely in some cross-functional collaboration between a sociologist and a musicologist — not only how it is that old-school hip-hop production thrives in the former Soviet Union, but also how it is that the two leading influences seem to be Pete Rock and DJ Krush. The great netlabel dustedwax.org is one of the major players in the free-culture quadrant of post-soviet turntablism, and its digitally manipulated progeny. Just about every recording on the label has at least one seriously enjoyable track, and Project Monarch, by the duo of Tab & Anitek, is no exception. The duo, which is half based in the U.S. and half based in Switzerland, may not share geography with the majority of its labelmates, but the label’s inclusion of Monarch in its catalog is a confirmation of a specific aesthetic at work here: downtempo, arid palette, one or two central samples, soulful, textural. The strongest tracks are “Dormouse” (MP3) and “ArtiChoke” (MP3), both of which exude a strong Krush vibe.

Get the full album, 14 tracks in all, at dustedwax.org.

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