Disquiet » netlabel

Mahoney & Peck Live (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:49:14 +0000

Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (MP3), with pixel percussion, these fissures that seem more like absences, sudden rhythmic moments of digital clarity that lend momentum to a cloud of synthesized dust. The collection comes from three different live performances: from broadcasts on the websites stillstream.com and electo-music.com, and from “City Skies 2011 sets in Atlanta, Georgia.”

Download audio file (track01_the_pale_blue_dot.mp3)

Get the full set at archive.org and at ethereallive.wordpress.com. Mahoney & Peck are Mark Mahoney and Michael Peck.

Automation’s Rigorous Verve

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:11:15 +0000

More than anything, some of the stronger tracks on Enko‘s Woods Moons, those earlier in the 14-track set, bring to mind the off-kilter rhythms of the band Battles at its most approachable, situations in which rock’n'roll is reduced to a shuddering husk, less feral than high-strung, less angry than anxious — and also situations that are enduringly electronic, whether inherently or associatively, with a rich dependence on automation’s rigorous verve and industrial’s manic momentum. The parallel is somewhat confusing, since Woods Moons appears to be the work of an individual, not a band — which is to say, if Battles was a band imitating broken machines, then Enko appears to be an individual using a machine to resemble such a band. Nonetheless, however it was recorded, the mix of jerky percussion and striated guitar on “Stouk” (MP3) and of glitchy dance rhythms on “IOE320″ (MP3) make much of this record something to be reckoned with.

Download audio file (01_-_Enko_-_Stouk.mp3)
Download audio file (03_-_Enko_-_IOE320.mp3)

Not all of the album is post-punk angularity. “Jaguar S” could be a track off a late-1970s or early-1980s Robert Fripp album. And there is also a cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Get the full set at archive.org. Enko is the moniker employed by Enkolf Kitler, who was born in the Ukraine and currently lives in Moscow. Released on the excellent bp.bai-hua.org netlabel, whose impressively old-school website is worth a visit.

On the Persistence of the Wind Chime in Instrumental Hip-hop

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:51:42 +0000

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.

Download audio file (Third_Person_Lurkin_-_01_-_Over_Forgotten_Places.mp3)

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.

Drones Are a Beach (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:02:32 +0000

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).

Download audio file (03-It_was_a_tragedy_of_microscopic_proportions.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.

The Drone-Industrial Complex (MP3s)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:26 +0000

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.

Download audio file (10.JonasRuchenhever-CornerV.mp3)
Download audio file (08.JonasRuchenhever-MachineIx.mp3)

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

Two Musicians, Less Than as Much Music (MP3s)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 02:32:09 +0000

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.

The Disquiet Junto

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:17:38 +0000

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 the suscription list, you can join up here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

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:

21: Disquiet0021-4seasons
Create a piece with one field recording representing each of the four seasons.
Start: 2012.05.24 … End: 2012.05.28

20: Disquiet0020-nodebeat
Make a piece of music with the NodeBeat app and one other instrument.
Start: 2012.05.17 … End: 2012.05.21

19: Disquiet0019-rojiura
Treat the provided photograph as a graphically notated score.
Start: 2012.05.10 … End: 2012.05.14

18: Disquiet0018-3×3
Make a three minute track from three sounds, alternating their relative prominence.
Start: 2012.05.03 … End: 2012.05.07

17: Disquiet0017-transition
Make a seamless transition between an original field recording and a provided, preexisting track.
Start: 2012.04.26 … End: 2012.04.30

16: Disquiet0016-backforeground
Take samples of sandpaper and dice. Make a track with one as foreground and other as background.
Start: 2012.04.19 … End: 2012.04.23

15: Disquiet0015-rgbinteract
Create sounds from colors, and make them interact with each other.
Start: 2012.04.12 … End: 2012.04.16

14: Disquiet0014-oumupo
Do a sonic-narrative version of Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story.
Start: 2012.04.05 … End: 2012.04.09

13: Disquiet0013-wildup
Make new music from a multitrack recording of a Shostakovich symphony.
Start: 2012.03.29 … End: 2012.04.02

12: Disquiet0012-cutpaste
Use “cut and paste” to combine two 1928 recordings of rural music.
Start: 2012.03.22 … End: 2012.03.26

11: Disquiet0011-motoring
Record an everyday mechanical rhythm, and make something of it.
Start: 2012.03.15 … End: 2012.03.19

10: Disquiet0010-reflect
Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks.
Start: 2012.03.08 … End: 2012.03.12

09: Disquiet0009-avian
Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.
Start: 2012.03.01 … End: 2012.03.05

08: Disquiet0008-voice
Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.
Start: 2012.02.23 … End: 2012.02.27

07: Disquiet0007-subtract
Create by removing material from an existing field recording.
Start: 2012.02.16 … End: 2012.02.20

06: Disquiet0006-cylinder
Remix three archival Edison cylinder recordings.
Start: 2012.02.09 … End: 2012.02.13

05: Disquiet0005-layer
Add sounds to a pre-existing field recording of everyday life.
Start: 2012.02.02 … End: 2012.02.06

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

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

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

01: 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.

As of May 21, 2012, there is a dedicated Twitter account for the Disquiet Junto: twitter.com/djunto.

Piano Minimalism (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 07:30:50 +0000

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.

Download audio file (%5btonAtom.119%5d-Mizati-Ydna-03-G.mp3)

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

Reclaiming “Industrial” (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:55:57 +0000

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.

Download audio file (tube245-01-mon0_-_cathedral_of_the_lost.mp3)
Download audio file (tube245-02-mon0_-_marching_into_desperation.mp3)

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

Movie with and without a Movie

Marc Weidenbaum — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:02:22 +0000

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.

Download audio file (kpu111-roto-visage-01-la-coquille-et-le-clergyman-vbr.mp3)

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