Up at the website of Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson (well, mostly Iverson, with the other members occasionally joining in — thebadplus.typepad.com): a sort of remix of work by 20th-century classical composer Milton Babbitt.
It’s just over a minute long, but Iverson has taken the jazzy inflections of Babbitt’s 12-tone original, “Semi-Simple Variations,” heard here with […]
It’s become increasingly common for record labels to release mixes of snippets of a given album in advance of its release. There’s something about these mixes that can seem preemptive at best, but perhaps they’re a good idea. Maybe uploading a preview edit will discourage “MP3 bloggers” from uploading whole tracks, since many of those […]
Madeline Puckette writes perky little songs in which she breathily sings atop electro-pop backing tracks of her own composition. She doesn’t quite bury her voice in the mix, but she’s more than comfortable letting the electronica, often a blippy mix of pin-prink percussion and warbly effects, share the stage. (She received her BFA in Music […]
The Buddha Machine is a collection of loops that keeps on giving. The original device, a cheap little plastic box available in a variety of colors, was developed by the China-based duo FM3. It contains nine short loops of sound that are rendered with lo-fi grit thanks to the machine’s thrift-minded construction. Since its release, […]
Walden Pond is the Galapagos Islands for English majors. The transcendental musings of Henry David Thoreau are rooted in his experience there, and those writings made him something along the lines of America’s version of William Wordsworth, both of them having limned the place where not town and country so much as human and nature […]
There are few musical pleasures as singular as listening to a remix side by side with the original. It’s a unique, even if increasingly common, experience to hear something and to then hear it reworked by someone other than the creator of the original song. Neither individual track is the full experience; the experience is […]
Another treat from the Other Minds archive at archive.org: a “text-sound composition” by Harold Budd, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno and with Cocteau Twins. Reportedly dating from 1970, it begins with him saying, “I’m in the same room but with the addition of an echo signal.” The statement echoes the Alvin […]
The Crate Kings website (cratekings.com) has been holding hip-hop Beat Battles online. If you’ve been following the often whimsical Iron Chef of Music competition series held over at kracfive.com, this is similar, but the Beat Battles participants have a more firmly shared understanding of the parameters for the end product. And where the Iron Chef […]
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) An illustrator has taken the concept behind Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” and applied it to his daily self-portraits (snooks.livejournal.com). … (2) The Wild Beast is the name of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) new music pavilion. It was designed by the Los Angeles-based […]
End the week on something both upbeat and frazzled, say “We Push Up On Frenchies” (MP3), a remix by Fujasaki of the electro act Lovely Chords. The original, which is streaming at the Lovely Chords’ myspace page (myspace.com/wepushuponfrenchies), sounded pretty pre-mixed to begin with — a self-lacerated, largely instrumental pop tune that isn’t so much […]