Alvin Lucier’s composition “I Am Sitting in a Room” is so ripe for adoption, it’s surprising that the work isn’t revisited more often. In the 1970 original, Lucier recorded himself stating something plainly and then recorded that recording being played, and so on and so on. The intelligibility of his spoken statement (which begins: “I [...]
A year ago today, I uploaded a project called Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 26-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off [...]
The unlistenability of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music is one of the great overstatements of pop culture. Some 30-plus years have passed since its release, and we now live at a time when the noise of Merzbow and the Boredoms and countless death-metal bands regularly draw sold-out crowds; many listeners today came of age to [...]
Netlabel works are, by nature, untethered. They’re generally the effort of relatively unknown musicians, composing and performing from behind opaque pseudonyms that obscure their identities, and the releases rarely have a physical manifestation, like a CD, or anything else to root them in the broader world. At its essence, a netlabel release is just a [...]
The passing of film director Michelangelo Antonioni this week brought many things to mind, many of them sound-related. This is in part due to Antonioni’s pop instinct, as exemplified by the rollicking soundtrack to his film Blow Up (1966); in part due to Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow Up, the film Blow Out (1981), [...]
Many new readers have come through thanks to the Buddha Machine article in Rob Walker’s “Consumed” column in this past Sunday’s magazine section of the New York Times (nytimes.com).
Here’s a quick rundown of Buddha-related material on Disquiet.com: (1) A December 2005 interview with Christiaan Virant of the duo FM3, who made the Buddha Machine (”I’m [...]
You’ll come for the brittle beats, but you’ll stay for the supple curves. That’s Colongib and Octopus Inc’s “Remix of Freeform Audio Tourism” in a nutshell. The track, the latest free monthly entry from the kracfive.com collective, starts with a crack of fire that could, alternately, be a radio signal coming into focus (MP3). What [...]
The Buddha Machine has taken on a life of its own. It was created as a portable sound-art automaton, but far more music has resulted from the battery-operated Buddha than was anticipated by its creators, the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian). The pocket-size device, which retails for around 25 dollars, contains a chip [...]
Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) One promising aspect of the new service iJigg, where musicians are invited to post their tracks and await rating by their eager public, is that among its 21 initial genres is “beats/instrumentals,” right up there with folk and hip-hop (ijigg.com). … (2) That sound-art disguised as a cheap [...]
“Longplayer” is the name given a sound installation by Jem Finer that is seven years into its planned 1,000-year run. It has “listening posts” around the world, in London and Nottingham, England; Alexandria, Egypt; and Brisbane, Australia, with additional posts in the works. The goal is for it to have its own radio transmission frequency, [...]