But there are other branches, and Prong’s employment over the years, and to varying degrees, of industrial music less as genre and more as nuance has been an interesting, and often enjoyable, thing to observe and listen to. Early on, the essential agent in this was arguably drummer Ted Parsons, who through the simple act of gating his drums — that is, of truncating the sound, lending them them a slightly clipped effect — adopted the aura of electronic percussion. And in turn, those sounds informed the band’s compositions. (Research for this Prong interview led me to get up to date on Parsons’ work, which delightfully led to learning about his Teledubgnosis work: “Digital Dub’s Metal Past.”) Sadly, my favorite Prong track, the one that best exemplifies this approach, never became a core part of the Prong repertoire. Here is a brief segment of the interview that didn’t make the final cut of the story:

Weidenbaum: I interviewed you last in 1990 or 1991, around the time of the Beg to Differ album. I was addicted at the time to the song “Prime Cut.”

Victor: We were recently rehearsing that song, and I knew there was someone who was deeply into that song. So, I guess that was you.

Weidenbaum: Will it be on the greatest hits collection?

Victor: It’s, you know, a little too avant-garde for that compilation.

The compilation mentioned here is due out later this year. Parsons, who is no longer with the band, may, or may not, have been primarily responsible for Prong’s early industrial approach, but Victor certainly himself came to prominence, notably as a participant in Ministry, as well as in Trent Reznor’s Tapeworm project.

Read the full piece at csindy.com.

Listen Up: The Estonian hangar in which Thomas Ankersmit recorded his live performance

To constrain the field, to make it knowable, this list is limited to recordings that are “of the web.” The following were not considered for inclusion: individual promotional tracks (and excerpts) posted from existing or forthcoming commercial albums (special “mixes” were considered for inclusion, as were situations in which entire commercial albums were made available for free download, as in “choose your price” scenarios in which zero is an accepted amount), downloads that were placed online for a stated limited period of time, audio that is streaming-only, and dated archival material (work that would be considered a “reissue” in the commercial world, such as the majority of what is housed at ubu.com). Also not considered for inclusion were tracks whose links have subsequently gone offline. (An intelligent case has been made that there is no such thing as “streaming” — that all audio is downloaded, in that it is at some point resident on your computer. However, for the purposes of this list, the focus is music that is fully intended to be downloaded.)

All of which is to say, everything on this list is of recent vintage and is available to download, for free, right now.

These 10 are listed here in the reverse chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com. Given the fluid nature of publication, attribution, and collation on the Internet, I cannot be certain that these audio files first appeared online in 2010, but many if not all of them did. And if some of them are older than that, at least this mention might gain them a new audience. Click through to each original Downstream entry for more information, and to the release’s source to get the tracks.

1. Site-Specific Estonian Deep Listening: Based on a recent recording by Berlin/Amsterdam-based saxophonist Thomas Ankersmit, he can be added to the list of Deep Listening devotees. Earlier this year in the Estoian city of Tallinn, he filled a reverberant, abandoned seaplane hangar with echo upon echo of his solo horn. The performance was captured (not just as audio, but in the color photos) by John Grzinich on May 29 of this year.
Downstream: October 8, 2010.

2. Halls of Silence: John Kannenberg visited 11 of the world’s best-known museums, and all we got was 11 blank tapes. Well, not really — what we get is recordings of silence, each 4’33″ in length. That’s silence with an implied capital S, silence as in John Cage’s framing of unacknowledged sound, the background noise of real life. Each track — from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing to the Van Gogh Museum in the Amsterdam — contains 4’33″ of uninterrupted, unedited semi-silence (“unmanipulated phonography,” as the liner note puts it). And with a sly nod, the collection ends at that bastion of popular noise, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Downstream: October 1, 2010.

3. Where Drone and Orchestration Meet: Saiph‘s Diffusion limns that space where electronic drone and classical orchestration meet. There is no doubt, in “Einsames Element,” that those are, indeed, tremulous strings amid the woodsy percussion, even if the strings are playing a role more likely to be handed to a synthesizer these days. And even on repeat listen, the knowledge of those traditional, symphonic materials doesn’t make it any more clear what, exactly, is the source of the light gusher of white noise, the fizzy wonder with which begins “Der Letzte Mensch.” Saiph’s melding of these elements puts guesswork aside, in favor of a contemplation of the inherent narrative, as when after-dark ambience, brush fire, footsteps, and horror-show voices collide late in “Mensch” for a truly filmic enterprise.
Downstream: August 12, 2010

4. A Netlabel Retrospective: The variety on Elisa Luu‘s recent release, The Time of Waiting, from the netlabel known playfully as La Bèl, is enough to suggest less an album than a reel — less a collection of interrelated music than a set whose lack of self-evident correlation serves the primary purpose of expressing the wide range of which Luu is capable. And to that end, it more than succeeds. There are playful beats, distorted as if through a watery mirror. There is quasi-orchestral extravagance, shot through with a theremin-like lead. But if one track must be selected, the keeper is the set’s opener, “r735,” which has four distinct elements that balance each other perfectly.
Downstream: July 19, 2010

5. A Solar Salute: There are 25 tracks on the compilation One Minute for the Sun, each 60 seconds in length, and each paying tribute, in one manner or another, to that great blinding fireball in the sky. Sublamp, a woozy, deep drone, offers thick bass-heavy undercurrents, while Koutaro Fukui’s track, which directly precedes it, is a watery burble, like a dozen frogs gargling before bedtime. A lot of the tracks traffic in a certain gauzy ambience, but the best of them disrupt it, like so many rays piercing a cloud.
Downstream: July 15, 2010

6. When Ennio Met Primo: Texas-based lawyer-cum-beatmaker (and, more recently, San Antonio City Council candidate) Diego Bernal returned with Besides …, nearly a dozen tracks of downtempo, hip-hop-infused, crate-digging goodness. Lightly strummed guitar at the opening of “A Long Second” suggests some regional flavor, as flanging light noise and a raspy drum kit kick in, followed by wisps of r&b horns that sound more like memories than like samples. “Blue Neon,” a particular favorite, makes the most of a back beat, a hi-hat, a vocal call-out, and some sour organ playing. The music is the like some secret side-project team-up between Ennio Morricone and DJ Premiere, mixing atmospheric melodrama and rough beats.
Downstream: April 8, 2010

7. Electronic Free Improvisation: If only there were a thin line between electronic music and European free improvisation. Instead, there’s more of thick, broad line — a gulf at times, really — between digitally processed music and the rich culture of abstract ensemble play. It’s a gulf occasionally, and increasingly, bridged by individuals like Ikue Mori and bands like Diatribes. The latter, consisting of d’incise (laptop & treatments, objects, percussions) and Cyril Bondi (drums, percussions), recently teamed up with the trio HKM+ (Ludger Hennig: laptop & software instruments; Christof Knoche: bass clarinet, live electronics; and Markus Markowski: prepared guitar, laptop & software instruments) and three other musicians: Piero SK (saxophones, metal clarinet), Robert Rehnig (laptop & software instruments), and Johannes Sienknecht (laptop & software instruments). The result is spectacular.
Downstream: April 5, 2010

8. A Jazz/Hip-Hop Rematch: The feedback loop between jazz and hip-hop takes another enticing spin in the work of the Chicago quartet Spinach Prince. As heard on its recent self-titled album, the group has come up with a highly potent recipe that mixes jazz touches (trap-set rhythms, meandering woodwinds, instrumental soloing) and the basic building blocks of old-school beat-making (samples of found vocals, emphasis on texture, tight metric loops).
Downstream: March 22, 2010

9. The Dark Side of Fusion: The murky and atmospheric noise-jazz of Leandro Ramirez‘s album jaja sh represents the dark side of fusion. His loosely strung instruments play rough, sour chords and single-note riffs in a manner that traces its mode back to that of Ornette Coleman, the great jazz saxophonist. Even though there’s no saxophone heard here, there’s something in the way Ramirez’s melodies seem to move backwards, as if feeling their way up a creaky staircase, that brings to mind Coleman’s more outward-bound experimentation.
Downstream: January 27, 2010

10. Every Photograph Has Multiple Soundtracks, Don’t It: As part of a new experimental series (titled simply Synaesthesia — i.e., the confusion of senses) at his musicofsound.co.nz site, Tim Prebble asks his readers to compose works that are suggested by a given image. Three audio segments were uploaded when I first wrote about the music inspired by a photograph shot at Tanah Lot in Bali. Martin’s is a dirgey drone supplemented by echoed vocals and a slow, noisey rhythm. The track by üav works in bell tones and kettle-style drums and otherworldly halos of sound. And a piece by ccu is more fragile and closely mic’d than the other two, a mix of taut ringing sounds (perhaps from a kalimna) and rough surface texture.

Play Bali: The photo that Tim Prebble challenged musicians to provide a score to

All three, especially when heard with Prebble’s photograph in mind, suggest rituals at dawn or dusk. A fourth track was added after I first wrote about the series. This year-end acknowledgment is as much for Prebble’s assignment-based project overall as it is for this particular episode thereof (it dates from very late 2009). The series is currently up to its ninth edition.
Downstream: January 7, 2010

And three others:

¶ WHY?Arcka‘s 26-track Exhibits A-Z compilation of experimental break beats was still a work in progress when I listed it, last year, as one of 2009′s best. This year, he completed it: arckatron.bandcamp.com.

¶ This easily ranks as one of my favorite releases of the year, but since I was directly associated with it even if entirely uninvolved in its creation, I took it out of the running for the ten best: Soothing Sounds for Baby: luvsound.org.

¶ Every year there is at least one track that I listen to repeatedly yet never manage to write about. I will at some point sum up what is great, in my estimation, about “Homage to Jack Vanarsky,” a duet for viola and motorized gadget on the album Solo Viola d’Amore by Garth Knox (volume 5 at shskh.com), but until then, just go give it a listen.

Participants in the contest, in the true spirit of online collaboration and open-source music-making, were provided (for free — no pay-to-play here) the raw materials, the stems as they’re called, of the piece “2×5,” a kind of post-rock bit of chamber music newly composed by Reich. They then set to work, beat-battle style, to see who could make something interesting enough out of original to impress the composer himself. (The other judge was Christian Carey, a member of the composition faculty at the Westminster Choir College.)

This is Steve Reich we’re discussing, the minimalist most comfortable with, most at home amid, uniformity and repetition, as well as with the subtle shifts that evidence themselves therein. So, since the audio player of the service that hosted the contest, indabamusic.com, includes waveforms, the question that suggest itself is: How do the waveforms of winners compare and contrast with those of the losers? Or, in this case, not the losers, but the honorable mentions.

These first three waveforms are of the top three placing entries:

And these are the ten honorable mentions:

It seems fair to say that the three that won show considerably less internal variety than do the ones that they bested, at least in the manner this waveform algorithm indicates. Of course, these are just 10 out the numerous ones that were actually submitted, so this is not exactly a scientific investigation. There may be, for all I know, one among them that looks like a solid block.

If you want to give those remixes singled out by Reich himself a listen, here they are, starting with the winner, credited to Dominique Leone:

More on the contest at nonesuch.com.

My interview with Reich, and some of the contributing musicians, on the occasion of his 1999 Reich Remixed album here: “The Public Record.”

Only one Cake song, to my knowledge, has been sampled for a rap record: the instrumental “Arco Arena” by Heavy D for the song “Guns & Roses” off Jay Z‘s The Blueprint 2: The Gift & the Curse. I’d hoped to learn more about the sampling experience than I did, but it turned out, after several lengthy conversations with McCrea for the article, to be a pretty straightforward permission-granting affair — and perhaps that was something in itself worth learning.

There’s a rigor in the band’s instrumentation and arrangements that almost seems to aspire to the status of automation, and that’s a subject I go into in more detail in the article. The Cake piece, “Going the Distance,” isn’t online, but you can learn about the magazine at sactownmag.com. The band’s new album is titled Showroom of Compassion, and it’s due out January 11, 2011. It was recorded on 100% solar power at the band’s studio, not far from the Tower Theatre in Sacramento.

One more Disquiet-ish Cake thing. This is a lyric from the song “The Headphonist” by the band Kinky, off its album Atlas. On the recording, that’s McCrea guesting on vocals. It goes, in part:

At this moment, I’m listening to a very, very quiet song / I’m walking alone again, with my headphones on again … sometimes it seems like everything I see has a sound and if it does — what is the shape of silence?

I made a brief mention here on Disquiet of the song back in 2004 (“Quote of the Week”), because the lyric was such a poetic depiction of everyday synesthesia, and it seemed especially interesting to hear those thoughts expressed in a pop song: a song about the music beyond songs. I’d apparently been mistaken in thinking that McCrea himself had written the lyrics. As I was researching the Sactown story, he set me straight, explaining that the lyrics were written by the band, and that they may have been the band’s attempt to write a lyric that resembled his own writing style. If there’s a great pop song about that least pop-like form of audio, the art of phonography, this may be it.

The song is titled “2 Forms of Anger,” and it’s due for release at the start of November on the album Small Craft on a Milk Sea, which gives a credit to both electronicist Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams. It’s Eno’s first album on Warp, known as the home to Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and other adventurous musicians.

The song is hosted at soundcloud.com, where enthusiasm is best gauged by the density of vertical bars superimposed on a given track’s waveform, each bar representing a comment from a listener.

One side note: Typically, the illuminated down arrow in that waveform interface (on the right hand side) signals a track is available for free download. In this case, it links to an opportunity to purchase the track. But since the album isn’t yet for sale, it simply leads to brian-eno.net.

Previous disquiet.com coverage of the record, from mid-August: “What the New Brian Eno Album Might Sound Like,” which includes a free Jon Hopkins MP3.

Addendum: I posted this a bit prematurely. I want add the following: This track makes me much more excited about the upcoming album than I had been. Eno’s work in recent years, on a sonic level, has largely been more interesting theoretically than in practice, from his last solo album, through his collaborations with David Byrne and Paul Simon, to his score for Lovely Bones, to his varied interactive projects on the iOS platform (Bloom, etc.). This song, though, is visceral — not that his music needs to be visceral to make an impression (if anyone has, it’s Eno who’s made it clear that one can be the opposite and leave a lasting one), but its visceral-ness is such a refreshing and welcome surprise that it changes the lens through which the album will be viewed. It shows compositional development from beginning to end, and it plumbs the recesses of his catalog, notably his association with the long-ago No Wave culture in New York. My only criticism after several initial listens is that some of the guitar, especially early on, sounds quite apart in the mix, almost like it was layered in as an afterthought. That may be the result of the subpar compression rate — Soundcloud, like many such services, streams at 128kbps — but since Eno’s a producer known to test-run his albums on cassette tape, it’s assumed that he gave this one a listen at 128 himself before unleashing it.

Oh is due out on June 15. In the meanwhile, above is an image of the album’s cover, which appears to feature a detail of the work “from here to ear” (2007) by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, in which birds serve as nature’s own resonators as they sit atop an electric guitar. The work serves as something of a pastoral response to Christian Marclay’s famous “Guitar Drag” (in which an amplified guitar is pulled from behind a pick-up truck).

Review copies of Oval’s Oh are now circulating, and I’m reserving judgment until I have had enough time to really take in its 15 varied tracks. As with the recent Autechre album, Oval’s Oh signals a significant shift — in both cases to something more melodic, less fractured, than listeners might expect. While Autechre on Quaristice employed recognizable synthesizer sounds (in contrast with rougher tonalities of the past), Oval’s Oh often sounds like broken segments of raw recordings of a post-rock band in rehearsal. And whereas Oversteps was, to me, a serious disappointment, Oh so far is anything but.

More details on Oh, including full track listing, at the website of its releasing label, thrilljockey.com.

My 1997 interview with Popp/Oval (which I was pleased to see referenced in the recent MIT Press book Cracked Media by Caleb Kelly) at disquiet.com.

And my brief review of So, which I listed as one of the top albums of 2003, at disquiet.com.

And speaking of Boursier-Mougenot, here is a video segment of his entrancing work “from here to ear”:

 
PS: An update (as of April 27). A representative at the Thrill Jockey record label provided a little more information on the album cover, and on Boursier-Mougenot’s relationship to the Oh album: “Céleste didn’t have anything to do with the music but he did provide permission to use the image as our artwork almost immediately.”

● On the Making of Brian Eno/Peter Chilvers iPhone/Touch Apps Bloom & Trope (usoproject.blogspot.com): Interview with Peter Chilvers on his development, with Brian Eno, of the iPhone apps Trope and Bloom, and the app Air: “It was something of a two way process,” he says of the development process. “I came up with the effect of circles expanding and disappearing as part of a technology experiment — Brian saw it and stopped me making it more complex! Much of the iPhone development has worked that way — one of us would suggest something and the other would filter it, and this process repeats until we end up with something neither of us imagined.” Story by Matteo Milani. More information at generativemusic.com, according to which a revised Bloom (version 2.0) will be released in early October: “New features include a sleep timer, stereo panning, two additional sounds, three new moods, and two new operation modes. The update will be free to anyone who has already purchased Bloom.”

● The Chimes of New York; and Their Ringers (nytimes.com): “Simple rope pulling it ain’t,” goes coverage of the North American Guild of Change Ringers recent convergence in Manhattan. “Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell. The ‘music’ consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls.” Why the article’s author, Daniel J. Wakin, or his editor saw it necessary to put quotation marks around the word “music” is unclear, but the enthusiasm of the bell-ringers interviewed in the article is infectious — you come to imagine a religion in which the ringing of bells isn’t ceremonial, but the ceremony itself.

● Kind of Bloop Update; Participant Critiques Time Magazine Coverage (ocremix.org): Musician Sam Ascher-Weiss was quoted in Time 's coverage of the Kind of Bloop compilation, an album that rendered Miles Davis's classic Kind of Blue, on its 50th anniversary, as "chiptune" music — that is, as if it had been programmed for ancient arcade video games. Ascher-Weiss, whose music moniker is Shnabubula, feels that he was quoted out of context about the limitations and potential of this sort of music-making. Original Time piece at time.com. Kind of Bloop available at kindofbloop.com.

● Book Review: Sara Maitland on Silence (nytimes.com): From Dominique Browning‘s review of the new non-fiction book by Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence: “The first kind of silence requires an emptying out of the self in order to be receptive to God; the other fortifies the self in order to be inventively godlike. ‘Silence has no narrative,’ she concludes. ‘Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.’”

● Video-game Website Joystiq Interviews Nine Inch Nails‘s Trent Reznor (joystiq.com): Says Reznor: "Rob [Sheridan, NIN Creative Director] and I are working on a project together that's moving forward and focuses on the creation of content from a developer's perspective. Would I do music for an everyday game? Meh. I'm not thrilled about the idea, but if someone cool came to me and had this great game, then I'd consider it." The interviewer posted quotes that didn't make the Joystiq cut at superdunner.blogspot.com.

● The Art of Turntables (interviewmagazine.com): Overview of contemporary artists making turntables as art, including Simon Elvins's paper cone (image below, top), Dennis de Bel's sewing machine, Sean Duffy's triptych (image below, middle), Yuri Suzuki's five-armed mutant (image below, bottom), and Tom Sachs's presidential podium. Story by Fan Zhong.

● Tauba Auerbach‘s Organ as Art (nytimes.com): It “requires two players, each pushing foot pedals to pump bellows for the other. Every afternoon at 5 Ms. Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser — hence the name of the instrument, the Auerglass — perform a transporting, specially composed duet.” Photo below by Adam Reich for the New York Times:

● On Rock and Joysticks, the Beatles and Nirvana (nytimes.com): The online version of the paper’s lengthy piece about the making of Rock Band – The Beatles, “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” lacks the intention of the title the article was given when it appeared, originally, as the cover story of the August 16 issue of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine: “The Music Will Matter to You Because You Are Pretending to Make It.” Story by Daniel Radosh. A few week’s later, the paper’s video-game critic, Seth Schiesel, brought some sanity to the hysteria that has followed the appearance of Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana, in the game Guitar Hero 5: “Assuming that Activision got [Courtney] Love to sign the proper contracts, it appears that the main potential legal issue (if Ms. Love actually fulfills her threat to sue) is whether having a digital Cobain re-enact songs by other artists in some way damages his image. I am as big a Deadhead as my generation was able to produce (Jerry Garcia died when I was 22, and I had already seen about 90 Grateful Dead concerts and a dozen Jerry Garcia Band shows), so I know what it’s like to be a fan. Hypothetically, would it be weird to see a digital Garcia playing a Jimmy Eat World song? Of course, but after about 15 seconds of shock, I’d find it totally hilarious.”

● Help the Duo of He Can Jog & Always Tokyo Fund Their Planned November 2009 Tour (kickstarter.com): As of this writing, they're about 20% of the way there. Funders get great benefits, like downloads of rehearsals sessions, a promotional 7", and more.

● The Rare Music Story to Quote DJ Mark Farina and Dream Theater — on the iPod Touch as Instrument (sfgate.com)

● Attention, Phonographers: Entomologists Say Cool Nights May Mean Less Insect Chatter (nytimes.com)

● Interactive Music App RjDj Holding October 2-4 Workshops in Its London Office (rjdj.me)

● Lifehacker Queries Readers on Best "Sounds for Getting Work Done" (lifehacker.com)

● The Kohler VibrAcoustic Bath Introduces Sonic Hydrotherapy (kohler.com)

● Artist Hugh Livingston Introduces the “Sound Landscaping” Installation: Sonogarden

● While We Wait for the Gristleism Box, an Interview with Genesis P-Orridge About Using Plastic Surgery to Look Like His Late Wife (nymag.com)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.