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.

The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.

Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.

Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”

Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)

Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Elec­tronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of elec­tronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where some­thing had hap­pened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.

Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.

Audio Flaneur: The excellent soundscrapers.blogspot.com by Nick Sowers is three deep in a new series of “Lunchwalks.” What’s a lunchwalk? Explains Sowers, “Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.” On each walk, he records the sounds he encounters. He maps the walks, and takes photos, which tend to feature his microphone, which in turn takes on the appearance of Sowers’ fuzzy walking buddy (see above). His descriptions are splendid (“The gear boxes and cable junctures add a constant hum to the background static of the city”), and he also posts samples of the audio, such as this from his third walk:

Read them, as his walking progresses, at soundscrapers.blogspot.com.

Banner Music: I don’t look too deeply into the statistics for this site. When you write about free music and about galleries that require no entry fee, as well as commercial music that often sells in the under-500-unit zone, the whole notion of pageviews can be an exercise in misdirection, if not futility. I do take note, because the dashboard in WordPress (the publishing tool that is this site’s backend) puts the information front and center, that this site seems to get a lot more visitors via Facebook than Twitter, even though I dedicate more time to Twitter than to Facebook. (Perhaps the automated posting of Disquiet’s RSS feed to Facebook that currently occurs is something I should do more of on Twitter? Somehow that doesn’t seem right. My approach to Twitter is conversational.) Anyhow, in the mix of sites sending somewhat significant traffic to this one is a service that was previously unfamiliar: shuffler.fm. The site is an aggregator of blog-filtered music (it bills itself as an “audio magazine made by music blogs”). You can search and sort by artist, genre, blog, and so forth. And, niftily enough, you can end up navigating this very site with a top bar that lets you listen to the music on a given page and navigate the site that way. The following link, unlike the previous one in this entry, will take you to an example: shuffler.fm. For the time being, the shuffler.fm service doesn’t seem to be infringing on this site’s non-commercial Creative Commons license, though there is a page on the site that talks about advertising.

Outside Man: Perhaps the craziest thing about the movie Bunraku isn’t its surreal set (part Kill Bill, part Sin City), its peculiar cast (Demi Moore and Ron Perlman and Woody Harrelson and Josh Hartnett), or the voice of its narrator (Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, etc.), but that the score is by trumpeter Terence Blanchard, best known for his numerous Spike Lee films. (The New York Times called the movie “a potpourri of genres that ends up a morass of clichés”) Back in reality, Blanchard is also tied to Red Tails, about the African American Tuskegee Airmen.

Dark Portal: The second and third freely downloadable volumes of the score to the excellent video game Portal 2 are available at thinkwithportals.com. The first volume was covered here in late June, in the Downstream department. (Via joystiq.com and nobuooo.com.)

Polluting Noise: Noise pollution is a subject that gives noise a bad name. A story in a local news site in my area, the San Francisco baycitizen.org, touched on how emotions color perception of noise: “On Sept. 12, 2001, no flights took off at San Francisco International, but complaints were lodged nevertheless.” The science-and-scifi site i09.com has been noting how birds and dolphins have shown adverse effects of human-made sound.

The Listener: Author Warren Ellis has launched a new podcast. Second episode came out the 5th of this month, at warrenellis.com, featuring such Disquiet.com favorites as Daphne Oram and Scott Tuma. Episode one had Moondog and Tangerine Dream.

If you have a favorite film-music composer, this can be a great way to experience a new film: listen to Cliff Martinez’s scores before going to the recently released Drive or Contagion, for example, and the music will be just that much more present during the viewing. It won’t be so present as to overwhelm the film, but it will bring the sonic elements more into focus, not just the elements within the score, but the sometimes enticingly ambiguous places where the score ends and the rest of the film’s sound environment begins.

In the case of Sun Hammer‘s score to the short film Forgiveness, by director David Meiklejohn, which the composer just posted for free (actually pay-what-you-want, so do feel free to pay something) at bandcamp.com, it means an opportunity to experience a greater-than-usual distance between score and film. This is because the film is a small production, and its imagery doesn’t precede it, in contrast with the massive promotional campaigns that serve Hollywood films as advance scouts into the consciousness of future viewers. Forgiveness is reportedly a tale of revenge. According to its production company, at damnationland.com, the story goes as follows: “A vengeful spy survives an assasination attempt and takes revenge on the man that tried to kill her.” It certainly sounds like a taut thriller, and the score matches the bare logline with a spartan approach: wells of sound, percussive anticipation, stretches of static-laden noise. It never has the music-by-the-yard pulsing of standard thriller scores, and stretches at times into a psychedelic realm that raises one’s expectations for the film. The various cues are separated by momentary pauses across one single track, breaking the program music into an enjoyably sequential experience.

Track originally posted at sunhammer.bandcamp.com. More on Sun Hammer, aka Virginia-based Jay Bodley, at twitter.com/sunhammer and soundcloud.com/sunhammer. (Music found via twitter.com/falsereactions.)

Game music has long been the venue for “earworms” — pieces of music that get stuck in your head. Anyone who ever played Tetris on a Gameboy will have the Soviet-style theme etched on their brain. And the chipper Super Mario tune is similarly unforgettable. But with technological developments audio quality has improved as much as graphics and the earworms have become more sophisticated.

And while the acknowledgment by the British professional music community of the role music plays in video games is appreciated, the award (pictured in silhouette below) could prove shortsighted.

Background music in video games is important, but the most innovative and expressive work in gaming these days isn’t about Hollywood-style scores of static music that plays in the background, but in (1) sound design, (2) music that changes as the game progresses, and (3) most importantly, games in which the music is manipulated by players. Alderman notes the latter (“from ElectroPlankton for the DS to Singstar, and the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games”), but we’ll have to wait to see how the Ivors wrestle with this conundrum. Will they solely focus on static scores, or will they reward the music that, to one degree or another, more fluidly interacts with (or is even the object of) game play.

Statements in a piece by Adam Sherwin at timesonline.co.uk from Mark Fishlock, director of one of the awards’ sponsoring organizations (BASCA, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors) and an Ivors-committee member, get to the heart of the tension. On the one hand, Fishlock sees validation of video gaming in the adoption of traditional methods:

“The Ivors has always sought to reflect the ever-changing world of songwriting and composing. The video games market has matured beyond recognition and big budget orchestral scores are regularly being commissioned.”

On the other hand — and this is promising — he acknowledges the unique challenges and potential in game music:

“Writing music for games also requires a number of specialist skills compared with conventional film scoring, such as non-linear and multi-layered composition.”

Joystiq.com‘s Mike Schramm notes that for a game to be eligible, at least one third of the composers involved need to be “British or Irish.”

More on the awards at theivors.com.

Michael Nyman‘s The Piano (1993)

Philip Glass‘s The Hours (2002)

● Why Brian Eno‘s score to Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones is reportedly not eligible for an Oscar (thewrap.com, via moviescoremagazine.com).

● Thanks to Google Translate, an interview with composer Cliff Martinez (commeaucinema.com).

● Great list of movie scores to look forward to in 2010, including Howard Shore‘s Edge of Darkness, Daft Punk‘s Tron Legacy (which we’ve been hearing about for so long you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s already come and gone), and Elliot Goldenthal‘s The Tempest (moviescoremagazine.com).

● Promising development for gadget and software hackers: French court “dismissed a lawsuit filed by Nintendo over the use of flash carts on the DS” (engadget.com).

● Software that emulates vintage 1950s music synthesizers (synthtopia.com, via contemplation.archipel.cc).

● Tom Moody continues the discussion about the proliferation of music apps, referencing something I’d noted about user-interface challenges in casual-gaming applications (tommoody.us, re: disquiet.com).

● Instructions on how to bend an existing RjDj scene to your wills (makezine.com), plus a fun video explaining the RjDj iPhone/Touch software, a great bit of propaganda if you want to introduce people to it (the-palm-sound.blogspot.com). Though before you get too excited at the prospect, note that the instructions look like this:

● On February 2, be sure to check out jasonsloan.com/1444, Jason Sloan‘s Cageian, day-long composition.

● William Gurstelle introduces the Atlantic‘s audience to the Arduino, the DIY artist’s “physical computer” of choice (theatlantic.com); also from the Atlantic (same issue), how composer David Dunn and colleagues might fighting insect infestation (theatlantic.com).

● Video footage of the Orchestrion, backing automaton music machine on what is certainly the Pat Metheny album I’ve looked forward to more than any other in (yow) a quarter century — that is, since his 1985 collaboration with Ornette Coleman, Song X (createdigitalmusic.com).

● Sneak peek at the upcoming Autechre album, Oversteps, due out March 22 (package design by Designer Republic). Definitely the most visually striking Autechre album since their Hafler Trio collaboration, æ³o & h³æ (bleep.com).

● Cool little USB hub that looks like a tape cassette (gizmodo.com):

● “How has the Internet changed the way you think?” Among those to offer answers to the World Question 2009: Tony Conrad, Olafur Eliasson, Brian Eno, and Ai Weiei (edge.org).

● Nortec Collective‘s Bostich and Fussible on teaming with an orchestra (latimes.com).

● Keen visual of the “Visual History of Loudness” (mediateletipos.net):

● The magazine Vice reports that dismissing the skill required to DJ brought in more negative comments than just about anything else it’s ever published (viceland.com).

● Growing database of who’s sampled whom: whosampled.com.

● The Significant Objects project (in which mundane items are given meaning and, hence, value through storytelling) focuses its narratives on a music box (significantobjects.com) — speaking of which, really pleased to see two Disquiet Downstream entries made Significant Objects cofounder Rob Walker‘s list of songs he listened to most this year (murketing.com).

● Alan Rich‘s review of Terry Riley‘s In C from March 10, 1969, in New York magazine (books.google.com, via twitter.com/aworks).

● Yuki Suzuki‘s “White Noise Machine,” which calculates “the quantity of street noise and then generate the same amount of white noise” (designboom.com).

● A documentary I want to see badly, Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, by Peter Esmonde: trimpinmovie.com.

● The plusses and minuses of music in galleries and museums: “‘Am I alone in finding the word “soundscape” mildly terrifying?’ asked one critic” (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk).

The latest (4) “MP3 Discussion Group,” on Monolake‘s album Silence, made the list, as did three free-download entries (from the Downstream department, published every weekday): (5) the first mix I found to include audio from the Gristleism box (a collaboration between Throbbing Gristle and Christiaan Virant of FM3, creators of the Buddha Machine), (6) processed field recordings by Terje Paulsen, and (7) space music created on an old TR-606 drum machine.

Two “Quotes of the Week,” one (8) a collection of movie critics’s comments about Brian Eno‘s score to the film Lovely Bones and the other (9) an example of the excellent mid-song comments system at soundcloud.com. And, finally, (10) a round-up of images from the “sound art” tag at flickr.com.

The 10 most searched-for terms during the month of December were, in declining order of popularity: tied for first place, “makezine”
and “weidenbaum” (I have no idea why anyone would search for my name on the site, but so be it); tied for second place, “buddha machine” and “likens” (I’m not sure why anyone would search for the word “likens,” unless perhaps they’re looking for Lichens, aka Robert Lowe); and tied for third place, “amon tobin,” “Autechre,” “drone,” “fm,” “garai” (which yields a null return), “hip,” “kent sparling,” “kikapu,” “ranaldo” (presumably as in Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo) “unsilent” (as in Phil Kline‘s communal composition “Unsilent Night”), and (I’m not sure what this last one was about) “watson.”

A.O. Scott at nytimes.com, on the film’s more fantasy-laden sequences:

“It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. ‘Heaven,’ a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is ‘a place where nothing ever happens.’”

David Denby at newyorker.com:

“Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy—there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.”

Todd McCarthy at variety.com:

“Jackson shows his low-budget horror-film roots in the way he shoots the sinister scenes, with silhouetting white lights, heavy fog effects, wide-angle closeups and generic synth backgrounding from Brian Eno’s otherwise effective score.”

All of which said, the majority of reviews at major publications didn’t even seem to note the Eno score, except with the occasional credit-bundle sidebar: washingtonpost.com, latimes.com, villagevoice.com, slate.com, guardian.co.uk, chicagotribune.com.

“We decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make sound, then we’re going to make it beautiful and futuristic.”

The engineer, Toshiyuki Tabata, was interviewed at bloomberg.com on the subject of the Nissan Leaf, an electric car so quiet that, as with many electric and gas-electric hybrids, it was deemed a potential threat to unsuspecting pedestrians. After consulting with the composers of film scores, the Nissan team opted for noises similar to those in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. No word yet on a commercial electric hovercar from Nissan. (Thanks to twitter.com/lucent2cents for the tip.)