Video games are a natural for fast changes in genre, given that sonic cues usually alter from stage to stage, level to level. In the mind of I, Cactus, that means something akin to Naked City–era John Zorn, with a dozen or so little bits of melodic play packed into less than three and a half minutes of song. In this case, there is dubby mid-tempo lounge, a gizmo walking bass line, the inevitable pachinko tomfoolery, not to mention the super slomo opening, which leads to a brief section of squeaky noise-making.

As always with Hexawe, the track is accompanied by the raw materials from which it is constructed, so you can play along at home. More on I, Cactus (aka Connor Long) at icact.us. Visit the releasing label at hexawe.net, where the track was uploaded on February 24, 2010.

The majority of the most popular posts this past month were drawn from the site’s week-daily free (and legal) download recommendations, the Downstream department: (3) a Grassy Knoll demo circa 1998, (4) one minute of instrumental hip-hop bliss, (5) a sample track off the Oval album O (due out later this year, to follow up the album Oh), (6) a slice of Bruce Kaphan pedal-steel atmospherics, (7) a sample of the collaboration by experimental electronic duo Matmos and percussion quartet So Percussion (plus guests), (8) electronica lullabies from Athens-based Naono (that’s Greece, not Georgia), and (9) news (and free WAV files) of a Peter Gabriel / “Games without Frontiers” remix contest.

And, finally, (10) a brief bit on the return of the patch cord, which is cementing its role as a visual metaphor in software-based instruments — such as this screenshot from the iPhone/Touch app Circuit Synth by Michael Daines:

The most popular post of both the last 60 and 90 days was the Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album link noted above. The second most popular post of the last 60 and 90 days was the initial response I wrote to the McArdle article, “What, After All, Is the ‘Music Industry’?”

The top 9 search terms on this site for the month of May were: “rss,” “performances,” “oval” (as in Oval, see above), “drone,” “oversteps” (as in the album by Autechre), “autechre” (as in the duo that just released Oversteps), “loops,” “topic,” and “mcardle” (as in Atlantic writer and editor Megan McArdle, as noted above). Tenth place had so many words tied, it’s just silly to list them all.

How many technologies have gone the way of the patch cord — from essential tool (in this case meaning the field of analog synthesis) to extended near-obsolescence (with the rise of digital synthesis) to increasingly ubiquitous visual metaphor (from the graphic language of Max/MSP to the proliferating virtual synths, like Circuit Synth and the DS-10 cartridge on the Nintendo DS)?

More information at circuitsynth.com, and at creativeapplications.net (from which the above image is borrowed), and at the Apple app store (itunes.com/apps).

Brief video of Squiggle in action:

Developed by Henry Chu of the Hong Kong design group pillandpillow.com.

Via creativeapplications.net and twitter.com/zachlieberman.

What it is is a diagram of “Piano Etudes” by composer-technologist Jason Freeman. Here’s a detail, for closer inspection:

Freeman writes about the project at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. He’s created a piece of music that is, more factually, pieces of music — pieces intended to be organized in any manner by anyone. There are four of these etudes, each consisting of multiple fragments of piano recordings. The approach to composition can be traced back to the “open score” mode of composers such as Terry Riley and Earle Brown, as Freeman explains. He has taken that approach and upgraded it for the Network Era, with the help of Akito Van Troyer:

In “Piano Etudes” (2009), I use technology to make the open score accessible not only to performers but also to audiences, inviting everyone to experience and participate in the work’s creative process. I notated these four short piano pieces as sets of musical fragments connected by arrows. The structure is reminiscent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, of a flow chart, or of the hyperlinked structure of the Internet. Each version of the piece simply follows the arrows to create a unique path through the score. There are an almost infinite number of possible versions.

You can make your own version of any of the four etudes at turbulence.org. The project also brings to mind the instructional scores of artists and musicians involved in Fluxus, and confirms that there is a direct lineage from the instructions-as-score of John Cage, Yoko Ono, and others, and the code-as-score of people like Freeman.

Disquiet.com readers with long memories will recall Freeman’s “Shakespeare Cuisinart,” which I wrote about back in July 2001: disquiet.com.

More on Freeman at jasonfreeman.net.

Thanks to Mike Rhode (of comicsdc.blogspot.com) for the tip.

“I have an original Oberheim SEM (35 years old, serial number 100) that I used for an A/B comparison in the article. I certainly don’t regret the $600 I paid for it (used), as it continues to serve me well. I wish I felt that confident when I buy software.”

This may sound like a concern primarily for working musicians, and the bedroom tinkerers who aspire to be them. And certainly, matters of cost and technique — that is, of depreciation and the benefits of long-term engagement with a specific instrument — are of particular interest to musicians, but the implications of Robair’s consideration are no less significant for listeners. (I fully appreciate that the divide is a specious one, but for the sake of this thought, I’m putting aside, for the moment, that ongoing blurring of roles.)

On the one hand, musicians who are coming of age on laptops will not, necessarily, have the sort of benefits at age 45 that, say, musicians who dedicate themselves to piano, or to clarinet, might have.

On the other, there is a new realm of association between musician and instrument developing in the digital world, one in which the instruments are improved iteratively as the musicians themselves age. There is, certainly, precedent for this in the pre-digital era, but the extent to which collective experience will feed the development of single instruments is a promising one. In addition, we are seeing more and more software instruments developed by musicians (in such environments as Max/MSP and Processing) for their own use (as well as for commercial gain).

At the risk of the appearance of equivocation, I certainly hope that musicians, professional and amateur, continue to pursue both paths, experiencing lifelong engagement with one instrument, while watching another, virtual instrument evolve over that same lifetime.

Full Robair post at emusician.com.

Following up on the Chris (Cabaret Voltaire) Watson South Pole entry earlier this week (disquiet.com), here’s streaming audio from below the Antarctic ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. (sic) … Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA, an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf”: awi.de/en/research.

A visual interface collecting numerous radio stations from around the world that stream their signals, from ABC Classic FM 93.9 on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific to Africa No.1 106.7 in Yaounde, Cameroon: bcdef.org/antenna (via appscout.com):

Forget the “Funky Drummer” sample and the “Amen break.” Check out the folk music that Béla Bartók used as compositional launching points: “The composer’s vast archive of Hungarian folk music has been digitized,” writes The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross, and a fair number of his phonographic recordings have been uploaded in MP3 format”: db.zti.hu (via newyorker.com).

Oddly old-fogyish comment from Geoff Dyer in his New York Times review (nytimes.com) of Don DeLillo‘s new novel, Point Omega: “This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix ‘conceptual.’” Which begs this question: “Rare”? The subject of his comment, and of DeLillo’s book, is “24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon, who has produced a vast body of work that employs similar approaches to retooling existing familiar film — an approach that is, while often humorous and sometimes revelatory in Gordon’s hands, a fairly common approach in video art, and needless to say an even more familiar approach in remix- and appropriation-friendly contemporary music (witness the 24-hour rendition by Leif Inge of Beethoven‘s 9th Symphony, aka “9 Beet Stretch”: park.nl).

Cory Arcangel, Sam Durant, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), and Pipilotti Rist are among the artists participating in this project of using the Frank Lloyd Wright‘s interior design of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to their own ends. The show Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum will allow them, and many others, to “imagine their dream interventions in the space for the exhibition.” Also part of the show is Hypermusic: Ascension, a March 11 rotunda collaboration by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie (guggenheim.org).

Documentary coming this summer on industrial-rock band Ministry, titled Fix: fixtheministrymovie.com. (It doesn’t appear to be listed in the IMDB.com database yet.)

An album of music made on the Monome, created to raise funds for Haiti (einpuls.bandcamp.com).

Review of Kenneth Kirschner‘s album Filaments & Voids, for which I wrote the liner notes, alongside Radu Malfatti‘s Wechseljahre einer Hyäne. The author suggests, quite rightly, that the “the importance of silence can easily be overstated here”: tokafi.com.

New blog from the prolific creator of Palm Sounds: mobilemusicmarketing.blogspot.com (via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com).

A lot of coverage coming out of New York on the Unsound festival, including this review of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio: “Their shared improvisation only hinted at the dance floor. It was sci-fi ambient music, with a background wash of pink noise like interstellar dust and puffy tones, pitched and unpitched, arising out of the static”: nytimes.com. (Previous Unsound overview: nytimes.com. More recent coverage of Andy Warhol footage set to music: nytimes.com.)

Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon reflects from a very personal perspective on his return to his native Miami for a concert of his work, as part of the New York Times’s blog (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com). … Another Bang on a Can associate, composer Peter Wise, has posted streaming audio for a project at MASS MoCA (muziboo.com, via blog.massmoca.org).

First podcast from the creators of RjDj: more.rjdj.me. … A petition that Apple allow audio-file sharing for music apps. I strongly support this initiative: petitionspot.com.

Art critic Joseph Masheck on an exhibit at Minus Space in Brooklyn (minusspace.com) of Josef Albers‘s album covers for the old Command Records label. The exhibit ran through the end of January: “Albers was doing a job, and took it seriously.” (brooklynrail.org, via tommoody.us). I’m not sure Masheck does justice to how well the geometry and implied motion of the Albers covers reflect the ecstatic stereoscopic experimentation (by lite-music star Enoch Light) contained on the records they adorn.

The Lifehacker.com website has been including background sounds as part of its ongoing attention to improving work productivity, including recent posts on whether its readers “use ambient sounds to concentrate” (lifehacker.com) and a Mac-only piece of software titled Ommwriter that combines a blank writing space and ambient noise (lifehacker.com).

The netlabel astorbell.com/remix has set a May 1, 2010, deadline for its open-source remix project.

I’ve finally got proper vimeo.com/disquiet and youtube.com/mwd1 channels going, with “favorited” recommendations popping up on a regular basis. Twitter, as always, is at twitter.com/disquiet. More social-network coordinates at disquiet.com/faq.

Also making the top 10: (8) a news report that included information on why Brian Eno likely won’t be nominated for an Oscar this year (for his work on director Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones), the forthcoming new Autechre album, and Nortec Collective‘s symphonic aspirations; (9) a “Quote of the Week” by sound artist Andrea Polli describing where art and science do not overlap; and (10) thoughts on issues in “interface lag” (or iteration lag) in the ongoing development of casual music-making apps.

The most popular post of the last 60 days was an overview of the, in my opinion, 10 best iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps of 2009.

The most popular post of the last 90 days was of field recordings made at a church in Rye, England.

The most popular post of the last year is a streaming playlist of guitar-based electronica.

The 10 most searched-for terms during the month of January were, in declining order of popularity, with some ties in there, “brian” (as in Brian Eno), “commercial,” “performances,” “eno” (yeah, the other half), “mention” (I have no idea what that’s about), “autechre” (whose new record, titled Oversteps, is pictured at left), “banks violette,” “broad,” “drone,” and the especially peculiar “info wedding.” (Right after those 10 came “basinksi,” as in William Basinski, “bush of ghosts,” as in the compilation Our Lives in the Bush of Ghosts and the Brian Eno / David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “cicada,” as in the insect that is often used as a point of comparison for electronic background noise.)

On the other hand, Apple’s increasingly closed software environment casts a long and dark shadow into the future of personal computing. From our current vantage, that is a potential future in which developers need to submit their work to the equivalent of censors before being able to make it available to its public. And it’s a potential future in which among the decisions facing those very censors is (based, at least, on Apple’s track record thus far in its app store) whether a given developer is impinging on Apple’s turf.

One of the best posts I’ve read on this subject is over at Peter Kirn‘s createdigitalmusic.com; deeply incensed by Apple’s restrictive software philosophy, Kirn may have penned his strongest post yet as he dissected the device within hours of its introduction.

To be clear, Apple’s mobile OS is very developer-friendly, hence the nearly 150,000 apps currently in the Apple store. Which is why I was especially interested in what developers had to say about the iPad. What concerns me at the moment is something Chris Randall, an accomplished software developer (I am pretty much addicted to his company’s product Automaton), hinted at in one of his Twitter posts, at twitter.com/Chris_Randall, also on the day of the iPad unveiling:

DroneStation is going to be kicked up several notches, of course. Plenty of room now.

DroneStation is a simple drone-making app that Randall developed for Apple’s mobile OS. I use it regularly on my iPod Touch, and enjoy it. The “Plenty of room” he’s talking about is ambiguous — he may have meant screen space, but he may also have meant memory size. Either way, what we’re looking ahead to now is a situation in which some existing apps will be overhauled for the newly expanded touch canvas, and others will be developed from the ground up (or abandoned in favor of something entirely new). I’ve long been of the mind that at least two of the best music apps for the Apple mobile OS, the beat program JR Hexatone and the track-syncing Touch DJ, were designed with the inevitable tablet implementation in mind; both are too cramped on my iPod Touch to count as truly fully realized, or really as fully usable.

What will be interesting to see is in the near future is how Apple developers respond to the new dimensions of the iPad, and whether the tidiness of the iPhone/Touch dimensions will give way, in the relatively expansive iPad, to bloat.

More on the iPad at apple.com/ipad. More on Randall’s software development at analogindustries.com.

● 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).