The Soundcloud.com platform has many strengths. Key among them is how the fluid nature of postings on the service leads to a specific situation that few if any other music-hosting services have approached. It’s one in which a truly fluid sensibility is easily associated with the postings. In other words: a musical sketch — a rough draft or a work-in-progress — makes sense on Soundcloud in a way it does less so, say, on cdbaby.com or in iTunes. Those latter two systems emulate the tradition of the recording as document, as self-enclosed entity. Soundcloud allows for such a thing, with its “sets” feature, but the default mode on Soundcloud is a reverse chronological list. It’s just a thread of whatever the musician uploaded most recently (the majority of Soundcloud accounts appear to be associated with individuals, though bands and organizations house there efforts there, too). Which is why it makes all the more sense that Dustmotes, the ace turntable-textured beatmaker, has launched a new podcast series hosted on Soundcloud. The six-minute inaugural entry is a suite, a medley, of found and homemade bits, filtered through Dustmotes’ trademark old-school-yet-of-the-moment, veering-toward-ambient approach to what could be broadly described as instrumental hip-hop. Which is to say, it’s downtempo, and it’s promising. Looking forward to the sophomore effort.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker, at dustmotes.net.

Following up a recent interview with Kid Koala about the intersection of scratchboard comics and turntablism scratching, here’s another audio interview with the Canadian musician and longtime Ninja Tune Records roster member on the occasion of his new graphic novel and accompanying soundtrack, Space Cadet (MP3). He was interviewed for the excellent Panel Borders comics podcast series, part of the generous offerings of resonancefm.com. Koala is a thoughtful participant in and observer of the more sedate vestiges of street culture. He spins a good tale about the origins of his “Music to Draw to” series, in which he DJs downtempo music to inspire the artists and other creative types who show up for the special live shows, held in places like art galleries. The series began during a Canadian winter, as a way to inspire his friends to get out of their apartments and do something creative together — or at least side by side. It isn’t just for artists. He reports that fashion designers, video-game coders, and writers have joined in. At least once, someone brought along a loom. The first rule of “Music to Draw to” is: be prepared to do something creative. The second rule of “Music to Draw to” is: no dancing.

MP3 originally posted at resonancefm.com.

Kid Koala is one of the mainstays of the Ninja Tune label, his expressly nostalgic and maudlin approach to turntablism fitting comfortably between texture-oriented art music and mood-setting party music. His latest release, Space Cadet, is a follow-up to an earlier such venture, Nufonia Must Fall: it’s a graphic novel with a score. He recently discussed the overlap between his comics and turntablism — between the scratchboard on which he made the drawings, and the scratching that is the foundation of his music — as part of a wide-ranging, and highly recommended, interview on the record label’s podcast. It’s downloadable as an M4A file — essentially an MP3 with embedded images, and a slightly more finicky nature in regard to playback.

Among the influences on his work discussed during the podcast interview is Carter Burwell, best known for his scores for Coen Brothers movies. Koala talks about the difference between scoring a movie and scoring a book, noting that while the music is intended to be listened to while one reads the graphic novel, he’s not particularly dictatorial about the speed at which the book is read, or how specific instances in the score are intended to align with instants in the narrative.

He’s touring in support of the album. The evenings are something he’s described as a “seated headphone concert,” in which the audience settles into “space pods” and listens to the music on devices that allow them to adjust the volume. Interestingly, Amon Tobin, arguably the other main artist on the Ninja tune roster, is also doing a multimedia tour right now, though Tobin’s audio-visual effort, titled Isam, is far more technologically demanding than Koala’s (it’s described at amontobin.com as a “25′ x 14′ x 8′ multi-dimensional/ shape shifting 3-D art installation … enveloping him and the audience”).

Video originally posted at youtube.com. More on the release at kidkoala.com and ninjatune.net.

But, of course, the creative employment of the turntable as not just an audio-playback system but also as a means of artistic production, as a performance instrument, is a long tradition. John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 1″ included turntables in 1939, which means just as long prior to the birth of hip-hop as we now are far from it. Hip-hop by and large has left the turntable behind in favor of digital samples, but avant-garde use of the turntable continues apace.

Take the work of Jay Sullivan, as recently displayed in a live performance broadcast as part of the Rare Frequency radio show, on WZBC 90.3, and later disseminated more widely as a podcast MP3.

The piece begins with the texture of the turntable, the slow warble and mechanical cadence of its rotation, the surface static noise. The introduction of a bellows sound, likely a harmonium (the credits on the site are minimal), serves several compositional purposes. It provides a drone that suggests an affinity for the underlying currents of Indian music. It shifts the opening texture from foreground to background. It suggests the turntable texture as the most minimal of rhythms, to be contrasted with the most minimal of melodies that is a drone. But most importantly, it simulates that distinction between foreground and background: The airy breath of the bellows, like a harmonica or organ on some surreally attenuated sustain, hovers above the texture of the turntable. The turntable surface doesn’t adversely affect the sound, as would be the case if the bellows noise were in fact recorded on the vinyl we hear. Instead, a cavern opens, and we listen to that void as much as we do to what is on either side of it.

Track originally posted at rarefrequency.com.

Get the full set of 21 tracks at dustedwax.org. If this weren’t already a decade old, much of it would be on my “likely” list for best netlabel releases of 2011. More on Hypoetical at hypoetical.net.

Sonic Warfare: A gadget created early in the life of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: “weighs only 12 lb.”

In the process of reviewing a recent book on the Workshop — Special Sound (Oxford), by Louis Niebur — for another publication (that review should be out in January), I was introduced by a friend to an online trove of BBC engineering monographs, some of which include Radiophonic-specific documentation. There’s one in particular, from 1963, that’s entirely about the Radiophonic activities. And it’s the subject of my latest post at boingboing,net, “BBC Engineering Monographs from 1950s and ’60s: Once 5 Shillings, Now Free.”

Many of those samples, as Hein notes, had appeared in earlier Nas songs — this includes samples of Nas’ own voice — which makes Premier’s production a meta-level project, and confirms why his name is uttered alongside not only the Bomb Squad but also the likes of Teo Macero and Bill Laswell.

As Heim puts it,

Any sample-based song carries a dense web of associations, and I love the complexity that gets introduced when people sample themselves, or when they sample tracks containing samples, or best of all, both. ‘Nas Is Like’ has a complex family tree, a set of allusions to allusions to allusions. This is as it should be. Fundamentally, all music is built of reshuffled bits of other music. Hip-hop makes this fact an explicit part of the music’s message, and that’s the biggest reason why I love it.

Heim collects all his “sample maps” at flickr.com. While many have to deal with the “sample and sampled” nature of the Nas piece, some map out from ur-texts like Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”:

And other Hein maps track various samples employed by a single musician, in the following case the rapper Common. Writes Hein in the caption for this photo on Flickr, “There are a lot of Kanye West productions here, which means a lot of samples. The map is nowhere near exhaustive for reasons of space, I limited it to songs using more than one sample”:

There are numerous resources for sampling information, notably the song-specific pages at wikipedia.org (click through for a more prosaic description of “Nas Is Like”), the rap-oriented whosampled.com, the more broadly defined secondhandsongs.com, which calls itself a “cover songs database,” and the-breaks.com. But none of that crowd-accrued data has the gravity of Hein’s post (which, of course, draws from those sources as raw material); his effort includes audio and video of various parts of the song, and commentary about the structure of the piece, as well as the nature of hip-hop and, more broadly, composition. As he writes in a related post, “What works the best in music, as in biology, is a minor mutation on an existing successful replicator.”

Read the full piece, originally posted in late August, at ethanhein.com.

The delightful item is the brainstorm of musician Jeff Mills, a storied Detroit techno DJ. It serves as the medium for his recent, science-fiction-themed effort, The Occurrence — Sleeper Wakes. It’s useful to read the Mills hybrid as an attempt to reconcile techno with the future. The vinyl album and the CD are quickly losing ground to tools like the MP3 mixer, as well as the virtual turntables of Serato. Techno long associated itself with a semi-dystopian future, and as the future comes into view, the likely absence from it of physically embodied music seems both a confirmation of the genre’s most dire predictions, and a warning of its own potentially limited cultural lifespan.

More on the release at axisrecords.com. (Mills was one of the participants in a group show that I had a small sound-art piece in at the gallery Crewest in downtown Los Angeles in April 2009: disquiet.com.)

Life After Transducers: Interview by Federico Placidi with sound artist and composer Agostino Di Scipio at usoproject.blogspot.com. He imagines a possible life cycle of electronic/electric music:

FP: What would happen to your works if one day there were no more possibility to perform it in a socially shared space? Where could it migrate, and how could it reconfigure itself?

AdS: If one day there were no more transducers (I mean microphones, loudspeakers, the tympanic membrane of human ear, even the skin maybe…) acting as interfaces between air pressure waves and nervous-electrical measures, my work and the work of a lot of other people would stop existing, it would cease. Fine so! It happened so many times in history. The music of the British virginalists, a few centuries ago, disappeared because of the extinction of their very instrument (the virginale, existing in several fashions across Europe). Then, just like it happens today with Renaissance music, at some point so-called ‘philologically informed’ interpretative approaches would be proposed, and these older technologies would be revived and again built.

Bubblegum Pop Art: Steve Roden collects sound effects from gum-wrapper comics at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com. The gallery is both touching, in how the onomatopoeia play out, and funny, in how odd some of the word choices are:

Memory Is a Mixtape Blessing: Gino Robair on the cassette tape (at emusician.com/robairreport):

Yes, there’s hiss — you can’t miss it. More importantly, there is a combination of wow, flutter, and crunchiness that warmed my heart. All the worst things about the cassette format as a playback medium were the best things for this new release in terms of sound quality. Although the live performance was from ’09, it sounded as if it was recorded in the ’50s — in a good way.

I have yet to find a plug-in that does lo-fi like this.

Ear of the Beholder: Inclusion of a sound artist in shortlist for Turner prize seen as a kind of recognition for the artistic element, sound, often overlooked by short-sighted critics, according to John Kieffer (at guardian.co.uk):

More importantly, perhaps, sound art can be as much to do with the act of listening as it is with making the work. Many of us now live in a world of visual and auditory overload. We happily make do with a pixelated version of music on our MP3 players, and end up hearing things we do not want to. We tolerate buildings and public spaces that look OK, but sound terrible. We eat and shop in places where music and noise are calibrated just short of inducing hysteria. We stick our fingers in our ears when trains screech on dirty tracks. For those of us who live under flight paths or in hectic, noise-filled cities, the recent cloud of volcanic ash brought with it something astonishing – the revelation of hearing the sound of birds and insects for the first time.

Return Policy: A project by Christian Marclay for Peter Norton‘s annual family Christmas project is going for over one grand at
abebooks.com:

All That Glitters …: I’d really like to know what this book, at awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com, contains (thanks for the tip, Eric):

Sound-Walkabout: The Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen, Australia is hosting this Sunday Touch at a Distance, a day of “music, installations and soundwalks,” curated by Ben Byrne: “Alan Lamb will set up some of his infinite music machines, Matt Chaumont will contribute a large scale installation producing sub-bass frequencies you feel rather than hear and Philip Samartzis will present recordings from his recent trip to Antarctica. Meanwhile, Anthony Magen will lead the development of a program of soundwalks that visitors will be able to take around the property”: melb.blogspot.com. The “soundwalk” seems to be a dark-horse term, increasingly likely to gain popular acceptance and usage before “sound art” does.

And in Brief: Technologically, this is an upgrade, but it’s not hard to see the addition of a microphone for DJ Hero 2 to, implicitly, downgrade the element of turtnablism: engadget.com. … A museum of musical instruments in Phoenix, Arizona (nytimes.com). … Interview with sound artist Zimoun at everydaylistening.com: “Q: What sound would you like to wake up to? A: I enjoy a lot the very tiny click sounds which our very old heating system is producing when the radiator is getting warm. Very beautiful and always different.”

Koala takes the original, as sung by Audrey Hepburn, and burnishes its antiquated affect — the glossy, gauzy dreaminess of Hollywood theme songs past — by using turntable effects to mimic the cavernous echo of early recording equipment. By emphasizing the fragility, the malleability, of the vinyl, he celebrates the illusions at the heart of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the movie that the song made famous (and vice versa). His is the lightest of touches, barely skimming the surface of the original, just reworking it at times, nudging it — less a remix than a massage.

Remember, only eight hours to go for this, the latest in Ninja’s weekly celebratory free giveaways. By breakfast (at least here in San Francisco), it’ll be gone. More information at kidkoala.com, including news of recording he’s done for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the film version of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series.