Grouper has covered an old punk-rock song. Grouper has channeled has an old punk-rock song into something akin to a deep drone. Grouper has accomplished this task not by undermining the original but, in fact, showing it deep respect — by, in essence, taking the song’s lyrics literally, especially the lines about how the title figure “comes in shallow light and disappears” and, later, the cryptic vision of a “silent chamber.” The song, “Demona” by Dead Moon, is in her rendering (Grouper is one person: Liz Harris) a deeply fuzzed out figment, less a song than the song equivalent of the illusion of water that results from hot tarmac being viewed at a distance on a sunny day. The melody and chord structure and overall shape are retained, but they’re produced in a way that makes the term “shoegaze” insufficient — this is “shoehaze” or “shoedrone” or “songdrone” or what-does-it-matter because trying to place the song in a tidy box is very much at odds with the ephemeral quality of the sound that it aspires to (MP3). It sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick wall. It isn’t wall-of-sound; it’s wall-as-filter.

The track was made available for free download by Yeti, the magazine in whose latest issue it appears as part of an enclosed 7″ (along with three other songs, apparently not available for free promotional download).

Found via xlr8r.com and thefader.com. More on Grouper at her site. The original can be heard on youtube.com. It is redolent with a particular quality of guitar playing, one that is at once lackadaisical and jarring, and is distinct to a certain realm of non-hardcore punk

In any case, the concept of a long read begs the question, What is a “long listen”? Arguably, the thing doesn’t exist — at least not as a willfully anomalous media form. Long-format is the longstanding format for music, in the mode of the full-length recording. Even if the “album” is fading in favor of individual songs, the fact remains that the majority of those songs are still being released as part of a larger parcel. Most singles are still tails trying, in vain perhaps, to wag a full-length dog. In other words, while long reads stand out as peculiar objects in our written-soundbite time, music continues to appear on the market in a manner that is inherently time-consumptive.

And that’s speaking of commercial music. In experimental improvisational music, the long performance is the norm. Pieces often veer toward the realm of an hour in length, in order to give the musicians space to get lost in. Take Crash Duo, a French duo, whose “Crash au Pôle” recently appeared on the netlabel Amplified Music Pollution, which is based in Guadalajara, México. It’s a sprawling work, moving from spare techno dread, through guitar-drenched reverb, to freeform space of broken radio signals, to folktronic reverie (MP3). It’s to the piece’s credit that it manages to both retain a certain dub flavor throughout, and still wander through impressively varied subsections. Crash Duo consists of Orléans-based Ayato, who plays “prepared guitar, cassettes, turntable, sanza,” and Paris-based Anton Mobin, who plays “prepared chamber, tape head, cassettes, radio, axololt,” and whose name looks like a play on Amon Tobin.

Track originally posted at archive.org and amp-recs.com. More on Crash Duo at crashduo.blogspot.com, on Ayato at ayato-sn1984.blogspot.com, and on Mobin at antonmobin.blogspot.com.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/would-be-messiahs. More on the Messiahs, aka John Ryan, at unlessyougotlostonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Get the full set at dustedwax.org. More on Mizontiq, who’s based in Russia (where exactly is unclear), at his soundcloud.com/mizontiq page.

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

The polar extremes of the holiday season are remarkable for their seeming incongruity, perhaps most notably in terms of psychic ambience: on the one hand, a manic consumerism; on the other, a sense of reflection and hushed anticipation. Guy Birkin ponders the latter by taking existing seasonal recordings, a pair of them, and forming from them something new, something singular.

Both of his chosen source documents are explicitly seasonal. There’s a church choir and there’s a brass band. The congregation sings “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the band plays “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choir is accompanied by a pipe organ. The brass band, on the other hand, is accompanied by various externalities: that recording was made from a distance and is infused with everyday noise. The resulting work, which Birkin titled “Christmas Ambience,” is very much an extended take on the latter approach to sound, in which context seems to submerge text, yet where the result is an aura with more meaning, more feeling, than the text might have ever had on its lonesome. It’s a slow, solemn piece, yet it seems to glisten in its seeming stasis:

Bikrin also provided some explanation for how he accomplished his piece:

The recordings were pitch-shifted and stretched with FFT, then layered together and the process repeated. The original version of this track was over 18 minutes long, but the most interesting section was its beginning in which the choral and brass sounds are barely audible above the background noise. It took quite a lot of work to simplify the track and concentrate only on the most ambiguous sounds.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/notl. More on Birkin at twitter.com/guybirkin and aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com.

By all appearances, the musician who goes by All N4tural is the only one on the Soundcloud.com audio-hosting service who applies the tag “colliding banter” to his recordings. This is unfortunate, because the resulting work is deserving not just of a listen, but of emulation.

The “colliding banter” material uses spoken words — not “spoken word” as in poetry,” but “spoken words” as in “spoken words,” i.e. human speech captured in its colloquial form — for source material in the pursuit of a glitchy funky music. Though a given track has no semblance of the shape of a song, the presence of bits of human speech amid a kind of rough tunefulness lend it the feeling of a song. Fans of Scott Johnson, Steve Reich, and John Oswald will likely appreciate the sonic machinations. Here, for example, is “They Was Utterly Helpless”:

The term “glitch” is applied here purposefully. Not because the music, with its naked brokenness, has the fast data-processed cut’n'paste feel of music often described as glitch — though, of course, it does — but because glitch at its core is about error, and the work All N4tural applies to the human voice celebrates all the inaccuracies and unintended accentuations of speech.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/all-n4tural. His music has been covered here frequently in the past.

The image shown here is a detail of the photo that the track took as its “cover”; it’s from flickr.com.

The Triple Canopy site has just concluded its six-episode podcast on the sound of Bangkok. It’s a narrated study of the rhythms and noise, the speech patterns and technology, that define the political sensibility of urban Thailand (MP3). Car horns and megaphones, street-corner Ancient Mariners and thousands-deep crowds, are heard as Ben Tausig, the podcast’s creator, discusses the ongoing governmental transformation of the country, and how those infrastructural transitions play out in the street.

The timing of the podcast, which appeared on the Triple Canopy website at the end of November, clearly aligns well with the rise of the “Occupy” movement, but the correlation isn’t merely a useful coincidence. One needn’t listen too carefully to hear the cry of “We are the 99%” amid the beeping horns and half-broken amplification equipment that comprise much of the podcast.

If any moment stands out from the rest of the excellent episode in a decidedly strong series on the sonics of urbanism, it’s when, toward the end of the recording, that increasingly prominent English-language battle cry is heard to suddenly end, mid-syllable. It’s unclear what has happened: was the speaker unsure of the wording, was a threat sensed in the immediate vicinity, was the recording equipment quickly shut off? The episode is as much about the tenor of protest as it is about the message, but at that moment, the two matters — texture and text — collide in one deeply ambiguous occurrence.

More on the episode at canopycanopycanopy.com. An earlier episode was covered here last year: “Sound, Class, and Sound Clash Over Bangkok.”