Month: October 2003

Illuminated MP3 Album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On October 20, Audiobulb Records uploaded a new various-artists electronic-music collection in MP3 format. Titled Exhibition #2, it’s currently highlighted on the label’s website, audiobulb.com. The set features 11 tracks, ranging from gentle stereoscopic play, Claudia’s “Sleepyhead (Roomix),” to vaguely disturbing vocal mishmash. Disastrato’s “2 Orgasms Before Each Suicide + A Deformed Smile = Ixtab” uses what seems to be the voices of children; Autistici’s “Tiny Machines Engaged in an Unsuccessful Vasectomy,” judging from its layered moans, may better deserve the Disastrato title. Also using a vocal cutup is Build’s “A Protective Plastic Coating,” which has the abstract-rap feel of Amon Tobin’s nonsense “Verbal” single and the more chaotic songs by the UK techno outfit Underworld. Many of the record’s tracks emphasize elastic, seemingly autonomous rhythms and light, pleasing melodies. David Newman runs Audiobulb from Sheffield, England. He describes Exhibition #2 as follows: “This album provides compositions based on subtleties, attention to the little details and a non-reliance on repetitive rhythmic structures. Within the album you will find the sound of minimal ambience, micro clicks and deconstructed samples.”

The album’s shortest piece, at less than two minutes, features renowned the renowned Tetsu Inoue working with Daimon Beail on a series of brief elements that shift by as if someone’s switching stations on a radio with faulty wiring. By far the most restful entrant here is Erik Schoster’s “Study No. 1 (For Chris Penrose & Eric Lyon),” which is truly ambient: absent of a downbeat, ethereal even as it develops texture. If you’re low on bandwidth or disk space, or otherwise want to limit your downloads, be sure to check out the album’s first track, “So Gone” which is credited to Diagram of Suburban Chaos. The song (here) starts with exactly the sort of stuttered snippets that have you checking whether your speakers are on the fritz, or your laptop’s motherboard is overloading. As a result, you’ll find it doubly centering when a gentle tune wafts in and, around the one-minute mark, a drum beat arrives to steady the track’s course.

Quote of the Week: Noise Matrix

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Audio technician Dane A. Davis tells Wired magazine, in its November issue, about his sound designs for the Matrix film trilogy:

It’s all about telling a story with noise.

The article is online here. The issue also includes a brief interview with DJ Kid Koala and a piece by punk Svengali Malcolm McLaren about his affection for 8-bit electronic music.

Dobro Trance MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Canadian composer and guitarist Benoît Charest wrote the music for the masterful new French anime, Les Triplettes de Belleville, which is a bit like saying he wrote its captions, since the film is almost entirely free of dialog, so much so that the occasional bit of spoken language — a vaudevillian song or the spiel of a TV news anchor — goes without subtitles. One of the many musical highlights in the film is a kind of household-goods industrial music, featuring a newspaper ruffled rhythmically into a microphone, a muffled vacuum cleaner that moans like a pneumatic Theremin, and a refrigerator, its shelving grates plucked like a harp that’s entered rigor mortis; joining the trio is a woman who specializes in playing slim wooden mallets on the carefully tuned spokes of a bicycle wheel. That track, sadly, is not readily available for MP3 download. However, on Charest’s website (bencharest.com), he hosts a dozen full-length cues from various of his film-soundtrack assignments, and one in particular evidences a taste and talent for electronic music that was hinted at by Bellville‘s bit of found-object wizardry. Be sure to give a listen to “Dobro Trance,” one of two clips from the film Ne Dis Rien (it’s the second of the two files listed under that film — all these clips are available via the “téléchargement” tab on Charest’s homepage). The track is just what its title suggests, spacious music that uses, of all things, the dobro guitar as its main source material. Eventually a drum machine kicks in, but it’s worth waiting around for the dobro’s return later in the seven-plus-minute track. The music brings to mind the solo cello work of ECM recording artist David Darling and the ambient slide guitar of Bruce Kaplan, and, of course, the spaghetti-western scores of Ennio Morricone.

Transparent MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Stasisfield is an Evanston, Illinois-based record label focused on what it calls “minimal instrumental experimental music.” So far this year it has released eight sets of free MP3s, the latest of which is London-based musician Thanos Chrysakis‘s three-song Transparent Geometries & Close-ups, beautiful, church-like, long-form compositions that emphasize patience and reverberation. The set is linked to from Chrysakis’ page (here) on the Stasisfield site (here).

Through a Microphone, Darkly

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

C. Reider is a one-man game of telephone. The voices that enter his recording devices exit entirely transformed. Almost invariably, what was said in the first place is altered beyond any sort of verbal comprehension. There are instances on the opening track of his recent Aughtet album (Vuzh Music) where, amid the sub-bass rumblings, a distant human utterance might be identifiable, but it’s a voice on the far end of an extremely bad extension. You can sense the anxiety, but you cannot discern the cause. Of course, Reider has such control over his source material that he could probably make the most erudite politician sound like a patient at an Asperger Syndrome clinic. For all we know, the voice on this track is reading saccharine poetry from a Hallmark card.

Since the advent of the mobile phone, it’s become abundantly apparent that proximity and clarity are no longer directly proportional. For that reason, even the most alien sounds on Aughtet may ring more true than the false promises of Sprint and Verizon spokespeople. Reider’s sound art revels in the everyday dissonance of the overheard and the misheard. Aughtet’s second track begins with a tantalizingly false promise. The word “siblings” sounds loud and clear, but what is subsequently spoken is chopped, cut, garbled and mix-matched into a mosaic of broken syllables, even the vowels fractured into harsh, otherworldly consonants. Reider plays many games with his chosen sounds. On “Lumchumble,” a giggle and a “huh” flit in and out, repeated like a stuttered mumble. He embraces the almost purely rhythmic on “Narh Narh.” Several tracks bring to mind the gender-bending games of early Laurie Anderson multimedia performance art, others the nonsense mouth-play of Charles Schulz cartoon adults and Jerry Lewis comic antics, but they’re just as likely untouched surveillance tapes of Wookie psychoanalysis sessions. “Organic Machinery C 3,” looped like a deep, beat-less techno track, pushes voices beyond any identifiable human tone, but the best work here may be where a voice, however remotely, makes itself heard, as on “Vian II-V,” which reproduces something close to the cumulative rush of crowd-speak. These are the half-remembered narratives from nightmares, warped like the faces in Francis Bacon paintings.