November 2003 – Page 2

Avant Guitar MP3s

November 17, 2003 / By Marc Weidenbaum

On the cover Neil Jendon‘s new album, Live at Buddy in Chicago, Jendon stands on a stage, the image slightly blurred, as if he’s in constant motion, as if he’s contorted by rock’n’roll, as if he’s more interested in bending his guitar than playing it. From a listen to the album, only the third of those conjectures holds any water. The music is expressly still. Aside from the centrality of the guitar, Jendon’s music here has less in common with rock’n’roll than with the sort of ambience more generally associated with synthesizers and tape loops, found sounds and computer equipment. Many musicians experiment with the guitar as an ambient tool, from Greg Davis to Fennesz to Steve Roach to Robert Fripp, but few let the sonic trappings of the instrument — the sound of a strummed chord, a picked string, a discernable riff — take a backseat to resonance. Live at Buddy is over half an hour of rigorously experimental guitar music that will appeal to fans of Glenn Branca’s robust “guitar symphonies,” but also of Japanese noise, and of laptop composers’ elegant, fragile glitch.

The album’s three tracks, each over 10 minutes, are wholly distinct from one another. “Part One” traces a path less whisper-to-scream than silence-to-hum, building from quiet (so quiet that it probably makes more sense on headphones than in a live venue) to a psychedelic hymn. “Part Two” summons bracing, invigorating, piercing sounds that, over time, become comfortable, less like static and more like a fuzzy wool blanket. “Part Three” is by far the liveliest of the set, getting downright symphonic at times, in terms of depth of sound; it’s also the most varied, with segments of bell tones, pastoral hum, industrial noise, oscillating catharsis, and fuzztone drone. The album was released November 10 on the Stasisfield label’s Aux-In sublabel (mission statement: “live music, straight from the soundboard to your digital turntable”), and was recorded live on January 29 of this year. Download all three tracks for free from the album’s webpage (here). For more information on Stasisfield and Aux-In, visit stasisfield.com.

Three Chef MP3s

November 14, 2003 / By Marc Weidenbaum

THREE CHEFS MP3S: The Kracfive collective has posted the results of another of its Iron Chef of Music events, the ninth overall. Kracfive’s series, which began in June, is based on the Iron Chef TV show, in which star chefs are given a set amount of time during which to produce meals in front of a live studio audience. In each Iron Chef episode, there’s a surprise ingredient, a mystery meat (or vegetable, etc.). The resulting entrees and appetizers are judged by a panel of guests.

Kracfive’s conceit is cheeky, to be sure, but it’s yielded some great listening. For Kracfive’s musical version of Iron Chef, unedited sound samples are provided to participating electronica whizzes, who have two hours in which to convert the raw material into a composition. In the past, source recordings have included a Charles Mingus jazz tune and a closely miked chess match. The seventh Iron Chef of Music, based on ice rattling and dice being thrown, was the subject of Disquiet’s Downstream on October 25 (here).

For the ninth Iron Chef of Music, which took place on October 28, three acts were provided with a 36-second recording of two people passing time in a kitchen. Kracfive posts the raw sample as well as the resulting compositions, so the listener can hear not only the contestants’ works, but the unadulterated recording from which they grew. (See the Kracfive “battle” archive, here.) On this occasion, the source material (file here) begins with a piano piece trailing off, after which someone starts whistling; conversation and kitchen noise ensue. Between the source’s opening piano segment and the sounds of kitchen work, it’s hard not to think of Erik Satie’s theoretical “furniture music,” music composed to mingle with the sounds of a dinner party.

Three acts contributed their takes on this bit of household ambience. Colongib apparently loved that bit of whistling, which in its version, “Popsy Police” (file here), is extended and repeated, like something out of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti western film score. In contrast, the original was more Andy Griffith whimsical than Clint Eastwood epic. Colongib also slurs the sound of plates in the sink, with a turntablist’s ear for stretched audio. (The actual source of a given sound is mostly guesswork. The event’s official name is: “Reimer and Stephen Prepare Cheese with Gherkins.”) Mr. Numan’s “Ik Hou Van Deken” (file here) turns the kitchen sounds into percussion, occasionally pitching them, and putting the voices through a filter that has an effect similar to helium.

Noah’s piece, “Servant Cabine” (file here), is the most traditionally melodic of the three. He uses the source recording for his own purposes, in contrast with Colongib and Numan, who use composition as a window on the original material, allowing the listener to hear the voices and other sounds in new ways, but keeping them easily recognizable. On “Servant Cabine,” the melody appears to be a richly processed version of the whistling, that offhand whisp of a moment transformed into a proper lead instrument, a thick pure, singular line.

All three tracks are among the most polished of the Iron Chef of Music series so far. The best way to listen to them is to do so in tandem with the source material. The pleasure is less in any given end result than in each composer’s wily acts of extrapolation.

Laotian MP3

November 13, 2003December 21, 2008 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Aaron Ximm went to Southeast Asia on his honeymoon in 2000, and he came back nine months later with a dowry’s worth of field recordings. A self-described “headphone tourist,” he subsequently produced a CD of sounds he found in Laos — “whining outboard engines,” “an ancestor memorial celebration,” “plumbing resonance” — forged into musical compositions. The album is titled Rockets of the Mekong, released this year as a CDR, the fourth volume in the Echolocations series from his Quiet American project. One of Rockets‘ 14 tracks, titled “Calisthenic,” is available for free download from the album’s promotional page (here) on the Quiet American website (quietamerican.org). It’s a beautiful piece, just over four minutes long, though it feels much quicker; brief snippets of real world sound are looped to incantatory effect, moving steadily away from silence. The track’s title might be an expression of its pace, its rapid-fire little sound elements, seeming at first like the hive techno of a late night insect swarm. Ximm, who writes eloquently and philosophically about his sound art, describes “Calisthenic” as follows: “An exercise in negative space. Composed almost entirely from a single moment in a very short source recording, this piece was created using a sculptural process in reverse: starting from almost nothing, everything is added back, a little at a time. At the end, we escape our single moment and the context of the recording (made in Luang Prabang, Laos) is revealed.” The name Quiet American is taken, of course, from the Graham Greene novel about Vietnam, and there are field recordings from Vietnam (as well as from Burma, Nepal, the United States and elsewhere) on Ximm’s website to complement the neighboring Laotian ones.

Meta-Remix MP3

November 12, 2003 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The British trio Red Snapper helped define the Warp Records label in the mid-1990s with a series of singles and collections, sets marked by lessons learned from U.S. hip-hop and European club music and good old guitar-oriented soul. Some called it fusion, others acid jazz. And then the Snapper called it quits. And now, almost as suddenly, they’re back — well, sorta. Lo Recordings has released two Snapper sets in 2003: a self-titled album and a subsequent remix collection, titled Redone, that features versions of material from the self-titled record reworked by an eclectic rogues gallery of studio mavens, including Depth Charge, Blue States, Pedro and Rothko. (Any talk of a full-fledged Snapper reunion requires a Day-Glo asterisk. According to the label, if the question is whether the group has truly split up, the answer is the ambiguous statement: “Well they have as far as playing live and spending months in recording studios.”) To promote the new albums, Lo had Jay Burnett, an early Def Jam Records artist and Beastie Boys colleague, combine material from Redone into a single, 12-minute extended meta-remix, the “Super Snapper Mash Up.” To recap, the track is a mash up of remixes of various work by a single artist. Truth be told, it’s less of a “mash up” than it is a montage, less a jamming juxtaposition of dissimilar sounds than a steady flow of compatible ones. The extended track is available for free as a relatively compact MP3 (here), and also as a stream (pick Windows Media or Real Audio). These links were made available in conjunction with Lo Recordings (more info at lorecordings.com).

Plaid Music Puzzle

November 11, 2003 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The Warp Records band Plaid is promoting its new Spokes album with a mini-site (here). At the time of this writing, six of the album’s 10 ambient-techno tracks are available in streaming mode. An added incentive: the site includes a puzzle that, when solved, yields an “exclusive” downloadable track, titled “Awotm.” The band’s puzzle hint is: “You will need speakers, think L to R.” There’s lots of good music online for free, but sometimes you still have to work for it.