If the pastel clouds of Harold Budd and La Monte Young strike your fancy, then float over to the Electronical netlabel for the Piano Versions. Credited to Twocker, its five tracks of minimally — strike that, minimalismistically — enhanced and filtered acoustic piano are caught in an interesting limbo between sound experiments and composition. Chords are announced, and then allowed to fade away, perhaps to be echoed into an otherworldly state; tones are extended until they sound more like breathy church organs on the verge of exhaustion. Twocker aptly describes one track as “a five chord loop treated to a massive amount of short delay times” and another as “a massive chord stab put through a single frequency band.” According to a July post on the site, Electronical had been AWOL for some eight months, due to technical problems. But it’s back, along with it Piano Versions, the label’s 12th and most recent release. Download the album here and visit Electronical at electronical.org.
Month: September 2004
Three Remix MP3 Pairs
What distinguishes “Distorted Vision (Elmar Remix 2)” from the five other tracks on Elmar’s recent set of kAzooo techno remixes (the typ 2×3 EP, free from the Acedia Music netlabel)? Whereas all the others pretty much start off with stark and interesting musical snippets — the sonar funk of “Comaforce (Elmar Remix 2),” the remote techno thrombosis of both versions of “7 Days” — and subsequently thicken into weekend party music, albeit a fairly dark variety thereof, this sole track has the fortitude to keep it simple: beats that run at splintering cross purposes, fluid echoes in the distance, an occasional taste of dub. The other take on “Distorted Vision” (“Elmar Remix 1”) is a close runner up, warping its prominent bass line in a unique manner, and taking the odd commercial break for toy-piano tinkling. By contrast, the two huffy versions of “Comaforce” and “7 Days,” for all their post-production torque, smell vaguely of stale beer after a while. Download “Distorted Vision (Elmar Remix 2)” directly, here. Or visit acediamusic.org, also home to several kAzooo releases, for the full set.
Archival Steve Reich Videostream
The website of minimalist composer Steve Reich (stevereich.com) posted a videostream of his “Clapping Music” (1972) about two months back. The fuzzy black and white video shows Reich and noted percussionist Russell Hartenberger performing the piece in 1974, each clapping independent rhythmic lines that occasionally intersect, and otherwise produce a funky counterpoint. The endearingly low-quality video footage reminds you of life before such computer programs as Apple’s iLife made high-quality audio and video available for the masses. (It feels like it’s from an early episode of Sesame Street: “This avant-garde segment brought to you by the number two.”) For contrast, there’s also posted on the site a gamelan-flavored segment from the Hindenburg-themed section of Reich’s 2002 high-tech “video opera,” Three Tales. (More on Hartenberger — a University of Toronto music professor, and a member of Reich’s ensemble since 1971 — at nexuspercussion.com.)
Free Bill Laswell MP3
The ever prolific Bill Laswell, one of the great ambient-dub producer/musicians, has posted for free download an MP3 of a track from his upcoming album, Version 2 Version (ROIR). The song, “Babylon Site,” is a extended chunk of dub, almost nine minutes of bass that slows the pulse, flanged percussion that sounds like some sorta super-slo-mo Doppler Effect, and just generally deep, deep echo that brings to minds vats of rich chocolate. The cherry on top is a mix of chiming guitar and synthesized strings, just about the track’s only nods to the treble range. For the Version 2 Version album, Laswell characteristically brought together a supergroup, including bassist Jah Wobble, keyboardist (and George Clinton sideman) Bernie Worrell (whose great work with Talking Heads is being rediscovered of late, thanks to the rerelease of the Name of This Band album), and two percussionists: Karsh Kale and Abdou Mboup. Now, a lot of echo-heavy music sounds as if it had been recorded in a sterile hall, a modernist zone of aesthetic purity — a wrongheaded Platonic ideal of a space-music space, especially where dub is concerned — but Laswell’s “Babylon Site” has the intimacy of seasoned musicians working in close commune. The full album comes out Sept. 21, 2004. The “Babylon Site” MP3 is downloadable, for the time being, here. More info on Version 2 Version, as the release date nears, at roir-usa.com.
Guit-tronic Pop MP3
The Ipagos track “Lets Go Rodeo v3” (sic), the most recent free download on the kracfive collective’s website, begins with what sounds simply like a fun, computer-generated, rapid-fire jumble of pixelized percussion. But as it progresses, a similar theme — a burst of melody that won’t be easily excised from your memory bank — is played on guitar, and maybe a ukulele, and you realize that what sounded computer-generated was, far more likely, the strummed part filtered and tweaked into a digital simulacrum. Once that cause and effect is apparent, Ipagos layers the opposing elements, setting some slide work against a hopped up drum’n’bass figure, as cartoony as anything Carl Stalling ever penned. At just over two and a half minutes, the whole thing is utterly delectable. Oh, and if the break sounds familiar, you might try singing George Michael’s “Faith.” Check it out in the “MP3 Rotor” section of kracfive.com.