Month: February 2005

Instrumental Sylvian MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It was widely reported that David Sylvian, one of the more enigmatic figures associated with so-called progressive rock, collaborated on his most recent full-length album, Blemish (2003), with Christian Fennesz, the generation-younger electronic musician who has artfully employed glitches and laptop-tweaked guitars in his own music. Fennesz brought those same textures, and along with them a certain freshness, to “A Fire in the Forest,” the closing track on Blemish, Sylvian’s first album on his own Samadhi Sound label. Fennesz’s presence also brought to mind Sylvian’s past recordings with other guitarists known for using technological means to push their instrument of choice into new territory, including Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson.

The extent to which Sylvian has embraced an aesthetic more closely associated with Fennesz is nowhere as apparent as on a fine MP3 he subsequently posted on his website, davidsylvian.com. (Modern electronic music owes a great debt to Sylvian, but there’s no room here to trace that lineage with any detail. Just pick up an album by his early band, Japan; listen to his singing amid Fripp’s loops; and ponder the subsequent musicians, such as Trent Reznor, who commissioned one of his, and Brian Eno’s, favorite album-jacket illustrators, Russell Mills.) Click over to the Downloads section and listen to “Mothlight”  (MP3), nearly nine minutes of lovely stillness, interrupted by flashes of field recording and foregrounded digital synthesis. The track’s title phenomenon is represented both by the stereoscopic suggestion of erratic motion and by these whizzy cues that at first seem very much like a close-flying insect, but frequently flip over to things that merely resemble that familiar flutter: quick switches, looped static, shrill-pitched tones and other compositional fragments.

Best known as a vocalist, Sylvian doesn’t sing a word on “Mothlight,” yet the piece is clearly marked as his own; like his best work, notably the album Gone to Earth, it appears at once florid and concertedly restrained. Sylvian explains on the site that the track was composed after an editor requested his participation in a book of work by the Starn Twins, the photographers. Though that project never materialized, some of the sounds later made their way onto the Blemish album. Those same sounds have gone on to have a third life on a recent compilation, The Good Son vs the Only Daughter, featuring remixes of Blemish tracks by, among others, Akira Rabelais, Burnt Friedman, Yoshihiro Hanno and Ryoji Ikeda; Nils Petter Molvaer guests on trumpet. “Mothlight” is apparently where it all started.

Cage-Feldman Discussion MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“I’ve never heard anyone boo a transistor radio,” says John Cage. He’s talking with fellow composer Morton Feldman, who was just complaining about how the presence of radios playing rock’n’roll had spoiled a recent day on the beach. Cage is having none of it: “All that radio is, Marty, is making available to your ears what was already in the air and available to your ears but you couldn’t hear it. In other words, all it’s doing is making audible something you’re already in. You are bathed in radio waves, TV broadcasts.” And, Cage goes on to joke, telepathic messages from other deep thinkers, such as Feldman himself.

This is just one early highlight from a recording that’s among the many treasures in the Other Minds audio library at archive.org. Taped between 1966 and 1967, the discussion documents the minds of two of the major figures in 20th-century music. Feldman passed away in 1987 and Cage five years later, but even by the mid-’60s they sounded like ancient gurus trading koans. Feldman has rabbinical gravitas, and Cage’s pixie-ish voice is marked by a verbal tick, a frequent “Hmm?” that is at once inquisitive, probing, accusatory and rhetorical. The discussion was taped at WBAI in New York City and the transcript was collected as a book, Radio Happenings I-V (Edition MusikTexte), but it’s a unique treat to hear them live. While much of the Other Minds library at archive.org is for streaming only, these five interview segments, ranging in length from about half an hour to an hour, are downloadable via FTP. Best way to locate them is to go to archive.org, click on the “Audio” option in the menu at the top of the page, then select the Other Minds Archive and search for “cage feldman wbai.” For some reason six search results come up, but one currently leads to a dead link. The five entries you want are clearly labeled “Cage and Morton Feldman In Conversation, Radio Happening I of V recorded at WBAI in New York City, 1966 – 1967,” and so on. (This link should do the trick.)

Aural Vacation MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

They take digital equipment on their world travels, so we can enjoy the field recordings from our cubicles. Among the latest weekly One-Minute Vacation tracks uploaded from various contributors to Aaron Ximm‘s quietamerican.org website are an evening in Barcelona, complete with street music (February 7), and of numerous boats all blowing their horns on the North Sea (January 24). Not everyone’s that hi-tech, as evidenced by a third entry (January 31): which documents a race-car rally, recorded on an answering machine via cell phone. If you’d like to extend your stay, there’s an additional five-minute version of the Scottish boating chorus, an annual tradition called “hogmanay.” Check ’em all out at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.

Near Silent MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Few netlabels free themselves from the vestiges of traditional commercial recordings as thoroughly as does Term, an ongoing project of 12k, a boutique record company run by musician Taylor Deupree. Netlabels by definition traffic in free downloads. Yet many netlabels offer “cover” art despite the fact that there is no physical object to wrap, as well as detailed liner notes even though there is no lining on which to print explanatory text, not to mention a cumbersome array of additional files that can sometimes make a free EP download feel like a box set. To the contrary, Term, located at 12k.com/term, simply posts its free MP3 files, in chronological order, against a blank white space, with a small amount of information. And, yes, it’s all set in lowercase type.

This presentation is fitting not only with the modus operandi of netlabels in general — that is, to post music online for free — but with Term’s sonic realm in particular. Term houses microsound recordings, music of a fragility that would have been almost unrealizable prior to the rise of digital phonography. Not unimaginable, mind you, simply impractical, because Term typically celebrates sounds that we learn from birth to ignore, sounds buried by, if not inherent in, the surface noise of pre-digital recording mediums.

The 11th and most recent entry on Term, posted January 14 and titled “two compositions” (“for c.” and “untitled 10/04/04”), is credited to a musician called Asher. For liner notes, we’re to make do with a short quote from Samuel Beckett, which reads, in part: “it was a night of listening, a night given to the faint soughing and sighing stirring.” And soon thereafter: “the far unchanging noise the earth makes and which other noises cover but not for long.” The quote’s a nice find, a pre-digital premonition of the sort of listening that Term champions, and that Asher’s “two compositions” exemplifies. For historical context, it’s worth noting that the Beckett text is from Molloy, published in 1951, one year before John Cage performed publicly for the first time his famous 4’33”, which cemented Cage’s notion that silence is anything by silent. (Beckett, for point of reference, was barely a half decade Cage’s senior.)

Something was in the air in the early 1950s, and it’s in the air now. There’s a growing catalog of near-silent sound art today that has the consistency of vapor and the texture of grime. Asher‘s two Term pieces are good examples of this music, so quiet, so attenuated — so quiet, you can miss them if you do not pay attention; so attenuated that the more you listen to them, you’d swear you can hear them falling apart. Each crackles on for over ten minutes, never breaking stride, moving back and forth between small grinds that sound like machines and gurgles that seem almost lifelike. They’re as casual as a stroll, albeit one witnessed at a microscopic level.

I don’t mean to do Asher’s “two compositions” a disservice by spending so much time talking about the website on which they appear, and the text that serves as their introduction, and the historical context they invoke, and the movement they participate in, but it is a Cageian given that silence in music exists to frame, to let through, the sounds we might otherwise ignore. In a broader sense, Term’s mission is the backdrop that Asher’s music illuminates.

Post-Post-Rock MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In its own way, Pilot Balloon‘s “Vampire Tonic” (MP3) elegantly compresses the already brief history of pop psychedelics, from the Beatles through the Chemical Brothers and Tortoise, into one seamless montage. But don’t call it a mashup. The track, off the duo’s Ghastly Good Cheer album, released last year on the German label 2nd Rec, opens with something reminiscent of so-called Britpop. There’s an electrified piano and a solo male voice, barely intelligible and heavily echoed. Don’t bother grasping for what it’s saying because soon enough that same echo has dispersed the voice into background haze, and the drums have worked their way into primacy. If that alone isn’t the history of heady rock, what is? Anyhow, the next time you hear the voice, late in the track, around the four-minute mark, it’s been sampled and repurposed as pure tone, an instrument to be played. The message is clear: the real “voice” on a track like this is the voice of the arranger, or in the case of Pilot Balloon, the arrangers. The Massachusetts-based duo of Judson MacRae and KaeoFLUX are able to segue from the opening song through elegant post-rock to tunneling drum’n’bass and on, never losing sight of where they’ve been and where they’re headed. The post-rock sections are particularly fine, threaded through with a woodwind dirge and a halo of mallet work that could just as easily be from a piece by a post-minimalist, like a Michael Torke, or a composed-jazz macher, say Marty Ehrlich, and yet feel right at home here, among the fragments of pop songs, the trip-hop grooves, the machine drums. Yeah, it’s that good. More info at 2ndrec.com and pilotballoon.net.