If the proliferating mass of names that make electronic music so difficult to keep up with has got you down, then here’s a netabel worth visiting: Ansiform, at ansiform.a.la. Why? Well, besides the fact that it posts fine ambient-leaning music (its mission statement reads: “unobtrusive, beatless, finely textured, and stable”), such as the elegantly rote “I Know Nothing” and the soft synth tones of “Fluids” and the horrorshow spookiness of “Slowly Fill My Eyes,” not to mention the light emphasis on naturalist elements, such as the apparent flock of birds on “Three to Six Months, Tops,” and the background noise that opens “Artroom”… yeah, well, besides all that, the label posts all these files anonymously. If you don’t know who the artists are, it’s one less thing to lose in your memory bank. This brief notice is just an initial pass on these fine tracks. More details to follow.
Month: April 2005
Oceanographic WAVs
Sounds are all around us, and so too is writing about sound, often as not well beyond the bounds of what’s considered music criticism. For example, a story in today’s New York Times (“For Young Fish, It Seems, the Call of the Reef Is Music,” link) puts many netlabels to shame in its exploration of the outer reaches of sonic life. Destination? The coral reef, where scientists have discovered that young fish use ocean noise as a means to gauge a new neighborhood’s hospitality. Says a researcher from Edinburgh: “They can listen to what animals are on it before deciding whether to settle.” Included with the online version of the article are two downloadable “wav” files, one of the “popping sound of nocturnal shrimp,” the other of the “sizzle” of snapping shrimp. It’s unclear if the decision to use wav files is some sort of aquatic pun.
La Monte Young MP3
Another fine Other Minds entry from the Internet Archive, at archive.org. It’s a recording, from 1965, of a La Monte Young piece comprised of sequential bangs on a gong, performed by Peter Winkler at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco. To be clear, this is no clang fest. The gong decays in a manner that’s entirely elegant, not regal or militaristic. You barely sense the plosive, just the denouement. Furthermore, on this old recording, the tape hiss is almost as loud as the taped material, but to modern ears the patina sounds almost purposeful, like a treated field recording. Search for “henry flynt” (the essayist and artist after whom it was composed) at the archive.org.
Tangents (Matmos, scores, psychoacoustics)
Matmos Stream: A 20-minute live set featuring Matmos, along with frequent guest J Lesser, recorded March 17 for the BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It show dated April 1 (link). … Keeping Score: Here’s some soundtrack news, courtesy of the imdb.com database. Cliff Martinez (Solaris, Traffic) is attached as the composer for Havoc, a new L.A. story directed by Barbara Kopple, which features actress Laura San Giacomo, a star of Martinez’s score debut, 1989’s sex, lies and videotape. … The Jacket, which featured a score by Brian Eno, died in U.S. theaters, and is tentatively scheduled for a July DVD release. … Gustavo Santaolalla (whose music was featured in Michael Mann‘s The Insider, even before he scored Amores Perros, 21 Grams and last year’s The Motorcycle Diaries) is attached to Ang Lee’s upcoming Brokeback Mountain. … Cross-Cultural Review: The New York Times reviewer of the Onkyo Marathon last week at the Japan Society was Anthony Tommasini, one of the paper’s classical/opera critics. This may have been a signal of appreciation of the compositional roots of today’s avant-garde electronic music, or an act of curiosity on the writer’s part, or one of against-type assigning on his editor’s part. The Japan Society defines “onkyo” as “an umbrella term for a new genre of computer music that is primarily atonal, noise-based and improvised.” Performers included Sachiko M, AOKI takamasa, Carl Stone, Nobukazu Takemura, o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) and Otomo Yoshihide. The reviewer’s conclusion: “Whether loud or soft, noisy or soothing, an onkyo improvisation is more like a sound environment than a musical composition.” Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that. “You can’t complain when a sound environment runs on or seems aimless. Such concerns are not the point.” (nytimes.com) … Psychoacoustics Today: In today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, a piece (“Our Ratings, Ourselves,” nytimes.com) on the science of TV ratings mentions “psychoacoustic masking, which places a signal just beneath the frequency of whatever is being transmitted.” The signal helps Arbitron track consumers’ media usage. However, it’s not a simple task. The signal’s developers “discovered that the masked code’s frequency could not be too low (where it would run into technical problems) or too high (where it would bother dogs and cats).” … Quote of the Week: “The bus plows down the highway at a set speed, the tires humming along, never getting any louder or softer. Same with the engine, its monotonous sound like a mortar smoothly grinding down time and the consciousness of the people on board.” From Haruki Murakami‘s recent novel, Kafka at the Shore.
Intro
A place on Disquiet.com for brief notes and quick links has been coming for a while now. Pretty much any downtime in updates to this site can be traced to after-hours stints spent fiddling in HTML and dry-running various scripts, potential blog tools and content-management systems. In the meanwhile, too many live concert attendances go unreferenced, too many interesting webpages and posts go unlinked to, too much offline reading gets un-cited, and too many general, even if inevitably tangential, observations don’t receive a mention. The site’s Downstream section (disquiet.com/downstream) already recommends free, musician-condoned downloadable music, but there are plenty of streaming broadcasts that deserve to be noted, even in passing, and a quick-links section would satisfy that requirement. Oh, as of this writing, the site’s search routine has been upgraded. A place to mention such backend maintenance would be beneficial as well. Disquiet’s been running since late 1996, and it has long lacked a spot for such material. So, now it has one, “field notes.” OK, enough with the backstory. On with the short stuff. …