What with the continued popularity of those 1980s theme bands, from Interpol to the Killers to the Rapture, it’s inevitable that someone would arrive to channel for us the mechanized ruckus of such industrial acts as Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb and Consolidated. Kill Memory Crash does just that, filtering those groups’ cyber-adenoidal sounds through the subsequent improvements in recording technology, which lend the band’s new album, American Automatic, its first full-length, a sense of detail that its militaristic predecessors only could have dreamed of. The album is out this week on the Ghostly International label, which has made the title track available as a free MP3 download from the release’s promotional page (link). More info at ghostly.com.
Month: May 2005
Tangents (Tijuana, guitar, Dormouse)
Sound Award: The 11th annual Alpert Awards fellowships have been announced (that’s Alpert as in Herb Alpert, of Tijuana Brass fame), and among the five winners is Santa Fe, New Mexico-based sound artist David Dunn. More info at alpertawards.org and artscilab.org/~david. .
.. Guitar Talk: Backbeat Books will publish Sonic Pioneers this fall. The book will feature the guitar setups and techniques of various musicians, explained one of its subjects, Christopher Willits, in a note to his email list this past week. Also included: Adrian Belew, Glenn Branca, Robert Fripp, Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins) and David Torn, not to mention Link Wray and Jimi Hendrix.
… New Releases: Out this week is industrial act Kill Memory Crash‘s American Automatic on the Ghostly International label. … Keith Fullerton Whitman‘s Multiples (Kranky), about which he wrote to his email list today, “[O]f the records i’ve released over the past ten odd years this album comes the closest to encapsulating the sounds i hear in my head.” … Also on Kranky, Nudge‘s Cahced. … Jamie Lidell‘s three-track 12″ When I Come Back Around (Warp), in advance of a June full-length. … More new-release info at brainwashed.com/releases.
… Quick Links: Useful entries via the del.icio.us web service, a “social bookmarks manager”: ambient, idm, eno, field recording. … The e.discogs.com open-source discography of electronic music is rapidly approaching its 30,000th record label. Of course, this being a group effort, included are variants along the lines of Wax Trax, Wax Trax! Europe, Wax Trax! Records and Wax Trax! UK. … On May 21, the BBC Radio 3 show Hear and Now will present the first of three programs of music from this year’s Cut and Splice Festival (link).
… Quote of the Week: “the notion that one person should control all of the functions of a computer and that the machine would in turn respond as an idea amplifier.” That’s the definition of “personal computing” set down in John Markoff‘s introduction to his new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
Karkowski & Co. MP3s
Listening to a live recording of noise-meister Zbigniew Karkowski on an MP3 has about as much fidelity (in the general experiential sense of the word, as well in the more common audio one) as watching the big weekend game on a countertop TV the size of a small loaf of bread. Such an MP3 is almost an absurdist document, like a cellphone snapshot of a ballet. A Karkowski performance is a visceral thing, something you prepare for with earplugs and a solid meal, something you feel, not just the thick waves of sound punching your gut, but the air currents that emanate from the speakers to brush your cheek and make your pants flap. Promoters of Karkowski’s brand of avant-garde noise are aware of his exacting standards. Take, for example, a gig he played last March in San Francisco at Naut Humon’s Compound with the groups Fe-mail and Rajar. Shortly after his set started, he began moving around (and under) the venue’s central control table, fiddling with cables and devices. It seemed like he was adjusting the considerable noise that filled the small room, especially as his face took on an aggravated look that matched the aggression of his sound. As it turned out, though, he was simply frustrated with the sound: it wasn’t loud enough for him. All along he’d been attempting to pump up the volume, and when he’d determined that the Compound’s system wasn’t up to the task, he simply stopped.
Based on that experience, it’s unlikely that Karkowski would be enthusiastic regarding the 25-minute live track that’s half of the new release from the Noisejihad Live! netlabel (noisejihad.dk/netlabel). It presents such a thin layer of audio that it seems less like a Karkowski performance, and more like a single sound element from a Karkowski performance. It may be helpful to keep in mind, when listening to it, that this isn’t an ear’s memory of the event; it’s a microphone’s. Still, like an anecdote from a traumatic incident, the track does provide a useful vantage on the live show, tracing the shape of the set, from its opening static through periods of brash chaos and absolute silence. As such, it’s a bit like listening to a blueprint. (Also, you can’t help but wonder if those moments of silence were, in fact, moments of intense noise that simply overwhelmed the mic.)
This is the fourth release from Noisejihad Live!, and as with the previous entries it bears the date of the concert as its title (15/04/2005: April 15 of this year) and pairs two acts. Following Karkowski’s entry comes one from Fl/ex’0. With its insistent beat, the latter’s set is much more, in a word, knowable. Its pace slows after 10 minutes, from industrial pummel to something with a bit of swing, broken up by what sounds like the marriage vows of a sex cult. The show was recorded live at the club Splab in Aarhus C, Denmark; more info at splab.dk.
Electric Body Music MP3 EP
Dub Jay‘s new release on the Kikapu netlabel, at kikapu.com, has a colorful backstory. But before spelling it out for you (that is, before exploring the somewhat hidden provenance of Perfectly Ordinary Recorded Noise, as the EP is titled), it’s worth taking a moment to just listen to its four tracks, especially the first two. As the musician’s name suggests, Dub Jay’s work is informed by dub, which in this case means that it takes extended reverb as a given, much the way someone raised in New Orleans would take humidity as a given, or someone raised in Manhattan would take street noise as a given. Long echoes are inherent in Dub Jay’s music, so everything he does he expects to occur again, at repeated intervals, until it fades away. On Perfectly Ordinary Recorded Noise, that results in slowly accruing, vocal-less pop songs built from rival currents of gadgety sound, not the clicks and whirs of microsonics, but the more substantial beats of trip-hop, as well as emotive skronks that suggest a tentative saxophone, and little bits of vocals that, while only occasionally intelligible, are ever-present.
Now, about those vocals … as it turns out, if you abbreviate Dub Jay’s album title, you get P.O.R.N., and that’s exactly what it’s really built from. The Kikapu site refers to Dub Jay’s raw goods as “obscure,” but click on through to his own site, at dubjay.samenna.com, and there’s a more detailed depiction of his recording process: “Every sound on this EP (which has a convenient abbreviation) is sampled from Internet pornography. Obviously there has been a considerable amount of effecting and manipulation to obscure the original source and make the results musically useful. … Hi-hats may come from breathing noises, pads from female noises elongated and stretched out, and so on.”
Now, of course, such literal electric body music automatically enters P.O.R.N. into a relatively small library of like-sourced recordings, including Matmos’ phenomenal A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and Jessica Vale’s The Sex Album, a far less rigorous, and far less interesting, attempt to build music from the sounds of the human body. As for Dub Jay, he’s got his priorities straight: “No sounds were sourced from music contained in pornography — that would be cheating.”
Three Remix-Contest MP3 Sets
Three new remix contests are, if not a study in contrasts, worth looking at for their distinguishing features. What follows is a brief, and far from complete, overview. Feel free to bypass the observations, and just download the source material (and, as they’re posted, the entrants’ remixes). All three provide free MP3 downloads of the raw goods: the first, a single track; the second, its 10 constituent parts; the third, relatively brief excerpts of various extended wholes. The first contest hinges on a work of ambient spaciousness, with echoes of Erik Satie’s elemental piano lines. The second and third ask participants to transform something into electronic music: the second subject is, in its initial state, a fairly generic pop song, but several of its individual layered tracks, laid bare courtesy of the contest, have a delicate quality all their own; the third is entirely spoken word, but of course that’s just the beginning.
And the contests are as follows: (1) The first is sponsored by 12K, Taylor Deupree‘s record label, to celebrate the CD release of his recent collaboration with composer Kenneth Kirschner, post_piano 2 (12k.com/term/postpiano2). (2) The second focuses on a track, “Ever (Foreign Flag),” off a new album by the pop group Team Sleep, whose name may be familiar from a song they had on the soundtrack to The Matrix: Reloaded, and whose lead singer, Chino Moreno, may be familiar from his other band, the Deftones (teamsleepremix.com). (3) The third is sponsored by Penguin, the publisher, which has posted online some 26 samples from its audiobooks; among the reader/writer combos made available are Brian Cox and HG Wells (Time Machine), David Carradine and Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Richard E. Grant and Bram Stoker (Dracula), sure to be a favorite (penguinremixed.co.uk).
As for prizes, 12k dangles the opportunity to appear as part of a free compilation download; Team Sleep’s promotional partners will provide DJ equipment, sporting goods, a cellphone, and more; and Penguin will collect the top 10 tracks into a commercial (download-only, presumably) compilation, and give the winners 70 of its paperback classics, among other goodies. Readers, start your samplers…