Month: June 2005

Minimal Viennese Piano EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Monohm netlabel, based in Vienna, Austria, has released one album thus far in 2005, an EP by Markus Brosel, titled Locus. Monohm takes a minimal approach to everything, from its music to its website to its liner notes. Each album gets a list of “descriptors,” and nothing else. On the one hand, this is a bit bothersome, because in the world of abstract music a little explanation can provide significant orientation (oh, these are all radiator sounds, or the tracks are based on Pi to some esoteric degree, or the entire thing is built from faux field recordings, etc.). On the other hand, what’s refreshing about Monohm’s descriptors is that they’re a solid step toward ignoring the idea of genre, which is arguably as specious a construct as race, in favor of something more akin to flavor. Any given Monohm record gets several of these descriptors. For example, the label’s first album carried four tags: minimal, texture, drones, rhythms. Aqua Genic by Drumlake, the release that came out just prior to Locus, is clicks, tones, drones.

And Locus? It is piano, minimal, drones. That neatly sums it up, albeit in an absurdly arid way. Though the EP contains four tracks constructed with that trio of aural elements, it’s really one lengthy piece (track two: “Five Points in Ascent”), at over 16 minutes, and three footnotes (“Forest of Masts,” “Fontana,” “Torchon”), each coming in at under three minutes. Indeed, it does consist of piano and drones and it is as minimal as the label that presented it to the world, but the real listening is somewhere in between, and that’s nothing less than dynamic: the space where the overlap between piano and drone is worked out. It’s fairly lovely music, reminiscent (as would be anything this willfully tepid featuring a piano with the sustain full on) of Michael Nyman’s minimalism, and it has a pleasing effect of running glitchy textures and rudimentary woodwind sounds below the light waves. Check it out at monohm.com.

Barcelona Techno MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The third and latest release from the “minus n” netlabel is as notable for how it’s presented as for how it sounds. A vaguely poppy riff on minimal techno, Lod‘s Taskenti EP is four tracks of metrically succinct music composed of sodden beats, albeit with intriguingly hesitant melodic aspirations. The song “Clokio,” for example, introduces a synthesized mallet melody. While that melody, frilly at a whopping three notes, stands out like a candy raver at a Steve Reich recital, what’s interesting is less the riff itself than the extended fade on the final note, as it bleeds back into the whole. The netlabel deserves particular praise for including along with the four tracks an interview with Lod, aka Luis Ortiz, who is based out of Barcelona. It’s not a lengthy back and forth, but there’s enough space to touch on the album’s title (a kind of vegetation, appropriately), his basic tools (“i mainly work with a computer although i add some synths, and i also use some analog guitar filters and a compressor”), and his other projects, including two online labels he runs: klitekture.com and sinergy-networks.com. Check it out at minusn.com.

Surveillance Art MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Scanner, the British electronic musician also known as Robin Rimbaud, regularly posts MP3s of his live concerts on his website, scannerdot.com. It certainly seems fair-minded for him to give out music for free, since so much of his early work was built on random voices and sounds that he snatched with his namesake device. The most recent such concert listing, as of this writing (it’s toward the bottom of the scannerdot.com MP3 page), is from an April 29, 2005, event held in the capital of Latvia. He gave a half-hour concert in Riga as part of “Waves: Scanning,” a lecture and performance session at the RIXC Media Space. His set and that of the Latvian duo Clausthome (credited as Lauris Vorslavs and Girts Radzins) are available as free downloads from RIXC’s website (link).

Though Scanner has gone on to mix visuals (Michelangelo Antonioni in 52 Spaces) and archival audio (Andy Warhol on the album Warhol’s Surfaces), he is true to his early form here, mixing “found” conversation yanked from the ether into extended, mournful electronic ambience that serves as a contextualizing soundtrack. In this case, the initial conversation features what sounds like a brassy New York woman, a substitute aerobics instructor or something along those lines, planning her schedule with another equally obstinate woman, either a manager or a booking agent. After the two tough cookies find something to agree upon, their words are subsumed by an undulating, bottom-heavy score, which transforms repeatedly as it continues on; voices will be heard again, but none with such clarity as those first two.

On to Clausthome’s music: is it more haphazard, more confused or, simply put, more challenging? Or are Scanner’s techniques just more familiar, making his work easier to decode? Clausthome’s has the additional disadvantage — well, this is a geolinguistically chauvinistic thing to utter, but there you have it — of not using English-language content. As a result, their spoken material, buried beneath phone hookups, dial tones and generic sonic interference, will provide a comprehensible narrative to few Scanner fans. All of which said, the telling in the Clausthome work is in its remoteness, and that’s something you can sense, whether or not you understand what’s spoken; the emphasis on phone sounds highlights the role of technology as a tool that both connects people and keeps them apart. To Western ears, Clausthome’s recording, with its echoes of wiretaps and of Eastern European intrigue, brings to mind a cornerstone of surveillance culture: the Cold War.

Usefully, Scanner’s own recording comments on the association of language and accent, of verbal affect, with emotional meaning, when that same snotty New Yorker duo discuss someone they both know: “He’s adorable,” says one. “He’s South American or something? Aww, I love him.” Says the other, “He has a little bit of a Ricky Ricardo accent?” If Scanner’s surveillance art always brings along with it the illicit thrill of intruding on someone else’s privacy, he knows how to turn that back on the listener. By the time these women are judging their colleague based on how he speaks, we’ve already judged them.