Month: August 2005

For all the evening’s sonic ingenuity, the harmonica took top honors. Two Fridays back, on August 5, Seamus Cater played as half a laptop duo with Roddy Schrock. It was part of an extensive bill held by the Drum Machine Museum some four or five stories up in a brick building in San Francisco’s always colorful Tenderloin District. In addition to Cater-Schrock, there were performances by Lx Rudis and Beau Casey (for which I arrived too late), and by another duo, Christopher Fleeger and Marielle Jakobsons. In between, DJ Guanaco spun. Jakobsons is a violinist, and her set with Fleeger had her not so much trading fours with his laptop, but feeding bits of riffs into it, which he’d process and shoot back at her. Though they’d only apparently played together once previously, they had a good collaborative feel, especially when Jackobsons emphasized the strings’ textural quality, and when Fleeger met the violin halfway, by trying out gestural melodic elements.

Anyhow, the harmonica is what Cater used to open his set with Schrock. He played a short warm hum, which was immediately processed into a rumble of minimal techno. What distinguished his and Schrock’s work together was, once you got past the harmonica, how difficult it was to sort out who was playing what. Whereas most duos perform as individuals, they were producing a singular sound. Not surprisingly, they’ve collaborated for some time, both in concert and online.

Two of their group efforts are available on Schrock’s website, fundamentallysound.org, both artifacts of their file trading. “Reset Artclock” (MP3) reportedly originated as a computer improv, and was subsequently treated with field recordings by Remi Gerard-Marchant; it’s considerably more sparse and enigmatic than anything they emitted at the Tenderloin gig, a mysterious assemblage of tiny sounds, all light clutter, water drops, distant whir. An untitled piece (MP3) will satisfy anyone still wondering about that harmonica mentioned up top. It presents Cater’s harmonica processed by Schrock, who creates a kind of monastic zone-out realm, with overlapping patterns of round tones that echo Terry Riley’s minimalist mysticism.

Cater has another project that combines acoustic and electronic elements, his trio Hills not Skyscrapers, which teams him with Missy Mazzoli and Tom Parkinson. They’ve put three segments from their just finished album, Highwires, up on their site (seacater.com/hns), and though they’ve drawn on a wide range of instruments (“We play pianos, harmonicas, guitars, basses, melodicas, sinewaves, tiny toy instruments and computers”), each of the tracks is sedate and spare. “Rushed Girl” (MP3) is introduced with what sounds like a muted piano transcription of “When I Wish Upon a Star” played above knee-smacked spoons. “Trilingual” (MP3) opens the piano up for something more free and improvisatory, amid spacey strings; those spoons, or perhaps castanets, reappear, but more as sound effects than rhythmic engines. “Orrizonte” (MP3) may be the real keeper. It locates Mazzoli’s wide piano chords within steady cicada sine waves. The three tracks are apparently excerpts of longer pieces, but the Hills not Skyscrapers folks have done listeners the favor of closing each MP3 file with a slow fade, so as not to disturb an otherwise elegant listening experience.

There’s a handy RSS feed (link) that alerts you to what free music downloads have been added to Amazon.com. Amid unfamiliar names in the past week or so is one that’s a fairly regular subject of Disquiet Downstreams: Greg Davis, whose “Curling Pond Woods” (link) is a bit of low-key folk whimsy, guitar and piano amid field recordings of antic birdsong. At least that’s how this suite, all of six and a half minutes in length, begins, before rising in a digital approximation of orchestral grandeur, and adding a sour synth line and a sturdy backbeat. It’s the title track of his great album of last year, from Carpark Records. Also available, and from Curling Pond Woods, is “Brocade (Rewoven)” (MP3), an experiment in phase-shifting acoustic guitar that comes across like some long-awaited collaboration between Robert Fripp and Steve Reich.

Judging by a recently uploaded example, Chris Herbert‘s forthcoming album on Kranky is to be looked forward to. At six and a half minutes, with little to no contextual setting by Kranky, the song, titled “Chlorophyl” (MP3), opens a narrow sliver of a glimpse into another, considerably private realm. Utterly quiet, with a pulse-soothing beat, it takes several listens to reveal itself, like a dark room slowly brought into focus. First come the contours: a crackle that suggests old vinyl, a warm blanket of earthly hush, and that unwavering but organic beat. Then come the details: little snaps in the sound bed, the vinyl crackle transforming into more of a door creak, thin layers of wisps as simultaneously compact and flaky as fine phyllo. And then there’s that beat, so steady that over time, as the other sounds make themselves more apparent, it softens and recedes, becoming the equivalent of invisible. Kranky and Herbert encoded the track at 192kbps, relatively generous for a promotional download, but necessary given how much aural information is buried in there. Kranky explains that Herbert lives in Birmingham, England, and is a member of a collective called Modulate AV. More info, though not much more, at kranky.net.