Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Yes, that is the early drum’n’bass figure Photek who’s got a remix on the new single, “Cool,” off Gwen Stefani‘s Love. Angel. Music. Baby., currently atop one of Billboard‘s many charts. … (2) Guitar Hero, the video game (info at guitarherogame.com); (3) a new turntable from Vestax apparently triggers individual notes (coverage at skratchworx.com, product page at vestax.co.jp) and (4) David Byrne on “playing a building” (fargfabriken.se): “A sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of a building, is converted into a giant musical instrument” (all via createdigitalmusic.com). … (5) Volume four of Make magazine is the music issue (table of contents at makezine.com), including a tribute to Bob Moog, the world’s biggest MP3 player, circuit bending and more. … And, (6) via makezine.com, “Portable Art Noise Things” (viktoria.se/~lalya). … (7) Use Excel as a music synthesizer (link): “Just play with the sliders and enjoy what is happening” (via musicthing.blogspot.com). … (8) The guy who programmed that helpful Palm OS beat counter (see the August 7, 2005, Disquiet field notes) hHEADmade his own FinalScratch-style “control your MP3s with vinyl” interface (timothywisdom.com), (9) a tool to help the deaf “feel” music (news.bbc.co.uk), (10) a concept device from Philips to share tunes in public (shinyshiny.tv) and (11) a sonic grenade (therawfeed.com): “three pitches of skull-shattering sound,” the packaging reportedly states (all via engadget.com). … (12) Build a simple, battery-powered tool (distractech.com) to mess with someone’s mind sonically (via boingboing.net). … (13) The BBC is working on a system to annotate audio files (downloadsquad.com). … (14) The premier bookmark community, del.icio.us, has been upgraded to better handle MP3s (blog.del.icio.us). … (15) It looks like RSS feeds from the blogs at artsjournal.com, such as those of Kyle Gann (artsjournal.com/postclassic) and Greg Sandow (artsjournal.com/sandow), have changed: postclassic and sandow, respectively. Sandow just started posting his notes toward a book on the future of classical music (artsjournal.com/greg). … (16) Giving new meaning to the term “cover songs,” Dave Bush has created a “song quilt” consisting of one image each for the 15 tracks on the new Boards of Canada album, The Campfire Headphase (davebush.com/song_quilt.html). Roll over any tile for the related track’s title, and click to proceed to the streaming sample at bleep.com. … (17) If you set your Google Alerts for “sound art” you’ll discover a lot of towns with the word “sound” in their names have art walks (google.com/alerts). … (18) If you set your Google Alerts for “field recording” you’ll unintentionally learn a bit about soccer.
… Select New Releases: A few releases of note this coming week: DVDs from (1) Can (Can, Mute) and (2) Four Tet (Everything Ecstatic, Domino), a (3) Richie Hawtin 12″ (“The Tunnel”/”Twin Cities,” novamute), (4) Windy and Carl‘s The Dream House (Kranky), (5) Bell Orchestre‘s Recording a Tape the Color of the Light (Rough Trade), (6) Thomas Brinkmann‘s Lucky Hands (MaxErnst) and (7) Clint Mansell‘s score to Doom (Varese Sarabande).
… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Autechre and Hafler Trio‘s two-CD aeo3&3hae (Die Stadt): Each CD contains a single track, though not necessarily a continuous event. Disc one moves from what could be a distant volcano rumbling, to rabid fissures and sparks, to more earthen tumult. Disc two is more sedate, the sort of noise that never seems to get louder, no matter how much one turns up the volume knob. … (2) Bless the holy union of industrial music and minimal techno. Converter, aka Scott Sturgis, certainly does on Expansion Pack 2.0 (Ant-Zen). … (3) The Maya Angelou segment of composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain‘s A Civil Rights Reader, composed for electric violin, string quartet and DJ Scientific‘s turntables (the October 26 entry in the Disquiet Downstream).
… Quote of the Week: “The old pond, a frog leaps in, the sound of water.” A haiku by 17th-century poet Basho, quoted in Peter Carey‘s pop-culture travelogue, Wrong About Japan (Knopf), as Carey is trying to convince his son to attend a kabuki performance by comparing it to manga. The son is not convinced.