Recent favorites from the One-Minute Vacation series of volunteer-contributed field recordings at quietamerican.org/vacation.html, curated by Aaron Ximm: bells rung gently in Moscow for the Russian Orthodox Christmas (MP3); a mild cacophony of bugs, birds and a live band in Quito, Ecuador, (MP3); and a street scene in Hoi An, Vietnam, during which a vendor’s amplified voice sounds like a computerized sample against the techno-like aural vibe of the setting (MP3).
Month: November 2005
Space Music MP3
On Halloween, the Stasisfield netlabel (stasisfield.com) released a single, hour-long piece by musician Peter Koniuto titled Past Andromeda (MP3). As the name suggests, it’s an exercise in space music: slow blooms of galactic sound that stretch from ear to ear like a blissful smile; sonar blurps that bring to mind how Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry imagined submarines, rather than airplanes, as the Starship Enterprise’s most significant predecessor; and occasional flurries of digitally messed-up speech, suggesting the space-enabled psychosis of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris. There’s also a patiently plucked melody that sounds like the opening from the theme to Deliverance played at quarter speed, and each time it cycles through it grounds the track’s otherwise heady stew of aural effluvia. The version of Past Andromeda on Stasisfield is a stereo reduction of an eight-speaker installation project by Koniuto, who first staged it at the University of the Pacific’s Conservatory of Music in Stockton, California, back in September 2002 as part of the school’s annual Music Beyond Performance series. The music’s source materials include electric bass guitar, field recordings, children’s toys, glass vases, harmonica, among other household objects. More on Koniuto at the website of his upstate New York studio, redsunsoundroom.com.
Tangents (Photek, del.icio.us, aeo3&3hae)
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.
Dark Winter MP3s
Tell someone in Toronto, while visiting from San Francisco, how lovely, walkable, vibrant and diverse their city is and they’ll say, “Come back in mid-January.” Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that a netlabel with the uneasy name Dark Winter (darkwinter.com) has released an album of Canadian origin, some of it “initially recorded in various burnt out and abandoned buildings throughout Toronto” earlier this year, the site explains. The album is As Everything Fell from the Sky by ANGELswing, aka Adam Dollard, who perpetrates a uniquely claustrophobic brand of experimental audio. “Maybe Today, Aronud Six” layers piano parts that rub up against each other just beyond the realm of believable live playing, and as a result concentrates your listening on the spare melodies’ internal logic. Piano, or piano-like sounds, provide a kind of theme on the album, lending a muddy beat and an out-of-the-blue bit of frill to “As His Muoth Went Dry” and triggering a nostalgia-tinged figure that haunts “It Started Around Elevne.” Many of the tracks on As Everything Fell from the Sky embrace rough furrows of abraded sound, such as the slow, dry spacelessness of “There Were No Streetlihgts.” Every song title on the album has a misspelling, which the brief liner note at Dark Winter explains is willful. Of course, the music itself takes a far more strenuous approach to unsettling the listener than mere typographical play. Oh, and kudos to Dark Winter for doing something few netlabels think of: recommending key tracks.
Welsh Scanner MP3s
Science-fiction novelist William Gibson once noted that the Walkman changed the way we experience cities. Among the many things packed into that koan is the sense that music shapes human interaction. Few musicians have embraced the idea as thoroughly as has Scanner, much of whose work involves providing soundtracks to conversation after the fact. He’ll take audio, often ripped from the ether thanks to the equipment from which he takes his name, and provide a sympathetic score that illuminates not only the words but the emotions those words are intended to convey and to mask. Sometimes Scanner’s work is less clandestine. He reported this month on his website, scannerdot.com, that he’s spent time recently in North Wales, where he was commissioned to travel around and record people, often talking about the Welsh language and culture, and to produce his compositions on a portable studio.
Almost a dozen free downloads resulting from this experiment, which was commissioned by the Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology, have been posted subsequently (link). In “Around and Around” (MP3) we witness a family discussion, and it has two soundtracks: a Satie-esque piano part introduced by Scanner, who emphasizes the emotional undercurrent, and the on-site jukebox spitting out the pop song “The Rhythm of the Night,” which despite being more factually accurate to the event feels far more artificial and out of place. Other times, Scanner erases the divide between speech and music. On “Love of Love” (MP3), a man’s cackle is echoed until it fades into the background like a dubby sound effect. (Note: the track titles listed on the website and the titles encoded into the files don’t always match up. According to the file itself, “Love of Love” is titled “Caernarvon 1.”)
By the way, when Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) reports on his website that he did the Wales work on “the portable studio on the Hysbys,” understand that “Hysbys” is not a new generation of audio software. Well, not quite. Hysbys is a bus-cum-studio that travels from town to town, visiting Welsh communities. It was developed by the Department of Lifelong Learning, University of Wales Bangor; BBC Wales and the Welsh Language Board. More info at hysbys.org.