It’s apparently New York week in the Disquiet Downsteam. Monday was Raz Mesinai’s computer-enabled chamber music (link), for which he draws upon some of downtown Manhattan’s most accomplished talent, including violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Marc Ribot and cellist Jane Scarpantoni. Then came a nearly two-decade old recording of “Butch” Morris (link) in a trio that included a Ribot/Scarpantoni contemporary from the early days of the Knitting Factory, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, and treaded into electric-Miles territory, suggesting a strong precursor to the atmospherics of illbient. And today it’s an actual illbient figure, DJ Olive (aka Gregor Asch), who has posted a third track off his new live set, Heaps As — Live in Tasmania (The Agriculture), following up the two that were Downstream entries back on March 22 (link). “At Least Some Knots Get Untangled” (MP3) is dub draped over a hi hat, a loungey affair with characteristic attention paid to individual beats and texture. And if you’re in the mood for an extended set, Olive spun the fifth and most recent in resonancefm.com‘s podcast series (stream, MP3).
Month: April 2006
Live Jazz Conduction MP3
Composer and cornet player Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris has what is essentially a fifth name as well, a jazz neologism with which he is synonymous: “conduction.” That’s his word for the subtle art of using hand gestures to weave a single technique out of both conducting and improvising. An hour-long trio performance, recorded live at the Kitchen in Manhattan in 1987, has been uploaded to the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org), featuring Morris, usually with his mute on in full electric-era Miles Davis mode, plus two electronically enabled colleagues: trombonist J.A. Deanne and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz (he’s credited as “Wayne Horowitz” on the set’s archive.org entry). The music ranges from gauzy electric jazz to deeply echoed dub. The latter distinctly foresees the shape of illbient a decade or so yet to come. The set is bookended by an interview with Morris in December 1988 (he also employs the alternate word “conprovisation”), conducted by Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian. The track is available in various formats, the most compact of which is a 64 kbps MP3 file (MP3). More details at archive.org.
Digital Chamber MP3
Raz Mesinai is a maestro of Middle Eastern-edged ersatz chamber music. On his new Asphodel Records album, Safe, he piles samples of composed and improvised cues by the likes of guitarist Marc Ribot, violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Jane Scarpantoni into his computer and completes what they might never have accomplished without his post-production mediation: a mesh of digitally enabled collaboration that layers their individual efforts with an emphasis on drama and momentum, all trailing electronic echoes. Having originally gained fame as half of the next-gen dub act Sub Dub, Mesinai has recently branched into film work. Safe, which he’s had in the can for some time, finally arrives attributed to his Badawi pseudonym and represented by a free download courtesy of Asphodel, “I Said Oblivion” (MP3), an escalating charge of strings and percussion. More info at razmesinai.com. (My interview with Mesinai appears in the Winter/Spring 2006 issue of e/i magazine, on newsstands now. I’ll post it on Disquiet.com as soon as the subsequent issue is published.)
Disquiet @ Maker Faire, April 23
What does it take to invent your own instrument? How has pervasive computing technology altered the way musicians compose? When you design your own instrument, does that change how you write music?
These are just some of the questions we’ll be discussing when I moderate a panel (one that should bleed into an ensemble performance) this coming Sunday as part of the Maker Faire, sponsored by the magazine Make, at the San Mateo Fairgrounds in San Mateo, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. The subject is “Making Instruments, Making Music,” and it’ll feature three musician-inventors discussing their work: Krystyna Bobrowski, Chachi Jones (born Donald Bell) and univac (aka Tom Koch). And after a Q&A with the audience, they’ll play together.
The Faire runs from 10am to 5pm on April 22 and 23. Our session is 11am on Sunday in the Maker’s Lounge. There’s a ton of other music programming at the Faire, including sessions by Evolution Control Committee, Broker/Dealer and Rick Walker‘s Loop.pooL. For a complete list of music events at the Maker Faire, click here. And visit makezine.com/faire for more info.
THE PITCH: Here is the text of my initial pitch to Make:
Title: “Making Instruments, Making Music”
Format: A show’n’tell panel discussion featuring musician-inventors who have devised their own instruments, from circuit-benders to contact-mic experts to USB-interface enthusiasts. After they discuss their work in a public dialogue, there will be a moderated Q&A session with the audience. And when the Q&A is over, the musicians will jam.
Thesis: There is a growing population of musicians who make their own instruments. The invention of a musical instrument is nothing new, from Wagner’s specialized tuba, to Les Paul’s solid-body electric guitar, to Robert Fripp’s Frippertronic looping hardware. What is new is the prevalence of musical-instrument invention — from Mix Master Mike’s wah-wah pedal turntables to all manner of “virtual” instruments, resulting from the rise in laptop electronica — fueled by such disparate phenomena as the DiY punk aesthetic, the logarithmic adoption of personal computing, and the homebrew-tech sphere celebrated by Make magazine.
There are two key components to this “Making Instruments, Making Music” discussion.
The first is the practical circumstance of making an instrument. Is it a matter of discovery or of experimentation? Does one plan a tool and then figure out how to construct it, or does one fiddle with sounds and materials until one devises something sonorous?
The second is matter unique to this sphere of invention: How does making an instrument alter a musician’s understanding of composition? Traditionally, musical composition has bonded two skills: the ability to develop a musical idea, and the ability to transpose that idea to accepted instrumentation. But when simultaneous to producing music one is producing new tools for the expression of that music, what feedback loop exists in the artist’s mind, and how does that play out in the music that the artist produces?
And to bring the questions full circle: To what extent is the improvisation involved in the invention of a musical instrument like the composition of a piece of music?
THE PARTICIPANTS: Here are the bios of the three participating musician-inventors:
1. Krystyna Bobrowski is a sound artist, composer and musician living in Oakland, California. In addition to French horn she plays acoustic and electronic instruments of her own design. Her collection of original instruments includes prepared amplified rocking chairs, bull kelp horns, Leaf Speakers, Gliss Glass and the Harmonic Slide. Bobrowski received her M.F.A. in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College and her B.A. in Computers and Music from Dartmouth College. She has presented her work in a number of music festivals throughout the US, Europe and Mexico. In addition to performing her own work, Bobrowski plays with the Bay Area-based, improvisation ensemble, Vorticella. Over the last few years she has worked on prototype sound exhibits for the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Currently she teaches and directs the Electronic Music Program at the College of San Mateo. More info at vorticella.com.
2. Hailing from Oakland, California, Chachi Jones has little reason to leave his home. As an electronic musician and editor for S.F.’s Robotspeak Magazine, Chachi (aka Donald Bell) spends lots of time pointing and clicking away at his computer. His unique brand of darkly textured, neck-snapping electronic funk is created in equal parts by homemade circuit-bent instruments and precise laptop composition. His music is filled with emotion and begs to be enjoyed, scrutinized and bumped from car speakers like some kind of Martian hip-hop. Chachi’s distinctive sound bears the unmistakable mark of many hours spent in a bedroom studio delicately refining each moment of audio. More info at chachijones.com.
3. Univac is constantly searching out the detritus of trickle-down technological toys, digging inside for the elusive never-before-heard sounds that cause the designers of the original items to shudder. When univac isn’t turning electronic toys inside out, he is a frequent collaborator with Big City Orchestra, the sound guy for Negativland, a Macintosh tech, and father of 2 boys under 4. He has been bending circuits since 1995, and taking things apart since 1968. Univac’s past creative work includes professional photographer, sound designer, musician, graphic designer, filmmaker, writer, performance artist, sculptor, pizza delivery guy, event producer, technical director and meat cutter. Univac is known by many other names including Prof. Werner V. Slack, God’s Grandparents, Hoyt Shrimpfinker, bumpermeat, TechDweeb, AirSickBags and Tom Koch. More info at techdweeb.com.
Philosophical Matmos MP3
Pre-release promotional CDs of the duo Matmos‘ upcoming album, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, arrived with a handwritten note by one of the members, M.C. Schmidt, imploring recipients not to upload the disc’s contents to the Internet. Meanwhile, over at the website of Matmos’ record label, Matador, the closest thing the album has to a title track, “Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein,” is available for free download (MP3).
Every one of the album’s 10 tracks is a tribute to a prominent cultural figure who, like the couple that is Matmos, happens to be homosexual, including producer Joe Meek, photographer/filmmaker James Bidgood, and author William S. Burroughs (Jon Leidecker, aka Wobbly, played a Burroughs adding machine in a live performance of that piece last year at Mills College). The Japanese edition of the album will include a region-specific 11th track, “Kendo for Yukio Mishima.” The U.S. edition opens with the Wittgenstein entry and closes on another Ludwig, the 19th century king of Bavaria.
Until it peaks out with a feast of raspy guitar squalor courtesy of Jay Lesser, the Wittgenstein track is a chunkily percussive setting for various voices intoning what Matmos has explained to be a paragraph from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Among the speakers on the song are Laetitia Sonami, Bjork and Schmidt’s brother, Werner. The sounds include those of cows chewing, dried roses being mangled and manure being shoveled. That churning rhythm is deceptively simple. Listen to it repeatedly and it becomes clear that what makes the song so vibrant is how all those clacky, scratchy, rickety sounds are used to produce a single, almost mechanical groove. Also in there, according to the news page at Matmos’ website (brainwashed.com/matmos), are the wisdom teeth of Erika Clowes, presumably wife of cartoonist Daniel Clowes, who is among the artists to contribute track-specific art to the forthcoming release. It’s due out May 9.