The lineup for the next Circuit Bending Festival in New York, at bentfestival.org, has been posted. And even if you can’t make it there between April 19 and 23, the list still provides a handy primer to who’s doing what right now in the wacky world of misusing existing technology on the cheap. The performers’ names are familiar and unfamiliar, and most links on the site lead to something worth hearing. Take Burnkit2600, whose burnkit2600.com site features several near-soundscapes, like the slowly pulsing “Aquacat” (MP3) and two takes on the slurpy, sci-fi-flavored “Whale Hunt” (MP3, MP3). Burnkit may be at its best when it wrestles with percussion. “Naut” (MP3), a live cut recorded in December 2004, plays a distorted riff above snare rolls that, as time passes, are themselves mutated by technology, skipped and tweaked, layered and bent.
Month: April 2006
Noise-Improv MP3s
In the world of noise music, no one can hear you scream. Or, more to the point, your scream may be heard, but it’s likely to have been so utterly transformed by digital and analog sonic torture devices that it will not be comprehended. The squelched voices in the work by a duo going by the name Look to the Skies sound, at times, like some robot Diamanda Galas in full torque mode. There are over 20 tracks, many in the 20-minute range, at the Skies website, looktotheskies.net, and among the more recent entries, such as “A Deep Gash in the North Face” (MP3) and “A Series of 42 Negative Statements” (MP3), the human voice is heard as something so heavily sublimated that it might be mistaken for pure electronics. Still, on the former you hear a distinct if muddied melody that almost approximates singing (think of an industrial spin on Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet”), and on the latter speech makes itself heard, if not understood, amid a crackle of fire and the whorl of overhead motion. Elsewhere, “56 Witnesses” (MP3) has the brute force, at times, of an ongoing battle and “Phone Box Somewhere” (MP3) follows a slow sine wave of throb and muffle until what very well may be carillon bells.
Industri-Organic Scape MP3s
The Kikapu netlabel usually leavens its ambience with beats, often bringing them to the foreground. However, for much of Sieve‘s recent Vacuum-Assisted, you might be hard put to distinguish the beats from mere static in the ether; others bring to mind biological processes. Its four tracks are industrial-organic scapes of dready background stuff. What distinguishes it is that most of the sounds remain fairly close at hand, like the gloomy “Cold” (MP3), with its heartbeat murmurs and breathy rhythm, and “Void” (MP3), which could be mistaken for footsteps around the next corridor ”¦ well, if you happen to already be on a dank, neglected space station. More info at kikapu.com.
Minimalist Dreamtime MP3s
The blank white background, the text-only interface, a font seemingly better suited to character-recognition software than to the human eye … the website of the Complementary Distribution netlabel is as minimal as, perhaps even more so than, the music it hosts. And then there’s the liner notes, which are rarely more than a few words, less notes than koans. For the new four-track release by DIA, titled simply cod008 (this is the label’s eighth set), we’re informed, “Notes: Dream them.” Well, OK then. The opening entry, “Live at Home 4” (MP3), is a tense nightmare of black ops over the next hill, all muffled rotors leading to something shy of actual resolution. “Resad” (MP3) taps into fears of miscommunication, chopping up words and distending them to an edgy yet narcotic effect. “Elated” (MP3), despite the upbeat title, is the sound of one of those eerily people-less dreams, wandering about a factory site as the sun slowly rises. As for “Too Late” (MP3), it’s the most ambiguous of the batch, a chamber work of soft signals left to waver on their own. More info at bitlabrecords.com/cod.
Freesound Remix Tree MP3s
A wise friend once described 1970s AM radio as a medium in which singer-songwriters flirted with each other, had love affairs, broke up and then (usually resulting in the best songs) told tales. The remixes of raw sound at the Freesound website (freesound.iua.upf.edu) are rarely autobiographical in any immediately discernible sense, but dialogues do occur there. Take, for example, a sample of a flying grey heron caught on tape (link) in Cologne, Germany, by a Freesound participant (and biology teacher, according to his personal page) who goes by the tag reinsamba. This reinsamba suggested from the start that his file might make a good remix subject, since he notes in the upload’s description: “Play it with 25% of the original speed and You will hear the cry of a dinosaur” (sic). Subsequently, one acclivity dropped the file two octaves (link) and someone named pixt sped the thing up (link), resulting in what’s described as resembling “a machine to mix cement, water and sand.” The remix section of Freesound is getting bigger every month. And though the majority of entries feature remixes by individuals of their own items, there’s a growing number of situations, such as this, when various sound-minded individuals play a cool game of telephone.