Month: August 2007

Improvised Electro-Acoustic Quartet MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the risk of suggesting anything akin to a rule, when it comes to electronic music the best ensemble work tends to add up to less than the sum of its constituent parts. Take this nearly half-hour improvised recording by Rick Reed, Cory Allen, Brent Fariss and Josh Russell, together performing as S.I.R.S.I.T. Titled “Colorblind Cycle,” it follows a hum-to-thrall path that could easily be passed off as the work of a single individual. That the often elegant mix of classic synth sounds, filtered noise and mangled field recordings never begins to approach chaos is a testament to the quartet’s mutual sensitivity (MP3).

And for all the gadgetry employed, the standout instrument may be … an amplified hamster wheel, part of Russell’s bag of tricks. He’s also credited with “zoom sampletrack, various pedals, audiomulch”; the others are on Moog (Reed), “moog synthesizer, laptop, ring modulator” (Allen) and “mixer feedback, modified field recordings, resonant filter, ring modulator” (Fariss).

More info at the website of the releasing netlabel, bremsstrahlung-recordings.org. More on Rick Reed at spectralhouse.com, Cory Allen at cory-allen.com, Brent Fariss at spectralhouse.com and Josh Russell josh-russell.org.

1971 Musique Concrete MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Here’s an hour-long recording of two musique concrete pieces that should be required listening for anyone venturing into laptop music. Recorded back in 1971, it’s a textbook case of the effort required, in those days long before home-computing, to make electronic compositions built from found sounds. Now that audio-processing software comes preloaded with countless transformative plugins, the painstaking process of musique concrete — that is, of composing music based on real-world noise — has to be heard to be appreciated (MP3).

In a deadpan delivery that verges on comical (“I worked 12 days to get six seconds of music”), Don Hannah explains in detail how he went about recording a piece based on the field recordings of marbles. He first discovers they have pleasurable sonic properties when banged against various objects, including a margarine container, an empty soft drink can, a coffee mug (“good for two sounds, one with a contact mic, the other with a conventional air mic”), cardboard and a glass. He then sets about slowing and speeding the taped samples, and arranging his sound objects into a proper composition. “Small wonder,” he says, “they invented synthesizers.” The result is 10 minutes long, a spacey, percussive piece that begins precisely 23 minutes into the MP3 file, should you want to bypass Hannah’s lecture.

It’s followed (at the 33:40 mark) by a recording of an Allan Bryant composition based on the sounds of three home-made fretless guitars. Over the course of its nearly 20 minutes, it goes from chamber to orchestral, and from recognizable to otherworldly. Unfortunately, Bryant doesn’t contribute any further background information in this recording.

This file is part of the Other Minds archive at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org). It’s reportedly the ninth edition of Source, in its day “a bi-yearly publication devoted to avant-garde composers’ scores, articles and photographs.” (That numbering doesn’t quite coordinate with the Source listings at ubu.com.) By the way, that MP3 link above is to the lowest-quality sound recording available at archive.org; this URL (link) goes to an FTP folder with a variety of format options.

The Fernando Pessoa Underground

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This website was named for The Book of Disquiet (or Livro do Desassossego) by the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). There’s a somewhat hidden sub-site on Disquiet.com about Pessoa, viewable at disquiet.com/pessoa. It contains three sections: (1) an experiment in using multiple windows to compare 13-plus translations of a single Pessoa poem, “Autopsicografia”; (2) an experiment in using color to compare three translations of an excerpt from The Book of Disquiet; and (3) a list of Pessoa-related spots on the Internet.

Pessoa’s axiom “Mute, because overheard” has been a touchstone for this website since it began, as has this excerpt from Desassossego, here translated by Richard Zenith:

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text.

From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

I’m adding this post, because the Pessoa sub-site isn’t itself searchable in this newly revised version of Disquiet.com. Now, at least, this post (along with a few other pages) will come up in search results.

This, by the way, is the original Desassossego text that Zenith translated:

Tudo quanto o homem expõe ou exprime é uma nota à margem de um texto apagado de todo.

Mais ou menos, pelo sentido da nota, tiramos o sentido que havia de ser o do texto; mas fica sempre uma dúvida, e os sentidos possíveis são muitos.

2002 Markus Popp Lecture MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When your computer is busy downloading via a slow connection a 60-plus-megabyte file of a lecture by a German musician, there’s a lingering concern that the resulting document will, in fact, be in German. Fortunately for English speakers, the lecture by Markus Popp (aka Oval) housed at totem.menneske.dk is in English. The talk dates back to 2002, when it was delivered as part of the SeeSound Festival in Denmark. Popp talks about the vagaries of defining electronic music, his work in installation art, and his creative process (MP3).

I came upon this file while porting over the remaining interviews and essays from the old version of Disquiet.com to the new one (there are still several dozen to go). Here’s my interview with Popp from 1997: “Popp Music.”

Metal Machine Remix MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The unlistenability of Lou Reed‘s Metal Machine Music is one of the great overstatements of pop culture. Some 30-plus years have passed since its release, and we now live at a time when the noise of Merzbow and the Boredoms and countless death-metal bands regularly draw sold-out crowds; many listeners today came of age to singles by Aphex Twin and Kid 606 that are nearly as aggressive as Reed’s 1975 double album. In the process, Metal Machine Music has gone from lonely outlier to strong precursor.

But if you still find its unadulterated, maniacally mashy splatters to be, well, unadulterated, maniacally mashy splatters, then the person who runs globalvariables.net/audio.out provides a useful service, having just yesterday posted two remixes of Reed’s timeless hot potato. There’s an ambient version (MP3) and a dance one (MP3), though the latter proves more sedate than the former. The dance version takes a denuded edit of Lou Reed’s original and applies a kind of audio strobe effect that lends it a steady, slowly pulsing tempo. In the ambient version, there are still quite a bit of sudden, split-second sounds that could prove nerve-wracking to some.

As an added treat, there’s also a mashup (MP3) of Plastikman (the B-side from his thumping “Spastik”/”Helicopter” techno single) and Karlheinz Stockhausen (an excerpt apparently from his conceptual and logistic feat, “Helicopter String Quartet”).