Month: January 2008

Lucier-in-a-Shower MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Here’s an aquatic take on Alvin Lucier’s classic “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening.” Over on the freesound.iua.upf.edu website — a community where users share field recordings –  an audio document of a shower has expanded into a collaborative series of recordings, each displaying how the original shower sounds when a recording of it is played in other bathrooms.

The effort may seem mundane or peculiar, or both, but it’s very much in the tradition of Lucier’s explorations of how enclosed spaces have their own intrinsic sonic properties, and of how sound degrades with successive reproductions.

One of the many great things about the Freesound site is that every sound object is complemented by a slew of data, including a visualization of the sound. Those images are reproduced below, with links to a compressed MP3 version of each iteration of the experiment. For a higher-resolution recording, click through to the given entry’s page. Each track is about 47 seconds long. Any descriptive text within quotation marks was supplied by the given file’s poster.

1. The original recording sounds as much like rain shower as it does a shower stall — it’s a gentle if insistent precipitation (MP3, page): “Mono recording of a shower running in a bathroom. Oktava MC-012 cardioid capsule straight to hardisk.” It was uploaded by Freesound contributor Hell’s Sound Guy.

All the subsequent mixes are by different Freesound regulars. I’m not sure that when Hell’s Sound Guy turned on his tape recorder he realized how many people were going to jump into his shower.

2. The second version has a much higher treble end, like water against a plastic sheet (MP3, page): “Second recording of the shower sound. This time played and recorded in an old stone house’s bathroom in Girona, Spain. Played through a couple of studio monitors and recorded with a minidisc and a stereo microphone on october 16th 2006.” It was posted by Freesounder LG.

3. The third is noisier still, more noise than water (MP3, page): “Second recording of the shower sound. This time played and recorded in an old stone house’s bathroom in Girona, Spain. Played through a couple of studio monitors and recorded with a minidisc and a stereo microphone on october 16th 2006.” Posted by bebops. (Bebops and LG may be the same person using different accounts.)

4. The fourth has a lulling quality (MP3, page): “Another recording in the shower-in-shower experiment. The bathroom this time is a very small 2 meters by 2 meters bathroom with a half-size bath tub. The recording of a recording of a recording of a recording of a shower.” It was posted by Bram — that’s Bram de Jong, founder of the Freesound website.

5. The above renditions of the shower are all part of the Freesound community’s “Remix! tree” (freesound.iua.upf.edu). There’s also a rendition, by morendaman, that doesn’t appear in the remix tree (MP3, page): “Part of the ‘shower in the shower’ experiment. The 3rd re-recording. Recorded with an rode nt4.” The morendaman file’s title, which includes the phrase “broken speaker,” may explain the resulting music’s rusty, minimal-techno feel.

Quote of the Week: Artemiev’s Solaris

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From composer Edward Artemiev‘s notebook as he worked on the score to director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, released in 1972:

The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kinds of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identify out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises.

The quote is from the recently published book Edward Artemiev’s Musical Universe (Vagrius), written by Tatiana Yegorova. Yegorova is the head of the Department of Research of Modern Culture at the Moscow Institute of Social and Cultural Studies. The source of the Tarkovsky film was the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, which was later re-adapted by director Steven Soderbergh, with a score by Cliff Martinez.

Jim Nollman’s Music for Cigarettes MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The score to Jim Nollman‘s “Cigarette Piece” is a classic example of instruction-music, a work in which the score is a set of rules, not of musical notes on ruled paper. The piece was performed live on KPFA radio in 1973, and a recording of that show was uploaded to the Other Minds catalog at archive.org earlier this month. The instructions are as follows:

The piece is scored for ten cigarette smokers and each night’s performance lasted as long as it takes each of them to finish one cigarette. In this performance one smoker whirls a noisemaker for the duration that smoke is in his lungs. In addition three other smokers each ring a bell for the length of time each one inhales smoke. Three others performers exhale against suspended wind chimes, while the final three sound a gong at each time they flick an ash.

The sound of breathing, of smoking, might be somewhere in the deep background, but the music as heard in the recording is all dispersed bells, chimes, and an enveloping gong against the semi-mechanical rotations of the noisemaker (MP3). The result could easily be taken for a meditative ritual — which, in some respects, is what smoking is in the first place.

Live Sawako/Chartier/Yamaguchi MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest release on the netlabel called term, a subsidiary of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label, is a live performance recorded back in November of last year, featuring three eminent electronicists: Sawako (computer and voice), Richard Chartier (computer), and Shinjiro Yamaguchi (mixing board, feedback loops, sampling). The concert was part of the festival Atlantic Waves, held at the ICA in London. What opens as a very low-volume-level mix of white noise and disparate, distant voices evolves quickly, and then it does again, and again. The recording is less a single piece than it is a series of very different sound environments that the trio coaxes the listener through. Not that much coaxing is required, given how inviting and rich those environments are; they include heavenly swirls of sound, deep and mysterious rumbling, synthetic aviaries, and lulling bell tones (MP3).

At each new stage, the sound is fairly uniform and concentrated — to the extent that a listener to the MP3 might infer that an individual, rather than a trio, is playing. The transitions between stages occur quite quickly and efficiently. One warning: when the piece is over, the enthusiastic response from the audience kicks in fast and loud. After the applause dies down, you can hear a man say, “I don’t know what it was.”

Missing from this MP3 experience is João Silva’s video improvisation, which accompanied the sound work and for which he received co-billing; Silva also engineered the recording of the performance. The quartet (trio plus video) performed on an evening, November 9, billed as “Grain of Sound Night,” which featured two other ensembles: Terre Thaemlitz, Manuel Mota, Jonas Olsen, and Stilb, as well as Tim Hecker, Safe & Sound, and Morph3u.

More on Sawako at troncolon.com, Chartier at 3particles.com, and Yamaguchi at two-lines.org/asamoya. More on the release at 12k.com/term. And more on the festival at atlanticwaves.org.uk.

Polish Drill’n’Dubstep Mix MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The peaceoff.c8.com website, a music retailer, last year posted its first free download, a mixtape of breakbeat, beatcore, drill’n’bass, dubstep, call-it-what-you-will contemporary hard electronic music, all sewn together by DJ Trippmatic, who’s from Poland. The set, colorfully titled Break Beathoven Got Heroin, is an hour-plus mix of music that was a mix to begin with, highlights including the broken metal of Aaron Spectre‘s “Alien vs. Rodigan” and the timely dub of Krumble‘s “Usual Terror.” There’s also Spectre’s take on a Math Head track, “Bonafidekilla.”

The complete lineup is as follows:

1.  Aaron Spectre -- "Alien vs. Rodigan"
2.  Math Head -- "Bonafidekilla (Aaron Spectre Mix)"
3.  Krumble -- "Gazoline Serious Blast"
4.  Rotator -- "Get So ExXxcited"
5.  Electric Kettle -- "Dogmind Ball"
6.  Krumble -- "Usual Terror"
7.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Punished"
8.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Cease and Desist"
9.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Rungleclaart"
10. Dr. Bastardo -- "Murderation Warrior Sound"
11. Repeater -- "Collision Repair Specialist"
12. Venetian Snares -- "Hand Throw"
13. Cardopusher -- "In the Power of XTC"
14. Maladroit -- "Beware of the D.E.R.O.s"
15. Ronin -- "Pissing on the Gates of Hell"
16. Maladroit -- "Thieves (Remix)"
17. Kos + Raw & Uncut -- "Babilon Life"

What’s particularly bracing about the mix is hearing so much music once considered an onslaught in its own right — the mechanized punch of industrial music, the apocalyptic riffs of heavy metal, the elastic rhythms of jungle, the fluorescent theatrics of house, along with some borrowed pop hits, which were already abrasive in their own treacly way — ripped into little pieces and put back together on computers and turntables, yielding something all the more visceral and powerful. Download the full set, including a cover image (ZIP), and get more info at peaceoff.c8.com. More info on Trippmatic at myspace.com/trippmaticsk.