Month: January 2008

Slo-mo Steam Whistle MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are certain real-world references that often serve as descriptors when it comes to electronically mediated music. There’s the robotic cycling of the cicada, the semi-sentient hum of an aging refrigerator, the proto-minimal-techno rumble of the subway, the piercing cry of the tea kettle.

As the poster at santafesound.blogspot.com reminds us, those overly familiar sounds mask hidden and mysterious depth. He’s taken a recording of a tea kettle as it reaches the boiling point, for instance, and slowed it to one quarter its original speed. The result is an at times harrowing, and at times warm, series of noises and undulating drones, the complexity of which suggest that more than a single sound source is involved (MP3).

In fact, a car does reportedly pass by at one point, adding “a cool little something,” as the poster puts it. But the core of the 12-minute track is just water being brought to a boil. As a result of his little experiment in process-music, he’s made us slow down and smell the coffee — or, more to the point, he’s slowed down the tea kettle and made us listen.

This same website was the origin of the dying Buddha Machine of last December (disquiet.com).

Archival Gamer-Music MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great netlabel Monotonik (mono211.com) closed out 2007 not with another in its ongoing free new electronic releases — but with a tasty archival entry. Back in 2000, on his own Systorm Technologies label, Aaron Rutledge released an EP titled Musical Endeavor under the name Pliant. According to the recent Monotonik entry, the EP was intended to be the sound of a fictional video game, an intention supported by such track names as the vigorously bleepy “Title” (MP3), the sedately synthy “Options” (MP3), and the vaguely porn-score-ish “Boss” (MP3), not to mention “Credit” (MP3), which sounds like several arcade faves being played side by side. And those are just four of the nine tracks. What’s interesting, in retrospect, is that though Pliant’s tracks suggest video-game background scores, they aren’t stuck in the 8-bit mimicry or nostalgia that fuels so much of today’s retro-gamer music.

More info on the release at mono211.com. The old systorm.com URL now redirects to Rutledge’s own aaronrutledge.com.

Taylor Deupree “Auld Lang Syne”-wave MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just as 2007 was quickly coming to a close, Taylor Deupree posted a quiet, two-minute paean to time that was almost immediately past. He explained his process on his website, 12kblog.wordpress.com, as follows:

today, on the last day of 2007, i decided to spend no more than one hour creating a short piece of music, as a final farewell to the year. the piece, “untitled_1231″ was created with a small wooden xylophone, given to me as a christmas present from Keiichi Sugimoto (Fourcolor) and Sanae Yamasaki (Moskitoo), a small tone bell, and a single synthesizer patch. it was created and recorded live in about 15 minutes and i spent another 40 minutes or so on the mixing and production. it was a spontaneous piece, a simple thought, dedicated to a close friend of mine whose very difficult 2007 will be a very positive 2008”¦

The ticking clock and other creative constraints yielded a tender gesture of a recording: a slight sound, not unlike the simplest of glass-harmonica maneuvers, milked for all its exquisite detail (MP3).

The Playlist as a Literary Genre

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Before it recedes too far into my memory, a quick note about a panel discussion I attended last month. On December 11, 2007, at the San Francisco offices of the software development company behind Songbird (songbirdnest.com), a quartet of seasoned technologists involved in media web development talked about “portable playlists.” The four were Tantek Çelik (tantek.com; former Chief Technologist of technorati.com), Tom Conrad (tomconrad.net; CTO of pandora.com), Lucas Gonze (gonze.com; a director at music.yahoo.com and co-creator of ccmixter.org), and Scott Kveton (kveton.com; Open Technology Lead at mystrands.com). The moderator was Chris Messina (factoryjoe.com).

Gonze (pictured above) gave a pre-panel talk during which he provided an overview of portable playlists, which is to say — in my own super-uninformed, less than syntactically rigorous language — groupings of songs in list form that can be shared. Back in 2003, Gonze produced a detailed survey of existing playlist formats, from the ubiquitous M3U to the iTunes Library’s proprietary system, some 16 in all (it’s still online at gonze.com). Gonze joined Yahoo! when that company absorbed his webjay.com service, a pioneering playlist-sharing website that has since closed down; the XSPF playlist format was developed hand-in-hand with webjay.com.

The field of playlist formats has expanded further since 2003. Among them is hAudio, Çelik’s explanation of which was a highlight of the evening (more on hAudio at microformats.org) — as was his impassioned critique of Flash-intensive websites; subsequent to the panel he created a webpage summarizing his notes from the evening (at microformats.org). Kveton also blogged after the panel, following up on some thoughts he felt he hadn’t explored fully during the discussion (kveton.com).

There was a lot of talk about web standards, about non-musical data that can be associated with music files (such as year of release, genre, author, performer, etc.), and about how the growth of the playlist as a “literary genre,” so to speak, is dependent on the general public taking more interest in sharing playlists.

What I came away with most was thinking about music in context. Much of what I write about is music as a standalone object, a song or album or performance as some independent node of critical, aesthetic scrutiny. What context or perspective I try to provide is generally restricted to the given musician’s previous work, and to work associated with the music in question, whether related by genre, geography, record label, era, instrumentation, what have you. That’s all helpful, certainly, but it doesn’t allow for how musical context can itself provide a kind of commentary — the sort of gloss, for example, that a DJ provides.

Along those lines, I’ve been thinking for some time about supplementing the Disquiet Downstream MP3 recommendations with something along the lines of a playlist, a kind of listening station or set of listening stations of grouped musical content — for example, the five most recent Downstreams, or a set of atmospheric Downstreams, or beat-oriented Downstreams, or Downstreams that have in common some particular source material (acoustic guitar, piano, voice, field recordings) or time period (WWII, 1960s). Anyhow, we’ll see what comes of that, but the panel discussion strengthened my interest in this idea.

More on the December 11 discussion at songbirdnest.com. The event was filmed, so perhaps it will appear online in the future. A separate interview that was done with Gonze coincident with the panel discussion has been posted, in video form, at the website openmediaweb.org, which co-sponsored the event with Songbird. The image of Gonze above is a still from that interview, in which he talks about the nature of “open” media, the importance of having a URL for any media posted to the web (something closely related to Çelik’s critique of Flash), and other related subjects.

By the way, the credits to that video introduced me to something I wasn’t aware of previously. The theme music is credited to Moby, and below his name is listed the URL mobygratis.com. True to the “open media” model, Moby apparently provides a variety of backing tracks for, as his site states, “independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.”

Tim Coster Live Processing MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

New Zealand’s Tim Coster is a musician, label owner, and concert promoter whose own creative output often focuses on the use of field recordings. There’s a nearly 20-minute live performance by him available at archive.org. Titled “three parts of the night, second try,” it was originally recorded in 2005 — the “second try” refers to Coster having edited it last year for this free release. The materials involved include “laptops, microphones, walkman, glockenspiel, ipod” and Coster describes it, aptly, as an “intimate journey into the evanescent sounds of live processed electroacoustic textures, a subtle organisation of manipulations and loops.” The result slowly makes its way from glistening whirls to a sing-songy downtempo creak to warm lull, those being the three parts mentioned in the title (MP3). The latter third strongly suggests the break of dawn. More on Coster at myspace.com/timcoster.