Month: January 2008

tangents / Eno, Autechre, Chopin …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Brian Eno is advising the British Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg on “youth issues” (bbc.co.uk). … (2) The sign for the Long Now Foundation’s museum and store at the gate of Fort Mason in San Francisco reads: “Open Daily, Weekly, Millennially.” The clock-like sign in the window reads “Will Return in Minutes, Years, Decades, Centuries” (longnow.org). … (3) It’s kind of funny to see an Autechre album release treated with the same sort of story-arc trajectory as a mainstream pop release. Does the announcement of the track list (warprecords.com) really benefit many people? Here, for the record, are those track names: “Altibzz,” “The Plc,” “IO,” “Plyphon,” “Perience,” “SonDEremawe,” “Simmm,” “Paralel Suns,” “Steels,” “Tankakern,” “Rale,” “Fo13,” “fwzE,” “90101-51-1,” “bnc Castl,” “Theswere,” “WNSN,” “chenc9,” “Notwo,” “Outh9X.” The album, titled Quaristice, is due out March 3. The image to the left appears to be the cover to Quaristice. … (4) A new journal-on-CD: Popular Noise (popularnoise.net) — thanks for the info, Rob. This makes me wonder: Was there ever a volume two of the journal-on-CD Relay Project? Volume one, which included Alvin Lucier speaking with Stephen Vitiello, was excellent (therelayproject.com). …

(5) Upcoming redbullmusicacademy.com interviews will include DJ Krush, Arthur Baker, and Bonobo. … (6) The fällt label is doing a special download promotion, with contributions from Tonne, Taylor Deupree and others: fallt.com. … (7) Make a speaker with a plate (engadget.com) and (8) make music with old ink cartridges (engadget.com). … (9) Some more 2007 best-of lists worth checking out: Jacob Arnold of gridface.com and Alan Lockett of igloomag.com. … R.I.P., (10) Beat-era artist Liam O’Gallagher (1917 – 2008; nytimes.com: “In some circles, he is probably best known for sound art that combined performance, chance and technology to create surreal, sometimes funny works like ‘Border Dissolve in Audiospace’ from 1970, a fuzzy, echoing recording in which directory operators are called and asked to look up various numbers”) and (11) sound poet Henri Chopin (1922 – 2008; dbqp.blogspot.com).

Heavy Rotation: Japanese jazz, Fahey-esque guitar, Madlib, Splatter, processed vocals

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is what I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (Les Disques Victo, 2007). While the rest of the set tends toward artful chamber-jazz singed with cacophony, this piece starts with  quiet yet feral cat-like noises from piano and strings and ventures into long tones before rising to a late-in-the-game climax.

(2) Even with the John Fahey-esque guitar runs that constitute such as albums as Sunshrine and O True Believers, the latter spiced with sitar, there was little in introspective guitarist James Blackshaw‘s output to necessarily prepare listeners for the Metal Machine Music-quality industrial drone that is “Clouds Collapse” off his excellent recent The Cloud of the Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007). (A review last week by nytimes.com‘s Jon Pareles, who described “Clouds Collapse” as “the album’s brief textural diversion,” induced me to check it out.)

(3) There’s a sped-up vocal, yeah, on rapper Percee P‘s “Watch Your Step,” produced by Madlib (it’s off Percee’s Perseverance album — both single and album on Stones Throw, 2007), and those tweaked whines certainly are de rigueur these days in hip-hop (and, perhaps someday soon, they’ll be déclassé), but it’s how that unnaturally high-pitched voice alternates in the spotlight with some taut, 1970s-style strings that truly distinguishes the track. The result, with its almost swinglessly strict 4/4 beat, is like some sort of industrial Zen soul music. Instrumental available on the 12″.

(4) The track “Glitchfarben” on last year’s Clear the Club (Rastascan, 2007) by the Splatter 3 + N (that’s the Splatter Trip plus guests, including Dave Slusser and Les Paterson) homes in on an unlikely genre-parallel: the sqwonky up’n’around-the-instrument of out-jazz horn playing and the pixel-level randomized noise of so-called “glitch” electronica. The Splatter Trio, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, consists of the multi-instrumentalists Dave Barrett (saxophones, ocarina), Myles Boisen (doubleneck guitar/bass, keyboard, sonics), and Gino Robair (drums, synths, organ, theremin, rhythm guitar).

(5) Last week’s Disquiet Downstream entries were a particularly rich group, including archival Morton Feldman (disquiet.com) and a preliminary sketch of a Leafcutter John track (disquiet.com), but perhaps the most singular piece was a live performance of Vesna Pisarovic‘s voice reworked by Roberto Garréton (disquiet.com), posted for free download at dnk-amsterdam.com. For the most of the piece, Garréton’s electronics send the voice through an exhausting exercise course of techniques, from waifish chorale to spectral whisps to data chatter (MP3).

site update / Archival Interviews: Autechre, Spring Heel Jack, Photek, Tilliander, Dub Assassin

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Re-uploaded six additional archival interviews I’ve done, dating back to 1995. Here they are in something approximating alphabetical order:

  • Autechre‘s Sean Booth (circa Chiastic Slide and Cichlisuite) on architecture and technology, 1997 (“More Songs About Buildings”)
  • Dub Assassin on learning from Bob Marley’s own deck-hands, 1999 (“Straight Outta Chapel Hill”)
  • Photek on DJing and remixing, 1998 (“Smile for the Camera”)
  • Spring Heel Jack‘s John Coxon and Ashley Wales (circa 68 Million Shades……) on their roots in dub and jazz, 1997 (“Low Sparks”)
  • Skylab‘s Matt Ducasse (circa #1) on working with his international bandmates (Howie B, Toshio Nakanishi, and Kudo) and learning to appreciate exotica, 1995 (“Ground Control”)
  • Andreas Tilliander on the Clicks & Cuts series and electronica’s hip-hop soul, 2002 (“Click It”)

Quote of the Week: God’s Tone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From an obituary of Joybubbles, born Josef Engressia (May 25, 1949 — August 8, 2007), the “original granddaddy phone phreak”:

Someday there will be no need of the dial tone, and for a few of us it will be as if the voice of God has gone dead.

Written by Elizabeth McCracken: “Dial-Phone Phreak” (nytimes.com).

Haunting Screwtape MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is beauty in decay. The beauty in destruction is more complicated, ethically and artistically. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s all-too-timely comments about the spectacle that was the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 9/11 haunted him right up through, and will no doubt long past, his recent obituaries. In “Requiem for a Dead Church,” a musician who goes by the name Screwtape has forged a sonic consideration of a church in Moonee Ponds, Australia, that was destroyed back in 2004. The destruction occurred in an arson attributed to a drunk fan of black metal.

Writes Screwtape, “One can lament the destruction of a building that has community value even if the community is not one’s own. One can also admire the beauty of its present form, forlorn, forgotten, fenced off, charred, blackened and ruined yet still retaining a sense of past dignity.” The sound in “Requiem for a Dead Church” (MP3, mp3.com.au) allies itself with both those interpretations of the church’s fate. The nearly 10-minute track can most easily be imagined to be a rendering of the haunting of the space: phantasmal voices slurring by, the portal to another realm symbolized by ruptured textures that signify liminality, trespass and dread. The sorrow and sense of loss are unmistakable, but one listens just as much for the care taken with, and the resulting beauty of, the sonic transformations.