Month: March 2008

Tim Dwyer/Off Land’s Guitar-Infused MP3 Album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

After several listens through the eight tracks on Encounter Point by Off Land (aka Tim Dwyer), set your MP3 player to a minute or so prior to the end of the album’s final track. There will have been several listens already, because this mix of quiet soundscapes and occasional bits of guitar and spoken soundbites is a carefully constructed collection that invites repetition. For example, the earlier “Trail” opens like a duet for piano and distant helicopter, before invoking a nodding little beat and some water-drop percussives (MP3). And “Colloquy” uses tantalizingly plucked strings to invoke a kind of pixel plectrum (MP3), while on “Evident” the more traditional strumming brings to mind Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd (MP3).

That final track is titled “Places” and if you do opt to jump in midway, you’ll be surprised as the background percussion and swelling orchestration rolls through like the score to some summer blockbuster — moments earlier, weren’t piano keys playing against singsong tones? The inherent surprise is evidence of Dwyer’s talent: For all the seeming ease of Encounter Point, it’s actually a fairly tumultuous affair — there’s a lot lurking beneath its sedate surface.

Get the full set at the netlabel restingbell.net.

Oliver diCicco’s Sirens Sound Sculpture (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

An installation by Oliver diCicco, titled Sirens, filled the large hall at the gallery and performance space SomArts (somarts.org) in San Francisco from January 10 through February 14 of this year. I missed the opening, but was fortunate to be almost entirely alone when I stopped by a few days later. Sirens consists of 11 free-standing, drone-emitting sculptures. Their hemispheric shape brings to mind the horns of some mechanical beast, while their purpose suggests oversized tuning forks, and they move with the lilt of a human-proportioned metronome. When turned on, they filled the room with rolling, gently overlapping layers of long, held tones.

In diCicco’s telling, the work was inspired by the ocean — the title comes from the Sirens of mythology, the motion from the waves. An artist’s brief statement, pinned to one wall, includes the following excerpt from the Wallace Stevens poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”:

An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine
Of ocean

The following images show from afar how Sirens was situated in the SomArts space:

And these two show, close up, some of the construction. The top image is the device that emits the tones, while the bottom is the counterweight system:

For the first time ever, I used the movie option on my camera to capture some video, complete with sound. For some reason I can’t figure out how to get this embedded youtube.com video to center horizontally in this post, but that probably won’t bother anyone but me: Continue reading “Oliver diCicco’s Sirens Sound Sculpture (San Francisco)”

Quote of the Week: Assayas & Eno

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis on Boarding Gate, the new film from director Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, Clean, Paris Je T’aime):

I was again struck by how he uses music to amplify reality, almost as if he were inviting you to listen to the songs playing in other people’s heads. His use of Brian Eno here is particularly potent. Mr. Eno creates music that drifts around you, enveloping you in moods and waves of feeling, which is precisely what Mr. Assayas does as a filmmaker. Mr. Eno has said that for him making popular music is about “creating new, imaginary worlds and inviting people to join them,”a sentiment that Mr. Assayas no doubt understands.

Read the full review at nytimes.com.

Glistening MP3 EP by Nodepet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The four tracks on Decay by Nodepet sound like the work of some otherworldly glass harmonica, a massive structure that expands to fill whatever room you choose to play the album in. For each track, the primary sound is a glistening but substantive shimmer that has no attack and, true to the title, enormous decay.

Compositionally, the pieces are distinguished not only by the lovely sound of those circumference-riding tones, but by the occasional silences that Nodepet, born Olliver Wichmann, uses to punctuate the drama. “My Enemy Insight” (MP3) contains some of the more threatening additional sounds, compressed flurries of noise that suggest things moving in the dark. “Behind the Mask” (MP3) inserts some additional textures and lurking noise. Aside from a watery undercurrent, “Wall of Fear” (MP3) uses higher pitches than does the rest of the album, which induces some unease, despite the beauty of the tones themselves. And “Last Possible Lie” (MP3), on which the set closes, is Decay‘s quietest and least foreboding entry.

Get additional details at the releasing netlabel, petcord.com. More info on Nodepet/Wichmann, who’s based in Germany, at his website, nodepet.com.

“Szabad” as in Netlabel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The netlabel is among the purest expressions of the Internet’s ability to function as a frictionless environment for art and culture. Netlabels distribute music freely, with the enthusiastic support of the musicians they promote, and while most netlabels focus on a fairly well-defined realm of music, that music is generally defined aesthetically first, rather than geographically or economically. And because of the free model, the music on netlabels rarely evidences any effort to take commercial matters into consideration. These organizations creatively channel the energy of individuals who may never meet in person, but for whom the collective endeavor is a compelling opportunity.

Back in 2006, I gathered the heads of three leading netlabels to discuss what makes netlabels tick — and, in the case of their electronica-leaning labels, what makes them whir, crunch and drone. True to the netlabel culture, we had our conversation online, and it was published as “Free as in Netlabel” on June 17, 2006 (disquiet.com).

Yesterday, one of the participants, András Hargitai of Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod), out of Budapest, Hungary, informed me that the conversation has now been fully translated into Hungarian. That’s no small accomplishment, as the original article, even after being edited down from the raw conversation transcript, clocks in at over 11,000 words. The other participants in the discussion were Nathan Larson of Dark Winter (darkwinter.com), from Minnetonka, Minnesota, and Pedro Leitao of Test Tube (monocromatica.com/netlabel), from Lisbon, Portugal. If you can read Hungarian, there’s more information on the translation at prae.hu, and the article is available for download (PDF).