Month: May 2008

21-Year-Old Henri Chopin 7″ MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Courtesy of musician Steve Roden‘s blog, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, a five-minute recording of Henri Chopin, the pioneering poet who passed away earlier this year. Roden has ripped to MP3 format the 7″ that accompanied the 1987 Chopin catalog published by Galerie J&J Donguy.

Roden describes the track: “made with mouth and tape, [it] resembles very much a typewriter’s frenetic/rhythmic activity. it’s a beautiful rhythmic stuttering presence that mimics the visual works.” Roden also notes that “if you listen quietly it sounds a bit like trickling water” — and, for that matter, like a pneumatic drill on concrete (MP3). Meet the late Henri Chopin, avant-garde poet and France’s premiere human beatboxer.

Image of the Week: Tales of Hofmann

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the face — and, more to the point, those are the eyes — of Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who first synthesized LSD.

Hofmann passed away this past Monday, April 28, at the age of 102. According to the Telegraph obituary (telegraph.co.uk), which the above photo accompanied, he was “the first person in the world to experience a full-blown ‘acid trip.'” That would have been on April 19, 1943. (The photo, undated, is credited to the European Pressphoto Agency.)

Quote of the Week: Gann’s Horoscope

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the sort of sentence that Kyle Gann says he used to fantasize inserting into his music criticism:

Don’t bother attending Nic Collins’s Roulette concert this Friday, Mercury is retrograding over his midheaven, and it’s a sure bet his equipment will malfunction.

The context of the quote is that Gann, the critic and composer, recently completed work on his longest composition, The Planets. “It’s just over 70 minutes long,” he writes on his blog, artsjournal.com/postclassic, “a 346-page score, in ten movements, my own personal Turangalila.” In the post he explains his long fascination with astrology: “I never defend astrology, nor proselytize for it, nor say I ‘believe’ in it. I have no idea why astrological transits sometimes seem startlingly relevant, but, like the I Ching, it is an ancient worldview containing a wealth of psychological insight that greatly widened my understanding of human behavior.” Gann traces his interest in the I Ching back to reading John Cage as a teenager. (And OK, this isn’t quite the quote of the week — it’s dated April 20.)

Nine Industrial Drone MP3s from Quiet Covenant

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Nine extended industrial drones comprise the album Underneath, credited to Quiet Covenant and made available for free download courtesy of the estimable netlabel Dark Winter. Each track is a decaying sine wave, a dreary call signal, a wavering thing that seems well on its way toward dying.

The sound is mournful, sorrowful, not dark so much as dim. None of the individual tracks have anything to distinguish them, which is sort of the point; these are generic noises, the sort of things we ignore, the sort of sounds through which we hear the world. Here, undisturbed by the world, the sounds are still distant, out of reach, ambiguous to the point of transparency.

However, as a group they work as a fascinating, even enticing, study in minute contrasts — like how relative silences interrupt the otherwise resolute, if wan, “Within” (MP3), and how the standard spectrum of white noise thickens noticeably for “Upon” (MP3). More info at darkwinter.com.