Right on schedule, another month yields another free track from Monalake, aka Robert Henke. “Index I” was first a 12″ and later appeared on Hong Kong, the debut Monolake album, back when the act was a duo, before Henke’s partner, Gerhard Behles, left in order to start up the audio-software company that became Ableton Live. Every month, Henke posts a free download on his website, monolake.de, and for June it’s a cleaned up edit of “Index I,” which is mostly of interest for how, over time, it has come to sound considerably less minimal. Monolake were among the originators of minimal techno, a music that removed the gloss from house and left just the pulsing infrastructure — their early works were the audio equivalent of The Lonely Crowd, picturing a dance space as a zone of interpersonal desolation. Per the website’s rules, there’s no direct link in this post to the MP3; just head to the URL link above to locate the file.
Month: June 2008
Manipulated Field Recording MP3s from Ascsoms
Solo albums by pop musicians are gauged by their guest stars. Solo albums by field-recording artists are gauged by their source material. On Realms, newly available for free download from the estimable wanderingear.com netlabel, those source materials include the sounds of boat masts, voice, rain, amplified room ambience, fireworks, a refrigerator, flies, birds, street noise, a cat, a fan heater, and a harmonica. Realms is credited to the London-based Adam J Wimbush (aka Ascsoms).
After Ascsoms’s processing, those sampled sounds aren’t always recognizable. “Realm D (In Loquaciousness Lay Insanity)” seems like it’s infested with small buzzing lifeforms, but it’s not the one with the fly sounds (MP3). Birds are vaguely discernible on “Realm C (The Permeated Anomaly)” as they chirp away as if in some infested, squalor aviary, where the place is so on the fritz that the automated announcements have degraded (MP3).
The real standout on the four-track set is the lead piece, “Realm A (Rococo),” which is the one that includes rain and boat masts and, perhaps explaining its achievement in ambiguity, what’s described succinctly as “unidentified field recording.” About halfway through a track marked by richly layered noise and churning rhythms, the majority of the sound suddenly drops out and about all that’s left is this cycling beat, like a rusty old machine clanking away in some back room while thunder is heard overhead (MP3). The moment is stark, and it focuses the ear on the inner workings of Ascsoms’s approach to manipulating individual sonic objects.
Get the full set at wanderingear.com. More on Wimbush/Ascsoms at myspace.com/ascsoms.
Live Ralph Steinbrüchel MP3
For 40 minutes, a series of bell-like tones cycle through. They’re heard as a simple riff that’s played out in minutely differing permutations, against a slowly transforming backing track. The tones are seemingly artificial, in that they don’t truly resemble actual bells, but they’re fairly organic, in that their textures bleed into the background in a natural manner and their sonic envelopes involve a comfortable give and sway. The track in question (MP3) is a live recording, made this past May 10, by Ralph Steinbrüchel, performing material from his album Basis, which was built from layers not of bells but of modified recordings of guitar and piano. Basis was released on the label Room 40 (room40.org). The MP3 was recorded at the Offf Festival in Lisbon (offf.ws). More on the recording at cronicaelectronica.org and on Steinbrüchel at synchron.ch. (Thanks to the website of the label 12k, 12kblog.wordpress.com, for the initial reference to this recording. The 12k associated label Line, 12k.com/line, released Steinbrüchel’s album Stage in 2006.)
Asynchronously Improvised MP3s
The album All Are Welcome by Male comes with a limited amount of explanatory material, but alongside the names of the participants are one simple request and two declarative sentences.
First the request: “Please listen to as loud as possible.” While All Are Welcome ranges from meditative drones to contemplative guitar work to minimalist patterns, it is intended to serve not as background but as a richly detailed aural foreground into which listeners situate themselves. This is true of all four tracks, such as the John Fahey-esque “Dark Advances” (MP3), in which guitar lines slowly repeat atop a foundation of household field recordings. “I’ll Be Standing Soon” (MP3) opens with moody tones before layering in industrial noises and a sequence of beautiful horn playing that nods to Miles Davis, Jon Hassell, Ben Neill and Nils Petter Molvær, but that is more willfully stunted and austere than anything those gentlemen have recorded. The key word in the previous sentence is “layering,” but more on that in a moment.
As for the declarative sentences that accompany the album, they contain a seeming conflict: “All Are Welcome was recorded in one take, with each individual musician adding to the previous layer. There is no overdubbing on this record.” In fact, not only is there overdubbing on All Are Welcome, it is an exercise in overdubbing — but only in the most literal sense. The creation of the album was inventively collaborative, with the duo of Male (Jonathan Krohn and Benjamin Mjolsness) setting down a basic track, onto which a series of musicians individually recorded their own layer, one at a time. Think of it as asynchronous improvisation, the full effect of which is best experienced in the joyous cacophony of “Wrangler for Higher” (MP3), an oceanic noise that Glenn Branca or Michael Gordon might have dreamed up. (Out of curiosity, I corresponded with Male’s Krohn and confirmed that what’s really meant by the “no overdubbing” statement is that there were no post-production edits imposed on the live takes.)
The guest participants include Todd Mattei (guitar), Nick Butcher (tape), Mike Reed (percussion), Steven Hess (percussion), Josh Berman (that’s his cornet on “I’ll Be Standing Soon”) and Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), as well as Bob Weston (Shellac, Mission of Burma), who mastered the project; Jeremy Lemos handled recording duties. All Are Welcome is available on vinyl and as a free download. The free download (at xrkx.net/male) also includes the vibes-enriched song “Whip” (MP3).
Image of the Week: Byrne’s Building
One of several images by photographer Ozier Muhammad accompanying the New York Times story on Friday, May 30, about David Byrne‘s project “Playing the Building,” in which an old pump organ has been wired to turn the internal space of a massive Lower Manhattan structure, the Great Hall of the 99-year-old Battery Maritime Building, into a musical instrument:
The caption in the paper (nytimes.com) reads, “Solenoids attached to columns produce clacks and clanks.”