The first server of hyperreal.org, the rave and electronic-music resource that is approaching its 15th anniversary. The X-Files-like aura of the photo seems appropriate to the home of, among other things, such essential email lists as IDM and microsound (hyperreal.org/lists).
More on the history of the online hub at hyperreal.org. Photo originally uploaded to flickr.com on July 6. (Thanks for the tip, Matt.)
David Byrne is exhibiting his singing robot Julio at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, as part of the show “Machines and Souls: Digital Art” (or “Máquinas y Almas”). Pondering the show’s title, he says:
I suspect that many of the show’s participants might disagree with this implied duality since much of the work here demonstrates a symbiotic relationship between artist and machine
Julio is a collaboration between Byrne and robotist David Hanson. Also featured in the show are Antoni Abad, Daniel Canogar, Vuk Cosic, Evru / Zush, Harun Farocki, Paul Friedlander, Pierre Huyghe, Theo Jansen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Sachiko Kodama, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chico MacMurtrie, John Maeda, Antoni Muntadas, Daniel Rozin, and Ben Rubin & Mark Hansen.
Read the full entry at journal.davidbyrne.com (in which, as a side note, he reflects on Justin Green’s classic comic Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary), and learn more about his and Hanson’s Julio at davidbyrne.com/art. More on Hanson at hansonrobotics.com. Visit the website of the museum, which also happens to be presenting Nam June Paik’s A Tribute to John Cage (1973-1976), at museoreinasofia.es.
It’s long been a central conceit of the music and art of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) that when a human utterance is impacted by the envelope of a thick, electronically produced soundscape, the result isn’t a suffocation of the human element but, in fact, clarifying insight into the subsumed source material — insight that might not have been gained had that same material been left on its own.
This is especially the case in the work he’s done in which he purloins conversations from the air (usually courtesy of the device from which Rimbaud takes his Scanner moniker, though he’s also done interview-based research and employed archival recordings), and drapes them in synthesized, occasionally danceable scores that lend drama and backstory.
So it’s no surprise that Scanner takes so well to The Sinking of the Titanic, by British composer Gavin Bryars, as evidenced by a free download of a 2007 performance available on Scanner’s website (MP3, scannerdot.com). Originally released on Brian Eno’s appropriately named Obscure record label in the mid-1970s, Bryars’s Titanic is slowly becoming part of the 21st-century standard repertoire. Bryars’s conceit for Titanic is that the band played on as the ship famously went down, and he set up a musical circumstance in which the hymn they might have played is heard amid sounds that suggest submergence. There’s none of the thrashing one associates with a shipwreck — instead it’s a triumph of maudlin. This is not James Cameron’s vision of disaster; sometimes a whimper carries a lot more emotional heft than a bang.
Scanner’s version was performed in Philadelphia in February 2007, and it is a more dynamic rendition than what Bryars originally committed to disc (and than the version he recently released, on the Touch label, with turntablist Philip Jeck and the ensemble Alter Ego). It opens with creaky boards, a literalist salvo that soon yields to artfully muddied string playing (by violinist Todd Reynolds) that closely recalls the original. But then come martial percussion and strong playing by Reynolds that are more robust than any version of Titanic I’ve heard before. Putting the performance squarely in Scanner’s mode, there’s also audio documentation of a Titanic-disaster survivor, whose words put this more arguably more more hopeful version in perspective: “I believe instead of being submerged by the Titanic, I might say I’ve been floated by the Titanic.”
The forums at cratekings.com continue to be a great place to dig for excellent electronic music in the form of beat-heavy, sample-based solo work. Recent faves include Grimeshine‘s “Hangover,” with its old-soul strings, punchy funk touches, vocals reduced to moany vowels, and a hot little minimalist piano riff (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com). More on the Seattle, Washington-based producer at myspace.com/vinylfreeway.
Also worth a listen, Dyllemma‘s “New York Shit,” in which the vinyl surface noise lends some serious grit to a florid piano line and a soul-vocal snippet that’s truncated just in time to match the cut’s title (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com) — and, also by Dyllemma, the extended (three and a half minutes, which by Crate Kings standards is equivalent to a concept album) “Melon Chollie Strings,” which lays some scratchy violin-bowing over a mid-tempo groove and one majorly psychedelic break (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com).
If the above direct MP3 links don’t function, just go to the zshare.net service. The cratekings.com links go to where the artist first posted the work for public critique.
Fans of techno, and even those simply intrigued by its android beats and cool emotional palette, needn’t fear repeating history due to any absence of learning. Monolake (aka Robert Henke), one of the founders of techno’s most remote schools — the willfully barren zone known as minimal techno — has been posting ancient artifacts for free download at his website, monolake.de. Well, ancient by popular-music standards. The latest such artifact, “Index II,” is a revised mix of “Index,” a 12″ he released in the Pleistocene era of 1996. As Henke says in his brief write-up, “If you have no turntable, never mind, here it comes via the magic internet.”
“Index 2” has the slowly fading drum patterns and the caffeinated, pixelated percussion that characterized his more danceable efforts; what distinguishes the nearly 12-minute track from other (un-minimal) techno is the relative absence of frippery: no diva-esque vocal, no flesh on the bone, no billowy synths. Just beats.
Per the Monolake 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. Monolake posts a new free file each month, so grab this one before the calendar bumps us to August.
