The latest podcast from the Touch label is a brilliantly detailed documentary recording by Tom Lawrence, who’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dublin City University. Titled “Donadea Forest,” after the Irish location where the sounds were recorded, it captures, in a languorous half hour, bird calls, breezes, and the rain amid the trees.
One especially appealing segment introduces more traditional musical elements into what is otherwise a collection of field recordings. This is accomplished by working in chimes at play in the forest. Also complicating that portion of the overall piece is the presence of traffic noise — it’s a smart moment, as humankind makes its presence heard simultaneously as tone and noise, as organized musical sound and unintended aural presence.
To assist in the listening process, Lawrence has helpfully provided a time-code guide to the work’s five constituent parts:
00:00-04:27 Castle Crow’s Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am)
04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics)
10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding)
14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and the ‘carbon chorus’ [surrounding motorways]).
20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)
The set of recordings was made between December 2007 and May 2008, and was just released on Touch’s Touch Radio series. The entire piece is available for download: M4A. More information at touchradio.org.uk. And more on Lawrence at his website, tom-lawrence.net.
Contemporary r&b has given a bad name to melisma. Once upon a time, that mode of moving a single vowel around the octave and back was an emotive rhetorical tool in popular music. These days it’s just sung and otherwise employed by tools, showy vocalists and instrumentalists whose emphasis on their own virtuosic prowess has the unintended effect of leaving listeners doubting their sensitivity. So, leave it to drones, of all things, to rejuvenate the melisma. Now, much drone music is more akin to static, an investigation of random data and texture. But there’s a growing field of drone-like music that has a melodic soul.
There’s a fairly solid new compilation out of purposefully instrumental beat-music, mostly hip-hop and dance but some verging into other areas, from lounge to flat out electronic. None of it is waiting around for someone to lay down a vocal; it’s all beats for beats’s sake. The set’s titled Beat Dimensions Vol. 1 and was compiled by Cinnaman and Jay Scarlett, with contributions from a host of drum-machine mavens. Cinnaman and Scarlett call the stuff “beatstrumentals”; on this website, it’s all categorized as “