Who says noise-makers don’t have a sense of humor? Prolific death-ambient figure Carlos Giffoni has posted the first track of his forthcoming album, The Absence of Essence 2×7 (Ann Arbor Records), as a free download. Titled “The Absence,” it’s five and a half minutes of white-noise onslaught, the thick industrial groan of some massive factory set on autopilot in the dark of night (MP3). Several listens are required for one to begin to hear through the noise — to discern the shapes that are buried in there, the way harsh slashings of sound and routinized thudding are just as much a part of Giffoni’s brutal work as is the thick haze of static in which they’re subsumed. And then, at the very end, the piece skips to a close, dropping down to a quiet buzz, providing not only a bit of relief but maybe even a smile. More on Giffoni, who has recorded with Nels Cline, Merzbow, Alan Licht, Lee Ranaldo and others, at carlosgiffoni.com.
Month: September 2008
Live Monolake-Deadbeat Duo MP3
It’s quite likely that Monolake, aka Robert Henke, couldn’t set expectations lower for the latest “Free Download of the Month” at his website, monolake.de/downloads (the track should be up through September). The recording, which features him and Deadbeat, was made live at a Spanish festival this year, and these are among the concerns that Henke details in his recent post:
He and Deadbeat, aka Scott Monteith, were due to perform solo, but the promoter billed them as a duo, so they felt a responsibility to do what the audience had been led to expect.
Despite a preference for performing in the center of the audience, they had no option but to perform on stage
The resulting recording is in mono. Writes Henke, “Nice deep reverbs and dubby echoes … — gone.”
Nonetheless, the two professionals persevered, performing in a tandem Ableton Live setup. And even if it is somewhat diminished to hear all that inherently reverberant music in mono — it’s like looking into the eye of a storm, instead of being surrounded by one –Â the result is exactly the sort of percussive minimal techno you’d expect from these seasoned performers. It’s also almost a full hour long.
Henke posts these free tracks with certain rules, including an admonition against linking directly to the MP3 file, so just proceed to monolake.de/downloads.
Aaron McLeran’s Piano Transformation MP3s
There’s no datestamp to the entry, but up on the website of composer Aaron McLeran are examples of granular synthesis methods that he has applied to a sample of solo piano. The original is a slow, romantic piano piece (MP3). Following that are five digital etudes, each applying a different transformational technique to the original. What’s immediately striking about the five variations is the relative absence of that telltale sign of granular synthesis: those brittle, glitchy, abrasive micro-slices of sound that often seem like the sample has been shredded to pieces by some landmine, with virtually no resmblance to the source material.
Quite the contrary here — for example, version three (MP3) retains the shape of the unmediated version, but it sounds more like a more shrill rendition, as if played on some sort of alien glass harmonica. Likewise version five (MP3), which, again, follows the contours of the original, though the melody is now rougher, as if a DJ were muting it heavily and rapidly excising segments with a volume knob.
The research is evidence of work McLeran is doing at the Media Arts and Technology graduate program at UC Santa Barbara, with professor Curtis Roads and with Bob Sturm, a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering. More information and the complete list of files at mat.ucsb.edu/~amcleran.
According to the MAT website, mat.ucsb.edu, McLeran, Roads, and Sturm, working with another professor, John Shynk, were recently recognized with a Best Paper award for work on “atomic decompositions” at the 2008 International Computer Music Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Maximalist Ambient Cello MP3
The cello-tronic rituals of reverberation that are the stuff, the modus operandi, the trademark of Ted Laderas‘s OO-Ray get a thorough workout on his maximalist “If We Aren’t Blind” (MP3). It’s a sample cut off a forthcoming album, reportedly titled Magnifcations, and the result is less drone-like than it might at first appear to be. For all its extended tones, it really sways, if slowly, back and forth, with gently layered swaths of sound. What’s especially remarkable about the piece is how far a little vibrato, heard throughout, can go — how the technique adds density to simple wave forms. As mediated by Laderas’s bank of technology, the lone cello takes on a kind serene majesty — sustained, rich, formidable. More info at Laderas’s website, 15people.net, and at that of the releasing netlabel, luvsound.org, where the MP3 recently appeared as a “single of the week.”
Tandem Drone MP3 from Jerman and Menard
For close to 50 minutes, the Zen-cast tandem drone session “The Now of Sound” by Jeph Jerman and Tanner Menard puts the world on hold (MP3). The sound is that of some threadbare sine wave casting its shadow on a blank horizon. To the extent that it has any sonic substance at all is only hinted at toward the end when, for an admirably extended period, it comes to a very slow face; the result not only delays the piece’s close, but also emphasizes just how voluminous, in fact, the preceding seeming quietude had been. Kudos to the record label, Archaic Horizons, for informatively summarizing the duo’s recording process:
‘The Now of Sound’ was created from a synthesis of synthetic bells, written in Supercollider by Tanner, and of desert recordings from Jeph. This amalgamation was then projected with homemade equipment by Jeph, onto the resonant portion of a gong. The resulting frequencies were recorded with a contact microphone, then post processed with basic computer effects.
More details at archaichorizon.com. More on Jerman at jerman.littleenjoyer.com. More on Menard at his aptly named myspace.com/barelyaudible.