“Le Menu Gastrophonique” is a series of podcasts recorded in and about kitchens. The concern of “Gastrophonique” is, according to its recordists, “the sounds of food, digestion, excretion.” Produced by Coraline Janvier, there have been 10 episodes thus far, though only the first two appear to have popped up on the Resonance FM RSS feed (more info at papier.brouillon.free.fr). The first had all the clanking and frying of a visit to an Indian market, followed by the making of pakoras (MP3), and the second celebrates the random noises of the kitchen, as if — notes the posting — concrete legend Pierre Schaeffer were a cook (MP3).
Month: October 2008
Kalte MP3 Album on Stasisfield
The name Kalte is utilized by two Toronto-based musicians, Deane Hughes and Rik MacLean, who traffic in dramatic electronic sounds. Their album The Lanthanide Series, from the excellent Stasisfield netlabel, collects five instrumental tracks that are quite distinct from each other, including the opening drone of “Shallow Approach” (MP3) and the swaying noise of “Bremsstrahlung” (MP3). The pieces each have an admirably through-composed feeling, despite their evident construction from loop-based components. The result is a kind of compositional circularity, in which materials surface on a kind of schedule, even if the work as a whole has the substance of something that grows and changes over time. Get the full set at stasisfield.com.
Monolake v. CERN MP3
To celebrate the newly launched Large Hadron Collider — i.e., the massive scientific experiment in subatomic particles that gained notoriety as some began to fear its activity might lead to the end of the world — minimal techno maven Monolake (aka Robert Henke) has released a track for free download.
Monolake has taken his song “Cern” (which first appeared in two slightly different forms in 2003, on the single Cern White II and the album Momentum) and mixed in snippets of interviews with scientists from the CERN website (among them Mike Lamont, Verena Kain, Lucio Rossi, Laurette Ponce, Andrej Siemko, and Lyn Evans).
The result is a complete transformation of both sets of source materials. The “Cern” music — a rising tide of beat-driven activity — lends drama to the voices, and the voices lend a sense of narrative to the music.
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. This one should be up for the full month of October. (Photo, above, by Valerio Mezzanotti for nytimes.com.)
Image of the Week: Fortescue and LaBianca’s Horn
The following image is a photograph of “Sounding,” a sculpture that is the result of a collaboration between Donald Fortescue (who heads the furniture design program at the California College of the Arts) and artist Lawrence LaBianca.
It’s part of the “Bay Area Now 5” exhibit, currently running through November 16 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The image accompanied an October 1 article by Zahid Sardar in the San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com); the piece stated, “Wire, pebbles and even live sea organisms are employed to make this nostalgic cabriolet-legged, gramophone-like polycarbonate whaling horn ‘speak’ to us.” More information on the exhibit at ban5.org and ybca.org.
Quote of the Week: Matmos, Post-Experimentation
From an excellent interview, dated October 1, by Molly Sheridan with the duo Matmos, aka M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel:
MCS: What we do is not experimental music in the sense of a lot of people’s work where it’s, “We did the experiment; these are the results.” We want to make something that’s listenable music.
DD: And to us that’s pop music. Pop music and noise texture might be the formula for what we’re doing, in that we don’t have any squeamishness about atonality and obnoxious, disgusting, or unpleasant texture, but we have the kind of ears that like bass lines and snare parts and high hat rhythms and the sort of architecture of pop. I want both.
Read the full piece at newmusicbox.org.