Month: December 2008

Quote of the Week: Sonic Leverage

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Dialog from “The Homecoming Job,” the second episode of Leverage, a new TV series on the TNT network about a group of thieves who moonlight as vigilantes, under the tutelage of a former insurance executive played by Timothy Hutton.

In this scene, one of the thieves, Eliot, a seasoned fighter (who may be based, in part, on the character Midnighter from the comic book series The Authority), is analyzing video footage of a shoot-out at a U.S. military base in Iraq:

    Eliot: Five point five six NATO rounds, mixed in with some nine mils from the submachine guns. Insurgents woulda used AK-47s with 7.62 ammo. Has more of a … crack. …

    Parker: You ID’d the weapons from the gunshot sound?

    Eliot: It has a very distinctive sound.

Parker is another of the thieves. The show is sort of like The A-Team meets Ocean’s Eleven, the latter of which is repeatedly referenced, not just with stylized shots of missions in progress, but also thanks to a score that riffs heavily on David Holmes’s music for the Steven Soderbergh-directed movie franchise.

More on Leverage at leveragehq.com and tnt.tv.

Electroplankton-Derived MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yesterday, via his twitter.com account, Merleon Cedraeon announced the latest in his ongoing series of electronic music constructed thanks to the Nintendo DS audiogame cartridge Electroplankton.

Titled “NepTune,” the track has the familiar, sing-song feel inherent in the great DS software (designed by Toshio Iwai, the same Japanese media artist behind the Tenori-On), mixing slightly askew rhythms with soothing, held tones. (There is no direct link available to the MP3, so just proceed via the Twitter link listed above.)

More on Cedraeon at f3music.com/78. Cedraeon just last weekend was mentioned in this site’s “Quote of the Week” (disquiet.com).

Percussion-Heavy Techno MP3s from the Fold

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tones and voices, dance-club-ready background music and street-clearing sirens — all that and more resonate throughout the Fold‘s self-titled, 10-track collection from the Panospria netlabel. But what makes it worth the download (and at 140-plus MB, it’s no meager file) is specifically the percussion — the cash-register chucka-chucka that bounds beneath the electric drills and mechanical dread of “They Said September” (MP3), the charged static that shoots amid the echo chamber that is “A Rainy Exit” (MP3), the broken technology that lumbers throughout “Rough Malk Collapse” (MP3), and, foremost, the hard patterning that binds the opening track, “Jackie’s Exam” (MP3). Perhaps explaining the quality of the sound, the credit for mastering goes to none other thn Andreas Tilliander. Get the full set at archive.org or notype.com.

Digging for Truffles … and Sound

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Several recent Disquiet Downstream entries have focused on the sound of food, sourced from the ongoing podcast series Le Menu Gastrophonique. That audio periodical approaches the sonic properties of comestibles from various angles, including kitchen activities (disquiet.com), the digestive system (disquiet.com), and outright synesthesia (disquiet.com).

But Gastrophonique isn’t alone in this edible-sound territory. Another podcast series, Touch Radio (a spin-off of the great Touch record label), features in its most recent entry, dated December 9, an audio documentary of a truffle hunt, captured by Pascal Wyse.

The sound is not unlike that of other rustic field recordings — the intrusion of moisture, the rustling of leaves, the bark of a dog, the intermittent human sounds — but the context lends a hint of drama, and expectation, to the proceedings. Wyse has encoded the recording not as an MP3 but as an M4A, a format that allows the inclusion of images from the truffle hunt (music file: M4A). More details at touchradio.org.uk.

Folktronic Giuseppe Ielasi MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

More than three years have passed since a work by Giuseppe Ielasi, who straddles the melodic and the atmospheric, has been featured in the Disquiet Downstream (disquiet.com, July 2005). Fortunately, though, the Italian guitarist has a new release due out in early 2009 on the 12k label, which recently posted a tantalizing track (titled “Untitled #9”) to serve as a teaser preview (MP3).

The four-minute piece opens with lithe, simple finger work on an acoustic guitar. It’s so quiet and subtle, it might be mistaken for a particularly arid slice of cafe folk music, but then the textures begin to make themselves clear. There’s a droning background noise that suggests an accordion, and long held zipper-like tones that could be a bass clarinet, and then the guitar itself begins to transgress, the odd note shooting across the stereo spectrum, a jarring effect when heard in headphones. And soon enough the gap between the guitar and its sonic surroundings has begun to blur, such is Ielasi’s alchemy.

Additional details on the forthcoming full-length at 12kblog.wordpress.com.