A sketch for Staalplaat Soundsystem’s recent residency at Khoj Worsksop in New Delhi:
The project involves triggered sounds in nearly a dozen small taxis in Connaught Place, one of the city’s densest — and loudest — commercial zones. More details in two posts at staalplaat.org and staalplaat.org Visit Khoj at khojworkshop.org.
The Wall Street Journal queried various folk from various fields about their 2009 plans. Among the respondents, composer Nico Muhly:
In 2009, I am going to finally finish a long series of short works for solo viola and tape [recorded elements]. I’m into this because it’s weird and specialized, like taking a year of your life and learning how to make blood sausage.
Full article at wsj.com (via rgable.typepad.com).
The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 25,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 28-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album. The contributing musicians are AllThatFall, Roddy Schrock, Pocka, Stephane Leonard, (dj) morsanek, MrBiggs, John Kannenberg, My Fun, Mark Rushton, Prehab, Ego Response Technician, and Doogie.
The songs are all available for free download in various formats (192Kbps MP3, 64 Kbps MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3) at:
More info at disquiet.com/bushofghosts. Thanks to all the contributors, including Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), who produced the beautiful “cover” (shown above) and “back cover” for the collection. The project would not have been possible without the instigation of Eno and Byrne, who posted the raw materials of the original songs at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.
Drum’n’bass could have become chamber music, but instead it became a plug-in. Once upon a time, those ricocheting beats, along with sudden moments at which the bottom simply drops out, felt like they’d landed from some alien nightlife. But within a few years, they were serving as backing tracks to car commercials, especially once the production became routinized, and the drums and the bass started to play tertiary fiddle to synthesized chimes and florid, insta-atmospheric aural haze.
Flipping through new drum’n’bass releases these days can be a heartbreaking endeavor, but you do come across solid nuggets. Case in point, the third track off the three-song release Id by [sub], on the Plain Audio netlabel. Perhaps the title to “The Monk Tune” means that the string bass resounding midway through the seven-and-a-half-minute track was lifted from a Thelonious Monk song, but whatever the impetus for the name, [sub]’s effort shows estimable restraint, the pinging drums and sonar blips left more or less to themselves, and the percussion following its own advanced calculus (MP3). It’s a bracing track, enlivened by taut horn and string elements.
Innsbruck, Austria, is [sub]’s home base, where he runs syncopathicrecordings.com. More details on Id and “The Monk Tune” at plainaudio.com.
Guitarist Robert Fripp by 1978 had disbanded King Crimson, embarked on a series of collaborations with Brian Eno, and relocated to New York City. Eno was also in the city, and that year saw the release of his No New York compilation, on which Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori, among others, performed. Mori herself had only recently relocated to the city, from Japan, and was then still a drummer — drum machines and laptops awaited her down the road. Kurt Munkacsi, long a key member of Philip Glass’s organization, was one of the engineers on No New York.
On February 5, 1978, Fripp made his debut as a solo performing artist at the Kitchen, long home to some of the city’s most vibrant avant-garde performing artists, including Glass, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, and others. That evening marked the debut of Frippertronics, his trailblazing experiment in live looping. And a few days ago, Fripp’s website, dgmlive.com, posted a rare rehearsal recording from that very evening. At nearly three and a half minutes, the lovely solo guitar loop is marked by the slow fades, loping cadences, attenuated accrual of layers, and brief passages of rapid patterns that have long characterized his playing (MP3). The dgmlive.com site doesn’t leave up these occasional free MP3s for very long, so I recommend that you download this one at your earliest convenience.
John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, was at the Kitchen show, and his story in the paper two days later (“Pop: Robert Fripp After 3 Years”) closed with these three paragraphs describing the performance:
The explanatory note at dhmlive.com reads, in full:
As the title cunningly implies this piece is taken from a test loop prior to Robert’s appearance at The Kitchen Video Arts Center in New York, February 5th 1978. The date is important, marking as it does Robert’s debut as a solo performer and the first public unveiling of Frippertronics. The opening night (of two) was subject to intense interest from the public with lines spreading around the block in freezing cold weather, requiring an impromptu second performance to try and accommodate the heavy numbers of eager punters queuing up. These loops would have been prepared by Robert as test pieces and ultimately used by him to solo over.
Perhaps the full recordings of the Kitchen shows will see release some day. The venue has recently released four archival CDs, including one from around the same time as the Fripp show, featuring live performances by Martin Kalve, David Tudor, and Bill Viola. More on the Kitchen at thekitchen.org.
