Month: February 2009

Quote of the Week: White Noisemakers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Applications programmed for the first Google-OS phone, the Android-powered G1, can be rated between one and five stars by users. Following are some of the comments by G1 users who gave one star to White Noise 1.2.0, a white-noise generator:

    “Good app if you like to fall asleep to static!”

    “This makes no sense at all”

    “Explain to me how this (a recording of white noise) cancels real world noise while listening to your music, genius.”

    “Can someone tell me how to work this thing so that it helps with sleep and other stuff?”

    “Might have raised the score if it made sense”

More on the programmer of White Noise, Grant Midwinter, at grantmidwinter.com. I’m testing a G1 right now — you can follow my experience, if that’s of interest, at g1for30days.tumblr.com

Two Live D’Incise MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s the taut plinking of strings that confirms a guitar was employed in the production of “Stase” (MP3). That’s a track, one of two, on the EP Stase / Contre Stase, by D’Incise, released on the Resting Bell netlabel (restingbell.net) last year. The tensile power, with its contained energy and spring-like effect, brings a brittle thrill to the steady-paced goings-on. Those strings are heard crackling amid bending metal and droning static, the internal workings of some infernal machine. D’Incise is the electronic musician whose laptop was part of the trio Diatribes (which puts him in the context of a drummer and pianist), whose recent full-length release was the focus of a Disquiet Downstream entry earlier this week (disquiet.com). To hear Stase / Contre Stase is to have an opportunity to extract D’Incise’s laptop from the embrace of his acoustic colleagues, to hear it on its own. As for “Contre Stase,” the music is noisier and more rambunctious (MP3), like a field recording of a factory tour. Both tracks were recorded in Geneva last year. More on D’Incise at dincise.net.

Alternative Sheet Music Techniques at New Langton Arts (San Franciso)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is just one of the many pieces of avant-garde sheet music on display as part of the Every Sound You Can Imagine exhibit at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. The show opened last night, February 5, and will be on display through March 28:

That is one of the panels depicting Morton Feldman‘s “Intersection 2” (1951). More coverage, including additional photos, will follow shortly.

Also on display is work by William Basinski, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Curran, Philip Glass, Ryoji Ikeda, Joan Jeanrenaud, György Ligeti, Christian Marclay, Barry McGee, Phill Niblock, Carsten Nikolai, Raster-Noton, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Steve Roden, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, Stephen Vitiello, Iannis Xenakis, and others. The show was curated by Christoph Cox and Robert Shimshak, and was organized and previously exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. More details at newlangtonarts.org.

Dusty Drone MP3s from Eluder

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a texture to all four tracks of Eluder‘s Drift (Archaic Horizon) that suggests the music was copied — surreptitiously, perhaps — from some rare, dusty old vinyl record. The static in the background is at times as loud as anything in the foreground. This static, this noise, is a scratchy, rough-hewn thing, immediately summoning mental images of fuzz-encrusted turntable needles and fingerprint-coated LPs. From an initial listen to Drift, you’d think you’d discovered some ur-drone, some ancient (well, in pop-music terms) album that predates today’s drone-rich ambient-music community not just by decades, but by several significant generations of recording technology.

Truth be told, though, all four of these pieces are of recent vintage. The vinyl texture is just a foundation, above which Eluder places elegiac tones, soothing embraces like the organ modulations of “Drift With Me” (MP3), which eventually peaks out like some brilliant sun coming over a distant mountain, and the more atonal “Moon Plea” (MP3), a thick pool of gorgeous dissonances.

Get the full set of four MP3s at archaichorizon.com. More info on Eluder (aka Boise, Idaho-based Patrick Benolkin) at myspace.com/eludist.

Dubby 8-Bit MP3s from Simon Mattison

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If ever there were two lo-fi sounds destined to meet, they would be dub and 8-bit. The former is the Jamaica-born body of studio techniques that put groove-heavy soul music through an echo chamber, elevating percussion elements into vapor trails of hallucinogenic effects. In dub, a simple snare drum can open up like a flower, and rim shot can ricochet like a SuperBall.

The latter is a nostalgia-infused computer music, one in which the rudimentary sounds of early arcade games are employed to make blippy, often happy-go-lucky tunes.

The realms collide on Simon Mattison‘s Leaves, a six-track collection on the MP3 Death netlabel (mp3death.us). Just listen to “Deltoid,” which has the bleeping spunk of Pac Man in heat; it’s kicked up a notch above average 8-bit goofiness thanks to a swaying, sideways-motion rhythm (MP3). And the dub feel is nowhere as pervasive as on “Ovate,” in which flanging repetition into extended fade-outs gives some needed heft to the bippity melodic line (MP3). Get the full set at archive.org. (Via twentygoto10.com.)