Month: April 2009

Images of the Week: The Geography of Buzz

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These displays show “The Geography of Buzz” in Los Angeles (square) and Manhattan (rectangle), according to data collected and processed by Elizabeth Currid, an assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Sarah Williams, the director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University”˜s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation:

More at nytimes.com and at the website of Studio X (columbia.edu), where the Currid-Williams work is on display through May 8.

Quote of the Week: Recombinant Classical

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Greg Sandow on the role of pop in contemporary classical music. This is the opening of his April 5 post, titled “In the DNA”:

    I’ve been pondering the reasons why the composers I call alt-classical seem to strike a nerve with the new young audience I keep talking about. It’s not just because these composers sometimes write music with a pop-like beat. First, the pop-like beat might not be steady, and might just pop up here and there.

    But second, and much more important, the music might not have a pop-like beat at all. And yet it feels like it fits into the culture where pop-like beats dominate. How does that work?

    I got some insight into that, I thought, when I heard a piece by Glenn Kotche, called Snap, at a performance by the Bang on a Can All-Stars at the University of Maryland last weekend. Kotche is the drummer in Wilco, but he’s also a free-jazz improviser and a composer, so his music can get complicated. And Snap is complicated. It’s based on classic R&B songs recorded by the Stax label in the 1960s. …

    But Kotche doesn’t even come close to imitating any of the songs. Instead, he picks them apart, finding rhythms and textures he likes, and then putting those (often in fragments) into a new piece that’s put together like classical music. Which means, in this case, that it’s an abstract construction, changing constantly, full of complexities and surprises, without any trace of a tune or the generally simple construction that we’d find in the original songs…

The piece continues at artsjournal.com/sandow.

Two and a Half Minutes Out Steve Roach’s Inner Window (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest from widescreen ambient figure Steve Roach is the double-CD Dynamic Stillness on the Projekt label. As always, he’s posted healthy excerpts of all his newly recorded aural vistas, and one highlight is “Further Inside,” close to two and a half minutes of droning, cloud-like sonic structures (MP3). These aren’t clouds that merely hover. They’re clouds that slowly and continuously transform — vapors ever twisting, expanding, contracting, and convulsing. The sounds are most easily comprehensible if you think of them as being distant, horizon-spanning phenomena. Roach on his recordings characteristically employs a sense of scale far more massive than do most musicians, even if the music itself is quite fragile.

[audio:http://www.steveroach.com/MP3/files/2248.mp3|titles=”Further Inside”|artists=Steve Roach]

More at steveroach.com.

Nintendo Korg DS-10 Album from DS-10 Dominator (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The MP3Death netlabel has done the Nintendo Korg DS-10 a great service by releasing Cheap Dirt, a 20-track album by DS-10 Dominator (aka Rutger Muller). The DS-10 is a port of a proper Korg synthesizer, which has been fully reproduced as a cartridge for the ubiquitous portable Nintendo gaming system. And no one has previously made available such a wide range of fully considered DS-10 music as Dominator has here.

While much of Cheap Dirt consists of party-ready techno, there’s some heady listening: the downtempo industrial sway of “Sea Son” (MP3), the 8-bit dance noise of “Garage Party” (MP3), and the clanging thrills of “Dubstep Gives Me Food” (MP3).

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_06_Sea_Son_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Sea Son”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_11_Garage_Party_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Garage Party”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_18_Dubstep_Gives_Me_Food_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Dubstep Gives Me Food”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)]

Muller says of the release’s conceptual purity: “No post-processing of the audio has been done. All sounds are synthesized, there’s no sampling involved.” Get the full set at archive.org. More at mp3death.us and rutgermuller.nl.

The Korg DS-10 cartridge runs on the Nintendo DS and the newly released Nintendo DSi. I’m looking forward to what folks with the new Nintendo DSi do with the DS-10, given that the DSi has some advanced internal sound-transformation tools. The DS-10 includes the ability to create a master-slave relationship between multiple DS machines. The DSi’s sound-tweaking tools mean that a second machine will now also be able to capture segments of the music and allow the musician to alter them. This is especially promising.

Live Marina Rosenfeld MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Newly listed in the ubu.com holdings is a 34-minute Marina Rosenfeld composition, recorded back in September 2005. According to the brief introduction, “participants performed Rosenfeld’s animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.” It’s a group improvisation, in which some 40 musicians followed her graphically notation, the work moving from sinuous layers of amplified strings, through ecstatic waves of drones, out-classical cat-screech noise-making, and glossolalia (MP3).

[audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/rosenfeld_marina/Emotional-Orchestra/Rosenfeld_Marina_Emotional_Orchestra_Sept_2005.mp3|titles=”Emotional Orchestra”|artists=Marina Rosenfeld]

Back in 2003, when the Orchestra was a work in progress, she told an interviewer at textura.org about the piece:

    “I am trying to connect the ideas of emotion in music and improvisation itself — and making the claim that both the idea and the practice of improvisation are essentially feminine — a female art derived from female so-called vices: emotion, volatility, variability, fickleness. Being called fickle, for instance, is never a compliment, but I think it can actually form a kind of structure for a work of orchestral music.”

More on Rosenfeld at marinarosenfeld.com.