The top 10 posts for the last 31 days are as follows, grouped here for the sake of comparison:
As always, free music (i.e., free MP3s) is a major draw, though it’s rewarding, personally, that just three of this month’s top entries come from the site’s daily Downstream section: (1) Serial, asynchronous collaboration with street sounds at freesound.org; (2) DJ /rupture remixing Langston Hughes; and (3) Japan’s Fjordne remixing piano.
(4) Also in the free-music category, the third in this site’s new “Listen?” series, which provided an hour-long selection of remixes of tracks by David Byrne and Brian Eno, from the 2006 compilation I commissioned, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet.
Two “Quotes of the Week”: (5) the late novelist David Foster Wallace on the sounds of an I.R.S. office, and (6) comic-book writer (and novelist, and cultural critic, and all-around Internet presence) Warren Ellis on the siren song of outer space.
Two “Images of the Week”: (7) one of a doll made in the image of tinkerer and musician Raymond Scott and (8) one of Marina Vendrell Renaut‘s sound-emitting soft sculptures.
(9) Also up there, my announcement that I was participating in a week-long (March 15 -19) online discussion at artsjournal.com of Lawrence Lessig‘s book Remix. (Thanks again to discussion host/moderator/cruise-director Molly Sheridan for the invitation.)
(10) And, finally, the announcement of an exhibit at the Los Angeles gallery Crewest, where I’ll have an audio piece featured from April 4 through April 30. The opening is this coming Saturday — if you’re in L.A., please do try to drop by. I’ll be there, as will the artist and writer who is the focus of the exhibit, the extraordinarily talented Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca. (And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.)
Things change on Glaciations, the five-track album from the duo Kalte. They just change, well, glacially. On the opening cut, “Obliquity,” thin wisps of sound give way to rumbling machinery and ghost echoes (MP3). And on “Luminosity Function,” metallic reverberations are slowly swallowed up by a mix of bird song and semi-melodic effluence (MP3). Such is the manner in which Kalte (aka Deane Hughes and Rik MacLean) itself functions, drawing on field recordings — a common thread for releases on the responsible label, Dark Winter — and bending them, often subsuming them, to their will. The result is a murky electronica, whose impact is strong even if — or, more to the point, because — the sounds themselves are mysteriously muffled.