Month: May 2009

Spoils of a Beat Battle (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The message boards at stonesthrow.com, like those over at cratekings.com, are filled with up’n’coming beatcrafters, sharing their productions and looking for feedback.

Looking to battle, too. Like the cratekings.com forums, stonesthrow.com hosts ongoing Beat Battles, in which entrants take a communal sample and make something new from it. The most recent battle, number 115 (you read that right), had over 50 participants (you read that right, too).

The house rules are simple, and purposefully restrictive. You’re allowed that one sample, which you can cut’n’splice as you please. There’s an admonition against keyboards, and you can submit only one mix per contest.

There are some masterful little productions among the submissions in contest 115. Dubman‘s upbeat “Chicken of the Sea” (MP3) is an organ-crazed, uncharacteristically upbeat affair, while AJ‘s “stmb bb 115” uses some backward masking to bring a turntablistic flair to the work (MP3). And while most of the productions have a rap-ready appeal, there’s some abstraction afoot: the cut’n’paste “kvu_STMB115” has some extended breaks that are downright leftfield — for fun, call its creator Will.i.am S. Burroughs (MP3).

While they’re enjoyable on their lonesome, the best way to appreciate a Beat Battle like this one is to listen to the whole group, which provides a broken-kaleidoscope view of the original track. That organ so central to the Dubman track (which won the battle vote), for example, is reduced to a halting cadence on Saphyre‘s “Stonesthrow15” (MP3)

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/34825c90-2038-012c-c6b3-f6cc3660e2f2/dubman-chicken_of_the_sea.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242486653&Signature=3VDgKwZJ3CRwzGj4A7%2Bv5tLhbK8%3D|titles=”Chicken of the Sea”|artists=Dubman] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/69975e90-1fe6-012c-cff7-f6bf56e7cd97/day_15_-_stmb_bb_115.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242487086&Signature=jFG0entJ5snv%2BtOAmIUz712Q7DI%3D|titles=”stmb bb 115″|artists=AJ] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/f42e0110-2331-012c-f0b5-f4a74bf81570/kvu_stmb115.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242487219&Signature=qpVCtjbFXDMjzWBLqpM1OpqdtyY%3D|titles=”kvu_STMB115″|artists=unkown] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/b6078630-2115-012c-95ed-f0076b6183d9/saphyre_-_stonesthrow15.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242486561&Signature=beAwT7EhhuRrKvbvJBoDXjHQn3Q%3D|titles=”Stonesthrow15″|artists=Saphyre]

The original post is at stonesthrow.com, and voting closed this past Friday at stonesthrow.com. The full set is at drop.io (the track titles veer toward the unintelligible, and I’m not sure which of them is the original sample). There appears to be an expiration date built into those MP3 URLs, but it’s not clear when it is, so if you find the material of interest, download sooner than later.

The next Stones Throw Beat Battle, number 116, is based on “The Paisley Window Pane” by late-1960s folk-pop duo Wendy and Bonnie. This time around, the source is helpfully titled “This Is What You Need to Sample” at the drop site, drop.io/stmb116. (The song was apparently sampled previously by Super Furry Animals on the opening track to their 2003 album Phantom Power, titled “Hello Sunshine.”)

Tangents: Eno’s Optimism, Ubu’s Curation, …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Brian Eno (aka Dr Pangoss) on the Recorded Object’s Bright Future (prospect-magazine.co.uk): Prospect magazine has serialized a column by Brian Eno, aka “Dr Pangloss,” each month since March 2009. The latest, May 2008, wisely distinguishes the "record business" ("in the doldrums") from the music business, noting that "the live music scene is exploding." And in Pangloss mode, Eno senses that even the recorded object may have a future: "The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable — so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork." For all three columns, as well as a firewall-protected book review from June 2006 by Eno of the memoir of producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Fairport Convention), White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, visit prospect-magazine.co.uk.

● David Toop & Pauline Oliveros Guest-Curate UbuWeb (ubu.com): Each month, the great archive of the avant-garde that is ubu.com asks an individual to select items from its archives for its Featured Resources section, a kind of virtual curatorial act. In May, it's author/musician David Toop (Ocean of Sound), who links to a lot of film, as well as music by La Monte Young and Group Ongaku (Takehisa Kosugi, Syuko Mizuno, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, others). In April, the guest curator was Deep Listening guru Pauline Oliveros.

● Video: Curtis Roads on Granular Synthesis (via usoproject.blogspot.com): A three-part video on computer-music figure Curtis Roads is being widely distributed, thanks to easy YouTube embedding. The video's circulation appears to coincide with a new Roads book, Composing Electronic Music (Oxford), and a new edition of his Computer Music Tutorial (MIT). It’s pretty darn informative, with frank talk by Roads about his development of his mode of synthesis, called “granular synthesis.” Of one early piece he says, “I wouldn’t call it a composition. It’s really an experiment.”

● ‘Soundscapes & Listening’ Conference Held in Vienna (soundscapes.fhstp.ac.at): The program this past weekend (May 14-16), included Ellen Waterman's "When it Rains: Experimental Music and the Cultural Ecology," Hein Schoer's "The Sounding Museum," Helmi Järviluoma‘s "Soundscapes and People's Environmental Relationships in Change — from 1975 to 2000," Michael Hanisch's "Soundscapes im Computerspiel Grand Theft Auto IV," and Tadahiko Imada‘s "Music Education and the Concept of Soundscape: Experiencing the Earliest Grain of Music", among other presentations, plus numerous concert performances. (Via mediateletipos.net.)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

MP3 Discussion Group: Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”/”Wolf Cub”

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

For the next few days, several people whose reflections on music — whose enthusiasm and insight — I admire have signed on to do in public what I, for one, have been doing in private for a week-plus now: playing over and over, as well as pondering, the recent two-song 12″ by Burial and Four Tet, a pair of songs (“Moth,” “Wolf Cub”), released on the Text Records label earlier this month.

Joining me are:

  • Robert Gable is a listener and musical enthusiast who has been blogging at aworks (rgable.typepad.com) about “new” American classical music since 2003. Earlier, he played jazz saxophone and blues harp until realizing he would always pale in comparison to Sonny Rollins and Little Walter. He works for a company that develops software and hardware IP used in multimedia devices.
  • Lauren Giniger is possessed by a deadly sense of the absurd and so is often paralyzed when composing her biography. When she is able to get over herself, she can be found organizing large productions, most recently including the 24th annual World Jewish Music Festival. She lives with two adorable rabbits; her current project is developing a vaccine to fight the overblown and imaginary scourge of lagomorph influenza. Also, she occasionally write about music for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
  • Alan Lockett is a sometime writer of electronic music reviews/features. Previously a contributor to e/i magazine, recent writings are mainly viewable via igloomag.com and furthernoise.org. His main interests are in ambient, drone, and the more experimental end of techno/house, post-dub, and “IDM.” He is based in Bristol, UK — a useful vantage point in being a breeding ground for stylistic tweaks which have impacted crucially in recent decades.

You can listen to streaming versions of the two tracks here, which I first came upon at pitchfork.com.

The discussion will play out in the comments section below.

Burial/Four Tet’s “Wolf Cub”

Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”

PS: This is not, per a reader’s inquiry, a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in. And for anyone reading this after May 19, for the first day the tracks below were mis-titled. Sorry about that.

PPS: Given the willful opaqueness of the “Moth”/”Wolf Cub” 12″ — it comes on black vinyl in a black sleeve — I looked around for how it was being visually represented. Directly below are three such representations via, from left to right, createdigitalmusic.com, which made the requisite Spinal Tap joke; stereogum.com, which described the release as “a black sleeve and pressed onto a slab of 12″ vinyl with a black label”; and residentadvisor.net, which ignores the package and fairly thoroughly describes the music in its write-up:

Continue reading “MP3 Discussion Group: Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”/”Wolf Cub””

The World in B-flat (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What a difference a common key makes. The ingenious inbflat.net website displays 16 videos in a 4 x 4 grid. Each video is of a solo instrumentalist, playing guitar or keyboards or trumpet or xylophone (all in B-flat, per the work’s title), and the listener/user is invited to initiate the clips simultaneously, or at any interval. Here’s an image detail:

The resulting music is ever-shifting, but free of anything approximating tension or dissonance — it’s lilting, subtle, peaceful, and quite beautiful. The site was developed as an experiment by Darren Solomon, of the group Science for Girls. He’s made a formal, fixed recording of one “performance” of the installation (MP3), and has invited individuals to contribute their own videos. He proposes that the MP3 be listened to while you perform, in order to provide some sense of inner coherence to the otherwise open-ended work. For anyone looking at what culture as formed by “Web 2.0” — which I’d define as a situation in which the network is greater than the sum of its participants — sounds like, this is a good starting point.

The title of Solomon’s piece is presumably a nod to Terry Riley’s In C, which pioneered the idea of a composition that consists of various parts that can be played in freely associated, musician-determined permutations.

[audio:http://www.inbflat.net/bflatmix.mp3|titles=”In B-flat”|artists=Darren Solomon & Co.]

For an early iteration of the work, check out Solomon’s January 22 post at scienceforgirls.net.

As a follow-up (this is the Internet, in which there is an answer-song to every song, including for every answer-song), someone developed tikirobot.net/BbBuddha, which invokes an “auto-replay” function, meaning the loops will play forever (a la the Buddha Machine), making for great background listening. (Several people recommended the inbflat.net website, so special thanks to the first of them, Michael Ross of myspace.com/prehab.)

Young Communicator

The self-education of the adventurous, Philly-based hip-hop producer Y?Arcka

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Whether pushing the lesser-known Jacksons to center stage, forcing a spotlight on a backing musician from Sly and the Family Stone, or taking Sade’s words and re-sequencing them to make a point, the Philadelphia-based hip-hop producer Y?Arcka (aka Shawn Kelly) has made a strong impression on his first two full-length albums. The Un-Herd Vol 1 was released last year by Ropeadope, and Y?Arcka followed it up more recently with a freely downloadable collection called The Appreciation SP. On both albums, he’s shown a knack for creative sampling, using less familiar parts of staple pop and r&b songs — even a bit of Afrobeat, courtesy of Fela — in unfamiliar ways. The end result is exemplary instrumental hip-hop: listenable to on its own merits, no matter the absence of a rapper.

The Temple University-educated musician took time out recently to talk about his self-education on the tools of the hip-hop production trade, his personal philosophy of sampling, and the producers who’ve inspired him. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

 

Marc Weidenbaum: First off, thanks a lot for making time for this interview. I really dug Un-Herd Vol 1 when it was released on the Ropeadope label, and your The Appreciation SP in particular got my head going — I wrote about it [at disquiet.com] when you posted it for free at your myspace.com/youngarchitect page.

Y?Arcka: I had that The Appreciation project [cover pictured at left], actually done before I did Un-Herd, but at the time, I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna have enough time to promote it and do stuff with it. Un-Herd kind of came up out of nowhere, where I was like, I could put something together a little different from Appreciation — because Appreciation was something you couldn’t really have rappers over, because it’s unusual, the unusual loops I did were not your ordinary stuff. I liked it more, because it’s different, but maybe it’s too different for people to start off with, as my first project. Continue reading “Young Communicator”