Month: May 2009

Monolake Video Game MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are some musicians who seem to make more music than most people listen to, among them the ever admirable Robert Henke (aka Monolake), who continues to post free monthly downloads at his monolake.de website. The latest is a score he did for a flight simulator developed for Lufthansa. More info at monolake.de/installations. The track is midtempo techno, with disparate beats, foreboding pounding, and the ongoing appearance of plane noise and pilot-airport dialog.

He describes the simulator as follows:

    A joystick allows players to navigate themselves from outer space down to earth and fly around the globe, whilst observing all flights of the Star Alliance fleet. The position and movement of the planes is an exact model of the real situation, based on the current flight plan of the Star Alliance members. The player can speed up the movement, freeze it, or tell the simulation to display all or a selection of the fleet as lines connecting source and destination airports. In all cases the player can move their point of view freely around and observe the situation from any point in space.

Henke posts these free tracks with certain rules, including an admonition against linking directly to the MP3 file, so just proceed to monolake.de/downloads. It should be up at least through the end of the month.

Tangents: DJ Hero, Jarmusch’s Limits, 64kbps …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Archive.org No Longer Producing 64kpbs MP3s: The massive storehouse of cultural data announces on April 14 that, among other upgrades, it is no longer providing 64kbps MP3 compressions of its audio holdings: "This was a judgement call [sic] — given how poor the sound quality is for these files and the fact that most people are getting more and more bandwidth to their devices and computers." It probably makes sense, but given how many people are accessing files via their phones, and with even a 3G connection being of middling speed, I've found 64kbps to be of value to previewing things, and for listening to spoken-word audio.

● Covers for (not of) the Term Netlabel Releases: A designer at bitphitz.org created "covers" for all the free albums released thus far by the netlabel Term, which is run by Taylor Deupree as a sideline to his 12k record label (at 12k.com/term).

● ‘DJ Hero’ Announced (engadget.com): New Guitar Hero-style video game with a DJ interface (a turntable controller that resembles a stripped down Technics 1200). Description of DJ Hero says it allows "'original mixes' of songs," further blurring the space between gaming and music-making. (The djhero.com website is still just in a holding pattern.)

● Manhola Dargis on Jim Jarmusch‘s ‘The Limits of Control’ (nytimes.com): "Philip Glass has said that repetitive music 'must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.' At least for its first hour, before its repetition strategy turns tedious, the same could be said of 'The Limits of Control,' a nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event." … The album's score, it's worth mentioning, is credited to Boris.

● Plumbing the Beatles‘s "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)" (www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes): Detailed notes by Alan W. Pollack on the famously repetitive Beatles song. I still remember my mother asking me many years ago whether something was wrong with my turntable, due to all the repetition. That repetition — which foretold sludge metal (Earth, Boris) and minimal techno (Monolake, Alva Noto), among other since codified forms — was probably my first taste of minimalism as a child.

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

Alan Morse Davies Daily Sound (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Welsh composer Alan Morse Davies has joined Taylor Deupree (disquiet.com), Justin Hardison (disquiet.com), and others in posting regular sounds on a scheduled basis, as a kind of sonic diary. On Monday of this week he launched his “I Make Today” series, which he summed up via Twitter (at twitter.com/stuffedspacedog) in a pair of posts — Twitter only allows for 140 characters per post, so it makes sense more than one post is necessary for a proper announcement:

    Launching a new series of music pieces called “I Make Today”, one a day for the next year starting Monday. Links to follow.

    “I Make Today” is designed to make me operate in the moment. My mind is already doing mental gymnastics to avoid it, and that’s the point.

Despite its title, the series’s debut, “Venice and the Two-Stroke Outboard Engine,” is not an extended field recording. Characteristic for Davies, it appears to be a reworking of existing sounds, perhaps choral vocals attenuated and layered with acoustic percussion — an Old World/New World amalgam that brings to mind Ennio Morricone’s score to The Mission (MP3). The second entry, “Pygmy Polyphonics (Protracted)” (MP3), likewise takes existing vocals and stretches them to the breaking point, until they’re spread thin and rendered ethereal. The third, released today, “Olga Samaroff’s Grief, Greta Garbo as Thief,” is instrumental in its source material, a quietly dramatic foray into a liminal orchestral state (MP3).

[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/1%20-%20Venice%20and%20the%20Two-Stroke%20Outboard%20Engine.mp3|titles=”Venice and the Two-Stroke Outboard Engine”|artists=Alan Morse Davies] [audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/2%20-%20Pygmy%20Polyphonics%20%28Protracted%29.mp3|titles=”Pygmy Polyphonics (Protracted)”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]

PS: When I first published this, there was no no apparent RSS feed for the series, except through Davies’s Twitter account. The home page for the project was at-sea.com/today.htm, and the MP3 link for the “Greta Garbo” track didn’t work in the Flash-based streaming-MP3 player. That’s all changed. Here’s the track for streaming:

[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/3%20-%20Olga%20Samaroff%27s%20Grief%2C%20Greta%20Garbo%20as%20Thief.mp3|titles=”Olga Samaroff’s Grief, Greta Garbo as Thief”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]

And the project’s now housed at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com, which has a proper RSS feed.

Live Drones from Static Kitten (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In the Encyclopedia of Drones, two of the most common — common as in prevalent, not common as in pedestrian — would be categorized as The Helicopter and The Prayer Bowl. Those are heard on Follow, by Static Kitten, newly released at the notype.com, but they’re just two of numerous identifiers buried in the slowly paced, methodically controlled, occasionally rough performance (per the notes, improvised freely by Kitten, aka John Brennan, in 2008). The title cut is, indeed, a highlight, balancing closely mic’d objects with hovering sine waves (MP3), as is (the more broadly listenable) “Ocean,” which uses bowed instruments to rich, folktronic effect (MP3).

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/pan037/pan037-static_kitten-2-follow.mp3|titles=”Follow”|artists=Static Kitten] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/pan037/pan037-static_kitten-4-ocean.mp3|titles=”Ocean”|artists=Static Kitten]

Get the full set of seven tracks at notype.com.

8-Bit Apocalypse (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To begin with, the moniker MPC2059 is — despite certain alphanumeric appearances to the contrary — not yet another in the ongoing series of sample-based beat machines produced by the Japanese technology firm Akai. No, what MPC2059 is is an electronic act with a especially crunchy 8-bit sound, a deliberately lo-fi sensibility, and a truly cartoony post-apocalyptic outlook. Regarding the latter, its webpage, mpc2059.com, provides the following back story:

    The year is 2059. We have just emerged from a 50 year global civil-war. Ecological disaster has not been averted. We have become increasingly reliant upon machine technologies. Our biological life support systems have failed. The vital impulse of our planet is artificial.

    mpc2059 is the sound of that mechanical heart beat – machine music manipulated by biorobots for a new cultural computer controlled phenomenon”¦.

Judging by Bad Habits, MPC2059’s recent full-length, those biorobots resemble the title character in the arcade game Centipede.

[audio:http://mpc2059.com/audio/lps/bad_habits/01_stuck_in_an_airtight_sleeping-bag.mp3,http://mpc2059.com/audio/lps/bad_habits/12_you_keep_talking.mp3,http://mpc2059.com/audio/lps/bad_habits/09_locked_in_a_closet.mp3,http://mpc2059.com/audio/lps/bad_habits/07_everyone_knows.mp3|titles=”Stuck in an Airtight Sleeping Bag”,”You Keep Talking”,”Locked in a Closet”,”Everyone Knows”|artists=mpc2059,mpc2059,mpc2059,mpc2059]

The 12 tracks on Bad Habits summon up childhood memories of early video game tomfoolery, but on machines that haven’t just seen better days, but have gone to seed. There’s the flanging, broken beat madness of the opening cut, “Stuck in an Airtight Sleeping Bag” (MP3), and the slurry vocoded fun of “You Keep Talking,” complete with percussion that blends hot jazz and minimal techno (MP3), not to mention the torqued beats of “Locked in a Closet” (MP3).

It’s not all damaged video-game noise. “Everyone Knows,” for example, has a synth-horn and hi-hat, approximating a kind of stripped-down funk adorned with squiggly electronic effects (MP3).

Get the full set at mpc2059.com.