Month: July 2009

Quote of the Week: Country in Space

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From a Guardian (UK) and New Scientist interview with Brian Eno on the occasion of a new arrangement of his Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, by composer Jun Lee, to be performed on July 20 and 21 at the Science Museum in London, by the ensemble Icebreaker with pedal steel guitar player BJ Cole:

    [Q:] Why is there pedal steel guitar in the Apollo composition?
    [A:] When director Al Reinert approached me about doing the Apollo music — which ended up in the 1989 film For All Mankind — he told me there was music on the moon shot. Every astronaut was allowed to take one cassette of their favourite music. All but one took country and western. They were cowboys exploring a new frontier, this one just happened to be in space. We worked the piece around the idea of zero-gravity country music.

Full piece at guardian.co.uk/science and at newscientist.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The Tone Lōc/Dust Bros”“sampling, MC 900 Ft. Jesus”“style monotone rap from recent True Blood: http://is.gd/1Dm8B I desire the instrumental. #
  • Screen/keyboard-sharing: Synergy 1.3.1 glitchy on Vista64. Win2VNC complicated for my brain. Input Director FTW: runs but copy/paste limited #
  • Afternoon sounds: plane overhead, squeaky wheels against wood floors, distant street noise, talking below, typing, paper shuffling. #
  • Got a new notebook. Wondering what the first thing is that will begin to fill it — beyond from today's date. #
  • Didn't realize iPod Touch software update, to v. 3.0 of its OS, would take half an hour to install. Wasn't completed before my bus commute. #
  • If you Twitter it's #followfriday: label @ghostlyint & musician @fieldswn (aka William Fields) & musician @jimmybehan (aka Jimmy Behan) #
  • RIP, photographer Julius Shulman (b. 1910), friend to modernism. http://is.gd/1CdnE http://is.gd/1CcAi RT compactrobot #
  • Just experienced my first "1 person liked this" in Google Reader. Feels invasive, yet useful. Benjamin Franklin spins in his grave. #
  • Testing/digging new iPhone/Touch @ghostlyint app. It streams the label's catalog by mood, tempo & digital-ness. Due out next week, for free. #
  • "Inside the shack a white plastic portable radio was trying to play the big beat; it sounded like a grasshopper fight." The Rare Coin Score #
  • Afternoon sounds: fans in window, internal HVAC on high, fans overhead, coughing, typing, footsteps. … Portrait of San Francisco at 70°F. #
  • Mid-morning sounds: percussive typing from various computers; melody of someone dialing while on speaker phone. Instant instrumental pop. #
  • Man, Walter Murch works his foley off on Coppola's Tetro. It's garish, but also a sound feast: bugs, glaciers heartbeats, traffic, opera … #
  • DJ @rhawtin is live-twittering his set again, from Budapest. Join the @rhawtin Drinking Game: guess a track. … My money's on Alva Noto. #
  • Sunday afternoon sounds: not insignificant wind; buses/cars; laundry; other chore-noise; & poppy glitchy new album Middlemarch by @hecanjog #

Subway Meditation MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are subways in Los Angeles and San Francisco, though they’re not as well known as their counterparts in New York City and London. Director Michael Mann focused the climax of his LA-centric film Collateral on the subway there, but the visual impact was about dissociation, not orientation; like much of that film’s settings, the subway location provided an unfamiliar, disorienting vantage on an otherwise familiar place. In San Francisco, it isn’t called a subway — it’s called BART — but that’s what it is (even though, as in New York, and London, and Los Angeles, it isn’t entirely submerged).

These two less celebrated subways provide the initial sound sources for Michael Bross‘s new album, Subway Meditations, which mixes heavily processed field recordings of subways into a lush, dense sound foundation. As heard on a free track he’s made available for download (“Subway Meditations 03,” MP3), it’s a montage of echoed voices, submerged bleeps, the passing whir of digital insects, and the ongoing deep thrum of dramatic undercurrent.

[audio:http://www.bross.com/assets/MichaelBross_SubwayMeditations_Subway%20Meditation03.mp3|titles=”Subway Meditations 03″|artists=Michael Bross]

Bross goes into detail on the album’s production on his website, at bross.com:

    For me, riding a subway train is both hypnotic and calming. The sway of the car. The click of wheels against black metal rails. The long echo of brakes down dark tunnels. It’s a space that allows me to think, to contemplate. I’m able to forget myself and, in the process, gain a glimpse of how I fit into what writer Willa Cather called “the immense design of things.”

Additional details at the website of the releasing record label, deeplever.com.

Cyberdread MP3s by 2methylBulbe1ol

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The five relatively compact tracks on Quelques Siècles d’Insomnie, by 2methylBulbe1ol (aka French producer Nicolas Druoton), map that often attempted and usually generic realm of hard-beat cinematic cyberdread. You know the brief: all dessicated synths, droning background moans, and crusty percussion. Here, though, Druoton rescues the genre from the cliche dustbin, giving texture to the synths that are in declining health, personality to those moans, and lending the broken percussion a sense of, if not utter resilience, then at least something inherently, admirably, indefatigable. There’s also an occasional light melodic aspect, as on the opening to “Neuf Clous” (MP3) — this intrusion of the pretty is something many similar enterprises trip up on, but Druoton nails it, because the sounds are rendered in a mechanical way, resembling a musical mobile hanging above an infant’s crib. In the broader context of cyberpunk audio here, the effect is more eerie than nostalgic.

[audio:http://www.monocromatica.com/netlabel/releases/tube177/tube177-03-2methylbulbe1ol_-_neuf_clous.mp3|titles=Neuf Claus”|artists=2methylBulbe1ol]

Get the full set of five tracks at monocromatica.com/netlabel.

Proto—Deep Listening MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Steve Roden makes music from fragile artifacts, in a modest manner that suggests an environmentalist’s concern with sustainability, and with an appetite that marks him as a veteran of thrift stores and online auctions. The posts on his website, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, generally single out objects of the past, not just sound-emitting devices, but fragments and images related to sound and perception. Among the most recent is a 98-cent seven-inch record album featuring one Leland W. Sprinkle, Sr., on the Great Stalacpipe Organ, a resonant device if ever there were one — playing all manner of standards, each note taking on an ever-deeper quality due to the depth of the Luray Caverns, in Virginia, where the recording was made (MP3). The accumulated scratches on old vinyl such as this can often be mistaken for a gentle rain, and in this case that’s not far from the truth; according to record’s narrator, the soudn does include “a delicate percussion section”: water dropping in the cave.

[audio:http://www.inbetweennoise.com/sounds/luraycaverns.mp3|titles=”The Great Stakacpipe Organ”|artists=via Steve Roden]

Writes Roden:

    it is nice that the luray folks mentioned the natural dripping sounds in this recording on the sleeve, because it is a rare breed of instrument that can only be recorded as a field recording, not because of social reasons such as with rural or ethnographic recordings, but because the instrument itself exists in the world and is built of the world, and can only be heard within its natural soundscape.

Fans of Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening will especially enjoy this material.