Month: July 2009

Alan Morse Davies’s “Really Gloomy Sunday” MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When Alan Morse Davies slows down pre-existing music, he finds entirely new music buried in the original. His version of the standard “Gloomy Sunday” takes an already downbeat affair, and then turns it into something worthy of a silent movie’s score — the very intersection of melodrama and expressionism. Most of the elements here are recognizable yet transformed, the strings a miasma of dread, the backing vocals a suffocating threat, the lead vocal something Gothic and right out of Bauhaus (MP3). The original was reportedly the version by Paul Whiteman with Johnny Hauser, from 1936.

[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/10%20-%20Really%20Gloomy%20Sunday.mp3|titles=”Really Gloomy Sunday”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]

More on the track, part of Davies not-quite-daily free-MP3 journal, at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com.

RIP, Dani Baquet-Long of Celer (MP3 Album)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

News spread today of the death of one half of the talented duo Celer: Danielle Baquet-Long, more commonly known as Dani, wife of Will Long, the group’s other half. A post was made at the Celer website, artificialcolors.blogspot.com, this morning at 9:33 AM by Will, reporting the terribly sad news. It’s been less than a month since I’d written about Celer here. They’d contributed a remix to a collection of songs by Electricwest, and of the 11 mixes, it was theirs I’d singled out for streaming and download — Celer had taken a minimal track titled “Goddess” and shredded it to something all the more dire, all the more minimal, and all the more intoxicating (disquiet.com).

A prolific group, Celer also appeared on the list of Disquiet readers’s favorite albums of 2008 (disquiet.com), and at the tail end of last year, the first time (to my recollection) I had ever written about them, they’d produced a sound-art work based on a glass house formerly inhabited by George Orwell (disquiet.com).

Not long ago, Celer launched a space at celer.bandcamp.com to stream and provide downloads of some of their work. The most recent free download there is an elegantly eerie five-track collection, titled Elias, which dates from November of last year. Each track is an ethereal drone, a seemingly light thing made of surprisingly dense details, lines of sound that appear fragile from a distance but prove sinewy and complex up close. The opening track, “Untitled 1,” plays like one long unresolved chord (MP3). It’s an excellent introduction to their work.

[audio:http://bandcamp.com/files/16/84/1684597619-3.mp3|titles=”1 Untitled”|artists=Celer]

The loss of Dani is a sudden one, but she leaves behind an enormous amount of music to inspire others. More on the duo at artificialcolors.blogspot.com and myspace.com/celersite.

RichVomDorf Beat & Remixes (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Perhaps it’s the simplest tracks that lend themselves best to remixing. Take “Momento A” by RichVomDorf. It’s a single song that serves as the cornerstone of a six-track release on the broque.de netlabel. It’s pretty much just horns and percussion — and, at first, just percussion: a subtle, minimal-techno beat played out on what at each stage reveals itself more and more to have been acoustic instruments (MP3). (It also, toward the end, veers gently toward chaos.) The horns, layered on top like icing, are an electronically addled bunch, soft, wispy, slightly slurred. Once upon a time, this might have been called acid jazz.

Then come the remixes. George Neufeld literalizes the beat (MP3), turning it into a more standardized 4/4, and seemingly running the whole thing through a flanging effect that softens it into a lounge-ready track. Versions by Håkan Lidbo (MP3) and Pseudónimo (MP3) — as well as what appears to be a group effort, credited to Tampopo Noodleking, Granlab & Tend (MP3) — likewise emphasize the downbeat, though the Tampopo edit approaches some of the light chaos of the original.

The EP closes with a sort of sequel, “Momento B,” also by RichVomDorf, which follows the more standard techno sounds of the remix, but comes close to returning to the sparseness that got the whole thing started, especially with a horn line that could have been ripped from a second-line parade for a beloved robot (MP3).

[audio:http://web0.pv220.ncsrv.de/music/brq54_richvomdorf_-_momento_ep/brq54_richvomdorf_-_momento_ep_-_01_momento_a.mp3|titles=”Momento A”|artists=RichVomDorf] [audio:http://web0.pv220.ncsrv.de/music/brq54_richvomdorf_-_momento_ep/brq54_richvomdorf_-_momento_ep_-_05_momento_pseudonimo_rebuild.mp3|titles=”Momento – Pseudónimo Rebuild”|artists=RichVomDorf (Pseudónimo Mix)]

The originating track and, for contrast, the Pseudónimo mix are streaming above. Visit broque.de to check out the full set.

One Bow to Infinity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In his sweeping, cloud-bursting, widescreen solo work, Ted Laderas hides behind mounting layers of shimmering sound what is, arguably, the most distinctive component in his toolbox. One might not realize on first or second or even third listen that the reverberant tones making up the dozen tracks on Magnifications all resonate from the wooden hollow of, of all things, a cello.

The slow sawing of Laderas’s bow on the live piece “Milky”certainly brings to mind the rooted, sinewy acoustics of a cello, but the feedback-enriched haze of “Downtown Pajama”is about as far as could be imagined from the instrument beloved by such composers as J.S. Bach and Benjamin Britten. And on Magnifications, the latter listening experience is far more the norm than is the former.

Of course, Laderas doesn’t play a cello; what he plays is the Oo-Ray, a system of his own invention that places the cello amid a tidy battery of electronic tools that allow him to loop, clip, distort, and, per the title of this collection, magnify the rich overtones of his sound source. His technology doesn’t transform his cello any more than his cello serves his technology; they are partners. There is a soaring quality to “Angostura”that would be impossible to achieve without the digital effects that Laderas employs, but the piece bears no trace of CGI detritus, no green-screen lifelessness, no automated coldness.

The cello is not his instrument; the Oo-ray is his instrument. If Bach and Britten wrote suites for the solo cello, what Laderas summons up is orchestral by comparison. If those composers momentarily turned the “always a bridesmaid”figure of chamber music into a leading lady, Laderas reveals her as an angel.

Each track on Magnifications is an exercise in maximalism, that place where the teachings of minimalism — attention to tone, to repetition, and to the pleasures of incremental change — are opened wide and played to immersive effect. To listen, for example, to “If We Aren’t Blind”is to hear droning, circular patterns that bring to mind some epic experience. The saw-toothed burrs and whirring motion suggest a bellows more than they do a handful of strings. It’s all like some massive troupe of bag pipers heard from a distance as they play in a deep valley with its own immense, natural echo.

Laderas has jokingly said that he pursued the Oo-Ray in the hopes of becoming “the acoustic My Bloody Valentine,”by which he meant the rock band synonymous with the term “shoegazing,”a willfully hazy breed of pop that buried melodies behind thick, billowy screens. Of course, no matter how deeply one peers into Laderas’s plush compositions, there are no proper songs hiding behind them. What he has done is closer in approximation to some of Brian Eno’s early experiments in sound for its own sake, where that famed producer attempted to forge a pop music devoid of song-ness — to celebrate the tonalities of rock by minimizing the presence of rhythm, harmony, and melody. Laderas, likewise, has on Magnifications — from the wildly flanging madness of “Eagre”to the heart-racing extravagance of “Slow Motion Death Scene”– made shoegazing music that lifts its gaze from the stage floor and peers far off to the horizon.

More on the release at luvsound.org.

Visit Oo-Ray/Laderas at 15people.net.

Gentle Buddha Machine Techno MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Buddha Machine is an engine for background sounds. Created by the China-based duo FM3, the Machine is a tidy little box of sound loops. There are two versions of the Buddha Machine (thus far). Each contains nine brief loops, ranging from beat-less reveries to subtly pulsing tones. Two Buddha Machines are more than twice as useful as one, because the layering of Buddha Machine sounds — the effect, that is, of playing them simultaneously, whether with the same or different loops — creates the effect of a new, more complex sound.

There is a Buddha Machine Effect, in that the longer you listen to a Buddha Machine loop, the less generic, the less plain, that loop comes to appear. Perhaps the second Buddha Machine was arguably necessary, because by the time it was released, the first Buddha Machine had, to its most frequent users (the word “user” seems more appropriate than does “listeners”), become familiar, recognizable.

The longer you employ a Buddha Machine, the more you become attuned to its loops — not only in your own practice of listening, but as the Buddha Machine is employed by other musicians. It’s proven to be a useful sound source for music-makers, and a search for “Buddha Machine” on many music forums yields homebrew experimenters. Take, for example Sinehead, a German who makes his public home at the sound-sharing site soundcloud.com/sinehead. His “FM3 buddha machine countryside” is a singular, linear experiment in pastoral collage. One of the beautiful things about soundcloud.com, in contrast with, say, myspace.com, is that each track (see below for an example) is given its own waveform image.



And thus, even before you venture into Sinehead’s Buddha experiment, you understand its structure: there’s a slow build, and then two separate lengthy sections, each with its own unique contours. In this case, the slow build is a rising tide of loops, with a single gentle thud suggesting imminent momentum. That first lengthy section brings a click track and more regular thud that organizes but doesn’t overpower the roiling loops. And the second lengthy section doubles the beat’s speed.