Month: July 2009

Buddha Machine—Infused Drone MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you find a Buddha Machine sample amid the roiling moans of this album, take note of it. It’ll provide a sense of orientation amid the free-form noise, sonar blips, and general audio miasma. The six melancholy drones that make up Six Melancholy Songs by Restive Sonic are all deeply rich background tonics, as on the burbling thunder of “0507” (MP3). The Buddha material serves as one of many sonic sources. As the Buddha samples get used more often in the work of abstract musicians, they are losing their initial inherent abstraction: becoming more and more recognizable, making the steady move from noise to signal. Get the full Six Melancholy Songs set at archive.org.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/restive_m23/02_0507_192kb.mp3|titles=”0507″|artists=Restive Sonic]

More info on Restive Sonic at restive.za.net and myspace.com/restivesonic.

Top 10 Posts from June

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Apparently these “top-10 posts” are useful, because the most popular post in June was … (1) the top-10 list for the month of May.

Six of the top-10 posts for June were for Disquiet Downstream (i.e., free legal download) entries. The most popular was (2) Durán Vázquez‘s terror film for radio. The other five were (3) heavenly string reverberants from Oo-Ray, (4) Jakob Newman‘s FM3 Buddha Machine mix, (5) an aggressive 8-bit (that is, old-school video game) entry from Lazerbeat, (6) blues great Junior Kimbrough remixed by Grassy Knoll, and (7) an album on the Dark Winter netlabel by Exuviae.

An image from (8) Yukio Fujimoto‘s beautiful sound-art exhibit in Birmingham, England, made the top 10, as did (9) the June 13 roundup of my twitter.com/disquiet postings, and (10) the announcement I’d updated the site to WordPress 2.8.

Baaba Maal Remix Contest Elements

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The word is “stem,” and what it refers to in music isn’t — in this case — the narrow vertical shaft of a single note in a written score, but the separate audio elements that are later combined to create a single track.

These are the constituent parts of a studio recording, and they’re the sort of pieces provided as a set in various remix contests, such as the one listed here earlier this week for ace Nigerian afrobeat drummer Tony Allen (disquiet.com, tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com; due date: July 7).

That contest offers, in MP3 form, the 15 parts of the title track of Allen’s new album, Secret Agent. Not to be outdone, Senegal’s Baaba Maal has provided 29 separate parts of the title track of his new album, Television, recorded with New York’s Brazilian Girls. The files are all available in a Zip archive at baabamaal.tv (due date: August 10). All in all, it’s less music than the Allen set, because this batch consists mostly of 20-second riffs, bits of vocals, guitar, and percussion that were looped in the construction of Maal’s song. However, there are some highly recommended chunks of sound in there, loopable and listenable to on their lonesome, notably recordings of tabla and djembe. All files are in WAV format. (Found via twitter.com/timprebble.)