Month: November 2009

Beats from an Exhibition (WHY?Arcka MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Exhibit K” in the ongoing Exhibits A-Z project by WHY?Arcka is the Philly producer’s most stripped-down recording yet. Titles to his tracks usually hint at their source material, which generally consists of lesser-known moments by r&b greats — the latest, “Kalimba Medley”‹ (Sly),” is therefore probably derived from some split second of a Sly and the Family Stone song (MP3 — the link may not function, so if there’s difficulty, just proceed to the bandcamp.com link at the bottom of this post; it’ll provide a 320kbps file).

[audio:http://popplers5.bandcamp.com/download/track?enc=mp3-128&id=2713111739&stream=1|titles=”Exhibit K: Kalimba Medley”‹ (Sly)”|artists=WHY?Arcka]

Characteristic for WHY?Arcka, this small segment is then looped and futzed with ingeniously, in this case yielding a threadbare beat that’s like dance music for dust mites. There’s the xylophone-like opening (cause for the title’s kalimba reference), soon joined by a tentative bass line, and then a throttled horn part, the collected composition slowly morphing into a slo-mo, downtempo shuffle. It’s as muted as all get out, and highly recommended — the sort of track that has its most delicious instance when your head, after nodding along, finds itself held momenarily, waiting for the delayed beat, both eagerly anticipating the closure, and enjoying the extended pause.

View the track in situ at arckatron.bandcamp.com.

MP3 Discussion Group: ‘Mirrorball’ by John Foxx & Robin Guthrie

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This week, the Disquiet.com MP3 Discussion Group returns to collectively given a listen to Mirroball (Metamatic Records/Universal), a new-ish album-length collaboration between two early figures in electronic pop music: John Foxx (b. 1947, original vocalist with Ultravox!) and Robin Guthrie (b. 1962, cofounder of Cocteau Twins). It’s a gauzy pop album, redolent with Foxx’s maudlin-romantic singing and Guthrie’s florid shoegazer lushness. As such, it’s a little off topic from the more abstract work generally featured on Disquiet.com, but between its opulent haze makes it a peer to the kind of work that’s often cited on Disquiet.com, and Guthrie’s shoegazer credentials played a role in the decision-making, too. For reference, the track listing is as follows:

1. “Mirrorball”
2. “My Life as an Echo”
3. “The Perfect Line”
4. “Spectroscope”
5. “Estrellita”
6. “Luminous”
7. “Sunshower”
8. “Ultramarine”
9. “Empire Skyline”

Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:

Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”

Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”

Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.”

The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section.

A little note on format: This is by no means a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in. Also, the initial posts by participants are all written before they have an opportunity to see each other’s take.

Four Real-World Sound Works

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Four musicians took field recordings into their studios and created something new from them, all for the debut of Editions, a web publication of soundwalk.com. The musicians are Francisco López, BJ Nilsen, Yann Novak, and Roberto Paci Dalo, and they used as their source recordings made in these locations, respectively: Mamori Lake in the Brazilian Amazon; Vatnsleysuströnd, Landakot, Iceland; Los Angeles; and Rapoli, Italy. Each track is accompanied by a brief description of the work, an artist bio, and a representative photo, such as the one up top, shot by Dalo in Napoli.

Despite a description by Soundwalk that these artists “use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work,” for some of them, the recording is the beginning and the end. The finishing work is, in fact, a raw field recording, framed by selective editing. That appears to be the case for Nilsen, whose Icelandic document captures birdsong, rain, and the ocean. The moans with which opens Novak’s L.A. could be mistaken for audio that has been slowed down, but it is in fact a distant car heard in the non-space that, as Novak puts it, is inherent in the indoor/outdoor middle-ground so intrinsic to Southern California living.

López and Dalo, to the contrary, take their recordings of the world and mix them into something new. For López, it appears to mean looping the sound of frogs into something rhythmically enveloping; for Dalo, adding oscillating, rudimentary electronic sounds — imagine a particularly existential scene from an early Star Trek episode — that slowly subsume the real-world sounds of city life.

The collecting in well-programmed, in that it balances the two non-mediated works, the Nilsen and the Novak, by bookending them with the enhanced/extended works, the López and the Dalo. Kudos, as well, for the explanatory materials. Subsquent editions of Editions are eagerly awaited.

Visit the Soundwalk Editions homepage at soundwalk.com. More on López at franciscolopez.net, on Nilsen at bjnilsen.com, on Novak at yannnovak.com, and on Dalo at giardini.sm.

Update: At the request of Soundwalk, the files have been removed from this post. Please go to the above link to experience the audio.

The 17th Pessoa “Autopsicografia”

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There now are 17 translations of the poem “Autopsicografia” by Fernando Pessoa in the Disquiet.com Pessoa subsite, at disquiet.com/thirteen.html. The ancient frame-based structure of that HTML feature allows simultaneous comparison, side-by-side, of multiple versions (interpretations, remixes) of the original poem. This 17th version is the automated rendition, courtesy of Google Translate (translate.google.com), made at the suggestion of reader Douglas Storm. The inclusion of a machine-rendered version is true to Pessoa’s Futurist interests — and, perhaps, to the potential misreading by some readers of the author’s intention, given the “auto” (i.e., “self”) in the poem’s title. (Thanks, Douglas.)

Disquiet.com was founded in 1996, its name borrowed from The Book of Disquiet (occasionally The Book of Disquietude, originally Livro do Desassossego) by Pessoa.

Images of the Week: Graphic Lewis Gesner

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Almost exactly a year ago, the Studio Soto gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, hosted a survey of graphic scores by composer Lewis Gesner. Images from that exhibit were recently uploaded to Flickr by the Mobius.org collective:

More at the gallery’s site (studiosoto.org). Full photo set at flickr.com.

Special thanks to Mobius (mobius.org) for permission to reproduce the images here.