The title of the track is “With Broken Heart and Sharp Mind.” The album is the self-titled release by We Are Bright & Broken. Perhaps that mention of a “heart” helps explain the intermittent beep, a sharp bright ping that is not consonant with the light and slow guitar-like looping that is the majority of what’s heard. This beeping isn’t metrically precise enough — it doesn’t arrive at a regular pace — to be the sound of a heart monitor in a hospital, though it certainly suggests such a thing: electronic audio that symbolizes, that verifies, actual life. What that beep in the song really does is distract from other sounds whose textures are further belied by the work’s surface placidity, notably an emerging and rough noise, like a microphone being bullied by the wind (MP3). The desire to listen more closely isn’t mistaken. The release includes limited information, just a list of equipment (“Two studies for electric guitar, sine generator and ring modulator”) and this telling advisory:
“Note: These tracks contain frequencies far below the capabilities of earbuds and computer speakers. Please listen accordingly.”
A second track, with the more obscure title “This, Our Good Stone Mother,” is a more foregrounded looping effort, the cycling ring providing a reflective tempo (MP3).
[audio:http://www.pandafuzz.com/mp3/pf018/1-withbrokenheartandsharpmind.mp3|titles=”With Broken Heart and Sharp Mind”|artists=We Are Bright and Broken]
[audio:http://www.pandafuzz.com/mp3/pf018/2-thisourgoodstoneMother.mp3|titles=”This, Our Good Stone Mother”|artists=We Are Bright and Broken]
Get the full release and additional details at the releasing netlabel, pandafuzz.com. We Are Bright & Broken is Joe Houpert of loud & sad. More info at loudandsad.com.
Two views of the exhibit Aoyama Space by Carsten Nicolai, currently at Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria:
Those familiar with Nicolai’s work for the Raster-Noton label will recognize his trademark, and trenchant, stark minimalism, and likely envy the opportunity of those who get to enter a three-dimensional manifestation of his aesthetic. According to a write-up at designboom.com, which is where I first came upon mention of the exhibit, there is an audio component to Aoyama Space: “a selection of specially composed electronic sounds, from deep
bass frequencies to high-frequency click sounds.” More at the museum site, kunstraum-innsbruck.at. The exhibit is scheduled to close on December 19.
To close out the week of SoundCloud.com-focused coverage, it’s useful to take a look at the conversations that occur within the web community of music-makers and -appreciators. Not the website’s forums, mind you, though those are informative. No, each track posted to SoundCloud allows for individuals to comment at any place along the given track’s timeline, matching comments to horizontal coordinates on the track’s waveform. It looks something like this:
Most of these comments, of course, are thank-yous — as when, above, watsonsound (aka Frank Rose: soundcloud.com/watsonsound) at the 39-second point in “11 15 09m” by map~map (aka Marcus Fischer: soundcloud.com/mapmap) takes the opportunity to say, simply, “beautiful.”
Or when an unspecified member of the 2eq Records label (soundcloud.com/2eqrecords), at the 2:18 point of a track titled “Lapidarium” by Michael Banabila (soundcloud.com/michel-banabila), record his impression: “very nice.”
But that’s just the beginning. The timeline comments in SoundCloud also allow for conversations between musicians and listeners, which yield explanations of how the tracks were constructed. Take this back’n’forth between Mark Harris (soundcloud.com/mark-harris) and musician Stephen Vitiello, at the 4:06 spot of Vitiello’s track “Dolly Acending”, which Vitiello had described as “A long track, based on a remix of a live recording of Dolly Parton singing Stairway to Heaven made in 2004-2005″:
Harris: is this all from a dolly parton singing?? – amazing!
Vitiello: it is but stretched and stretched and processed some more. Thanks for asking!
Harris: what did you use BTW SoundHack??
Vitiello: As I remember, it was a combination of Soundhack, Pro Tools and Live
Here’s the Vitiello track in question. Though for some reason the comments aren’t appearing in the widget here, they do at the track’s page on soundcloud.com:
SoundCloud is not a closed system; as evidence suggests, the tool allows for somewhat fluid communication with content systems outside its architecture. For example, there’s a track titled “Kitchen Song of Storms” in the collection of Sarah Brown (aka esbie, at soundcloud.com/esbie), and the annotation she attached to it was fairly basic (“I was humming this in the kitchen the other day”). But meanwhile over at her blog, esbie.blogspot.com, she’d commented at length about its production process. Brian Biggs (of soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance) took up the subject of esbie’s reflections within the SoundCloud interface, six seconds into the piece’s brief, 33-second length: “Responding from your blog post, no no no it’s the way it should be. A click track or Ableton would have taken the funny funky away. Glad you left it alone.”
And, using the comments for another purpose entirely, for episode three of his “Signal Drift” series (at soundcloud.com/the-land-of) of mixtapes, The Land Of (aka Justin Hardison) used the comments tool as a way to note when the song changes to a new track. See the rat-a-tat-tat series of icons along the comments field here:
This is the fifth and final entry in this week’s Disquiet.com Downstream section — all five recommendations this week of freely downloadable listening, along with the subject of the week’s “MP3 Discussion Group,” have been culled from the great resource soundcloud.com. I’m at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
Vuzh is C. Reider, a musician who’s admirable for his interest in constant experimentation and for his prolific nature. He digs in deep to whatever challenge he sets for himself, but he’s as curious as he is diligent. The majority of his many releases have a theme, which can often be read as a kind of wrestling with one or another self-imposed restraint.
His Ne Quid Nimis is all sourced from “unlikely objects.” His version of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” used voice-to-text software as the source of its slow dissolve from meaning. And The Long Defeat shares the sound of guitar in a massive space.
Among his latest is a series of recordings at his soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic space, in which his sole instrument is an early analog drum machine, one called the TR-606, which was manufactured by the Roland corporation in the early 1980s. Reider milks the machine for all it is worth, and what’s remarkable about it isn’t just that he’s taken a tool of percussion and turned it into a tool for space music — all wandering echoes and hallucinated canyons — but how much, to fans of his other work, it is immediately of a piece with things he’s made on far different instruments on other sonic journeys he’s taken.
This track is one of five off the fourth volume in a projected series of five albums focused on “experimental explorations of the textures and sounds of analogue drum machines,” as Reider puts it in his liner notes at vuzhmusic.com:
“The intentions of this project were: to use single analogue x0x (et al) machines as sound source material for each individual track — to use those well-trodden sounds in non-standard ways … to draw upon the styles of industrial, IDM, minimal-techno and noiseambient without having the work be strictly classified as any one of those styles.”
The file can be downloaded using the little down arrow in the above SoundCloud interface. More at soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic.
The title of the track is “With Broken Heart and Sharp Mind.” The album is the self-titled release by We Are Bright & Broken. Perhaps that mention of a “heart” helps explain the intermittent beep, a sharp bright ping that is not consonant with the light and slow guitar-like looping that is the majority of what’s heard. This beeping isn’t metrically precise enough — it doesn’t arrive at a regular pace — to be the sound of a heart monitor in a hospital, though it certainly suggests such a thing: electronic audio that symbolizes, that verifies, actual life. What that beep in the song really does is distract from other sounds whose textures are further belied by the work’s surface placidity, notably an emerging and rough noise, like a microphone being bullied by the wind (MP3). The desire to listen more closely isn’t mistaken. The release includes limited information, just a list of equipment (“Two studies for electric guitar, sine generator and ring modulator”) and this telling advisory:
