This week on Disquiet.com, all five daily Downstream entries are going to be culled from the great resource soundcloud.com. I’m at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
The ritual percussion of Mark Rushton‘s “Chuck Bird” is just that. The track, at a tad over six minutes in length, is a sad elegy for his friend B. Charles “Chuck” Bird. The opening percussion sounds like a distant talking drum — a small, circular pattern of light pounding, above a foundation of light ambience, and, true to its subject’s name, a smattering of birdsong. Shortly after the halfway point, the pace doubles, as what might be a bell tone chimes in, the resonance bringing a new momentum as the piece makes a slow, steady fade out. That we should all go so peacefully.
This week on Disquiet.com, all five daily Downstream entries are going to be culled from the great resource soundcloud.com. I’m at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
One person’s sonic experiment is another’s everyday listening. “Petron” by Esbie (aka Sarah Brown) is just that: “the sound of an empty Petron bottle, pitch shifted over 3 octaves in Reason.” The raw material is a great one to fiddle with: a taut popping noise somewhat akin to someone making a bubble sound with their lips. From that audio object, Esbie has produced a little melodic fun. As evidenced by the extensive striations in the piece’s waveform, the song is heavily percussive. Spread over three octaves, that single sound plays varied roles, including a kind of bass line, and a rapidfire mode that brings to mind a wooden xylophone.
The SoundCloud waveform is, if not a score, then at least a map. Note how the first third is less dense — that’s when Esbie is first introducing the sounds and the basic melodic formula; after that, layers are added for a bit of contrapuntal play.
One of the many great things about SoundCloud is how you can discover new acts by looking at who is following and followed by the people you listen to. I came upon Esbie through just such a circuitous route — which is to say, I can’t remember exactly what chain led me to her work.
The file can be downloaded using the little down arrow in the above SoundCloud interface. More on the track at soundcloud.com/esbie, and on Esbie/Brown at esbie.blogspot.com. There’s a lot of neat, if brief, experiments at her SoundCloud page, including some vocal layering, some remixes, video-game music, and a handmade piece for music box.
This is something of a record. When your website every weekday features free downloads, it’s rewarding at the month’s end to discover that a lot of the most visited posts had nothing whatsoever to do with free music. This past month, November, only three of the top 10 most visited posts at Disquiet.com were Downstream entries, and one of those three didn’t even have MP3 files in it.
The 10 most searched-for terms of the month were, in declining order of popularity: (1) “marclay” (as in sound artist Christian Marclay: 33 results), for the second month in a row; (2) “400 lonely things” (2 results, though I’ll likely have another mention soon); (3) “monolake” (53 results); (4) “sleep” (51 results); (5) “celer” (14 results); (6) “festival” (a probably unhelpful 129 results); (7) “japan” (147 results); (8) “kikapu” (presumably the defunct netlabel, not the native American tribe: 24 results); (9) “laurent” (which yields 14 largely unrelated results); and (10) “sculpture” (40 results).
On January 1, 2010, when the list of the top 10 posts of December gets published here, it’ll also note the 10 most read posts of all of 2009. Right now, at the risk of artificially buttressing their hegemony, those subjects include an installation by one of the above-mentioned musicians (involving balloons), a great Nintendo DS (and DSi) cartridge, and an album by an electronically mediated trumpeter, among other subjects. Hint hint.
Every week or so, the MP3 Discussion Group gets together online to talk about a recent release. The latest object of our collective, occasionally obsessive, close listening is Alphabet 1968, released on the Type Records label, and recorded by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter. The album’s 10 tracks range from epic drones to compact minimalism, with all manner of lo-fi field recordings mixed in. Type Records generously streams all its releases in their entirety on its website, and Alphabet 1968 is no exception. Below is the full album, available via the SoundCloud service:
Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:
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.”
Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”
Lauren Giniger: “I’m an occasional rock-centric music writer who enjoys the opportunity to flex a little mental muscle deconstructing ambient works.”
The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section.
A little note on MP3 Discussion Group format: This is by no means a closed conversation, so do feel free to join in. The initial posts by participants were all written before they had an opportunity to see each other’s take on the album in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.
This week on Disquiet.com, all five daily Downstream entries are going to be culled from the great resource soundcloud.com. I’m at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
The sound artist Stephen Vitiello performed recently at Mills College in Oakland, and for folk who didn’t make the performance, myself included, a nearly 12-minute recording of a soundcheck has been uploaded to Vitiello’s brand new presence at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. It’s a performance with James Fei, with Fei on Buchla modules and Vitiello on Eurorack modules:
One of the things about abstract music, and the collaboration between Vitiello and Fei certainly qualifies as such, is how valuable it is to see it performed live. Knee-jerk comments are common about laptop music, about the perceived absurdity of watching someone stare at their screen for half an hour. But the fact is, in the subtle motions, in the musician’s expression, in the way casual movements can be felt to correlate with some change in the audio, the laptop-watching experience is a meaningful one.
Performances on patch-cord modules aren’t all that more theatrical or otherwise dramatic than are laptop ones. One thing that makes hearing such music as a recording on SoundCloud useful is the way that the simple shape of the waveform, while a mere silhouette of sonic activity, lends shape — literal and figurative — to the goings-on. In this case, it means seeing rises and falls in momentum, as well as sharp contrasts and sudden changes, played out as a visual, while the audio presents dripping water, clanging metal, feedback, rattlesnake-like whirs, and other elements.
Now, this is Stephen Vitiello we’re discussing, an individual who has made beautiful graphic scores out of photographs of swamps, and turned the creaking audio of the World Trade Center into immersive sound art. While SoundCloud is a great place to audition recordings, what’ll be great is for it to become a creative medium unto itself.
Those waveform visuals connect SoundCloud not just spiritually but user-interface-ally to freesound.org, a long-running community where field-recordings post large-format, uncompressed audio files. Freesound has a rudimentary but well-utilized “remix” feature, which encourages individuals to rework and post the audio of others. No doubt SoundCloud will itself serve as a source for remixing experiments and for semi-organized group efforts like the Exquisite Corpse art-game. The service’s ability to let people tag songs at any point along their timeline suggests some creative opportunities as well (like, for example, noting sourced samples). It’s yet to be seen how SoundCloud will become an experimental performance or compositional tool, but it won’t be surprising if one of the first places such activity occurs is on the page of a sound artist like Vitiello.
More details on the track at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. The file can be downloaded using the little down arrow in the above SoundCloud interface.
