- Came up at dinner: versions of Rock Band I'd like to play. One vote for the the Janet Cardiff's 40-Part Motet Rock Band. #
- Police, Adjective: super-realist film, no score, just ambient noise. Sloppy translation; best moment: needlessly translating name of Pravda. #
- Every time I see "John McLaughlin" in the Tivo listings, I imagine it's a music talk show hosted by the guitarist. #
- I feel like CES is as close as I will ever get to understanding what sports fans experience during a draft. #
- Twitter-free LA vacation over. Highlights: Emily Lacy & Beuys @lacma & posters @crewest & group show at Compact Space & 30th @mocalosangeles #
Month: January 2010
Lesley Flanigan’s Music for Speakers & Voice (MP3)
Lesley Flanigan‘s voice is so beautiful that you can often lose track of the often thick, crusty, feedback-laden, speaker-mangling sound that accompanies it in her recordings and performance. Flanigan layers her voice to suggest an angelic choir, all the while her handcrafted “speaker electronics” emitting waves of broken white noise. One fine example is “Snow,” off her 2009 album Amplifications. The track begins as little fissures of sound — along the lines of the aural glint that occurs when someone plugs in a guitar — and her voice doesn’t appear for some time, which allows the listener to focus on the rich tones, the beading pulses, and the sine-wave counterpoint (MP3).
[audio:http://lesleyflanigan.com/speakersynth/Lesley%20Flanigan%20-%20Amplifications%20-%2003%20Snow.mp3|titles=”Snow”|artists=Lesley Flanigan]
Those sounds are produced on exposed-speaker instruments of Flanigan’s own design and construction, as shown in this image from her site:
More on the project at lesleyflanigan.com.
What a Picture Sounds Like (MP3s)
What does this picture sound like?
Not what does it look like — it looks like what it is, which according to Tim Prebble, who shot it, is Tanah Lot in Bali, photographed during a visit in March 2007. A year later he posted field recordings of the environment, including some rowdy ones captured during New Year celebrations (at his website, musicofsound.co.nz).
And more recently, as part of a new experimental series (titled simply Synaesthesia — i.e., the confusion of senses) at his musicofsound.co.nz site, Prebble asked his readers to compose works that are suggested by the image. Three audio segments have been uploaded as of this writing, associated with the Tanah Lot photograph. Martin‘s is a dirgey drone supplemented by echoed vocals and a slow, noisey rhythm (MP3). The track by üav works in bell tones and kettle-style drums and otherworldly halos of sound (MP3). And a piece by ccu is more fragile and closely mic’d than the other two, a mix of taut ringing sounds (perhaps from a kalimna) and rough surface texture (MP3). All three, especially when heard with Prebble’s photograph in mind, suggest rituals at dawn or dusk. There’s further discussion in the post’s comments section.
[audio:http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/SY002/SY002Martin-thehiddenlobby.mp3|titles=”Synaesthesia 002″|artists=Martin]
[audio:http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/SY002/SY002%20uav.mp3|titles=”Synaesthesia 002″|artists=üav]
[audio:http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/SY002/sy002ccu.mp3|titles=”Synaesthesia 002″|artists=ccu]
Read more in detail at musicofsound.co.nz. (There was one previous one, also at musicofsound.co.nz.)
Filtered Classical Music (MP3)
Contour Editions is a new record label based out of New York City. Its first three releases consist of two free album-length downloads and one long-form video. There are also plans for “physical” releases. Gil Sansón‘s Por la Adversidad a las Estrellas, Contour’s inaugural free release, is a series of three transformation tracks, each taking a different source material as its starting point. The first track on the album, “Por la Adversidad a las Estrellas 1,” is a ghostly mix of quavering tonal elements and eerie little brittle noises (MP3). There are hints from whence it came — elements of vocal tones, as well as that certain randomness that suggests a natural field recording — but the truth is still surprising.
[audio:http://www.contoureditions.com/releases/ce.onl_0001/ce.onl_0001/Por%20la%20Adversidad%20a%20las%20Estrellas%201.mp3|titles=”Por la Adversidad a las Estrellas 1″|artists=Gil Sansón]
Writes Sansón of the procedure that yielded the track:
“[It] makes use of samples of contemporary classical works that were submitted to looping and filtering processes. additionally, a rainfall field recording emerges slowly from the mixture of voices and instruments, and gradually becomes the main character of the piece.”
Two other tracks on the album transform electric guitar and a piano piece by Kenneth Kirschner. Full Sansón release at contoureditions.com.
Echoed Guitar via RjDj (MP3)
“RjDj” is the name of a great iPhone (and iPod Touch) application that is, in fact, less an app than it is an environment for apps. At a practical level, what that means is that RjDj hosts various “scenes” that produce sound, the best among them being apps that take audio input and turn it into something new — imagine walking down the street, for example, and hearing the world repeated and stuttered and digitally magnified and transformed. To close out 2009, the crew at RjDj put together a Best of RjDj compilation of 19 choice examples of RjDj in action. Among them is this entry by Nil Jones, in which acoustic guitar is echoed into something deeply psychedelic:
You need to have Flash installed to listen directly on the site. Install Flash or you can download the recording instead
There’s more information about the track, along with an MP3-download option, at rjdj.me/user/nilcjones. And there’s more about the EchoChamber scene, which was developed by Georg Bosch and employed by Jones in the production of his track, at rjdj.me. The “cover” image to the EchoChamber scene, shown to the right, displays some of the various ways that touching and tilting and shaking the iPod/Phone enacts various modes of audio manipulation. Get the full Best of RjDj 2009 compilation for free at rjdj.me as a Zip file. Note: the RjDj app is free, but some scenes require a small fee.