March 2010 – Page 2

Glass Marimba v. Frog Caller

March 26, 2010March 26, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The gentle, childrens-toy sing-song melody that runs through “Glass Marimba / Frog Caller” by Stephen Vitiello has a lullaby vibe, so to speak, even if it’s ever rubbing up against a frog caller, one of those rough wooden instruments that simulates the throaty gargle of its namesake amphibian.

The two instrumental lines are never fully aligned, and that adds to the contrast in melody and texture. It also allows each to highlight the corresponding aspects of its counterpart — the caller bringing out the hard consonance hidden at the heart of the marimba, and the marimba getting the listener’s ear to pay attention to the taut but not non-existent range of the caller.

The music serves as the score to an installation by video artist Pawel Wojtasik, with whom Vitiello has collaborated on several occasions. The piece, titled “At the Still Point,” is currently at the gallery Smack Mellon in Brooklyn (smackmellon.org), where it runs through April 11. A still from the video appears at the top of this post.

Via email, Vitiello explained a bit more about the video, and the sound sources with which he constructed its score:

“It was shot in India. The glass marimba is this instrument built by the Brazilian group Uakti. They make all their own instruments. It’s made from two wooden frames (resonator boxes) and pieces of window glass, which are cut to size, so they’re in the correct pitches. Eder Santos, Brazilian videomaker and friend, asked them to make one for me many years ago instead of paying me for a soundtrack. The frog caller is something they used in the making of the sound design for District 9 and I thought to get one and play with.”

There’s a massive gallery of instruments at the Uakti website, uakti.com.br. The marimbas are filed under “Idiofones” (other categories include Aerofones, Electromecanicos, Cordofones, and Memranaofones).

Original track at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More on Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com. More on Wojtasik at pawelwojtasik.com.

The Antiquity of the Electricity-Free Turntable

March 25, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Just to follow up the portable, electricity-free turntable I noted this past weekend, Steve Roden (artist, musician, and tireless archivist of fascinating music- and sound-related ephemera) points out that the design has been around for many a year:

Here’s the subject of my original post (disquiet.com):

Roden’s full post (“when new things are actually old…”), with numerous images, at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com.

40 Minutes of Small Sounds Mid-Transformation (MP3)

March 25, 2010March 24, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The squiggly, squirming sounds at the heart of Craque‘s “justBelow” are all too irritable, all too nervous, to ever retreat fully into the background, even though most of the initial ones in question are exactly the sort we train our ears to not pay attention to — the rush of air, little metallic clinking, slight textural roughness.

Heard here in a slowly evolving, nearly 40-minute improvisation, the raw materials (referred to by Craque generically as “electro-acoustic resources”) begin to come out of their hiding. There’s a whirly synth tone, as well as a slow hovering, that brings to mind a Bebe Baron analog UFO sound effect, and much more.

The piece needs to be heard straight through to be fully appreciated for what it is: an ever-shifting, ever-changing testament to transformation.

Original track at soundcloud.com/craque/justbelow. More on Craque, aka Matt Cooke-Davis, at craque.net.

One Night in Geneva (MP3)

March 24, 2010March 24, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Katja Rupp is a composer and sound designer living and working in Geneva, Switzerland, where she provides audio for commercial video. But in the age of inexpensive HD, the divide between roles is becoming less and less strict.

One night, she wandered her city with a brand new video camera, a Canon 7D, capturing in the dim light the pace of traffic, the lingering couples, the chance encounters, and the various establishments, both open and closed.

The next morning she put back on her primary hat, and composed this splendid electronic backing audio for the video — emerging from snatches of feedback come elegant pulses and subtle percussion that perfectly capture the aura of an urban enclave when it’s experiencing an enticing lull:

While the audio stands on its own, the full video is available, too. Much as there’s no surprise, based on the score, that she lists James Newtown Howard and David Holmes among her favorite composers, there’s also no small hint of her favorite movie directors, who include Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar-wai, and Ridley Scott.

More on Rupp at katapulse.com. Original audio at soundcloud.com/katapulse. Original video at vimeo.com.

Slowing Down Among the Pygmies (MP3)

March 23, 2010March 22, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Much of the music on Alan Morse Davies‘s recent album, It Is Glorious to Make Electricity for Socialism, will be familiar to readers of this website, because the set is a collection of material he produced throughout last year, some of which was covered here — including his super slo-mo distillation of “Gloomy Sunday” (disquiet.com) and an homage to Icelandic composer JÃ³hann JÃ³hannsson (disquiet.com). At least one of the collected pieces, though, had previously evaded my attention, “Pygmy Polyphonics (Protracted).” The parenthetical gets to the core of Davies’s method. At he puts it in the album’s liner notes with far too much modesty, the piece “is a slowed down field recording of pygmies.” But there are many pre-existing sound recordings, and many speeds at which to slow them down, and the beauty of Davies’s accomplishment lies in how the plaintive indigenous voices are revealed as elegant layerings in his glacial reassessment: