Month: August 2010

Brief Field Guide to Dance Music Genres

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Little piece I did for the Colorado Springs Independent (csindy.com) on “the fragmented world of electronic dance subgenres.” The article coincides with the Love Festival happening there this coming Saturday, August 7 (thelovefestival.com). Brief overview of various taxonomic intricacies, such as house (“As close as electronica has come to producing its own recognizable soul music”), techno (“perhaps best understood as emphasizing tech over sex”), minimal techno (“emphasis on monotony as a tool to both Zen-state zone-outs and cathartic freak-outs”), glitch (“celebrates failure and error”), IDM (“Stands for ‘intelligent dance music,’ which doesn’t exactly make nice with all that other dance music”), dubstep (“takes a kind of taut, broken shuffle and makes it reverberate … into dark fantasy of urban mystery”), trance (“Relatively more melodic … ‘Melodic,’ that is, relative to dance music; we’re not talking the Beatles”)”, and electro (“If robots from the 1980s made hip-hop and aspired to be pop stars, this is what it would sound like”), with suggested key acts for each.

Also, a little bit of additional terminology, including my advice on how to best experience a rave-like setting: “Massive party with multiple electronic acts, generally held in large warehouse or outdoor area. Unlike at any other such festival-style event, the best situation arguably isn’t watching an individual act, but standing at some blissful Venn Diagram spot where multiple simultaneous performances overlap in one singular, chest-shaking sonic experience.”

Full piece at csindy.com.

MP3 Discussion Group: Thomas Köner’s Glacial ‘Permafrost’

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Disquiet.com “MP3 Discussion Group”returns with its first full-length-recording consideration since pondering Autechre’s Move of Ten EP (see: disquiet.com) last month. This time around, we’ve been listening intently to the glacial ambience of Permafrost, the third in Thomas Köner‘s triptych. The Type record label has this year reissued Permafost (originally released in 1993) and its two preceding volumes, Nunatak and Teimo. Type streams all its releases for free, which makes this album a particularly good one for an online discussion:

If for whatever reason that music player fails to load, you can listen to Permafrost at its soundcloud.com/_type page.

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.”

Tom Moody: “I am a visual artist who also makes music, and blogs at tommoody.us. My informal ”˜statement of musical principles’ can be found at tommoody.us. All my music is at tommoody.us.”

Nick Seaver: “I’m an anthropology and media studies grad student who studies automation and experimental music, and I collect things along those lines at noiseforairports.com.”

And I’m Marc Weidenbaum; I have run disquiet.com since 1996, and have written for Nature, Down Beat, newmusicbox.org, weallmakemusic.com, Stereophile, and other publications; I live in San Francisco.

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

A little note on the 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 release in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.

More on Thomas Köner and Permafrost at typerecords.com.

Images of the Week: Nicolai’s Theorem

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Images from the art exhibit “Moiré” by Carsten Nicolai, perhaps better known in the world of electronic music as Alva Noto. The show ran at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan from May 21 through June 25 of this year:

The exhibit is associated with Nicolai’s recent book, also titled Moiré, which follows his similar collection Grid. Both volumes present numerous examples of the stark geometries defined by the books’ titles. Moiré is a meta-sequel to Grid, in that it focuses on how multiple patterns, when combined, produce the illusion of a subsequent pattern. The exhibit presents a range of op art that plays with viewers’ perceptions. What’s especially interesting is how the patterning mirrors Nicolai’s vibrant-yet-spartan musical output.

Images from the review by Geeta Dayal at frieze.com of the show (in which she reports, “Nicolai’s visual work is so well integrated with his work in sound that while there’s no music to be heard here — unless the hum of an air compressor counts — you can see music in everything.”), and from the gallery’s website, thepacegallery.com.

Top 10 Posts & Searches from July 2010

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Usually the majority of the most popular posts in a given month on Disquiet.com are drawn from the site’s daily free (and legal) recommendations of MP3s. July was no exception, though four non-freebie posts also appear in the top 10: (1) the MP3 Discussion Group’s take on Move of Ten, the recent EP by Autechre (cover pictured at left); (2) my essay on the use and meanings of sound in the novella Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo; (3) an announcement of an essay I published (at weallmakemusic.com) on “5 Reasons for Musicians to Consider the Creative Commons”; and (4) the fourth entry in this site’s “Sketches of Sound” series, in which illustrators (in this case New Zealand comics artist Dylan Horrocks, best known for his graphic novel Hicksville) draw objects associated with sound. Horrocks drew a vinyl LP in its paper sleeve.

The six most popular free downloads of the month, rounding out the top 10 most popular posts, were (5) Alec Vance having his way with a vuvuzela sample (that’s the plastic horn made famous worldwide during the recent World Cup); (6) a live performance of Christian Marclay‘s “Graffiti Composition” from 2006 by Melvin Gibbs, Mary Halvorson, Lee Ranaldo, Vernon Reid, and Elliott Sharp; (7) a podcast of field recordings (raw and cooked) produced by John Kannenberg; (8) Mystified‘s retro-proto-electronica (Adventures of Plunderman); (9) minimal-techno space music by Mensa (aka Edu Comelles); and (10) some blissful pop-noise from the group Truman Peyote.

That Autechre discussion was also the most popular post of the last 60 days, and the most popular post of the last 90 days was the previous MP3 Discussion Group, on the subject of Oh, the recent EP by Oval.

The top searches of the month were “autechre” (big surprise there), “aairria” (subject of a couple Downstream entries), “lesley flanigan” (interviewed here in June, and shown in the photo at left), and “oval,” and then in a multi-way tie “:¬l” (that’s a musician’s name), “aphex” (as in Aphex Twin), “exit strategy,” “green day” (your guess is as good as mine), “nah und fern” (the title of a box set of work by Gas, aka Wolfgang Voigt), “p-funk,” “rss,” “terry riley,” “topic,” and “vuvuzela.” That’s leaving out search requests that yield null results.