The percussion flanging left to right, splintering into feedback. The vocal snippets put through the glitch equivalent of autotune. The beats blank and broken. This is how Eufoteouria, on its self-titled album, makes instrumental hip-hop. The set’s 10 tracks, recently released on the dustedwax.org, are loping ventures into Poland’s after hours (there are two with guest vocalists rapping in Polish). Highlights include the muffled piano of “Spinal Cord” (MP3) and the robot torch song that is “7 am Blue pm” (MP3).
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK080/Eufoteoria_-_03_-_Spinal_Cord.mp3|titles=”Spinal Cord”|artists=Eufoteoria]
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/DWK080/Eufoteoria_-_02_-_7_am_Blue_pm.mp3|titles=”7 am Blue pm”|artists=Eufoteoria]
Come April 5, the Chicago-based duo Colorlist will release The Fastest Way to Become the Ocean, an EP, on the Serein label. As a preamble to that collection, Serein has compiled a single-MP3 “forecast,” collecting tracks from previous releases, seven in all (MP3). It’s a sinuous showcase for what makes Colorlist exceptional.
The duo is comprised of two Charleses: Rumback (drums, synths, electronics) and Gorczynski (saxophones, harmonium, Monome), the latter of whom will be familiar to readers of this site from his participation on the excellent Spinach Prince album (“The Continuing Feedback Loop Between Jazz & Hip-Hop,” March 22, 2010). They emphasize a discerning quietude, layering rhythms, warping acoustic sounds with digital effects, the horn echoed until it become a choral section, the decidedly limited percussion gaining the appearance of semi-automation.
According to the brief information at claritymusic.net, the new album features Jeff Parker (Tortoise), Josh Eustis (Televon Tel Aviv) / Liz Payne (Town & Country, Zoo Wheel), and John Hughes (aka Bill Ding, aka Slicker). More on the forecast MP3 at serein.co.uk.
And here are two brief videos from 2008 of Colorlist performing live improvisations
If John Muir was the proto-phonographer of nature, the model of a writer who strives to capture the world of sound with his words, he arguably had his equal in a fellow activist several decades his junior whose professional life overlapped with his own. Upton Sinclar, in The Jungle, among other works of creative muckracking, proved himself Muir’s match, the distinction being that Sinclair was an industrial mouse to Muir’s pastoral mouse. Muir is likely more often cited because descriptions of verdant national parks make better yearbook epigraphs than does reportage from slaughterhouse killing floors. But there is no less poetry, no less insight, to Sinclair’s ear. By way of example, this is from an early scene in The Jungle:
Then the party became aware of another strange thing. This, too, like the odor, was a thing elemental; it was a sound, a sound made up of ten thousand little sounds. You scarcely noticed it at first — it sunk into your consciousness, a vague disturbance, a trouble. It was like the murmuring of the bees in the spring, the whisperings of the forest; it suggested endless activity, the rumblings of a world in motion. It was only by an effort that one could realize that it was made by animals, that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant grunting of ten thousand swine.
The passage came to mind while listening, on repeat, to LuÃs Antero‘s Factory Music, a half hour of recordings made in a factory town in Portugal (MP3). The sound quality is high, and the range of captured audio is remarkable for the distinction and variety.
Italianate guitar is heard between a creaky door and train-station bells, and just above a foundation bed of vinyl surface noise. Wells of low-pressure feedback and heavily echoed piano make themselves heard. This is “Rumore del Roma,” off Recollage by Erik Nilsson. The title track is no different: same spaghetti western trip-hop vibe, all silverware percussion and romanticly strummed guitar, bonded by a heavy, slow bass line and made all the more enticing by occasions of whirry electric currents. The effect — a kind of frontier steampunk, all gunslinger accents and electronica undercurrent, broken-knuckle castanets and backward-masked samples — reaches its greatest achievement here on “Old Piano/Bad Back,” in which the six string is put on a loop that has just enough of an overlay to mark it as artificial (deliciously so), and punctuated with snippets of dialog and clockwork. The whole collection is tremendous.
Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
Upcoming • December 13, 2022: This day marks the 26th anniversary of the founding of Disquiet.com. • January 6, 2023: This day marked the 11th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.
Recent • April 16, 2022: I participated in an online "talk show" by The Big Conversation Space (Niki Korth and Clémence de Montgolfier). • March 11, 2022: I hosted a panel discussion between Mark Fell, Rian Treanor and James Bradbury in San Francisco as part of the Algorithmic Art Assembly (aaassembly.org) at Gray Area (grayarea.org). • December 28, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the Instagr/am/bient compilation. • January 6, 2021: This day marked the 10th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community. • December 13, 2021: This day marked the 25th (!) anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community. • There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too. • A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen. (Details at oup.com.)
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
disquiet junto
Background Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.
Recent Projects
• 0544 / Feedback Loop / The Assignment: Share music-in-progress for input from others. • 0543 / Technique Check / The Assignment: Share a tip from your method toolbox. • 0542 / 2600 Club / The Assignment: Make some phreaking music. • 0541 / 10BPM Techno / The Assignment: Make some snail-paced beats. • 0540 / 5ive 4our / The Assignment: Take back 5/4 for Jedi time masters Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.