- Re-read Jasia Reichardt's Computer in Art for like 10th time. Slim 1971 book about computer graphics but with obvious musical application. #
- Obituary for Egyptian artist/musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011) with partial list of exhibits: http://j.mp/fjAyvg via @africancolours #jan25 #
- Morning sounds: cars, hard drive/fan, no birds, no planes, no bus; fridge asleep, like everyone else. #
- It's a relief when you compare a musician's work positively to Depeche Mode's and said musician doesn't want to kill you. #
- Malcolm Gladwell sets out to prove ideas by yoking together disconnected anecdotes. He must see Egypt as an anecdote that doesn't fit. #
- "@timprebble: thoroughly enjoyed stuck/skipping CD in bookstore just now – went on for 10min – perfect soundtrack" #eartwit #glitch #chance #
- "@LongplayerNow: Longplayer has been playing for 11 years 34 days 11 hours 57 minutes. http://j.mp/f6JLkY Sounding beautiful right now." #
- Genius: Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" as performed by Lee Marvin and (mostly) Angie Dickinson: http://youtu.be/BY4bL_bO8sA via @pheezy #
- Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls remix: abridged to one sentence from each of its 15 chapters http://j.mp/ghel1P by YubNub's @JonathanAquino #
- Is there a Firefox extension that will give me a mild but noticeable electric shock when I have more than 20 tabs open at once? #
- "@melchoir: Tyondai Braxton is gone right? idk if they'll sound as good" Likely won't. If it's just snarky mathrock I'll bail. [Re: Battles] #
- I need to remind myself that in most cases @[whoever] isn't tweeting too much; to the contrary, I may be reading too closely. #
- Battles: "new music coming soon." That's enough good news to get me through a hectic day: http://j.mp/eLJGZB #
- Alternate memorial page for slain Egyptian musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011), with photos from Cairo protests: http://j.mp/h9xpx9 #
- NB to self: Don't install Ubuntu Netbook Edition while on deadline. Don't install Ubuntu Netbook Edition while on deadline. Don't install… #
- Maybe "John Barry" isn't really a specific composer, but merely a code name used by a long line of British secret-agent/composers. #
Month: February 2011
National Geographic Meets Xenakis (MP3)
There are many dedicated blogs, social networks, Flickr feeds, and del.icio.us link collections whose laser focus seems almost unnervingly specific. Podcast series are no different, for example the ongoing one by Sean Williams, its self-explanatory title Voice on Record. It collects all manner of archival documentary audio of its subject matter from, as Williams puts it, “a gigantic range of fascinating, famous and ordinary people recorded on vinyl.”
The key words are “people” and “vinyl.” The two of the core pleasures of Williams’ series are (1) the varied manners of speech — word choice, tone, affect — and (2) the found-object quality inherent in the surface noise. When a piece of vinyl is particularly aged, Williams is known to apologize politely in advance for the sound quality.
In fact, that qualifies as an additional pleasure in Voice on Record: (3) the depth of close listening that Williams brings to the material. He’s no mere collector. He occasionally pauses recordings to interject his take on the material, sometimes probing the stated facts, often guessing at the underlying circumstances.
Such is the case in an episode dedicated to the voices of animals (MP3), when a particularly consistent echo captures his imagination. He proposes that the echo is the result of “something going on between the sync head and the playback head,” and then asks that anyone who worked for the responsible company in the 1970s get in touch if they have any insight.
[audio:
http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/feed/5774/0/Voiceonrecord-38-peter_scott_320100608.mp3|titles=”Episode 38″|artists=Voice on Record]
http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/feed/5774/0/Voiceonrecord-38-peter_scott_320100608.mp3|titles=”Episode 38″|artists=Voice on Record]
The recordings in question are a series of 7″s (played at 33 1/3, not 45) narrated by Peter Scott (and, late in the episode, another gentleman), with all manner of birds, bats, apes, and so on, all cackling and calling, whining and singing. As Williams (or whoever wrote up the description that accompanies the episode online) puts it, “Some of these animal voices are spine tingling and some sound like electronic free improv.” At one point during the broadcast, Williams draws a comparison between a specific call and 20th-century composer Iannis Xenakis’ modern classical work “Concret Ph” from 1958, which he identifies as having been made from sounds of burning charcoal.
More on Voice on Record at voiceonrecord.blogspot.com. The episode was broadcast last June 8, 2010, and uploaded at the end of January 2011 to resonancefm.com.
(Image of bird from flickr.com, used via Creative Commons license.)
Texture Recognition / Glacial Sound / Pop Ambient (MP3)
Berlin-based Paula Daunt calls this facet of her output, which goes by Agnosie, her “dark ambient project,” and she recently let two tracks loose on her soundcloud.com/pauladaunt account. They are tasters, as she put it, of an EP that’s close to release. “Close to release” might sum up the pleasures of one of those tracks, “Lost Serendipity,” which sounds like the effusive burst of a pop song held on a tantalizing pause that’s straining to break free.
The voice — there’s clearly a voice in there, based on texture recognition, though not on anything stated, anything intelligible, anything “legible” — is all vowels, the whole thing slurred to the point where, even if there are consonants, they’ve been shoved horizontal, from a hard plosive to a soft aura of semi-wordness. If a comparison to an existing song were necessary, then the most attenuated split second of “Personal Jesus” (the Depeche Mode radio-single version, not Johnny Cash’s mumblecore cover) might come to mind, albeit here that momentary delay extended for five and a half minutes of slomo slurry. Not that it’s all open-mouth sibilance. There’s a near-orchestral soaring that could be a guitar solo, and a rattle that seems like a drum roll pulled apart like taffy.
After yesterday’s entry on classical music being submitted to a more painstaking approach than the Bieber/Jurassic glacial stretching (“If You Slow Down Grieg You Get Ligeti”), this seemed like an appropriate bookend in advance of the weekend.
More on Daunt at pauladaunt.com and twitter.com/pauladaunt. She contributed to the holiday remix project I put together at the end of 2010, Anander Mol, Anander Veig.
Two Makers/Players of Instruments (Jaroba, Sung Kim)
Two instrument-making musicians, one evening, two very different approaches. Last Thursday, January 27, the Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series hosted two Northern California musicians: Jaroba and Sung Kim. Jaroba (aka James Robert Barnes) was due to perform with Keith Cary. It was disappointing that Cary couldn’t make the show, because he’s quite accomplished — for example, he built the reproductions of famed futurist Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori horns (circa 1920) for performances held at the end of 2009 in San Francisco and Manhattan (I caught the San Francisco show, which happened at the Yerba Buena Center downtown).
Jaroba adapted well to the change in plans, and played a variety of things, including a saxophone with a thick long tube situated between horn and mouthpiece. The extension rendered the music with a rich reverby hum. For another piece, he played an instrument that connected his sax mouthpiece to a long irrigation tube, which then fed the sound through the speaker cone of a PA, resulting a deep fluttery noise. He credited Cary with much of the device’s creation, explaining it originally employed a tuba mouthpiece. He also described a tone generator built from a stationary bicycle, but that object wasn’t present at the Luggage Store show.
Totally Tubular: Jaroba at the Luggage Store Gallery
Sung Kim’s instruments were as complicated as Jaroba’s were simple. They included a bowed one made from wood with an animal-hide (deer, if I heard correctly) body with 24 strings, a plucked one that looked like a bass sitar merged with Wolverine’s adamantium spine (16 strings), and a wooden box with oscillators that emitted a mix of pinging bleeps and droning, resonating strings. There was also an incredibly simple guitar, like bass banjo, with just three strings, its oversize tuning pegs like buckteeth.
Axeman Cometh: The most complicated (above) and simple of Kim’s works
Both Jaroba and Kim are exemplary players of their instruments. Kim in particular seemed to take the opportunity to express all manner of techniques possible in his creations, banging on the hide of one of them, bending the neck of another.
String Theory: Note the dense spaghetti bowl of strings at the end of these two of Kim’s instruments.
Fortunately, a video most of his performance has been uploaded:
More on Jaroba at myspace.com/jarobamakesnoise, and Keith Cary at keithcary.com. Vimeo video at vimeo.com/19483700.
If You Slow Down Grieg You Get Ligeti (MP3)
Alan Morse Davies has discerned that if you slow down Grieg it turns into Ligeti. That’s not how he characterizes it, but the melodrama of a Grieg original, once stretched to the point of fracturing, comes to resemble one of Ligeti’s haunting, offworld, spectral fantasies. Davies, for one of his long-running series of slowed-music pieces, used Grieg’s “Nocturne” as the source material. He describes his approach in brief: “It’s a serious mangling /mauling of Grieg’s ‘Nocturne’ from two different 78 records from the 1920s. I wanted to create a disquieting sense of ‘otherness.'” The past year has seen a slew of slowed-down music, from the Inception cues and app, to the angelic Justin Bieber post on Soundcloud, to the 10th anniversary of the death of molasses-remixer DJ Screw (see DJ/rupture’s appreciation). Just this morning a friend introduced me to the wonders of a slowed down Jurassic Park theme. A lot of this work has been as simple as using a preset piece of software, but it has clearly resonated with the general public (the Jurassic Park slomix has accumulated over half a million listens in less than 20 days). Here’s to hoping those listeners will make their way to composers, such as Davies, for whom slowing down has been an ongoing artistic pursuit. And do note that Davies employed two different source copies, the mix of which, not to mention their surface noise, contributed no doubt to the shadowy pleasures of what resulted. He titled it “Cubic Sentient Ballroom” (MP3). Which is to say, if you slow down Grieg you do, indeed, accomplish something that resembles Ligeti — but what you truly get is Alan Morse Davies.
[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/17%20-%20Cubic%20Sentient%20Ballroom.mp3|titles=”Cubic Sentient Ballroom”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]
Track originally posted at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com.