- 9/11 had some people wishing Superman existed. Occupy just has me wishing Public Enemy was still fully functional. #
- RIP, Gary Garcia of Buckner & Garcia, best known for early-'80s novelty hit "Pac-Man Fever" #8bit #
- You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but you can far too often judge a netlabel release by its first track. #
- Copyright Timecops head to 1731 to keep Benjamin Franklin from founding early peer-to-peer system, the Library Company. #
- Says man with em-dash eyebrows. RT @improvingthomas: I think emoticons have begun to affect people's actual facial gestures. #
- â–º Late-week audiostream of drone + guitar by @ChisatoOhori of Tokyo: http://t.co/hTHaBJyg #
- Got email from band saying how many gigs they'd played in 2011. Briefly thought it meant accumulated data not live performance. #
- RIP, Lee Pockriss, author of “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini,”a #sonicweapon in Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”http://t.co/dSccI0JF #
Month: November 2011
Hard Drive Turntablism (MP3)
One’s data loss can be another’s sonic gain. Paris-born and -educated artist Gregory Chatonsky fiddled with a drive that had gone bad. Its innards, truly little more than an update on the LP player once one looks past the marvels of data compression, were banging away rather than smoothly transmitting numbers to and from the disc. Chatonsky took this raw material — “raw” no doubt being the appropriate term to apply to the nerves of those whose drives have taken this turn unexpectedly, and perhaps also to those listeners who might find the resulting music abrasive — and extended its unique properties with software effects (no doubt implemented on a machine with fewer technical troubles).
The result is a half hour experiment in the softening of edges, the sharp sound of metal-on-metal yielding sonic sparks that then glisten and decay like pollen caught in a consistent breeze. The banging can take on the feel of North African percussion, while the echoed variations sound at times like a country fiddle, at others like a slowly intoned harmonica.
It is commonplace to talk of digital sampling’s roots in turntablism. This is a rare — not unprecedented, but still out of the ordinary — effort in which the tactile aspects of turntablism surface in a digital practice.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/radius-7. The art collective incident.net was founded by Chatonksy in 1994. More on Chatonsky at theradius.tumblr.com/episode16.
The Punk Drone (MP3)
The word “drone” is not unlike the word “punk” in the way it offers to annihilate itself. But as with punk’s inherent contradictions, drones aren’t necessarily anonymous, aren’t necessarily formless, and certainly aren’t interchangeable. A drone contains sounds, and those sounds can transmit sensation, can suggest the sensibility of the artist who committed them to tape, can reference other cultural artifacts, intentionally and otherwise. The drone that is “Rites of Zen” by Marc Broude at first buries what appears to be ritual chanting in a haze of quavering noise straight out of a late-1960s BBC Radiophonic score for a science-fiction audio drama. Is it ritual, is it sci-fi romanticism, are these things set in opposition to begin with? There is drama to “Rites of Zen,” certainly, but it isn’t explicitly narrative-based. It’s an extended piece, over an hour and a quarter straight through, and to the extent that it changes it does so slowly, which means that the ear is more likely to notice changes in the short term than the long. For example, human cries dissolve into the ether. What seems like it could be ancient plainchant may, in fact, be a momentarily magnified whir of some tiny mechanism. The overarching sound, a kind of blanket hum, could be a harsh wind moving across a bleached desert, or a sine-wave sent through a modest filter. If there is a theme it may be this: Matters of scale evaporate (MP3).
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/MarcBroude-RitesOfZen/MarcBroude-RitesOfZen-01.mp3|titles=”Rites of Zen”|artists=Marc Broude]
Track originally posted, by the netlabel TVK, at archive.org. More on Broude at soundcloud.com/marcbroude.
New Essential Instrumental Hip-Hop (MP3)
As he promised on Twitter a couple months back, Philadephia-based producer Y?Arcka, aka WHYArcka, aka Arckatron, aka Shawn Kelly, has posted a slate of his recent instrumental tracks for free download and steaming. Kelly’s modus operandi is to dive deep into a single track, to extract a small part, like the riff or hook equivalent of a chromosome, and to then extrapolate from it an entirely new song. Generally speaking, Y?Arcka favors the less prominent chromosomes. Most producers of hip-hop instrumentals, which is, broadly speaking, how his music might be categorized (though it could just as easily be called plunderphonic), would favor, say, the hook equivalent of the chromosome for a strong chin. Kelly instead goes for the chromosome that is to blame for the patient’s slight instep. (As he tweeted back in May, “samples are where u never expect them to be.”) In one Jackson 5 remix, for example, he removed Michael in favor of two of the less popular brothers.
The new album turns another Jackson rifflet (a surprisingly prominent shard of “Rock with You”) into an estuary, but that’s just when it’s getting started. The collection is titled Blew Off the Burner Kinda Dusty, and its seven tracks show Kelly to be stronger than ever. Some of his earlier work emphasized ingenuity and off-kilter beats over compositional wholeness, but each of the seven tracks on Blew Off are full songs — not thoroughly conceived backing tracks awaiting a vocalist to complete them, just full songs.
The term “instrumental,” by the way, means a whole other thing in hip-hop, since a solid chunk of Kelly’s sample archive is vocal, if not verbal — vocal in factual terms, but no more or less textural and rhythmic than the rest of his source material. Perhaps the finest moment on Blew Off exemplifies this: “Swth,” which despite its Autechre-like title is a restlessly smooth affair, an endless give and take of hushed moans and rippling beats, bringing to mind some of the more subtle moments off Common’s under appreciated album Be.
The cover shows Kelly apparently blowing dust off his MPC beat machine, but if you ignore the set’s title, it’s also possible to think he’s about to give it a kiss.
Get the full set for free at arckatron.us. And I’m honored that the artist link on the album’s webpage goes directly to this interview I conducted with Kelly back in 2009: “Young Communicator.”
The Plectrum Region of Space Music (MP3)
The trio PGT cheekily refers to itself as the “only double latop/acoustic mandolin ensemble in the world.” One would hope after a listen to its recent release, Wood Lake, on the netlabel stasisfield.com, that other musicians might follow in its tracks. The ensemble’s members, whose initials lend it its acronym-free abbreviation of a name (Terence M. Pender, Brad Garton, Gregory Taylor), pursue a zone of ambient music that is ethereal and textural in varying ratios. Of the album’s three tracks, the opening one, “Wood Lake 1,” is the most placid. The most revealing, though, is the second, “Wood Lake 2,” a region of plectrum space music that brings to mind the more attenuated experimental formula explored by the Grateful Dead: picked riffs that circulate like loose material floating in a current that in turn lends it shape, a current that’s provided here by the accompanying duo’s gentle laptop synthesis (MP3).
[audio:http://www.stasisfield.com/mp3z_09/SF-9004-woodLake-02.mp3|titles=”Wood Lake 2″|artists=PGT]
Album available for free download and streaming at stasisfield.com.