Month: November 2011

Listening from Outside Plato’s Cave (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The reproduction after the fact online of live electronic music events often feels like the opposite of Plato’s cave. We mere MP3 listeners are lingering outside the cave, and inside there’s what seems to be some crazy laser-light show being projected onto the ceiling. All we get, however, is a muted audio recording. Case in point, the disparate, slinky, low-key phrases of Xesús Valle‘s live Sónar 2011 set, which was made availale for download as the 85th entry in the great Crónica podcast, at cronicaelectronica.org. It was recorded during Valle’s performance in Barcelona at Sónar. The brief liner notes lists, in a description of his process, “granular synthesis, analog synthesis and raw field recordings” as the constituent parts of his work. There are footsteps, and woozy synthesizers, and B-movie horror noises, and delicate crossfades (MP3). There is a sense of narrative to the progression, but one that never, perhaps intentionally, lets the listener ever forget that he, or she, is in the dark.

[audio:http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast085.mp3|titles=”Live in Sónar 2011″|artists=Xesús Valle]

Track originally posted at cronicaelectronica.org. More on Valle at alg-label.com.

Home Is Where the Sampler Is (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The 70th entry in the ongoing TouchRadio series of podcasts, a side project of the estimable Touch Editions, is from Peter 7 Paelinck, who appears to have taken his somewhat less than enchanted memories of a Norway visit and turned them into something formidable. (Not merely memories, but field recordings: concrete sonic documents of his experience.) Perhaps it is no more formidable than the journey that appears to have eaten at him, but it is certainly entirely more enjoyable, at least by his telling. (“Returning home, the place you love and when you stay too long, you hate, became the source of these recordings,” the brief liner note explains in part.) The mix of field recordings and live instrumentation, which appears to involve some sort of woodwind, perhaps a flure, at times, ranges from solitary and winsome to scraggly and threatening. There appear to be multiple parts, labeled, if the descriptive note can be interpreted as such, “6AM,” “Moonsickness,” “Nobah Sahibs,” “Deadend,” “Nachtmeer,” “Is,” and “23.2” (for example, there’s a clear break at 11:13, and at the 23-minute mark a sudden entry of what could be the dual bass drums of Slayer being imitated by a circus monkey). As a whole the full piece is just under an hour in length, collectively titled “The Home Recordings.” Maybe distance makes the heart grow less fond, because as the track goes on it gets more scroungy and more noisy (MP3).

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio70.mp3|titles=”The Home Recordings”|artists=Peter 7 Paelinck]

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Paelinck at peter7n.be. (The above photograph accompanied the piece on the TouchRadio website, and is credited to Luc Vanhoucke.)

‘Dubstep Is Fun’ Is More Than Fun (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Volume five of Dubstep Is Fun, the ongoing compilation series from the fine Hungarian netlabel named Complementary Distribution (aka COD), was posted earlier today. It’s 13 tracks in all, much of the collection rambunctious and seemingly willfully cold. In this vision of dubstep, the dank pleasures of genre from which the album takes its name are reflected in a harsh mirror, soft analog unease giving way to sharp digital constructions. One clear highlight is the closing track, “3” by All One. It is easily half the speed of many of those it sits alongside. “3” is all slithery beats and percussive attenuation (MP3), and — and what follows is a compliment, touching on the spartan beauty of the piece — feels more like an element of a track than a finished track unto itself.

[audio:http://cod.mosfet.hu/codif005/s4-all_one-3.mp3|titles=”3″|artists=All One]

One side note: the album is a digital download, but interestingly the tracks are divided into four sections, reflecting the dance-music tradition of two-LP sets. The first three sides are just labeled Side A, Side B, and Side C, while the fourth, on which “3” appears, is labeled Side Space, signaling the slower content of its material. Bringing the whole thing back into the digital realm, there’s a bonus track, unaligned with any of the four sides.

Get the full Dubstep Is Fun set, streaming and freely downloadable, at bitlabrecords.com/cod. Interview on Disquiet.com with Complementary Distribution’s founder, András Hargitai (aka Soutien Gorge), from back in 2006: “Free as in Netlabel.”

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Working in Menlo-Regular. Maybe I don't need Consolas after all. #
  • Heard fan on Macbook Air for first time since Tuesday purchase. Now back to silent. #SSD #
  • Whenever I use the term "program music" I am concerned a reader will think I mean "program as in 'computer program.'" #
  • Guy outside working fervidly in cold on massive phone-line switch box. He turns around. I'm surprised he's not Robert De Niro in Brazil. #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

The Score Before the Film (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To listen to a score to a film before one witnesses the film for which it was composed is to experience a kind of unintentional program music. It’s to listen to music that follows a story but that doesn’t express it verbally or visually — that is, it is to hear music that relates to a story, but that doesn’t relate the story.

If you have a favorite film-music composer, this can be a great way to experience a new film: listen to Cliff Martinez’s scores before going to the recently released Drive or Contagion, for example, and the music will be just that much more present during the viewing. It won’t be so present as to overwhelm the film, but it will bring the sonic elements more into focus, not just the elements within the score, but the sometimes enticingly ambiguous places where the score ends and the rest of the film’s sound environment begins.

In the case of Sun Hammer‘s score to the short film Forgiveness, by director David Meiklejohn, which the composer just posted for free (actually pay-what-you-want, so do feel free to pay something) at bandcamp.com, it means an opportunity to experience a greater-than-usual distance between score and film. This is because the film is a small production, and its imagery doesn’t precede it, in contrast with the massive promotional campaigns that serve Hollywood films as advance scouts into the consciousness of future viewers. Forgiveness is reportedly a tale of revenge. According to its production company, at damnationland.com, the story goes as follows: “A vengeful spy survives an assasination attempt and takes revenge on the man that tried to kill her.” It certainly sounds like a taut thriller, and the score matches the bare logline with a spartan approach: wells of sound, percussive anticipation, stretches of static-laden noise. It never has the music-by-the-yard pulsing of standard thriller scores, and stretches at times into a psychedelic realm that raises one’s expectations for the film. The various cues are separated by momentary pauses across one single track, breaking the program music into an enjoyably sequential experience.

Track originally posted at sunhammer.bandcamp.com. More on Sun Hammer, aka Virginia-based Jay Bodley, at twitter.com/sunhammer and soundcloud.com/sunhammer. (Music found via twitter.com/falsereactions.)