Category: reports/essays

Because of the enormous amount of music released each year, it is absurd to single out a handful of recordings as “the best,” or even as “my favorites.” But also because of the enormous amount of music released each year, the exercise can be helpful. This is my favorite music of 2005, broken into two categories: commercial recordings and free downloads. And there’s a short bit at the end about the year in film soundtracks.

Best CDs of 2005: To begin with, my favorite 10 commercially released albums of 2005, in alphabetical order by recording artist.

1. Christopher Bissonnette
Periphery
(Kranky)
While it would be inappropriate to simply reserve a spot on one’s top 10 list each year for a representative album from a specific label, there are nonetheless labels whose output in a given year (for example, Warp and Ninja Tune, at one time the Blue Note and Verve of electronica) could easily comprise a year-end top 5 or 10 entirely of their own. Kranky Records has become that sort of label, and if in 2005 albums by Keith Fullerton Whitman (Multiples, also on this list), Lichens (The Psychic Nature of Being), Brian McBride (When the Detail Lost Its Freedom) and others cemented the label’s reputation as a leading source of composerly ambience, it’s Bissonnette’s Periphery, these icily elegiac constructions built from orchestral recordings, that best exemplifies the label’s achievement.
Label: kranky.net
Artist: christopherbissonnette.ca

2. Colleen
The Golden Morning Breaks
(Leaf)
Colleen is Cecile Schott, who builds lilting, elegantly layered music from the most traditional of instruments (guitar, 19th century glass harmonicon, glass glockenspiel), and this album is among the most exciting folk-tronic releases of the year. The Golden Morning Breaks couldn’t be more true to its title.
Label: theleaflabel.com
Artist: colleenplays.org

3. FM3
Buddha Machine
Two musicians based in China make a little box that resembles an AM radio. Inside is a chip with nine short bits of music, some mere atmosphere, others like sonic ripples. Turn it on, pick a loop, and let it play. The only 2005 album I purchased two copies of for myself. No, it isn’t an LP, or a CD; it’s far more.
Artist: fm3.com.cn

4. Konono No. 1
Congotronics
(Crammed Discs)
Even had it been cyberpunk artifice instead of regional economics, this African group’s reliance on makeshift, homebrew electronics would have been no less fascinating and enjoyable. A relic from the future.
Label: crammed.be

5. Daniel Lanois
Belladonna
(Anti-)
Anyone who’s been seeking the vocal-less dubs of Lanois’ roots-music productions for folks like the Neville Brothers and Bob Dylan will find their equal here. And, freed from those acts’ audiences’ expectations, he leans even deeper into the industrial-ambient realm.
Label: anti.com
Artist: daniellanois.com

6. Steve Reich
You Are (Variations) & Cello Counterpoint
(Nonesuch)
As always, Reich is at his best when he finds chinks in the armor of uniformity. The main piece is largely about the vocalists locating an uneasy harmony amid an enjoyably disparate instrumental ensemble. An additional piece, for eight cellos (or one with taped accompaniment), is the latest installment in his long-in-progress “counterpoint” series, which is becoming akin to minimalism’s Well-Tempered Clavier.
Label: nonesuch.com
Artist: stevereich.com

7. SunnO)))
Black One
(Southern Lord)
Doom metal, like avant-jazz, can easily become a game of one-outsmanship, competitive acts upping the ante in a kind of aural arms race. Certainly the case here, but on Black One, the drone-rock band SunnO))) picks unusual weapons, like guest experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi, to take the sound to unexpected realms.
Label: southernlord.com

8. Amon Tobin
Soundtrack to Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3
(Ninja Tune)
When a musician’s name is attached to a video game, as is the case here, it’s usually a matter of a fast buck in exchange for cultural capital. Quite the contrary for Tobin, who hasn’t simply licensed some existing music or quick remixes to a franchise. He produced his most varied album yet, ranging from futurist techno to drama-drenched string-play, and brought in a heap of guest musicians, more than on any of his previous, un-commissioned albums.
Label: ninjatune.net
Artist: amontobin.com

9. Stephen Vitiello & David Tronzo
Scratchy Monsters, Laughing Ghosts
(New Albion)
The electronicist and the guitarist together make a kind of hardscrabble minimalism. Vitiello’s a conceptualist with a concern for small sounds, Tronzo a traditionalist far too steeped in guitar culture to merely repeat what’s come before; together they find common ground in the echoes. Also, Michael J. Schumacher contributes some piano.
Label: newalbion.com
Artist: stephenvitiello.com

10. Keith Fullerton Whitman
Multiples
(Kranky)
Once upon a time, Hrvatski was the processing-drunk mask behind which Keith Fullerton Whitman fiddled, more often than not, with guitar-loop fantasies. Now Hrvatski is something of a side gig for Whitman, who on Multiples employed “classic” technology of the modern electronic era, which he accessed at the studio at Harvard University. If only more musicians looked past the lip of their laptops.
Label: kranky.net
Artist: keithfullertonwhitman.com

Side note: I had a difficult time coming up with 10 singles I loved for this year’s Village Voice poll; I just find myself repeatedly listening to three in particular: Kanye West‘s “Gold Digger,” Common‘s “Go” (produced by West) and Mike Jones‘ “Still Tippin'” (featuring Slim Thug and Paul Wall). This difficulty in selecting a longer list seems odd to me, since I listened to more radio (thanks to having traded in my iPod for an FM-enabled iAudio) and bought more vinyl 12″s (for the instrumental tracks) in 2005 than in previous recent years, but there you have it. A flip through the year’s Field Notes entries on this site will include various hip-hop instrumentals I’ve singled out for recommendation.

ON THE DOWNLOAD: This year I’m singling out, for the first time, 10 downloads as my favorites. This time last year, I was of the mind that maybe two album-length works released directly to the web as free downloads (John Kannenberg’s Four Painters and Raemus’ Stream Studies) were of the caliber of the year’s best commercial recordings (say Fennesz’s Venice and Savath & Savalas’ Apropa’t). At the end of 2005, looking back on the entries in this site’s Downstream section, where I post recommended freely downloadable music each weekday, it was difficult to whittle down the list of favorites to a mere 10, since the Downstream is itself a culling of countless files out there on the web.

To make the field a bit more knowable, this list is limited to recordings that weren’t entirely promotional (like, for example, when record labels post for free a single track from a commercial album), or the temporary downloads favored by many websites. Which is to say, everything on this list is available to download, for free, right now. Click through to the original Downstream entry for more information. They’re listed here in the chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com:

1. By the concise litigious standards of Danger Mouse (who combined the Beatles and Jay-Z for his Grey Album), Ninja Tune Records stalwart DJ Food‘s Raiding the 20th Century is a veritable Bleak House of mashups, an hour of copyright-teasing snippets sewn together with a blend of Christian Marclay’s sense of pop-culture curation, an FM radio promo’s interest in keeping your attention, and an NPR afternoon forum on intellectual property.
Downstream: January 26, 2005

2. A 20-minute piece by septuagenarian legend Phill Niblock, “Sethwork,” in which he performs on vaguely termed “electronics” along with guitarist Seth Josel, who employs an e-bow to extend his tones to the horizon, recorded live on February 24, 2005, as part of the Other Minds Festival.
Downstream: March 18, 2005

3. Credited to Aitanna77 (aka Spanish musician Mikel Martinez), the Spring Is Coming Soon EP’s four tracks (posted on the test tube netlabel) mix gently plucked acoustic guitar and a smattering of digital effects. What makes the work special is that the blend of analog and digital isn’t predicated on conflict, but on how the elements work together.
Downstream: April 1, 2005

4. Chris Herbert has been long at work on an album for the Kranky label, and for now we have but a song, titled “Chlorophyl,” to extrapolate the rest from. Utterly quiet, with a pulse-soothing beat, it takes several listens to reveal itself, like a dark room slowly brought into focus.
Downstream: August 11, 2005

5. In Traum (“traum” meaning “dream”), by the German act Seetyca, could very well take as its title the name of the netlabel that released it: Dark Winter. It’s nine tracks of near-lifeless, emotionally and physically remote soundscapes. Or is it?
Downstream: August 19, 2005

6. Matthew Herbert‘s 2005 album, Plat du Jour (Accidental), took as its subject globalism and nutrition, as he built the tracks from food sources. The BBC filmed Herbert making an original piece, “Esme’s Waltz,” and posted the resulting MP3, a chock-a-block wind-up toy of countless little percussive elements. It’s arguable this track has an immediacy the album lacks, though that may simply be a consequence of having the opportunity to watch Herbert construct it.
Downstream: September 27, 2005

7. With far more elegance than the project might suggest, (dj) morsanek is constructing an album-length collection in which each track is built from segments of pre-existing avant-garde, out-jazz and otherwise exploratory recordings, and posting them on his website.
Downstream: October 3, 2005

8. Taylor Deupree built the album Post_Piano 2 (12k) from piano-based work by Kenneth Kirschner, and the duo celebrated the album’s release by, in the open-source spirit, putting out a call for other musicians to tweak Kirschner’s “11/11/2003,” the same piece from which Post_Piano 2 was made. The project received over 100 entries, 21 of which were selected, with highlights by Blake Stickland and Stephen Mathieu.
Downstream: October 5, 2005

9. Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) sets Welsh voices to found and synthetic sounds, commissioned by the Cardiff Festival of Creative Technology.
Downstream: November 1, 2005

10. This final entry isn’t really an album per se, nor is it by a single musician. Nor, for that matter, is it even complete. It’s a work in progress, with no end in sight: the “Remix! Tree” at the Freesound project (freesound.iua.upf.edu), a remarkable repository of field recordings and other public domain audio clips, intended to be uploaded and traded freely. The “Remix! Tree” is a subset of the Freesound site, where users take existing sound clips and twist them to their will. As of this writing, there are about 30 clips that have been remixed upwards of 7 times each. The tree has been featured six times in the Disquiet Downstream this past year:
Downstream: August 23
Downstream: September 12
Downstream: September 29
Downstream: October 31
Downstream: November 11
Downstream: December 13
And recommended tracks from elsewhere in the Freesound site’s holdings were noted two other times:
Downstream: August 16
Downstream: September 26

REEL WORLD: The year in film soundtracks was particularly noteworthy. Film scores have long existed as a parallel realm to ambient/electronic music, allowing for occasional intersections. From Warner Bros. house composer Carl Stalling to thriller-film heavyweight John Barry, the folks who set images to music for a living have provided models for audio cut’n’paste craftsmanship, as well as for background music as art. Likewise, composers from Aaron Copland to Brian Eno have lent their talents to the screen, and more importantly provided aural models for projecting all manner of spaciousness, external and internal, landscape and philosophical.

In the recent past, Lisa Gerrard, David Holmes, Clint Mansell and Cliff Martinez have contributed, year in, year out, some of the best electronic film music, all four of them having come out of the pop world (Gerrard with Dead Can Dance, Holmes as a DJ, Mansell in Pop Will Eat Itself, Martinez with the Dickies and the Red Hot Chili Peppers). But 2005 was odd in that only Mansell (Requiem for a Dream, World Traveler) came through with a big-league release, Doom. Holmes did the terrorism-themed The War Within, Martinez the SoCal culture-clash Havoc, and Gerrard (with Jeff Rona) the Native American-themed A Thousand Roads, none of which had particularly wide releases.

In the past, this turn of events would have signalled 2005 as substandard, but in those composers’ places, many ambient scores still bloomed. Just to name a few:

Holmes and Martinez made their film-world names on Steven Soderbergh projects, and Alexandre Desplat signals himself as a member of their emotionally cool school with the Soderbergh-produced Syriana. For Unleashed (aka Danny the Dog), the Jet Li film, trip-hop mavericks Massive Attack brought the piano of a character played by Morgan Freeman into the score. Tyler Bates rendered some haunting cues for Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. John Powell, a wizard at three-dimensional sound, continued to bring his microsonic details to numerous major big-time Hollywood flicks, notably Mr. and Mrs. Smith. And Raz Mesinai (perhaps better known to electronica fans as Badawi, or as one half of Sub Dub) scored his first major project: Sorry, Haters. I’ll have a lengthy interview with Mesinai on Disquiet.com early next year, after it’s seen print publication.

OAKLAND, CA — It began with someone playing a renaissance melody on a recorder and ended, four hours later, at midnight, with rough scraping noises amid a machine whine. In between there were dead bodies, a wicked game of Tempest and, according to the evening’s host, “the only goth DJ who matters.” It was the first night of the first ever Disquiet Festival (the name is a coincidence — the festival has no affiliation with this website), which brought together gothic industrial music and sound art in one dim white room. Held at the 21 Grand in Oakland, California, the September 30 concert featured four acts, with a DJ playing what the program noted as “interstitial” music in between. (The second night, October 1, which I was unable to attend, was set to feature four more acts: nO thiNg, a project by Loop.pooL’s Rick Walker; the duo nullspace; Dark Muse and Frozen in Amber.)

Forms of Things Unknown, a solo act by a fellow who goes by the name Ferrara Brain Pan, took the stage first, playing a melody on his recorder that wouldn’t have been out of place in Sherwood Forest. This shifted to a tape of a voice speaking, and soon a single phrase, an older man saying the two words “and sound,” started to loop. For the remainder of the FoTU performance, looping was the focus, layering the blurts of a kazoo, the sinuous intonations of a bass clarinet, and a unique setup in which each of the performer’s hands held a separate bow. When FoTU took a breath during his clarinet sequence, it became clear that the loop, about four seconds with an attenuated fade, gave the impression of intense breath control. The layering had a different impact depending on the instrument. With the kazoo (perhaps a duck call) it had a muezzin resonance, like a shofar call to worship. With the clarinet, phrases were able to overlap enough to present a patient, slowly developing sequence of long lines; he sounded like Eric Dolphy visiting Tuva. The bows were particularly remarkable. Though he wasn’t especially ambidextrous, he was able to crosscut what sounded like two violins. Furthermore, the loop delay allowed him to build up a fast Hitchcockian run on one bow and a more sedentary line on the other. FoTU closed by returning to the recorder, which brought the listener out of the trance of those more extended interior pieces, in part because the recorder melody made little to no use of the delay, but also because it was a familiar sound, reprising what had opened the piece.

Filling the gap between each set was DJ Merrick (an Elephant Man reference?), who spun industrial buzz tones and dropped in vocal samples. Of the night’s four acts, none meshed as cleanly with Merrick as did Whormongr (Wolfgang Chan), a solid figure with a slick of a Mohawk whose 35-minute set tumbled together shifting layers of static and noise, glitch and rhythm. Medical footage was projected in the background at first, archival images of hearts pumping and surgery being performed in rooms that looked like Twilight Zone sets. As if the footage weren’t artifactual enough, superimposed on top were narrow vertical striations that made the images seem even more old and worn, but since these scratches didn’t move along with the images, they had about as much verisimilitude as the trompe l’oeil condensation drawn into the design on soda cans. As Whormongr’s rhythm intensified, the images changed from medical cadavers to war, poverty and, most abundantly, state-sponsored killing of prisoners. The images of dying people provided such a visceral presentation of dissolution, both moral and physical, that the music, for all its elegantly stripped gears and artful static, just couldn’t compete. Pictures of the dead are a staple of goth culture, but sitting in a white room sipping Jim Beam on ice while one human being after another slumped to the ground with a bullet to the skull, it was difficult not to reflect on another recent situation in which images of brutalized prisoners served as entertainment.

Few acts today combine image and sound as successfully as do S.S.S., a trio from France. One of the members, Atau Tanaka, couldn’t make the show, but the other two, Cecile Babiole and Laurent Dailleau, split the duties over the course of five short pieces. Palms raised, they looked at first like they were going to initiate a seance, but their hands were suspended in mid-air for more practical purposes. S.S.S. uses motion sensors as its primary interface, so both Babiole, controlling the visual projections, and Dailleau, the sound, stood nearly still, save for their hands. Babiole produced images that combined the look of an old video game and the elegance of digital art, while Dailleau worked a theremin to shape freeform sounds that ranged from field recordings to electronic tones. The performance opened with a slow roil against a background like some colorful game of Tempest, but when it came to a close, after only six minutes, people applauded tentatively, not out of disinterest in the music, but because the first two acts of the evening had set a precedent with their music-by-the-yard soundscapes; it took a moment to recognize that S.S.S. trafficked in individual pieces. Though Dailleau’s music was interesting, especially moments that sounded like Conlon Nancarrow working an electric piano and another in which he appeared to reverse the tape of a plane crash, Babiole’s simple kinetic digital images were just breathtaking. One was so musical in its motion that it seemed like Luc Ferrari’s idea of Dance Dance Revolution. There were flowing grids of boxes you could watch for hours, minute variations in gray lending depth (a lesson some musicians could learn from). One work looked like the daydreams of a CAD machine, another like the cover to Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album come to life. After 40 minutes, you had to wonder how tired their arms were.

How do you follow such great visuals? You hunker down in the dark, illuminated only by a laptop screen and the light seeping in from the alley, and let the music speak for itself. Doing just that, the temporary autonomous duo of Thomas Dimuzio and Dan Burke closed the evening with 40 minutes of noise improv. The collaboration marked a common theme for Dimuzio, who has a penchant for room-filling sounds, but who likes to work with people who specialize in the fragile. When they started their piece, Dimuzio and Burke might have seemed like they were still setting up. The reason was that Burke’s primary instrument for the evening was a contact microphone, which amplified whatever he was doing on the table in front of him, well beyond the usual sense of scale. Occasionally those noises were overcome by Dimuzio’s wash, but they also provided brief interludes in the storm. An early highpoint came when Dimuzio introduced the sound of a jazz band, and peaked it out amid the white noise. Burke apparently had trouble with his laptop, and had to reboot it a few times, but the familiar sound cue of an Apple boot easily got lost in the rapturous noise, just another sound among so many.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Belatedly, some notes from each of the four nights at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, held August 18 through 21 of this year at the SomArts building. Between the abstract fragile sound art, courtesy of folks like Erik Glick Rieman and George Lewis, and material with a strict rhythmic intent, notably closing-night performances by Sutekh and Blevin Blechtum, SFEMF 2005 was either diverse or divided. Common ground was located by none other than Morton Subotnik, an elder figure in electronic music who managed to sound utterly contemporary, as if his next record were due out on the same label as Autechre and Aphex Twin. If there was one constant, it was the ubiquitous Apple logo, beaming from the vast majority of the laptops present; the Apple logo is to experimental electronic music what the Adidas logo once was to rap.

Night One, Thursday, August 18

Act I: Together the duo of Dina Emerson (voice, wineglasses, electronics) and Jonathan Segel (violin, guitar, electronics) go by the name Chaos Butterfly. Their music is ritual-like, with sonic ghost images, and the sundry sounds, including glass harmonica, have no inherent direct relation with each other, aside from a certain homespun quality, and that is probably to their credit. Electronic concerts such as these are so different from ordinary concerts. You hear noise instead of melody, and you seek something unfamiliar, rather than familiar. Even if you’re familiar with the musician, you may be disappointed if what they perform isn’t, in some way, new to you. Even visual cues mean something different from what they might elsewhere. When Emerson’s mouth doesn’t move in accordance with the voice emanating from the speaker, it’s not that she’s messed up a lip synch, but that she’s employing looping, that she is vocalizing against herself. And when Segel looks a little confused, it’s not that he hasn’t mastered his tools, but that he’s pushing the envelope of what his tools can do. He uses the laptop to chop up his violin. Her vocals are a bit histrionic, reminiscent at times of Diamanda Galas’ devilish glossolalia, despite which this is the sort of electronic music that would be at home in a public park on a Sunday afternoon.

Act II: Erik Glick Rieman took the stage with his disassembled Rhodes piano to what sounded like mechanized frogs gurgling and spouting. There was also a background drone that wasn’t part of his performance, and he seemed to complain when he brought his set to a close, apparently cutting it short. Anyone who’s been to the SomArts building is used to street noise, used to listening through unplanned sound, and if to Rieman it was like playing chamber music from inside a waterfall, for the locals in the house it really sounded just fine. No matter. He performed with a lot of focus on the tactile, on the moment when keys are hit, and apparently attention to such sonic detail cuts both ways.

Act III: Headlining the evening were George Lewis and Marcos Fernandes. Fernandes was billed as assisting Lewis, though indeed, as more than one audience member suggested after the concert, it sounded more like a Fernandes show than it did a Lewis one, more the nuanced real-world sound transformations of Fernandes’ Trummerflora Collective than the glottal exuberance associated with Lewis (of the much loved News for Lulu downtown-jazz trio albums with John Zorn and Bill Frisell, and now a professor uptown in Manhattan at Columbia). Here the street sounds were part of the source material, as were insect noise and other aural stuff. Lewis’ trombone sat on the table before them like a desk accessory or a trophy, though he eventually did pick it up to play, twice, for brief segments in which he augmented it — first with a mute, then with digital tools. Fernandes had his own old-school equipment, like a cymbal that he’d set on delay, so it played like we were hearing it through a thick wall of liquid. Lewis played sci-fi flares with his trombone, though even when the sounds were extended by processing, the mic picked up the physical touch of his playing, which was pleasurable. As the piece quieted down, it became apparent how even little sounds on his trombone would trigger a slow-motion flurry. Chaos Butterfly may have claimed the name, but Lewis and Fernandes were chaos theory in action.

Night Two, Friday, August 19

Act I: Victoria Jordanova played an amplified harp, enhanced with “live electronics” and what appeared to be a vibrating glove used by massage therapists. She plucked and strummed, using what may have been a toothpick to accent individual vibrations.

Act II: Guillermo Galindo, aka gal*in_dog, entered wearing a helmet, looking like an astronaut lost on his way to an MTV awards show, holding a black cross that appeared to be made of microphones. (How did Madonna not think of this first?) The noise that he proceeded to emit was incredibly loud, easily the most aggressive of the four evenings, not as antic as what Blechtum would do, or as percussive as Heckert, or as classic-rocking as Parkins, but it was visceral, and audience members felt it deep in their stomachs. This could be the sound-art shortcut to six-pack abs, or to a heart attack. The heaviest sound of Galindo’s set resulted when he held a power drill next to his mic-cross. Big surprise there.

Act III: Easily the best performance of the night, probably of the entire festival, was Morton Subotnik, playing with Miguel Frasconi, manipulating sounds in space thanks to six speakers and a sub woofer. It sounded vaguely like Autechre, circa the Tri Repetae+++ album, and was funkier and, certainly, punchier than anything playing at any club in the city that night. Subotnik took such pleasure in what he was doing, setting off little circuitous routings of sound with little more than a whisper into his microphone. It was like some sort of 21st-century boogie woogie — you didn’t just want to listen; you wanted to get in line to try out the system yourself. Subotnik, whose classic Silver Apples of the Moon dates from the mid-1960s, was in the pocket with an intensely pizzicato sound, occasionally introducing a voice transformed to seem like a Beastie Boys song being covered by one of Battlestar Galactica‘s Cylons.

Night Three, Saturday, August 20

Act I: Matt Heckert brought along some familiar robot acquaintances, the sort of mechanized percussion instruments he’d performed with on the same stage for the Activating the Medium Festival in 2004. One instrument was a pair of three-tiered wooden bleachers, with chains roped across the top of each step. The chains would bang against the bleachers in accordance with Heckert’s directions. He sat to the side while the bleachers nailed a militarist cadence. As the chains sped up, the chipped wood approached a level of near-chaos for which Heckert could only be held partially responsible, which of course is the point. Given enough processing power or physical intensity, mechanisms appear to gain sentience. Behind the bleachers was a second instrument, a pair of vertical rods, atop which were placed big yellow buckets — well, until they were thrown free by the rods’ constant motion, revealing long chains that resembled pigtails and that confirmed Heckert’s creations as the Muppets of Burning Man. The robots may not have passed the Turing Test during their 15-minute set, but they sure were entertaining.

Act II: As with the previous night, the middle act was more performance than concert, in this case a modern dance piece put together by Patrice Scanlon. The music started with spacey, organ-like sounds that turned out to be a sort of prelude to the more dancey (in the nightclub sense of the word) and generic techno music to follow. There was the familiar elastic percussion, not to mention bleep-bleep melodies oddly reminiscent of Harold Faltermeyer. A dancer appeared, wearing red, then a second one in yellow, and then finally the composer, seated front and center and running her computer, stood to reveal she wore blue. This may or may not have been intended, but red frowned, yellow had a neutral demeanor, and blue smiled. They twirled and swooped, looking like yoga in motion.

Act III: The Hub is six accomplished composer-performers working across a live computer network: John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone and Mark Trayle. Theirs was like a game piece, the six musicians on stage with their laptops and, in a few cases, secondary equipment, such as a keyboard or a motion trigger. The music was largely percussive, with snake rattles, bug-song, sawblade wave forms and a wide variety that would fit comfortably under the rubric of “bang!” There were high pitches, rings, and other upper-register sounds. On a screen projected behind them, bits of text appeared and slowly receded, mostly jokes at the expense of the performers, though some were informative. One sequence explained that each member of the Hub controlled one background element and one or more “foreground” elements. Another referred, correctly, to the ensemble’s “typically hyperactive” sound. At one point the screen appeared to display some computer code, which was edited in real time. Another background text read “funky, squishy,” which either provided the musicians with direction or the audience with adjectives to describe what was already being played. This line elicited considerable laughter: “What is that clicky stuff?” One bit of text expressed hope that the sound was better in the hall than it was in the musicians’ monitors. Also running in the background was evidence of the computer network: IP addresses, abbreviated names of the participants, and various command-line entries.

Night Four, Sunday, August 21

Act I: The night started with Sutekh, working on stage with a live visual presentation (by someone who wasn’t credited in the program). The music began with three minutes or so of mallet instruments and bell tones, all laptop-produced. Images of small geometric shapes moved about rapidly and jerkily, appearing to be hexagonal bits of metal, maybe magnetized fragments. These alternated with images of text being written, super-magnified, the ink’s absorption into the paper more of interest than the words themselves. Given the minimalist music and the text on screen, it all felt particularly Peter Greenaway, in a good way. When the tones faded, what came in their place was contact-mic stuff, which matched the written words, the scratching of pen on paper having intense appeal. Then horror-score strings and wind, and gorgeous images of street silhouettes against paper, the latter shown so every pore was visible, the grain texture self-evident, the moire pattern like a bloated Lichtenstein. A gorgeously flickering sound emerged amid the hum, but the hum had a disturbing quality. Silhouettes of cables appeared, like those on the cover of the festival’s program. Eventually reduced to a cricket’s idea of minimal techno, and then the most literal, or least transformed, sample of the set: a human chorus. Pop music reared its head, with a voice like Bjork’s, a warped female vocal as aware of its sibilant texture as of what it was saying. A nice piece of trip-hop, but somehow it felt inappropriate for the context.

Act II: Blevin Blechtum moves continuously through a massive sonic bag of materials, and it all seems of a piece. You want to credit it to stream of consciousness, but only a musician’s concentrated imagination could make sense of such disparate material. Call it techno’s theory of intelligent design. For a moment, early on, there was a pause in the noise. The second time this happened, perhaps it was a glitch. A third occurrence, though, made it seem that these were conscious ruptures in the onslaught; Blechtum was employing silence as a disruption. Her and Sutekh’s sets were both heavily rhythmic, especially for a festival such as this, one more associated with the abstract, with… well, with what? Classicism grafted onto new tools? Fragile sounds for their own sake? Well, increasingly, it appears, with performance. Blechtum wore a large cardboard horse head for the whole act, decorated like some courtly figure, like a fancy chess piece, with big white hemispheres for eyes, and teeth like bars of Ivory soap. Her laptops were disguised in pizza boxes, and she looked like a figment out of Sexy Beast or Donnie Darko.

Act III: Zeena Parkins closed the night and the festival, her harp a wooden triangle, some Danish modern furniture vision of a harp, unlike the more traditional one that Jordanova had played a few nights earlier. Next to Parkins was a desk of equipment, and below her some foot pedals used for looping, contorting and triggering. She worked her whammy bar hard (bringing to mind the performance at the 2004 SFEMF by former Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud), then extending into quiet periods. The opening was very bluesy, but broken; she’d scratch on the strings and loop the sound in her foot pedals, and she’d spin the harp to gain access to it from various vantages. Occasionally she’d just let the loops play for a while on their own, building an automated maze of Hendrix-oid feedback and overtones, seesaw drones, fiddling and blurps. She twisted paper into the microphone for texture and dramatic effect. The highpoint occurred when she got down on her knees, working the pedals with her hands, harp be damned.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — San Francisco regularly has more than its share of sound-art activities, but for the week that began on April 9, the fruits were even more plentiful than usual. Here’s a run through of a great week of experimental music, focusing on just three of the period’s many events: five nights, three concerts, two French horns — and one refrigerator. It’s worth noting that of the nine musicians involved, only two made prominent use of a laptop computer. The following reviews had been intended as brief individual entries in this site’s new Field Notes section for quick notes, but they ended up being longer pieces.

TAKING THE MEASURE OF ELLEN FULLMAN: Ellen Fullman brought her 70-foot string instrument to the San Francisco warehouse gallery space SomArts on Saturday, April 9. The hour-long concert, titled “Phantom Coincidence,” featured Fullman and her Long String Instrument in solo and trio settings. The instrument is less a tool than it is a workshop, its several dozen strings held taut across a room larger than most apartments. They’re divided into two separate strands so that she can walk back and forth among them, hands outstretched like someone stroking the tops of tall grass. The combined strings resemble a mechanical cobweb, and Fullman was the spider not the fly. She coaxed a range of sounds, which brought to mind sitar, bowed violin, and some alien bellows.

The evening’s program notes made mention of the different sonorous properties of stainless steel wire and “phosphor bronze wire.” Small clamps weighted down several strings near their midway point, defining their length (and, thus, their tuning: capos courtesy of Home Depot). But the overall effect was more holistic, a broad depth of sound and resonance (and, to those fortunate enough to sit front and center, a wide stereo spectrum).

After an extended solo work, Fullman was joined by two musicians. First came Krystyna Bobrowski, whose French horn brought brief melodic riffs into Fullman’s aural space. The trio was rounded out by Luciano Chessa, who strummed his autoharp like it was a washboard. For a second trio piece, Bobrowski switched to another homemade tool, her Gliss Glass, which is Dr. Frankenstein’s idea of a glass harmonica, two deep decanters suspended on metal tripods and fixed with plastic tubes that allow the player to alter their tunings in real time. After Chessa switched from autoharp to musical saw, he moved around the room regularly, by all appearances in an attempt (quite successful) to trigger different clusters of sympathetic vibrations in Fullman’s strings.

If Fullman’s guitar-of-the-gods was the focal point during the performance, afterward many eyes were on the floor. There, a lengthwise ruler divided the Long String Instrument down to the inch, and Fullman had taped on the ground other markings and instructions that served as the compositions. Here are some examples: “Beat Frequency / Ellen cues; go out together alternate smoothly with overlap play 2 strings fade out at 12.5 (5/4 clamp).” “Improvisation starts with duet; Ellen and Krys. Luciano goes outside waits 2-3 min — begins outside and walks in after a few minutes to continue playing.” “Cue #1 / Bass drone in Ellen’s solo / in 1 meter, out 1 meter.”

The concert was the first in a series celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Just Intonation Network. The shows, which run through June, will feature music from Terry Riley, Michael Harrison, Lou Harrison, Robert Rich and others.

TWO TURNTABLES & THREE GUESTS: Japanese turntablist Otomo Yoshihide played a small quartet show at Naut Humon’s space in the SOMA district on Wednesday, April 14. He was joined by Ikue Mori, the former DNA drummer, who has transformed into an adventurous laptop performer, and the Norwegian noise duo Fe-mail (Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord). They performed in a white cube of a room, the lights kept on to aid two camera operators shooting DVD footage. The bright illumination diminished the concert’s intimacy, but laid bare various strategies and affinities. Can noise art survive outside of its native shadow realm? In a word, yes.

The half-Japanese, half-Norwegian foursome played one half-hour piece plus three shorter pieces that added up to a second half hour. A cardboard box of individually wrapped earplugs greeted concert attendees, but the music never registered near the level of discomfort. The second piece, for example, began with beading, soft guitar lines, a kind of melodic minimalism that provided Yoshihide and Mori their most pronounced period of interplay that evening.

Yoshihide switched back and forth between that guitar and his trademark equipment (his turntables) while Mori sat patiently at her laptop, the image of composure. Both members of Fe-mail alternated between an array of secondary electronics (mixing board, Kaoss pad, ring modulator and more) and what amounted to a “primary” instrument: French horn for Tafjord, voice for Ratkje, whose high forehead creased when she shrieked. More often than not, those shrieks were muted, clipped or otherwise transformed by whatever black box she’d hooked her microphone into. Tafjord and Ratjke have such a remarkable musical kinship, it was possible, at times, to forget anyone else was playing. Each knows the other’s routine backward and forward, and one would occasionally smile, knowingly, when the other opted for a particular move.

Yes, a “move,” as in a game, for these four works were, in essence, game pieces, along the lines of the dueling makeshift ensembles that John Zorn has curated. There was a sense throughout the evening that the individual players were passing a baton from one to another, each taking the momentary lead, and contributing to a consensual tumult. Of course, it always came back to Yoshihide, whether he was providing a blanket of sound with his feedback-laced guitar, or commanding attention by clanging upturned record albums like the small, vinyl gongs that they are.

RODEN VS. BISCHOFF BY THE SEA: On Thursday, April 14, Steve Roden and John Bischoff played what will likely have been the final in a series of concerts hosted by Matmos member M.C. Schmidt at the San Francisco Art Institute. Or so said Schmidt that evening, having billed the event as a “two headed monster,” though technically speaking Roden and Bischoff played solo sets. Schmidt also apologized for the refrigerator that purred throughout the concert, but more on that machine later.

Roden’s peformance capped an extended residency at SFAI. His visual-art exhibit, titled “seamarks,” ran in the Walter and McBean Galleries from January through March. At the start of March he gave a lecture at the school, during which he revealed the musical basis for much of his abstract, geometric paintings, sketches and sculptures. He detailed how individual pieces were based on such inspirations as the organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral, Eric Dolphy (a painting he did with the brush in his mouth) and Richard Strauss. He showed slides of a large wooden sculpture he designed with two scientists; it was topped with a functioning glockenspiel triggered by seismic data. And the “seamarks” exhibit itself included a sound-art work based on a recording of the speech given by Saint-John Perse (pen-name of Alexis Leger), the French author of Seamarks, when accepting the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature.

For the April 14 concert, held in the Art Institute’s cafe, which has a phenomenal view of the bay, Roden, who is based in Los Angeles, performed a quiet series of fragile sounds for just over 20 minutes. Seated at a small desk, he sequenced through tiny, pitched materials. He fed them in loops with brief half-lives, allowing for momentary overlays that lent the work the sense of a round. He blew or lightly sung into a small can, which brought sparse melodies to a performance that had already suggested something more musical than pure sound for sound’s sake, even if those impulses were on display at a near microscopic level.

Bischoff, a significant figure in electronic music who is based at Mills College in nearby Oakland, prefaced his set by warning that it would open with a loud noise, which it did. That clang was followed by a buffet of randomness, which was particularly striking, following as it did on Roden’s near-melodiousness. Also at a small desk, Bischoff played four laptop-based pieces, each in the 10-minute range. They included analog synthesizer sounds, those old oscillators moving, plus razor-edged sine waves and pachinko madness, much of which would resolve to extended deep hum-buzzes. Each was marked by a sense of control on Bischoff’s part, and even the most disparate elements were balanced exquisitely in volume and timbre.

The highlight of the evening was his closing piece, which explained the six small contraptions that sat at the audience side of his desk. Each was a tiny wooden frame holding a small bell and connected to a nest of wires. The bells, apparently, could be triggered by his laptop. The final piece of the night opened with synthetic bell-like sounds, followed by slurry whistles that morphed into thick burrs (one hum to rule them all), out of which sounded these six small bells that lent the music a physicality, and also connected his work back to Roden’s often sound-based visual art.

Now, about that refrigerator…. The one in the back of the cafe was loud. Not police-siren loud, but still quite loud, given the context — loud enough that upon entering the room prior to the show’s start time, you might have imagined one of Roden’s CDs was playing. The fridge had two modes: the base level noise of a functioning industrial-strength machine, and the cooling cycle. When it switched from base level to cooling cycle, it cast a kind of aural shadow, not enough to distract, but certainly enough to add color. Perhaps, should Schmidt host another series in the future, the refrigerator will one day get a show of its own.