- Hoping the new iAnnotate PDF app upgrade fixes my Dropbox issues — except the iTunes store is down. #
- Kudos to @delicious for getting rid of "stacks." Tags are sufficient. #
- Broke another pair of earbuds. I need a sponsor. #
- If you could wear out MP3s, some tracks on this Quakers Instrumentals album would've been reduced to .ds files by now. #
- Likelihood that the person who committed the horrible crime in Denver was insane & so many people saying horrible things now are sane. #
- New track from Lee Scratch Perry's team-up with the Orb: http://t.co/LzIPX3Ud. Truly no disrespect, but I eagerly await the instrumentals. #
- Beginning to confuse press releases about 7" singles and 7" tablets. #
Rural Murk (MP3)
A lovely track by Chicago musician Cinchel
The Chicago-based musician Cinchel doesn’t say much of anything about his recent posting at his soundcloud.com/cinchel account, but it certainly is lovely. The track, “20120718 acc2,” is a slow movement of light strumming, reverberant humming, and an underlying rhythm like that of a far away train rattling through a dense, moist forest. The following cultural reference registers more positively with some than with others, but trust that it is intended as fully appreciative when suggested that the track sounds, for all its sublimated pleasure, like Led Zeppelin just before it bursts out of its occultist haze and rocks out. Here, however, the rock never comes. There is just the lovely murk of songless ruralisms left to lull themselves to sleep.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/cinchel. More on Cinchel, aka Jason Shanley, at cinchel.com.
Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero
The Assignment: Make music from running water, inspired by William Gibson's novel Count Zero.
Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.
This week’s project makes use of field recordings, a not uncommon source of sonic material in the Disquiet Junto series of weekly music projects. The particular idea this week originates in the following description at the start of chapter 17 in the 1986 novel Count Zero by William Gibson. I selected this version of the book’s cover, because it’s the paperback I own:
This idea of running water as music, in particular as “one of the oldest songs,” is highlighted in various ways in the chapter, which is titled “The Squirrel Wood,” and in the book as a whole. In the next paragraph of the chapter there’s an implied contrast to an artificial canopy in a forest, with its “mimetic approximations of leaves and branches.” More broadly, this is a novel in which there is an ongoing concern about possible Voudoun spirits running loose in cyberspace. The console jockeys make their money, and their names, reading signals: gleaning meaning from perceived noise.
I’d had the idea for some time of using running water in a Disquiet Junto project as the proposed source of a track, so my imagination was primed when I came across this notion in the novel when I recently reread it for the first time in many years. I was rereading Count Zero because of all Gibson’s novels, it lingers with me the most, in part because of its themes of corporate espionage, which I find fascinating, but also because this is the book of his that I found most difficult to pierce when I first read it. One interesting final note: This chapter holds special meaning in the broader novel, because it is the only chapter whose title is repeated. “The Squirrel Wood” is also the title of the book’s final chapter.
In any case, that’s all backdrop to this week’s project.
The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 23, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0029-countzero.
Bonus: In advance of the project’s announcement, I tweeted some information about it from the twitter.com/djunto account, and William Gibson himself (aka twitter.com/greatdismal) retweeted it not once but twice:
Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero”
Music for Abacus (MP3)
Montreal's Analogue01's various math tunes
The Montreal-based musician who goes by Analogue01 has routinely provided glimpses at his ingenuity. Not long ago, in response to a Disquiet Junto project (number 19) on graphic scores, he took the angular geometries of the subject image and recreated them as dots on a punch card. The origin point was a photo by Yojiro Imasaka; he took it and then reduced it through a series of steps to the sort of thing computers of yore would read for their rudimentary data. The result was a splendid exploration not only of the structures inherent in the subject image but, as he put it in a post-project summary post, of the role of the grid in composition. He runs through the process on his website, with some excellent photos of the various stages.
Among his more recent projects is one whose brief explanatory note when posted to soundcloud.com (“Sine waves + abacus. Rough improvisation at home on a Monday.”) asked more questions than it answered. Over at his analogue01.com site, he provided a bit more information: “Here’s a rough, improvised piece that I recorded yesterday afternoon. Just sine waves, an abacus, and some pedals. The sound of me trying to make sense of my gear. This probably what I would sound like if I were to perform live.” And via Twitter, when prodded, he provided a bit more detail still:
Me: “What role did the abacus play?”
Him: “It’s the “gurgley” percussive sound in the background.”
This is the track in question:
The “‘gurley’ percussive” to which he refers is very much core to the track. It makes for a lovely, rhythmic ambient piece, and while the track stands alone as a tidy experiment, it also sits nicely alongside the earlier punch-card project as an example of making music from earlier equipment associated with calculations.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/analogue01. More on the musician at twitter.com/analogue01 and analogue01.com.
The Orb vs Lee Scratch Perry (MP3)
A dub-electronic meetup illuminates the generation gap
Time does interesting things to perceived generation gaps. Take the current collaboration between electronic figures the Orb and dub godfather Lee Scratch Perry. On the one hand, there is a gap of over two decades between them, and the team-up certainly suggests a heavy amount of reverence on the Orb’s part toward Perry — and deservingly so; it’s arguable that the pop-esoteric realms explored by the Orb wouldn’t have existed had Perry not played his part in the development of dub — that, to push dub for a moment less as genre and more as metaphor, music like that of the Orb exists as a distant reverberation of a previous music that took reverberation as its essence.
On the other, had a more youthful act taken Perry, born 1936 in Jamaica, on as a guest, the melding would likely not be as thorough as it appears on the first listen they’ve provided, a free download (available currently at theorb.com) titled “Hold Me Upsetter.” Here’s a full-length video:
The hosts may be the more youthful participants, but they’re in their mid-50s, and have quite their own history. Perry’s voice, in fine form, fits in well with the dank beats the Orb posit here. The track is a teaser for the full set, which has the resplendent title The Orb Featuring Lee Scratch Perry Present The Observer in the Star House, due out September 3. An full instrumental set is part of the release, and that is particularly welcome.
More on the Orb at theorb.com.