The Punk Drone (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

What’s Japanese for “Netlabel”?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

1. 固有のウェブサイトを持つもの
2. soundcloud,bandcampなど既存のウェブサービスを使って運営しているもの
3. すでに運営していたレコードレーベルのサイドプロジェクトとしてのもの　

That text above is the first three rules from my netlabel manifesto, “If You’re Thinking of Starting a Netlabel …,” translated into Japanese. It’s very rewarding to see this sort of thing happen. This is at least the second time the piece has been translated from English into another language, the previous being Italian: “20 modi per distribuire musica in modo creativo.”

Netlabels, for those new to the concept, are online record labels that actively distribute their releases for free, with the willing, and enthusiastic, participation of the musicians who recorded the music. A sizable portion of the music covered in this site’s daily Downstream department originates on netlabels.

The original version of “If You’re Thinking …” was published on April 11 of this year in an attempt not so much to direct the flow of traffic among netlabels or scare away potential free-music moguls, as it was to list some useful, one would hope helpful, correctives. It was fascinating to me at the time, and sadly remains so now, how many netlabels neglect such useful tools as RSS feeds, streaming audio, and song-specific links (as opposed to massive Zip files).

Of course, despite this prevalent neglect, the netlabel community continues to flourish. As C. Reider pointed out in a recent reflection on the state of netlabels and their correlation to earlier networked cultures such as mail art and the cassette underground (“You Are Your Own Archive”), the exhaustive list of active netlabels accumulated by David Nemeth at actsofsilence.com now numbers over 500.

The Japanese edition of my netlabel piece (“ネットレーベルをはじめたいと思っているあなたへ”) was accomplished generously by Yutaka Nakashima, a Japanese native currently living in New York. Nakashima wrote an introduction to his edition of the piece, and added a few rules of his own for emphasis. When he sent me the link today to his post, he included this translation (into English) of his added rules, which are numbered to occur after the 21 on my list:

22. Don’t start yourself. Have some close friends to do it with you.
23. Use archive.org more! archive.org is a huge website and a community.
24. Make a label compilations sometimes. Its very useful for first time visitor of your label to understand.

He asked for my permission to do the translation, which was appreciated, though it certainly wasn’t necessary. My permission is inherent in the Creative Commons license that appears at the bottom of the pages of this website. Though the netlabel concept predates the Creative Commons, as envisioned by Lawrence Lessig and his colleagues, the former is deeply informed by the latter. There’s a sweet irony to the translations that have extended the conversation about my netlabel story. I wrote the piece to help spread the word about netlabels, about the growing cultural practice of actively releasing music for free distribution — but the same structure that allows for that music to flow freely has also allowed my article to.

The Nakashima translation appears on his website, The Polyhedron Formula, where he writes about various free-music releases posted not just on netlabels but via such services as Bandcamp.com.

Protecting Against ‘Protect IP’ (November 16, 2011)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 16, is American Censorship Day. For that day — well, starting the evening prior — the logo for this website will be blacked out. The action is part of an effort originating at americancensorship.org to bring attention to the flaws inherent in the Protect IP Act, which is being considered in the United States Senate, and its sibling legislation in the House of Representatives, where similar regulation is called SOPA.

The act would criminalize such an extensive array of uses of copyrighted material that it’s self-evidently too broad to be upheld in court. But the period of time between the bill’s passage and that potential, though certainly not inevitable, court ruling would be a dark age for the Internet, and for free speech.

From a very specific standpoint, this legislation is egregious to this website, because of the site’s longstanding interest in sampling and in the unintended uses of technology and in the longstanding cultural practices that have come to be termed the Creative Commons. But that is, frankly, just the start of the matter.

Here’s a usefully alarming video that summarizes the issues with the PROTECT IP Act:

Also recommended is the New York Times editorial on the subject (“Internet Piracy and How to Stop It”), which acknowledges the impact of piracy, but also points out examples of the “broadness” of the language in the bill:

In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates”intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.

The date of November 16 was decided because that is when the House of Representatives will hold hearings on SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), its version of the PROTECT IP Act. Apparently “PROTECT” is a reduction of “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011.” If only the ability to craft a nifty acronym aligned with informed legal vision.

The bill is available at senate.gov as a PDF. Please distribute it freely.