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.)

Dark Side of a Pixel Moon

An essay to accompany the work Blackwork by Paolo Salvagione

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The artist Paolo Salvagione, whom I have assisted on a variety of projects this past year, has an exhibit opening this evening in Oakland, California, at the gallery Aggregate Space (aggregatespace.com), as part of the Art Murmur event (oaklandartmurmur.org). His Missing Window installation (shown at the bottom of this post) will be on view, as will a new series of works collectively titled Blackwork. I wrote an essay for Blackwork, as I have for other recent Salvagione projects.

Up top are examples of Blackwork, in which voids are cut with lasers into blocks of thick paper, according to patterns developed in CAD software.

Shown above is the printed essay, as designed by our friend Brian Scott of Boon Design (boondesign.com). The “10.6μm” on the front of the piece refers to the wavelength of the laser that cut the paper.

And this is the text of the essay:

“Dark Side of a Pixel Moon”

The tightly packed layers of black card stock could, from a distance, be mistaken for sample swatches, or perhaps acoustical tiling. Upon approach, however, the deep impressions in them become apparent, and in turn they make a deep impression. There are angular indents, and sharp holes, and conical excavations. These are quizzical things, enticing geometries that seem at once iconic and whimsical. The impressions suggest some form of impact introduced them to the thick paper. The step-like quality of the indents imply the ravages of motion, arcade asteroids hitting the dark side of a pixel moon.

The various cavities were, it turns out, cut by a laser. The sheets of card stock were sliced one at a time, and then stacked to reveal the shapes — not the other way around, despite what the eye perceives. Then again, the paths were first traced in CAD software — sketched, then refined, then turned into instructions for the laser-cutter. In effect, the hypothetical space, though not the card stock itself, was stamped by a kind of virtual die.

A vacuum inside darkness, a void inside a shadow — each piece embodies a double negative. The emptiness of pure black space is given shape when something is cut from it. This double inversion fuels the viewer’s sense of disorientation. The artist acknowledges the disorientation by suggesting the works have no specified top, bottom, or sides — that they can be displayed on a wall in any alignment, or flat on a horizontal surface for that matter. However they are displayed, their sense of scale goes in and out, undulating like the naked speaker cones whose tar-paper material they resemble — as well as that of a field camera’s crinkling bellows. They veer in the mind’s retina from macro to micro, from architectural to textural, from lunar landing to Petri dish, and then back again, and again.

Regardless of scale, these laser-cut steps, these playful 8-bit Bezier curves, invite the eye to travel along, to walk amid geologic artifacts in imaginary landscapes.

Here are two previous essays I wrote to accompany work by Salvagione: “Where the Sky Begins” and “Addressing the Competition.” I also served as Euphonic Coordinator (i.e., Music Supervisor) for a video documenting his exhibit “An excuse to respond.”

This is a photo of installation of Missing Window, which is also part of the Aggregate Space exhibit:


More on Paolo Salvagione’s work at salvagione.com, which recently launched, thanks to the efforts of Boon (boondesign.com) and futureprüf.com.

More on the exhibit via Salvagione’s facebook.com account. There will be a closing event on December 3. The Aggregate Space gallery is at 801 West Grand Avenue in Oakland, California. Its hours are Fridays from 5:00pm to 8:00pm and Saturdays from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.

Blackwork photos by Heimo (heimophotography.com). Missing Window photo by Andria Lo (andrialo.com).