Bridging the Biological Environment and the Built Environment (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Bird song and voices, rumbles and flanging noise. The first two are discernibly “natural,” discernibly part of the biological environment. That’s a term employed to attempt suggest in a non-judgmental manner a distinction from the built environment. As for the latter two, these deep bass rumbles and that distinct quavering sinusoidal affect, they are seemingly “artificial,” a peculiar (and seemingly self-contradictory) term routinely employed to mean made by a human — but there are many sounds in between them as well, sounds that blur the lines, and help the collection of sounds become a self-contained whole.

The collection is titled Nadir. It’s a single-track release on the netlabel Modisti by the Greek musician who goes by Melophobia. The sounds that blur the line between biological and built are numerous. For example, fast forward to the 17:30 point — are those footsteps or a percussion instrument or an electronic ping? And following immediately thereafter, those soulful male voices: is the echoing a communal call’n’response, or the side effect of the structure in which the singing occured, or perhaps an after effect added by the musician?

More details on the release at modisti.com, where it’s downloadable and streaming, for free.

The Top 10 Posts & Searches from October 2011

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Of the top 10 most popular posts of the past month, October 2011, eight were drawn from the Downstream department of freely and legally downloadable MP3s: (1) a consideration of Richard Devine’s collection of field recordings of consumer technology such as printers and so forth (“An Alan Lomax of Lost Technology”), (2) a gloss on urgent information flow by Soundmutations (“A Series of Glitchy Twitchy Switchbacks Through a Steady Stream of Low-level Pulses”), (3) a live recording of a feedback-laden performance by Dave Seidel, aka Mysterybear (“Upload Through the Red Door”), (4) Sara Pinheiro‘s fragile arrangement of avian sound (“The Sonic Trajectories of Birds”), (5) Neil Wiernik‘s submerged pianism and balanced play between foreground and background (“More Than Haze for Haze’s Sake”), (6) the “glitchstep” of Biting Eye, aka Ben Bridges (“What’s in a Genre?”), (7) a casual field recording (related to the image shown up top) by Richard Thomas, CCO of the great RjDj and Inception apps (“45 Seconds of Unaugmented Reality”), and (8) an interview with Kid Koala (“Music for Drawing”).

And, for reasons that are always beyond me when it occurs, not one but two entries in this site’s automated Saturday compendiums of the prior week’s twitter.com/disquiet feed: (9) October 8 and (10) October 15.

The most popular searches of the past month were, in descending order: the truth about frank, autechre, 11-Sep, app, fernando pessoa, film, film scores, framework, lique, mp3, muller, music, OUTRA-G, raymond scott, sexby, tangerine dream, alan morse davies, 2009, 4’33 field recordings, aairria.

William Fowler Collins, of Generation Drone, Live (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It will be interesting to read retrospective impressions, a decade from now, about the generation of musicians who gave themselves over to the drone — a generation of musicians who dispensed with the recognizable and memorable sequences of melodic elements of their recent predecessors, and instead distinctly favored a tonal bliss (and seeming stasis) whose unique properties divulge themselves only through close listening, deep patience, and side-by-side comparison.

There will be vast amounts of music to be revisited, ranging throughout genres, from doom metal gongs to rural country ambience to everday noises derived from the realm of European free improvisation. No doubt the work of William Fowler Collins will be considered. Perhaps drone scholars will focus on the recording of his live performance at the On Land Festival in San Francisco from 2009. An MP3 of it was posted earlier today for free download at the website of the record label Root Strata (rootstrata.com), which sponsored the concert series, and it is already circulating widely. (It’s enclosed in a Zip file and housed on the mediafire.com service.)

I was at the concert. In my review at the time, “On Land Festival, Opening Afternoon,” I noted how Collins, who performed solo, “evoked his adopted home of the southwest by producing rich, feedback-intense approximations of Ennio Morricone soundtracks; he patiently limned the delicate no man’s land between abstraction and melody.” As heard in the MP3, the concert was even darker than description at the time suggests. When the sound of a lap guitar arises, it’s as if a whole world of hurt has been unpacked from a single chord from an old Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys recording. When waves of feedback waft up, it’s like the the entire Neil Young catalog has been set afire. And on the occasion when rhythm dares to present itself, as a nascent chugga-chugga, the failure — the determined failure — to resolve into a deeper, more trenchant phrasing reveals the piece as an especially maudlin vestige of doom metal. The sense of ritual, of ceremony, makes a very strong impression.

Track originally posted at rootstrata.com. More on Collins at williamfowlercollins.com.

He has a new album, The Resurrections Unseen, out on the Type label, and it is streaming freely at soundcloud.com:

More on the new release at typerecords.com.

Iowa City Ambient (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Earlier this year, this site’s Downstream department output was increased to daily from weekdaily, to seven days a week from five days a week. The goal wasn’t so much to increase the number of recommended free downloads, though that was an obvious result. The goal was to free up space for repetition. In other words, I wasn’t as interested in increasing the number of musicians I highlighted as I was in increasing opportunities to repeat appearances by specific musicians. The thinking was, the more slots available, the less stingy it will feel to focus on more than one occasion on the same musician.

Mark Rushton is such a musician. Based in Iowa City, Iowa, he has produced an extensive array of ambient music that has a rural intent, due in large part to its frequent rootedness in field recordings. A recent track added to his soundcloud.com/markrushtoncom account, two minutes and twenty two seconds titled “Machine Shine,” veers from the lush haze common to his work in favor of something, per its title, more mechanical. Despite which pulsing mathematics, it still retains a simplicity and elegantly threadbare quality that marks it as clearly his own.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/markrushtoncom. More on him at markrushton.com.

Revisiting Spanish Glitchpop (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The first appearance of the word “bacanal” on this website dates from April 26, 2005. As with subsequent appearances here of that word, it related to a release by Bacanal Intruder, a wonderful laptop musician based in Spain whose music is routinely marked by a blippy breeziness, a winsome glitch that that suggests nothing less than Jacques Tati’s giggling at the absurdity of automation, a kitchen-sink approach that is like sonic clutter that suddenly snaps into place — if by “place” is meant an intricately coordinated, rhythmically ingenious, jubilantly playful compositional zone that the Intruder alone inhabits. He’s recently begun posting tracks to a soundcloud.com/bacanalintruder account, among them the six items that constitute a 2005 EP titled Just Kidding. In the posting he quotes a review that sums it up well: “this little masterpiece full of little hymns and transparent melodies. … [W]e find trumpets, trombones, clarinets, horns, harp, tuba, celesta, violins, congas, spoons … All perfectly seasoned with lively house brand rhythms.”

The EP was originally released by the Tokyo-based label Duotone as a 3″ CD-R (“for their ‘music for pleasures series'”). Get the full set, streaming and freely downloadable, at soundcloud.com/bacanalintruder. More on Bacanal Intruder at bacanalintruder.com and twitter.com/bacanalintruder.