That sense of data quickly being parsed and shuffled and spat back as a quick stopgap response, fending off overload by collating and managing, rather than digging in deep and taking time to sort out the details and patterns. That’s what “Portal #0” from Soundmutations comes across as, a needfully quick gloss on urgent information flow. It’s a series of glitchy twitchy switchbacks through a steady stream of low-level pulses. Released on the consistently solid Absence of Wax netlabel, it is a brief snippet of a single, just one and one quarter minutes of anxious, hesitant, portentous sonic processing (MP3).
There are moments in club-minded techno when sound is celebrated for its own sake, rather than doing primary duty as a score for late-night social activity. And there is a moment in sonic experimentation when it’s as if a club had broken out in a digital Petri dish. It’s not clear which of these best describes “Portal #0” — it’s right in between.
Kudos to Absence of Wax for its ingenious download setup, which provides not an MP3 but a Zip archive containing in addition two alternate audio formats (an oversized AIFF and a compact OGG), two cover images (one full size, one thumbnail), and a pair of metadata files — and the track is also streaming at the netlabel’s website, devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. Get the various files individually, such as the MP3 linked to above, at archive.org. More on Soundmutations at soundmutations.com.
It isn’t just Metallica and Phish making their live concert sets readily available in a slightly slower version of the (peculiarly emphatic-yet-redundant) “day-and-date” digital publishing strategy being newly employed by comic-book publishers — or, for another current example, the multi-platform approach that has Universal Pictures releasing the comedy Tower Heist (surely destined to be the East Rider of the Occupy Movement) to on-demand cable a few weeks after the movie’s theatrical debut.
No, the power of Soundcloud.com — along with ustream.com, and Google+ Hangouts, and countless other tools, including any good old FTP server, for that matter — lets experimental musicians in distant enclaves spread their feedback-laden performances further and more quickly than ever before. As the FTP comment suggests, this is nothing new. Yet something new is happening. Naysayers to perceived cloud hype regularly comment that the cloud is just an FTP server with a fresh coat of paint. But of course the cloud is about more than that — and among those other things it’s about is multiple digital services employing each other’s API (that being the computer-code equivalent of a handshake deal) to share information.
What is new is the manner in which simultaneity — of services, of content availability, of cultural experience — is becoming the norm: the delay between hardcover and Kindle, between theater and living room, between concert hall and earbuds, is shrinking faster than you can say Moore’s Law. At the moment, this is largely, for at least the big businesses involved, a matter of throttling piracy and maximizing revenue opportunities. The implications are a long way from resolving themselves. Almost certainly new forms of culture will emerge, and along with them new legal imbroglios. (Tower Heist‘s cable-rental fee to the consumer is approximately $60, meaning that people are at once being invited to treat their homes as makeshift movie theaters, yet also being tempted to venture into becoming under-the-table commercial enterprises. Can’t you foresee a surly MPAA representative showing up at a suburban home’s front door demanding one beer from each six pack brought by attending friends?)
All of which came to mind during repeated listens to a solo concert performed yesterday evening by Mysterybear (aka Dave Seidel) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at a club called the Red Door. Seidel lives a couple hours away in the town of Peterborough. I live 3,000 miles away in San Francisco. Thankfully, Seidel earlier this afternoon uploaded a recording of the show to his soundcloud.com/mysterybear account.
It’s a rangy, deeply felt venture, digging into thick, sinuous bands of feedback and teasing out fragments of noise, melody, drone, and hush. Feedback is its media; it’s Seidel’s instrument — and feedback is also the media by which the file is being distributed. Its online distribution taps into a subsequent feedback loop. Were just one musician doing what Seidel is doing, the MP3 (available not only for stream but for download and subsequent redistribution) would be a mere archival document. Instead, it’s part of the natural course of the concert-performance experience. Who knows how many people showed up for Seidel’s Thursday-night gig? I live in San Francisco, which is home to an especially supportive community of experimental-music concert-goers, but I’ve been to plenty of Thursday-night shows even here where I was the only person in the audience who was neither a musician performing that evening nor one of those musician’s significant others. Whoever attends Seidel’s live show, he knows that an audience awaits on Soundcloud.com.
And in time, the live audience and the Soundcloud audience will merge, or at least commingle, in the musician’s mind. The live show is if nothing else a means to try out new material and get it out in the world, with the knowledge that an online audience larger than that available in most towns and cities is just waiting to hear what the musician is up to. It can be said that the concert didn’t end last night when Seidel packed up his equipment. It just took a break before it began resounding anew online.
These may be the least drone-like drones in recent memory — or, perhaps more to the point, the most drone-like melodies in recent memory. Certainly the music on Neil Wiernik‘s Broken Strings, Plastic Tubes and Bedside Serenades has the thick slow-motion ooze of the best down-spectrum haze, of the most bass-veering ambient music: dense figurations that hover just above the ground, more Tule fog than cumulous cloud. “Sunshine White Out Sequence No 207” in particular brings to mind the submerged pianism of Harold Budd at his least treacly (MP3). But there’s more here than just haze for haze’s sake, not that there’s anything wrong with purist sound design unto itself. (The contrast between “pure” sound design and “purist” is intentional: the word “pure” might mistakenly suggest that the optimal sound design is the ethereal music-of-the-spheres HVAC/distant-traffic/circulatory-system drone, while “purist” seems to embrace that idea more explicitly.) Instead, perhaps preeminently on “Endangered Species List No 387,” there’s a sense of sinuous threads of developing sonic and melodic content being given just enough energy to progress but not so much that they move into the foreground (MP3).
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/fbl018NeilWiernik-BrokenStringsPlasticTubesAndBedsideSerenades/01EndangeredSpeciesListNo387.mp3|titles=”Endangered Species List No 387″|artists=Neil Wiernik]
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/fbl018NeilWiernik-BrokenStringsPlasticTubesAndBedsideSerenades/03SunshineWhiteOutSequenceNo207.mp3|titles=”Sunshine White Out Sequence No 207″|artists=Neil Wiernik]
Following up a recent interview with Kid Koala about the intersection of scratchboard comics and turntablism scratching, here’s another audio interview with the Canadian musician and longtime Ninja Tune Records roster member on the occasion of his new graphic novel and accompanying soundtrack, Space Cadet (MP3). He was interviewed for the excellent Panel Borders comics podcast series, part of the generous offerings of resonancefm.com. Koala is a thoughtful participant in and observer of the more sedate vestiges of street culture. He spins a good tale about the origins of his “Music to Draw to” series, in which he DJs downtempo music to inspire the artists and other creative types who show up for the special live shows, held in places like art galleries. The series began during a Canadian winter, as a way to inspire his friends to get out of their apartments and do something creative together — or at least side by side. It isn’t just for artists. He reports that fashion designers, video-game coders, and writers have joined in. At least once, someone brought along a loom. The first rule of “Music to Draw to” is: be prepared to do something creative. The second rule of “Music to Draw to” is: no dancing.
Kudos to Absence of Wax for its ingenious download setup, which provides not an MP3 but a Zip archive containing in addition two alternate audio formats (an oversized AIFF and a compact OGG), two cover images (one full size, one thumbnail), and a pair of metadata files — and the track is also streaming at the netlabel’s website, devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. Get the various files individually, such as the MP3 linked to above, at archive.org. More on Soundmutations at soundmutations.com.
These may be the least drone-like drones in recent memory — or, perhaps more to the point, the most drone-like melodies in recent memory. Certainly the music on Neil Wiernik‘s Broken Strings, Plastic Tubes and Bedside Serenades has the thick slow-motion ooze of the best down-spectrum haze, of the most bass-veering ambient music: dense figurations that hover just above the ground, more Tule fog than cumulous cloud. “Sunshine White Out Sequence No 207” in particular brings to mind the submerged pianism of Harold Budd at his least treacly (