A (Temporarily Free) Record Album in Advance of Its Instrumentals

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

First: act quickly, as this free offer is only good until 9:19pm this evening, Philadelphia time. The Philadelphia-based producer Y?Arcka is a frequent subject of Downstream entries here at Disquiet.com, thanks to his intensely focused hip-hop productions, which tend to take a tiny slip of an existing track and extrapolate from it a fully considered instrumental composition. Though his own works at times push him toward the avant-garde edge of the instrumental-hip-hop continuum, Y?Arcka (alternately Why?Arcka, which stands for Young Architect) in no way distances himself from basic algebra of hip-hop, in which a prepared track is passed to a vocalist, yielding a finished work that has, generally speaking, one author responsible for each of its constituent parts — not counting, of course, the musicians who were the source for the samples, or guest vocalists.

In a full album just out today, and available for free download only until 9:19pm (Philadelphia Time), Y?Arcka has teamed with over a dozen rappers/vocalists, including the noted rhythmic raconteur Zilla Rocca. According to a tweet Y?Arcka sent me earlier today, folks who download the album will also receive a set of the instrumental versions. Especially looking forward to hearing the instrumental of “Up My Sleeve,” its central riff something halfway between a talking drum and a flute, and of “Mr. Matic,” with its super tight mix of drums and guitar.

Album available at arckatron.bandcamp.com. Y?Arcka is on Twitter at twitter.com/whyarcka, where he bills himself as “conceptual programmer.” Read a 2009 Disquiet.com interview with Y?Arcka, born Shawn Kelly: “Young Communicator.”

Email Isn’t Free

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Over at weallmakemusic.com, I’ve channeled my antipathy for the vast amount of email PR that I receive each week into something vaguely constructive. It’s an article with the self-explanatory title “How to Use Email to Promote Your Music Without Alienating Your Audience.” It’s aimed at musicians who use email to promote their own music (“When It Feels Awkward, Quote Other People”), but there’s no reason the suggestions (“Links, Not Attachments,” “Garbage Out, Garbage In”) aren’t applicable more broadly.

The Deadly Drone of the Robot Goat Eater (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Ernest Gonzalez has made a techno track that doesn’t have a beat so much as it has a pulse — a thick, droning throb that slowly and steadily disrupts the dense white noise that is its overwhelming presence. Most club-music beats are either overlays that set a grid atop the many elements of an individual track, or they are under-girding, setting a foundation for everything that is built upon them. Here the beats are more like hard objects pushing through a dense fabric, their impact muffled yet persistent. “ChupaCabra,” as the track is titled, by Mexicans with Guns (aka Gonzalez), opens with a deliriously slo-motion robot dub. It’s all swagger, albeit of a mechanical, almost robotic variety, and it proceeds at a pace that seems to slow everything within view for the duration of its playing time.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mexicanswithguns. More on Gonzalez at mexicanswithguns.com. Brief interview with him at npr.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Looking forward to the Fluxus event at SOMArts tonight featuring Alison Knowles and Hannah Higgins. #
  • Ben Barry, Everett Katigbak & Matteo Bologna were highlights of yesterday's Brand New Conference. Fluid, improvisational, dense, obsessive. #
  • Channeled my complaints about the music-PR-email deluge into something constructive: http://t.co/3Vy3RUg0 #
  • After episode featuring man with dolphin-quality echolocative ability, Alphas has tied Fringe as most sonically conscious drama on TV. #
  • Shareware shout out to SimpleNote, ResophNotes, WinSplit Revolution, Trillian, Chrome, Thunderbird, Orzeszek Timer. #
  • Sometimes a single feature added to a familiar piece of software can make it feel like you have a whole new laptop. #
  • ResophNotes, the SimpleNote application for Windows, now supports pinned notes. This is very good news. #
  • Earbud multi-source cabling: Anyone got a line on something like this http://t.co/w3gVKDH3 but with three, maybe four, inputs? #
  • Evening sounds: bus coming to a stop, paper being moved around, typing, laptop hard drive and fan (really need to switch over to SSD). #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

Sharing the Loneliness of the Dark Tunnel (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the interesting things about the sharing of field recordings is that the audience for these recordings has such a different experience of the recordings from that of the recordist. When Alasdair Pettinger, for example, emerged from the Glasgow tunnel that is the source of his recent soundcloud.com post, he had a personal memory of the original experience. The recording of that experience would both remind him of it, and be unfamiliar, and the gap between those two appreciations would be as much a source of fascination as would be the details in the recording itself. He would, as do we all when revisiting field recordings, listen for what he recalled, and be engaged by what he had not previously noticed.

Pettinger, who records as Bulldozia, describes the incident of the recording as follows:

Pausing mid-way through the foot- and cycle-tunnel under the road tunnel under the Clyde, listening to the cars passing overhead and the gushing of an overflowing drain. Is there a better way to spend a wet Sunday? Recorded 11 September 2011.

He has an apparent fondness for insular spaces, as evidenced by an earlier recording by him mentioned here back in May (“The Sonic Signature of Democracy”). That was the rough yet quiet noise of a voting booth. This time it is the metronome rhythm of a tunnel, its urban pulse evident in those vertical striations of its waveform, shown above.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/bulldozia. More on Pettinger/bulldozia at bulldozia.com and twitter.com/bulldozia. (Above tunnel photo via flickr.com and Creative Commons.)