Jen Boyd’s Wild West (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

They rattle like the wheels on an old covered wagon. What we’re hearing, though, is not wheels but what the wheels might have trampelled, the brittle foliage of the west. There is in the track, according to its brief descriptive note, “wild fennel, pine trees and thistle,” the latter of which provides the track’s name (MP3).

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio62.mp3|titles=”Thistle”|artists=Jen Boyd]

The result is a survey of rough scratching, tactile noises that edge toward erasing the ephemeral nature of digital recording. And while wagon wheels play no role in “Thistle,” which was created by Oakland, California, musician Jen Boyd, a record player (as pictured above) does (the liner note continues: “Additional sounds include multiple layers of a running hard drive and a thistle on a turntable”). It’s unclear if the intention is to associate the technology that enabled the vinyl record with the distant, rustic past of the western. But there’s certainly a celebration of the turntable’s mechanism (along with that of the hard drive) as a source of sound that’s essentially no less natural than weeds.

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Boyd at jenboyd.org.

Communikey Starts Today in Boulder, CO

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The fourth annual Communikey Festival starts today, April 13, in Boulder, Colorado, bringing to town such notables as early minimal techno figure Monolake and master of decay William Basinksi, and hosting such regional figures as Attentat, Pillow Garden, and DJ Ivy.

I interviewed the festival’s creative director, Kate Lesta, for the Colorado Springs Independent (“Ghost in the Machine”), and she talked about the fest’s roots in woodland rave culture and its aspirations for a permanent artist-residence space in the city:

“Ultimately what we are doing is exposing something to people who would never find it on their own, because the culture here is not urban culture, not about technology.”

I also spoke with sound artist Radere (aka Carl Ritger), who flies in from Philadelphia for the event. And the festival isn’t just about concerts — there is film, art exhibits and installations, and discussions, too. One highlight I didn’t have room for in the story is Laura Goldhamer‘s inventive speaker drum, the “Clamor Box,” which is shown up top.

More on Communikey at communikey.us, and read the full piece at csindy.com. The fest runs through Sunday, April 17.

Soundcloud.com as Chance DJ (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a reason that a commenter on Marcus Fischer‘s track “110410 (Waiting)” said that it’s “like looking into the sun,” and that reason is a moment. The moment arrives approximately 46 seconds into the piece. There’s a slight lift at that juncture, and for all its simplicity, a mere rising change in notes, it feels like daybreak, like the sun breaking cloud cover, like the great bald head, as William S. Burroughs once called the red-yellow globe, peeping its eyes over the horizon.

By chance, Fischer’s track appeared just before one by Matt Dean in my Soundcloud.com “Dashboard,” the linear jukebox of incoming tracks posted by musicians. Well, technically just after, because the tracks appear in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top. Without my realizing that I was no longer listening to Fischer, I heard his dulcet drones give way to slowly building insectoid buzzing, as if the heat of a summer sun had stirred life, when in fact the buzzes are all Dean’s.

The tracks have almost nothing, sonically, in common, and yet they complement each other perfectly. Narrative is an even more powerful force than genre, as any good DJ will tell you.

Fischer track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mapmap. Dean track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sfmattyd. More on Fischer at unrecnow.com, and on Dean at twitter.com/chromasonic.

The Self-Cutting (Up) MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“You have this feeling that it’s” — and the voice cuts out. That’s how the track starts. The sudden cut is more of a truncation than a fade. Had it been the latter, we wouldn’t know for sure if the speaker (so to speak), the interlocutor, had stopped mid-track (so to speak), or if this is the result of an edit. But, clearly, it’s an edit. Clearly for several reasons: the way the sound just ends, the opening up of a vacuum-like sonic space. And, of course, the piece’s title, “Chopped Off the Think.” Also, few tracks on Soundcloud.com, where the file is hosted for free download, have waveforms that look like this one’s, with these bits of sound that end in an instant, followed by extended near-silence, marked by thick singular horizontal bars.

The voice returns: “You don’t know what the” — and it’s fairly certain an f-bomb has been avoided thanks to another quick edit. As the track proceeds, it builds momentum, urgency. The voice seems to be narrating its own editing, as it comments on what does and doesn’t work, and how certain integers seem to correlate with a more pleasing effect. It’s like we’re witnessing the edit (which is credited to all n4tural) as it is enacted.

There’s a unique quality to the human voice — not just this voice, but the human voice in general. It’s a quality that often renders all other sound around it to the background. This track wrestles with the voice by curtailing its presence, limiting its power, focusing our ears on its sound by keeping its message tantalizingly just beyond reach.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/all-n4tural.

If You’re Thinking of Starting a Netlabel …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you’re thinking of starting a netlabel, don’t let anyone stop you. The movement — it does feel like we’re far along enough to call netlabels a “movement,” and have been for some time — continues to build. But for all its cultural momentum, perhaps because of that momentum, there’s no clear template for how netlabels function, not beyond the shared idea of delivering freely downloadable music with the permission of the artists involved.

Netlabels function in various ways: as standalone websites, as subdomains of prominent services (.soundcloud.com, .bandcamp.com, .blogspot.com), as side projects of traditional record labels, as thinly disguised podcasts, as fly-by-night operations, as slick enterprises with all the procedural rigor assumed of commercial businesses. The absence of consistency is a good thing, at the heart of the movement’s vibrancy. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to learn from all the netlabels that came before yours.

As a longtime listener to and observer of netlabel music, I propose the following to serve as an initial checklist while you get your HTML, CSS, RSS, and release schedule in order. Feel free to question these suggestions, and to add your own, in the comments section below. I’ll update this list accordingly:

• Have a dedicated URL. No hosting service is forever.

• Have an RSS feed. And if you make a conscious decision not to, please explain why. The absence of RSS feeds on numerous netlabels is one of the great mysteries of the field.

• Allow for streaming in addition to downloading of your individual tracks. Don’t assume that just because you’re giving music away that anyone actually wants to possess it. Allow each song to find its own audience, and to bring that audience back to the album.

• Consider making your netlabel singles-only. There aren’t anywhere near as many singles-oriented netlabels as there are album-oriented netlabels. The disparity suggests that album-oriented netlabels are easier to maintain. Challenge yourself and your musicians to whittle their releases down to an individual, singular statement.

• Allow for downloading of the complete album as a set (that is, when you ignore the previous instruction and proceed with an album-centric approach). It’s a hassle to download each track individually.

• Have a “look,” a consistent visual approach, even if what’s consistent is that every release is drastically different than what preceded it.

• Don’t model your releases on traditional record-industry releases. Look to television, movies, animation, comics, newspapers, magazines, radio, and other serial media for models, lessons, inspiration.

• Don’t be afraid to try to charge money. Give the releases away free, certainly, but consider a “pay what you will” interface (in which zero is one option among many), make snazzy limited-edition physical objects, add a donation/tip link.

• Make your site HTML5-friendly. If you don’t know what that last sentence means, there’s a good chance the rapidly expanding cultural consumption taking place on the iPad and iPhone is passing you by.

• Include with each release a brief text document containing key information (personnel, location, date, instrumentation, perhaps even a descriptive statement of intent on the part of the musicians).

• Link from the release’s page to artist information (biography, discography, web presence, etc.).

• Make each release memorable, not just sonically and visually, but how you describe it, how you promote it.

• Consider multiple services for file hosting. When archive.org (or sonicsquirrel.net) goes down, you don’t want your audience to have to make a conscious decision to try to remember to try again later.

• Consider your copyright options. Read up on Creative Commons, and perhaps follow the lead of a netlabel that you admire.

• Don’t put out too much or too little music. Don’t leave your audience wondering if you’ve ceased existing, and don’t overwhelm them.

• Tags, not genres. Repeat: tags, not genres.

• Don’t be louder than your music. You aren’t going to convince anyone to like, let alone listen to, your latest release by over-promising on its transcendent genius. Just be factual, and the audience for those facts will find it.

• Develop a sense of community among your netlabel’s contributing artists. Have them remix each other, and let those remixes lead one artist’s audience to check out another artist’s album. Combine like-minded tracks into themed samplers. Provoke collaborations.

• Don’t be insular: develop a sense of community with other netlabels.

• Consider having a secondary RSS feed to function as a proper podcast, perhaps with the full album or select tracks sewn into a continuous whole, with opening and closing thematic music for consistency, perhaps even little interview segments.

• Surprise people. Break all these suggested rules in creative ways.