National Geographic Meets Xenakis (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are many dedicated blogs, social networks, Flickr feeds, and del.icio.us link collections whose laser focus seems almost unnervingly specific. Podcast series are no different, for example the ongoing one by Sean Williams, its self-explanatory title Voice on Record. It collects all manner of archival documentary audio of its subject matter from, as Williams puts it, “a gigantic range of fascinating, famous and ordinary people recorded on vinyl.”

The key words are “people” and “vinyl.” The two of the core pleasures of Williams’ series are (1) the varied manners of speech — word choice, tone, affect — and (2) the found-object quality inherent in the surface noise. When a piece of vinyl is particularly aged, Williams is known to apologize politely in advance for the sound quality.

In fact, that qualifies as an additional pleasure in Voice on Record: (3) the depth of close listening that Williams brings to the material. He’s no mere collector. He occasionally pauses recordings to interject his take on the material, sometimes probing the stated facts, often guessing at the underlying circumstances.

Such is the case in an episode dedicated to the voices of animals (MP3), when a particularly consistent echo captures his imagination. He proposes that the echo is the result of “something going on between the sync head and the playback head,” and then asks that anyone who worked for the responsible company in the 1970s get in touch if they have any insight.

[audio:
http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/feed/5774/0/Voiceonrecord-38-peter_scott_320100608.mp3|titles=”Episode 38″|artists=Voice on Record]

The recordings in question are a series of 7″s (played at 33 1/3, not 45) narrated by Peter Scott (and, late in the episode, another gentleman), with all manner of birds, bats, apes, and so on, all cackling and calling, whining and singing. As Williams (or whoever wrote up the description that accompanies the episode online) puts it, “Some of these animal voices are spine tingling and some sound like electronic free improv.” At one point during the broadcast, Williams draws a comparison between a specific call and 20th-century composer Iannis Xenakis’ modern classical work “Concret Ph” from 1958, which he identifies as having been made from sounds of burning charcoal.

More on Voice on Record at voiceonrecord.blogspot.com. The episode was broadcast last June 8, 2010, and uploaded at the end of January 2011 to resonancefm.com.

(Image of bird from flickr.com, used via Creative Commons license.)

Texture Recognition / Glacial Sound / Pop Ambient (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Berlin-based Paula Daunt calls this facet of her output, which goes by Agnosie, her “dark ambient project,” and she recently let two tracks loose on her soundcloud.com/pauladaunt account. They are tasters, as she put it, of an EP that’s close to release. “Close to release” might sum up the pleasures of one of those tracks, “Lost Serendipity,” which sounds like the effusive burst of a pop song held on a tantalizing pause that’s straining to break free.

 

The voice — there’s clearly a voice in there, based on texture recognition, though not on anything stated, anything intelligible, anything “legible” — is all vowels, the whole thing slurred to the point where, even if there are consonants, they’ve been shoved horizontal, from a hard plosive to a soft aura of semi-wordness. If a comparison to an existing song were necessary, then the most attenuated split second of “Personal Jesus” (the Depeche Mode radio-single version, not Johnny Cash’s mumblecore cover) might come to mind, albeit here that momentary delay extended for five and a half minutes of slomo slurry. Not that it’s all open-mouth sibilance. There’s a near-orchestral soaring that could be a guitar solo, and a rattle that seems like a drum roll pulled apart like taffy.

After yesterday’s entry on classical music being submitted to a more painstaking approach than the Bieber/Jurassic glacial stretching (“If You Slow Down Grieg You Get Ligeti”), this seemed like an appropriate bookend in advance of the weekend.

More on Daunt at pauladaunt.com and twitter.com/pauladaunt. She contributed to the holiday remix project I put together at the end of 2010, Anander Mol, Anander Veig.

Two Makers/Players of Instruments (Jaroba, Sung Kim)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Two instrument-making musicians, one evening, two very different approaches. Last Thursday, January 27, the Luggage Store Gallery New Music Series hosted two Northern California musicians: Jaroba and Sung Kim. Jaroba (aka James Robert Barnes) was due to perform with Keith Cary. It was disappointing that Cary couldn’t make the show, because he’s quite accomplished — for example, he built the reproductions of famed futurist Luigi Russolo’s intonarumori horns (circa 1920) for performances held at the end of 2009 in San Francisco and Manhattan (I caught the San Francisco show, which happened at the Yerba Buena Center downtown).

Jaroba adapted well to the change in plans, and played a variety of things, including a saxophone with a thick long tube situated between horn and mouthpiece. The extension rendered the music with a rich reverby hum. For another piece, he played an instrument that connected his sax mouthpiece to a long irrigation tube, which then fed the sound through the speaker cone of a PA, resulting a deep fluttery noise. He credited Cary with much of the device’s creation, explaining it originally employed a tuba mouthpiece. He also described a tone generator built from a stationary bicycle, but that object wasn’t present at the Luggage Store show.

Totally Tubular: Jaroba at the Luggage Store Gallery

Sung Kim’s instruments were as complicated as Jaroba’s were simple. They included a bowed one made from wood with an animal-hide (deer, if I heard correctly) body with 24 strings, a plucked one that looked like a bass sitar merged with Wolverine’s adamantium spine (16 strings), and a wooden box with oscillators that emitted a mix of pinging bleeps and droning, resonating strings. There was also an incredibly simple guitar, like bass banjo, with just three strings, its oversize tuning pegs like buckteeth.

Axeman Cometh: The most complicated (above) and simple of Kim’s works

Both Jaroba and Kim are exemplary players of their instruments. Kim in particular seemed to take the opportunity to express all manner of techniques possible in his creations, banging on the hide of one of them, bending the neck of another.

String Theory: Note the dense spaghetti bowl of strings at the end of these two of Kim’s instruments.

Fortunately, a video most of his performance has been uploaded:

More on Jaroba at myspace.com/jarobamakesnoise, and Keith Cary at keithcary.com. Vimeo video at vimeo.com/19483700.

If You Slow Down Grieg You Get Ligeti (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Alan Morse Davies has discerned that if you slow down Grieg it turns into Ligeti. That’s not how he characterizes it, but the melodrama of a Grieg original, once stretched to the point of fracturing, comes to resemble one of Ligeti’s haunting, offworld, spectral fantasies. Davies, for one of his long-running series of slowed-music pieces, used Grieg’s “Nocturne” as the source material. He describes his approach in brief: “It’s a serious mangling /mauling of Grieg’s ‘Nocturne’ from two different 78 records from the 1920s. I wanted to create a disquieting sense of ‘otherness.'” The past year has seen a slew of slowed-down music, from the Inception cues and app, to the angelic Justin Bieber post on Soundcloud, to the 10th anniversary of the death of molasses-remixer DJ Screw (see DJ/rupture’s appreciation). Just this morning a friend introduced me to the wonders of a slowed down Jurassic Park theme. A lot of this work has been as simple as using a preset piece of software, but it has clearly resonated with the general public (the Jurassic Park slomix has accumulated over half a million listens in less than 20 days). Here’s to hoping those listeners will make their way to composers, such as Davies, for whom slowing down has been an ongoing artistic pursuit. And do note that Davies employed two different source copies, the mix of which, not to mention their surface noise, contributed no doubt to the shadowy pleasures of what resulted. He titled it “Cubic Sentient Ballroom” (MP3). Which is to say, if you slow down Grieg you do, indeed, accomplish something that resembles Ligeti — but what you truly get is Alan Morse Davies.

[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/17%20-%20Cubic%20Sentient%20Ballroom.mp3|titles=”Cubic Sentient Ballroom”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]

Track originally posted at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com.

4’33” (Egypt) for Ahmed Basiony

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Update (2011.02.04): A second publicly accessible memorial Facebook page for Basiony features photos of him taken during the Cairo protests:

Battle of Cairo: What appear to be the late Ahmed Basiony (right photo) and presumably him (in mask) with unidentified friend during Cairo protests (photos from Facebook tribute page)

Update (2011.02.03): There is now a publicly accessible memorial Facebook page for Basiony, filling up with video and photos. (By “publicly accessible,” I mean that no Facebook account is required to view it.)

Art of War: Reportedly special forces in the Egyptian Museum (photo from washingtonpost.com)

Initial Post (2011.02.02): Word spread this morning that Egyptian artist and musician Ahmed Basiony died on January 25, the first day of major anti-government demonstrations in the current Egyptian uprising, reportedly of asphyxiation from tear gas. (Subsequently the date of his death has been reported as January 28.)

That’s according to his page on Facebook — and five full days after I’d admiringly, at twitter.com/disquiet, shared a link to a video of him performing live in 2009, utterly unaware that he was no longer with us. In a memorial to Basiony, the American sound artist John Kannenberg posted a 4’33” field recording made outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — even at the time of its recording, the street was, as the audio displays, a noisy, busy place. Of course, that is nothing compared to what Cairo at this moment, under siege, is like.

 

The 4’33” length is, of course, following the lead of John Cage’s famous “silent” piece, in which a musician sits at his or her instrument (a piano traditionally, but not always) for three movements whose combined length is three seconds over four and a half minutes. It’s widely understood that one of the key aims of Cage’s piece is for the listener to listen through the framed silence and hear the world beyond the performance. To listen to this pre-uprising recording from Cairo is to hear not only the cars, the talking, the random noises, but to struggle to locate the long-simmering outrage, the deeply sublimated discontent that eventually ruptured this past week, and in whose tumult many died, including Basiony.

Kannenberg writes of this piece:

The sound of the water fountain outside the main entrance of the national Egyptian Museum in Cairo; what the museum campus sounded like before the protests that began with the Day of Rage on January 25, 2011. At the moment of uploading this track, the area around the Egyptian Museum has become a battleground between anti-government protestors and pro-government intimidators in the employ of the police. Dedicated to the memory of Ahmed Basiony, Egyptian sound and media artist who died on that first day of protests, a victim of police brutality.

This Egyptian Museum recording of 4’33” serves as a postscript to Kannenberg’s collection of 11 museum field recordings from last year, Audio Tour, released on his netlabel, stasisfield.com. There were two Egypt tracks on that release (MP3, “Internet Archive Backup Server, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt – May 10, 2010”; MP3, “Open Air Museum, Memphis, Egypt – May 4, 2010”), which I wrote about at the time of its release. The album was among my favorite free downloads of 2010. The collection includes 4’33” recordings from, among other spots, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Modern (London), and two music-specific entries: the Motown Museum (in Detroit) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (in Cleveland). It’s interesting to note that each of the 11 tracks on Kannenberg’s Audio Tour are not only the same length (4’33”, naturally), but also the same size — that despite the variation in complexity, they all fill roughly the same amount of hard-drive space.

It’s no doubt something of a pipe dream among those of us who enjoy field recordings, but should the act of recording the sound of a place ever become nearly as popular and common as is taking photographs of places, it’s imaginable that 4’33” would become a if not the standard length of such an audio document, the same way that there are standardized dimensions for photos.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stasisfield. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com, twitter.com/stasisfield, and his netlabel, stasisfield.com.

The top Google link for a search for Ahmed Basiony leads to a page at 100copies.com/ahmedbasiony, the music organization led by his fellow Egyptian experimentalist Mahmoud Refat. The site has been offline since the start of the uprising. One hopes it will soon again be publicly accessible, and that, as if anything good could come of such a tragedy (beyond, of course, sweeping and solid governmental reform), the late Basiony’s work will gain a wider audience.

(Photo of Egyptian Museum steps by Tara Todras-whitehil, from coverage at washingtonpost.com. The caption reads: “On guard: Special forces officers patrol the Egyptian Museum in Cairo two days after would-be looters broke in and damaged about 75 objects.”)