“Suspended Memory” (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

All six tracks on Suspended Memory by Darren Harper are worth spending time with, but the first of them, “Crystal Ships,” is especially rewarding if lingered on. In many ways, the album’s title serves as an even better one for this specific track: glistening marimba-like sounds suggest a childhood toy, and Harper exaggerates the fragility with glitchy stutters and twitchy back’n’forth edits, the end result resembling a thought rising up from distant depths.

 

Rather than use that shifting fractured effluence as a backdrop, Harper charges it with the purpose and responsibility of the foreground. In time, various tiny elements come to circle each other: the marimba sound, vapor trails of activity, hushed rhythms, a rising current of percussive textures. It’s a wonderful thing: sharp as a shard as glass, yet gentle as a breeze.

More on Harper, who also goes by Mukti, at darrenjh.blogspot.com, where he explains the Suspended Memory album is dedicated to a friend and her son who passed away this past November, and at metameme.org. He lives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

“A Depressing Little Ditty for Piano and Cello” (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The electronically enabled cellist Ted Laderas recently posted a brief (three-minute) recording of an original composition that makes people who love his music hope he personally has a dreadful year. That’s intended entirely in jest, but it’s stated in light of the comment that accompanied the piece, titled “A Savage Exposition,” at his 15people.net website. He wrote: “I have been feeling a little depressed about my art as of late, so here’s a depressing little ditty for piano and cello.”

 

It’s a gem of a piece: compact, tight, classically refined, illuminated from within. The cello on “Savage Exhibition” has less of the artfully claustrophobic gaseous-effect shoegazer aura that is characteristic of Laderas’ work. Here he pairs the rhythmic cello with a simple piano line, one that is equal parts percussive and melodic. Together in combination, they suggest one of Philip Glass’ early chamber pieces intended for a dance performance. The sense of compactness comes from its limited motion, from the way it seems to move in place.

More on Laderas (for whose album Magnifications on the Luvsound label I wrote the liner notes) at 15people.net and soundcloud.com/ooray, “Oo-Ray” being Laderas’ name for his digitally enhanced cello work.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Re-read Jasia Reichardt's Computer in Art for like 10th time. Slim 1971 book about computer graphics but with obvious musical application. #
  • Obituary for Egyptian artist/musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011) with partial list of exhibits: http://j.mp/fjAyvg via @africancolours #jan25 #
  • Morning sounds: cars, hard drive/fan, no birds, no planes, no bus; fridge asleep, like everyone else. #
  • It's a relief when you compare a musician's work positively to Depeche Mode's and said musician doesn't want to kill you. #
  • Malcolm Gladwell sets out to prove ideas by yoking together disconnected anecdotes. He must see Egypt as an anecdote that doesn't fit. #
  • "@timprebble: thoroughly enjoyed stuck/skipping CD in bookstore just now – went on for 10min – perfect soundtrack" #eartwit #glitch #chance #
  • "@LongplayerNow: Longplayer has been playing for 11 years 34 days 11 hours 57 minutes. http://j.mp/f6JLkY Sounding beautiful right now." #
  • Genius: Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" as performed by Lee Marvin and (mostly) Angie Dickinson: http://youtu.be/BY4bL_bO8sA via @pheezy #
  • Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls remix: abridged to one sentence from each of its 15 chapters http://j.mp/ghel1P by YubNub's @JonathanAquino #
  • Is there a Firefox extension that will give me a mild but noticeable electric shock when I have more than 20 tabs open at once? #
  • "@melchoir: Tyondai Braxton is gone right? idk if they'll sound as good" Likely won't. If it's just snarky mathrock I'll bail. [Re: Battles] #
  • I need to remind myself that in most cases @[whoever] isn't tweeting too much; to the contrary, I may be reading too closely. #
  • Battles: "new music coming soon." That's enough good news to get me through a hectic day: http://j.mp/eLJGZB #
  • Alternate memorial page for slain Egyptian musician Ahmed Basiony (1978-2011), with photos from Cairo protests: http://j.mp/h9xpx9 #
  • NB to self: Don't install Ubuntu Netbook Edition while on deadline. Don't install Ubuntu Netbook Edition while on deadline. Don't install… #
  • Maybe "John Barry" isn't really a specific composer, but merely a code name used by a long line of British secret-agent/composers. #

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

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.