Best Acoustic Techno of the Year (Bad Plus Interview)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Bad Plus — the jazz trio best known for its covers of Black Sabbath and Vangelis, not to mention György Ligeti and Igor Stravinsky — is the rare jazz band that functions like a rock band. That’s what I focused on when interviewing Ethan Iverson, the group’s pianist, for a short piece recently. It’s available at csindy.com. The title track of the new Bad Plus album, Never Stop, may be the best electricity-free techno ever (a category that could do with more material). It was composed by the group’s bassist, Reid Anderson. It’s the band’s first album ever with no covers; it’s all originals by the band members (drummer David King, in addition to Iverson and Anderson). The editor gave my interview a great title: “Compose Yourself.”

And here are a few things that didn’t make the printed interview, due to length:

¶ The “Never Stop” song was written for an Isaac Mizrahi fashion show.

¶ Asked if he’d ever tried augmenting his piano electronically (in addition to the band’s interest in Aphex Twin, and the techno-ness of “Never Stop,” Iverson has played with digi-celllist Hank Roberts), Iverson said, “Reid works on electronica every day but I don’t know much about it. I just play the piano.”

¶ There are no current plans for remixes. Said Iverson, “What a nice idea — no plans yet, but you never know.”

Full story at csindy.com.

John Kannenberg’s Spalding Gray Tribute (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sound artist John Kannenberg has remastered one of his most touching recordings, a tribute to the late monologuist Spalding Gray. The audio takes recordings made in 2003 on New York City’s Staten Island Ferry and transforms them into a lament for its troubled subject. The Ferry is associated with Gray because it is reportedly the last place he was sighted before disappearing; later, his body was discovered in the East River.

 
At nearly 20 minutes, it mixes a wide variety of sounds, including what could be highly processed bird song, the rumble of the ferry’s motor, and ringing bells. This is no simple elegy. For all its surface placidity, it is shot through with high-pitched sounds that edge toward anxiety. It also has a uniquely melodic component for a work, such as this, derived from field recordings. Especially after its midpoint, there comes to be heard a light melody, an eerie riff that resembles some of the more otherworldly recordings of Louis and Bebe Baron.

One thing to note is the dates. Gray died in 2004, and the recording was produced and released shortly thereafter (originally on Earlabs; this version was remastered this year). But the recordings of the ferry were completed by Kannenberg in 2003. Which means he had in his possession sounds that meant one thing before Gray’s death, and something else entirely after. Even without the sonic transformations inherent in Kannenberg’s processing, the association of Gray with the ferry gave those recordings new meaning after his tragic suicide. That simple gap in dates lends even more gravitas to the recording. Music built from field recordings is intended to, in some way, reflect our world back at us, slightly altered, and thus illuminate it in a special way. Since the ferry audio was transformed (in terms of meaning) simply by the fact of Gray’s passing, the piece casts a shadow on all field recordings, exemplifying how even raw documentation will change as context changes over time.

Track (title: “For Spalding Gray”) originally posted at soundcloud.com. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com.

(View of Staten Island from the ferry in 1998 from flickr.com by Gregory Melle. Used via Creative Commons.)

Susan Philipsz Wins the Turner Prize; First Sound Artist Nominated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today was a pretty solid milestone for sound art. It’s the day that Susan Phillipsz, the 45-year-old Glasgow native, won the Turner Prize for her installation “Lowlands.”

Her victory served as a good opportunity for me to follow up on an invitation from boingboing.net to guest blog for them. You can read the post, my first for the directory of wonderful things, here.

 

And here’s a very nice welcome post that Madam Boing, Xeni Jardin, wrote to note my participation: boingboing.net.

Steve Reich Remix Awards: And the Waveform Is …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The winners of the Steve Reich remix contest were announced earlier today. It’s a lot of music to sort through, but for starters, a hypothesis, and a resulting observation.

Participants in the contest, in the true spirit of online collaboration and open-source music-making, were provided (for free — no pay-to-play here) the raw materials, the stems as they’re called, of the piece “2×5,” a kind of post-rock bit of chamber music newly composed by Reich. They then set to work, beat-battle style, to see who could make something interesting enough out of original to impress the composer himself. (The other judge was Christian Carey, a member of the composition faculty at the Westminster Choir College.)

This is Steve Reich we’re discussing, the minimalist most comfortable with, most at home amid, uniformity and repetition, as well as with the subtle shifts that evidence themselves therein. So, since the audio player of the service that hosted the contest, indabamusic.com, includes waveforms, the question that suggest itself is: How do the waveforms of winners compare and contrast with those of the losers? Or, in this case, not the losers, but the honorable mentions.

These first three waveforms are of the top three placing entries:

And these are the ten honorable mentions:

It seems fair to say that the three that won show considerably less internal variety than do the ones that they bested, at least in the manner this waveform algorithm indicates. Of course, these are just 10 out the numerous ones that were actually submitted, so this is not exactly a scientific investigation. There may be, for all I know, one among them that looks like a solid block.

If you want to give those remixes singled out by Reich himself a listen, here they are, starting with the winner, credited to Dominique Leone:

 

More on the contest at nonesuch.com.

My interview with Reich, and some of the contributing musicians, on the occasion of his 1999 Reich Remixed album here: “The Public Record.”