Black to Comm, Live (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Black in Blue: Marc Richter, aka minimalist genre-smasher Black to Comm, performing live.

Exactly a year ago, this site’s MP3 Discussion Group got together to talk about an album by Black to Comm, aka Marc Richter. The album, Alphabet 1968, on the Type label, was a rich mix of sounds, both composed and found — as we described it at the time, “from epic drones to compact minimalism, with all manner of lo-fi field recordings mixed in.”

That sonic broadmindedness is in full effect during his nearly half-hour long performance for the Rare Frequency podcast (MP3), in which he moves from splashing drums to guitar solos out of some Ennio Morricone film score, all the while this richly patterned hummingbird burble building slowly, at first almost imperceptibly, until the background becomes the foreground, a pointilist techno fantasy. To hear muted sirens played against automated arpeggios is a splendid thing, especially in Black to Comm’s hands.

[audio:http://www.rarefrequency.com/podcasts/Podcast_Spec_Ed_48_Black_to_Comm.mp3|titles=”Live on Rare Frequency”|artists=Black to Comm]

Track originally posted at rarefrequency.com. The performance occurred on November 3 of this year. More on Comm/Richter at blacktocomm.org. He also runs the label Dekorder (dekorder.de).

Top 10 Posts & Searches from November 2010

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It would be a lie of omission if once in a while it wasn’t mentioned that these stats always seem somewhat less than meaningful, but to paraphrase a fax of a recollection of a misreading of a newspaper report of a leak of Winston Churchill, they’re still of some vague use, if only for apples-to-apples comparison, month in, month out. One thing that is self-evident yet deserves being pointed out about the whole “top 10 posts” mode is that posts made toward the end of a month, like the Hanukkah-remix project entry, or the one just last night about the musical nature of field recordings or about David Byrne‘s audio-text memoir mash, seem to get short shrift.

Digits, All: Two hands and up to ten fingers can be used to manipulate the Thicket app on the iPad (shown here), the iPhone, and the iPod Touch.

In any case, three of the top most read/visited/commented/etc. posts of the month were non-free-MP3-downloads. These would be (1) the interview with the developers of the iOS music app Thicket (shown above; “Being Decimal”), (2) our semi-regular MP3 Discussion Group (which compared notes on Brian Eno‘s recent Small Craft on a Milk Sea); and (3) a brief mention (with a truly tantalizing illustration, shown below) of Kevin Kelly‘s book What Technology Wants, in regard to cornet taxonomy.

Cornet Taxonomy: A chart showing the development of the cornet, from Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants

The rest of the top 10 is rounded out by entries in the site’s Downstream department (freely, legally downloadable music): (4) instrumental hip-hop from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Tictoc and from (5) Chicago, Illinois’ 22Tape; (6) drones from Argentina (Peregrino, aka Bernardo Durand); (7) IoNizer‘s strings’n’beats EP, Infused Fear; (8) a sound-journal entry from Justin Hardison (aka My Fun); (9) a nearly songless song from Declining Winter (aka Richard Vincent Adams); and (10) despondent techno from Sherbe.

The Eno discussion mentioned above also ranks as the most popular post for the last 60 days, and the Soothing Sounds for Baby compilation is the most popular post of the last 90 days.

The top searches of the month were: “topic” (that pops up frequently, and I still have no idea why), “bandcamp” (the music-hosting service, not the American Pie joke) “karkowski” (as in Zbigniew, not the 30 Rock actress — that’s Krakowski), “alan morse davies,” “kate carr,” “autechre,” “buddha,” “Buddha Machine,” “Determinism,” “distortion,” “harold budd,” “ionizer,” “myo,” “portrait,” “scary,” and “scherbe.”

This now being December, the start of January will see two top-10 lists: one for this month, and one for the full year.

Everyday Techno

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The following, for a moment, should be heard without being read about or, for that matter, into:

What it isn’t is some long lost Chain Reaction 12″, though it could easily be, with its rumbling bass line, and the churning suppressed squalor.

What it is is a steam pipe, as captured by a microphone by Michael Raphael of Rabbit Ears Audio and posted on his blog, sepulchra.com. The post follows up a similar one from around this time last year, when Raphael wrote about apartment living in New York City (“My apartment features several steam pipes that seem to enjoy vocalizing”: sepulchra.com). It isn’t a coincidence that the posts are almost exactly a year apart, because the steam pipes turn on as winter approaches, and as the landlord decrees.

He writes of the more recent recording, with a nod to the audio-gearhounds who no doubt make up a significant percent of his readership, “Our steam pipes are full of character — they gurgle, hiss, clank, and make a host of other noises that I can’t begin to describe with adjectives. Last year, I recorded my steam pipe with a Schoeps MS pair on a boom, but this year I staked out my subject with a DPA 4060 taped to the wall next to the valve.”

Such thought experiments, such perception-reality switcheroos, are easily come by, and to some extent that is the point. The comparison, between field recording and abstract electronic music, isn’t intended to minimize or glorify either, just to draw attention to how the ear provides context simply by hearing. In the absence of context, our imagination provides context. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but imagination loves one, so much so that we fill the vacuum with quotidian reality long before venturing down more fantastical imaginative paths. When we listen to everyday sound — really listen to, as opposed to overhear (that last word being one that, it’s worth noting, contains its own inherent mistake) — we pay attention, and since the main sounds on which we consciously focus are voices and music, it is music that the everyday sounds come to resemble.

The association of everyday sounds with music is something Raphael is quite cognizant of. In another recent post, he describes the following recording, which while more self-evident than the above field recording is still worth hearing first out of context:

What it is is a ratchet, not the one you get at a hardware store, but the musical gadget employed by those MacGyvers of the orchestral world: the percussion section. Raphael visited his old music teacher, reflected on the work of Edgard Varese, and presented this sound, performed by his teacher, a sound that is neither fully instrument nor everyday noise. (Writes Raphael, “I just love the character of the instrument. It is not just some cheap piece of wood grinding away, but it has a real depth and dark quality to it.”) It’s a device whose modest nature puts it at the fulcrum of the two. In some ways, it can be seen as serving as a totem for the gap between music and field recording.

David Byrne: Listening Head

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It should be no surprise that when David Byrne was finalizing plans for an audiobook version of his mobile memoir, Bicycle Diaries, he didn’t just hire a B-movie actor to read it it, nor did he merely read it himself. He enlivened the entire enterprise with an ever-changing sonic backdrop (and, yes, he read it himself). By doing so, Byrne arguably created the rare audiobook that may be better than the written book (print or e-) itself. (That’s not to knock audiobooks — if you enjoy Don DeLillo, you owe yourself the experience of Stockard Channing reading Mao II, and The Body Artist is almost certainly more fulfilling when Laurie Anderson reads it.)

At his website, davidbyrne.com, there’s a taste of his literary-alchemical ingenuity. Click on the “Sydney” track and you’ll notice several things. There is his distinct speaking pattern, which is slurry and lispy [update: see comment] in a way his singing never seems, and then there is the gurgling didgeridoo underneath. Audio cues like that earthy glottal woodwind are used to underlay various moments in his recounting of events and observations.

And as of earlier this week, over at boingboing.net, they’re now hosting an excerpt from the book — and it’s at least the third or fourth generation of the story’s telling, depending on where you start counting. An excerpt from his “Berlin” chapter is reproduced, along with little audio-cue buttons that let you hear something: an urban soundscape, what appears to be an excerpt from the score to The Lives of Others, even bits of what seem to be original compositions (click on the arrow after “The Easties couldn’t afford it” to hear some lovely incidental music).

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Byrne could alter one’s expectations about narration. He’s argued in the past for the artistic potential of PowerPoint, and mixing sound and text here suggest another kind of bare-bones multimedia show that suits his trademark sense of economy.

Mics, Cassettes, “Inner Piano,” Oh My (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Someone deserves an award. Someone, that is, who was at the Bonnie Jones and Andrea Neumann duo performance at Fotofono in New York City on October 3.

Foto Finish: Bonnie Jones and Andrea Neumann live at Fotofono this past October

[audio:http://www.m-i-c-r-o.net/fotofono/fotofono_media/snd/101003/101003ff1.mp3|titles=”Live at Fotofono Oct 3 2010″|artists=Bonnie Jones Andrea Neumann]

Maybe it was an especially attentive sound engineer, and maybe it was a particularly respectful audience, but recordings of microsonic improvisation are rarely as rich with place and sound, and just as importantly this devoid of extraneous noise, as the one that documents the Jones-Neumann show.

Jones is credited with “electronics, mics, cassettes,” and Neumann with “inner piano, etc.” Their 20-plus-minute set (MP3) is a study in lowercase-sound imprecision. To say it’s unclear which person is doing what at any moment has less to do with the absence of a visual to accompany the audio as it does with the level of trust that must exist between two musicians for them to navigate — to chart, to create from scratch — such a subtle landscape together. Light buzzing gives way to fritzy circuits give way to mad oscillations give way to droning static give way to buzzy vibrancy, each moving to the next with a natural progression that suggests a narrative impulse. Where it all ends up is a mass of tangling strings and utterly unexpected vocalizing.

The evening also featured sets by Andrew Lafkas, Barry Weisblat, and Margarida Garcia, and by Chris Cogburn, Gill Arno (mpld), and Tim Catlin. Give a listen at fotofono.net.

More on Neumann at japanimprov.com. More on Jones at bonniejones.wordpress.com.