Soothing Sounds for (My) Baby

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

[audio:http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/01-Fredo_Viola-Lullaby.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/02-Autistici-Two_Sleep_States_In_A_Quiet_Environment.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/03-Nomad_Palace-Saigon.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/04-Hey_Exit-Twenty_Seconds.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/05-The_OoRay-Bubbaly.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/06-Nils_Quak-Printemps.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/07-Stephane_Leonard-Au_Clair_De_La_Lune_ReEdit.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/08-talkingmakesnosense-Holophrase.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/09-Benjamin_Klein-Tuba_Cloud.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/10-He_Can_Jog-Shhh_Before_Peyton.mp3,http://luvsound.org/mint/pepper/tillkruess/downloads/tracker.php?remote&url=http://luvsound.org/files/luv025/11-Brian_Green-Peyton.mp3|titles=”Lullaby”,”Two Sleep States In A Quiet Environment”,”Saigon”,”Twenty Seconds”,”Bubbaly”,”Printemps”,”Au Clair De La Lune (Re-Edit)”,”Holophrase”,”Tuba Cloud”,”Shhh! (Before Peyton)”,”Peyton”|artists=Fredo Viola,Autistici,Nomad Palace,Hey Exit,The Oo-Ray,Nils Quak,Stephane Leonard,Talkingmakesnosense,Benjamin Klein,He Can Jog,Brian Green]

Three weeks ago today, my soundworld changed forever. There was a lot of electronic beeping and human panting for many hours, and a not small amount of institutional chatter and directives, and then suddenly silence, into which arrived this incredible scream, a scream of life. This was late in the evening of August 31, 2010, when my wife gave birth to our daughter, who turns a momentous three weeks old this evening.

A group of electronic musicians has put together an incredible (and free to download) compilation of music intended as appropriate for the mix of quietude and gurgling playfulness that one might associate with a baby’s first experiences of life. The project’s production unfolded entirely unbeknownst to me, until the day before its release, when Erik Schoster, who makes music as He Can Jog, wrote to inform me of what he and his musician buddies had been up to.

The album is titled Soothing Sounds for Baby, after the collections by famed inventor-musician Raymond Scott. However this Soothing Sounds collection includes a subhead and a brief introduction that make me blush to reproduce here:

Soothing Sounds for Baby
A LuvSound Sampler for Marc Weidenbaum

You probably know that Marc Weidenbaum is the man behind the excellent and long-running Disquiet blog on ambient music (and beyond!) but you may have missed a recent tweet declaring his new fatherhood – true to form, it was couched in a reference to an ambient festival he’d planed to attend.

This seemed like a good enough excuse to take a moment and pay respect to someone who has tirelessly supported this little corner of the musical world we love so much. So, Marc: thanks for everything! Here are some sounds for you and baby (and you, dear reader) presented with warmth from a gaggle of LuvSound alumni.

Here, by the way, is the tweet in question:

Looks like I will miss the On Land & SFEMF festivals in San Francisco these next weeks. Good excuse: my first child was born Tuesday night.

11:11 AM Sep 2nd  via web  from Ashbury Heights, San Francisco

 
As the fellows who handle the raymondscott.blogspot.com reminded me, I listed Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby among the “16 Albums That Changed My Life” when I made the list in February 2009. Let’s just say that the ideas of life and of life changing are even clearer to me now.

You can flip back and forth through the playlist (up above) using the small arrows, or select an individual track down below — as well as click through to learn more about each contributing artist. The collection is housed at the luvsound.org netlabel.
Continue reading “Soothing Sounds for (My) Baby”

Sketches of Sound 6: Thorsten Sideb0ard

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the sixth occurrence of a little Disquiet.com project called “Sketches of Sound”: inviting illustrators to sketch something sound-related. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.”

The above drawing was done for me for this project by Thorsten Sideb0ard, who is possibly slightly more well known for his London-based electronic music label, Highpoint Lowlife. He has been scribbling on paper for many years, from club flyers to album artwork, with the occasional self-published comic. Over the past year, he has been devoting more and more time to drawing, uploading content regularly to his blog at drawingb0ard.blogspot.com, where you can see sketches, works in progress, and older material that has been found and scanned. This year he decided to lay the label to rest and concentrate on his illustration, and has started in earnest on a comic project entitled Physic or Surgery which is set in a near future post-industrial city, covering the interactions and lives of the cities many inhabitants.

In interviewed Sideb0ard back in 2003 (“Behind the 8-bit”), and he explained how the label he’d founded was inspired less by indies like Def Jam and Matador, and more by a computer database:

“I had just started working at a company who specialize in content-managed websites within the music industry, usually for small independent labels (the company is called State51), and they have this really cool database system for adding and manipulating content. I’m the system and network administrator for them, which is something I have done for years. However, I hadn’t done too much Perl coding, nor database work. So 8bitrecs.com started almost as a pet project to get up to speed with how a lot of their systems work, like a much smaller version.”

He’s also on Twitter, at twitter.com/sideb0ard.

The previous “Sketches of Sound” contributors were, in alphabetical order, Brian Biggs, Warren Craghead III, Dylan Horrocks, Minty Lewis, and Hannes Pasqualini.

Steampunk Minus the Punk (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

C. Reider has recorded steampunk music, minus the punk — a single-track release of what he describes as “drones, drummachines and recorded sound” that has all the ambience of a dank tunnel and all the composure of a tape-music event, or perhaps it’s the other way around (MP3). Reider is a prolific and deeply curious (and curiosity-inducing) musician, some of whose most intriguing work involves employing drum machines for purposes other than beats. He announced the track’s availability via twitter.com/vuzhmusic last week. In it, recognizable pneumatic pounding shares space with insectoid chatter, whizzing burry sine waves, and sinuous droning. Any one of those items might, in fact, be sourced from the drum machines in question, but there’s even money that in fact it’s the least likely element — quite likely, it’s those drones that are, in fact, some standard issue drum machine tweaked far from its factory-preset comfort zone.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/JNN052-CReider-SteamInspector/JNN052-Steam_inspector_vbr.mp3|titles=”Steam Inspector”|artists=C Reider]

If the title summons up some Hayao Miyazaki vision of a homunculoid cartoon character making its way through a realm equal parts fantasy and dessication, you aren’t far off.

More on Reider at vuzhmusic.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Gotta love form-emails from music publicists that start, "Dear ," #
  • Twitter apps of the stars: @ryuichisakamoto uses @echofon, @chris_carter_ @tweetie, @shocklee @hootsuite, @kronosquartet the web interface. #
  • The @facebook film is Fincher/Sorkin but feels like Soderbergh experiment. Anyhow, Reznor/Ross MP3 set just $2.99 http://www.nullco.com/TSN/ #
  • Long before @twitter, book-reading as a form of ambient awareness for "forgetful majority" http://is.gd/ffF6y (by James Collins @nytimes) #
  • Anyone see a film called La Linea (The Line) with Ray Liotta? Looks a bit like Traffic. I may need to watch, if only for David Torn's score. #
  • #ff Some feeds that shouldn't have fewer "followers" than mine: @sfemf @gregdavis @mapmap @npseaver @mariplasma @soundscrapers @carlstone #
  • Turning your ashes into an LP puts the "forever" into "perfect sound forever," a true "vinyl resting place" http://www.andvinyly.com/ #
  • "The Gentle Hum of Anxiety": a cue from @trent_reznor / Atticus Ross Facebook film score; 5 free MP3s http://nullco.com/TSN via @brandonnn #
  • Sound-recycling Organ of Corti wins new-music prize. Congrats to liminal (composer David Prior & architect Frances Crow). http://is.gd/fe8bL #
  • Yes, dear, when I was your age, we did use that weird word "and" but we started to use the ampersand around 2009/2010 because it's shorter. #
  • Looxcie's "wearable camcorder" always-on earpiece (think Jawbone + video) makes me wanna reread Two-Step by @warrenellis http://is.gd/fdzdA in reply to warrenellis #
  • According to Matmos' myspace page, its http://brainwashed.com/matmos/ page will be updated more regularly. Current post on Baltimore fest. #
  • Dancing with my two-week-old kid appears to put her to sleep. Who says music is without functional value? #
  • Based on "Hamburg Hotel" off the new Underworld, will be listening to a lot more Appleblim and Al Tourettes. #
  • Silent-car plot device. Last night on Sons of Anarchy, comment after fugitive is hit by car: "Damn hybrids! Dangerous!" http://is.gd/fc0Ow #
  • Name drop of Underworld on Covert Affairs, so close to the release of Barking. Someone's got good timing. #
  • Tuesday noon air-raid/emergency-alert alarm in San Francisco almost always triggers Cold War flashback, kindles desire for tinned-meat lunch #
  • Continuously misreading "drone war" stories as being extensions of Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare. #
  • Seeking first soundscape @alexismadrigal notes primacy of visual: "Decades when we can see our places, but not hear them" http://is.gd/faCer #
  • The incremental rewinds inherent in transcribing an interview always make the process sound like a Scott Johnson composition. #
  • ICV2 on digital sales/piracy's role in comics (vs. music). Argues comics, in essence, too small to not grow http://is.gd/faqVF Seems wishful #
  • Two time-honored staccato traditions (blippy modular synths, jittery time-lapse photography) yoked by @robotdancerobot http://is.gd/f9vR2 #
  • I second this: RT @pheezy I'd love a bookmarklet [to] highlight date/time on a page & it's added to calendar w/ url as description #lazyweb #
  • Feels like 90% of the emails from djshadow.com are about designer hoodies, but today brings two free MP3s — when the website isn't overrun. #
  • Afternoon chamber music: dishwasher, babbling baby, typing, hard drive, neighbor cleaning house, wind outside, occasional bird/plane/car. #
  • Bittersweet audio anecdote: an old reel-to-reel + the hope to hear a father's voice + a demo of the Norelco 100 recorder http://is.gd/f7Jom #
  • ♫ Afternoon tune: blood-in-the-ear drone + hot-jazz drums = a beat named "Cheat" by @rieces_pieces http://is.gd/f7EkJ #
  • Misread this @nytimes headline today as being about music: "Some Ask if Ozawa Is the Force That Japan Needs" http://is.gd/f7cqm #
  • Maybe once in a while the foghorns could have a guest DJ? #
  • Remain convinced that the @aquariusrecords record-store emailer is one of the best music publications going. #
  • "Paying for free" differs from "it pays to be free": @bandcamp to charge for free downloads (over a threshold) via @vuzhmusic @hecanjog #

Five Free Bonobo MP3s from Ninja Tune

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The 19th (of 20) free giveaways from the Ninja Tune label, intended to celebrate its 20th anniversary, contains five tracks from Bonobo (aka Simon Green). The core of the gift is “Ghost Ship,” a bit of what might have been called acid jazz once upon a time, never before available — and with it come four remixes of tracks from his Days to Come and recent Black Sands albums. “Ghost Ship” is all looped tinkling pianos and other jazz elements turned into downtempo exotica. Also among the five tracks is an Aaron Jerome mix of “Walk in the Sky,” which has a similar feel but adds a vocal worthy of Eartha Kitt. The real keeper is a remix of “Ketto” credited to Kidkanevil, which is little more than the barest of rhythms being made as if on old soup cans with dull knives, amid a slowly swirling bed of synthesized sounds; it sounds a bit like if Konono No. 1 had taken a field trip to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.

Speaking of the Ninja Tune giveaways, the tracks have been coming too quickly to keep track of, since they’re available for a limited time. The Bonobo is only around for about another three days. You just missed an Amon Tobin piece, and before that was a great mix by Kid Koala that mixed up Henry Mancini and Autechre, Dan the Automator and Boards of Canada. Most of the source material for Koala’s mix was available in video form, so for kicks I put together this streaming video playlist/mixtape (which of course, by definition, misses the finesse and invention that Koala brought to his deeply transformed versions of the material):




 

It’s also accessible via youtube.com/user/mwd1.

Keep an eye out for the next and final Ninja Tune XX giveaway. Potentially it’ll be something from Coldcut, the duo that founded Ninja Tune, though they’re not exactly musicians who draw attention to themselves at the expense of their roster. Perhaps it’ll be a remix of an early Ninja track done up by a more recent artist signee. Given the choice, I’d appreciate some previously unreleased Up, Bustle and Out.

More on the anniversary at ninjatunexx.com, and on the label at ninjatune.com, and on Bonobo/Green at bonobomusic.com.