Top 10 Posts & Searches from June 2010

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Seven of the top 10 most popular posts on this site during the month of June (out of a total of 37 posts) were drawn from the site’s week-daily free (and legal) download recommendations, the Downstream department: (1) a Four Tet remix by Canadian beatsmith Caribou, (2) Kid Koala‘s take on “Moon River” (released as part of the Ninja Tune label’s 20th-anniversary festivities), (3) broken instrumental hip-hop by 22Tape, (4) Hungarian dubstep (from Banyek), (5) pianotronica, (6) hold-your-breath ambience by Kirill Platonkin, and (7) 8bit abstraction from I, Cactus.

Also in the top 10, (8) my interview with sound artist and vocalist Lesley Flanigan (whose homemade instruments are pictured above), (9) a note about a neato vinyl/CD hybrid created by techno DJ Jeff Mills, and as is occasionally the case, (10) one of the automated Saturday round-ups of the previous week’s twitter.com/disquiet posts (this one including brief notes on Songbird, statistician Mark Hansen, artist Ben Rubin, artist Zhang Huan, cartoonist Pascal Matthey, the Falun Gong, similes, foghorns, and the late designer Tobias Wong, among other subjects).

The most popular two posts of both the last 60 and 90 days were an MP3 Discussion Group on Oval‘s recent album, Oh, and the recent free album download I compiled, Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album; each track on the album is a response-in-music to a misinformed article (“The Freeloaders”) about copyright and creativity in the May issue of The Atlantic by Megan McArdle.

There were a lot of ties for most-search-for terms this past month, topped by: “rss,” “soundcloud” (the music community), “autechre,” “topic,” “oval,” “oval celeste” (a reference to the art on the cover of Oval’s recent album, Oh; it’s by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot), “youtube,” “bandcamp” (another music community), “buddha machine,” “cardboard,” “mego” (the record label), “minimalism,” “oval oh,” “rephlex,” “souns,” and “static kitten” (an act whose drone release on the No Type label was featured here over a year ago: disquiet.com).

Japanese Downtempo MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Based in Tokyo, the musician known as Ichiro_ creates artfully loping instrumental hip-hop haunted by the vocals it so demonstratively lacks. On a superb recent downtempo track (with the ungainly title “Repeatpattern plus ichiro fairport reply draft one”), he uses a muddled voice as a melodic and percussive component, the loose vowels heavily mediated by technological transformation until they are almost — key word that, “almost” — indistinguishable amid a context largely defined by head-nodding beats and tinkling notes. At times they have the tone of an analog keyboard, at others they reinforce the rhythm.

Original track at soundcloud.com/eiseikankei. More on Ichiro_, albeit mostly in Japanese, at myspace.com/icr0414 and twitter.com/ichiro_0414.

Mysterious Field Recording (OGG)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Distant car alarm. Thunderous industrial undercurrent. Passing transportation. Terse conversation. Pacing feet. These may not be a few of your favorite things, but they are among the many — the arguably countless — constituent parts of a uniquely satisfying field recording recently posted to the netlabel rainnetlabel.blogspot.com. The single track, almost 50 minutes (and as many megabytes) in length, marks the label’s 36th release, and it’s credited to Aairria. The file is only available as an OGG (no MP3), which is why it isn’t available for streaming, only download, here. Titled “Phonography Archive 01: Corridor Cabinet,” it suggests itself as a salvo in the world of mundane audio. The words “archive” and “cabinet,” however, reflect each other — the track is both an item in the proposed series, and itself a collection of disparate if linked sonic items. The overall effect is that of unspecified dread: emotionally remote, narratively ambiguous, sonically spare.

Aairria was previously featured here last November: disquiet.com. More on the musician here: aairriamusic.wordpress.com.

The PDF as Sound Object

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The PDF may yet prove to be the fax of the Internet: an under-performing technology that persists because of some peculiar set of ill-defined yet tenacious niches that it fills.

Which isn’t to say the PDF doesn’t have artistic promise. Like the fax, it may even be ripe for experimentation. Back in the early 1990s various artists, including Art Reseaux and Gilbertto Prado, created endless fax loops, modern scrolls enabled by the technology.

Recently the trio of Duncan Whitley, James Wyness, and Katherine Hunt collaborated on a PDF titled 58 Processions: Listening through Holy Week (PDF — caveat: it’s almost 100 megabytes) that seeks to take advantage of the format’s little-promoted audio capabilities. The document is a map with sound files encoded in it. Released this year, it collates material from a 2008 Whitley-Wyness sound-art exhibit in the crypt at St Pancras Church in London. The duo projected in the crypt sounds they had collected in Seville during holy week — liturgy and passing bands, crowd noise and other field recordings. In the solemn space of St Pancras, they didn’t attempt to transport the experience so much as create a new experience, that of disembodied sound in a sympathetic environment.

The PDF collects simple maps that delineate the source points of the audio, as well as frame the audio with explanatory text. Unfortunately, true to the PDF’s iffy nature, the audio didn’t all function on either of the Windows machines nor on the Macintosh that I attempted to play/read it on. Still, it’s a fascinating prospect — and what exactly is the proper verb when a PDF serves as a multimedia platform?

More on the release at khora.org.uk. More on the original exhibit at measure.org.uk.

Images of the Week: Vinyl-CD Hybrid

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Via makezine.com comes news of this ingenious hybrid of a CD and a 5″ vinyl single:

The delightful item is the brainstorm of musician Jeff Mills, a storied Detroit techno DJ. It serves as the medium for his recent, science-fiction-themed effort, The Occurrence — Sleeper Wakes. It’s useful to read the Mills hybrid as an attempt to reconcile techno with the future. The vinyl album and the CD are quickly losing ground to tools like the MP3 mixer, as well as the virtual turntables of Serato. Techno long associated itself with a semi-dystopian future, and as the future comes into view, the likely absence from it of physically embodied music seems both a confirmation of the genre’s most dire predictions, and a warning of its own potentially limited cultural lifespan.

More on the release at axisrecords.com. (Mills was one of the participants in a group show that I had a small sound-art piece in at the gallery Crewest in downtown Los Angeles in April 2009: disquiet.com.)