- Outside in the Richmond District, a gorgeous symphony for foghorns and birdsong. #
- I think I need a self-imposed simile embargo. #
- The music section of the @make website is like some ongoing, geographically distributed electronica Manhattan project: http://is.gd/cDG50 #
- Enjoying new version of "open-source iTunes" program by @songbirdteam — major improvement: no longer see the Edge every time it turns on. #
- Morning sounds: no alarm clock, but two airplanes in quick succession, chugging overhead like tug boats in the sky. #
- Drizzly morning: Falun Gong under the Bill Graham eves, tinny radio echoing like a Lilliputian / Horton Hears a Who-ian orchetra. #
- Between ebooks and flat-screen TVs, living rooms look more and more like they did in François Truffaut's film version of Fahrenheit 451. #
- RIP, Tobias Wong (b. 1974), meta/para/trans-designer. Someone I would have like to have spoken with. #
- Time-lapse video of the installation @sjmusart of Mark Hansen & Ben Rubin's The Listening Post: http://is.gd/cB3hT #
- Current office noises: tea-kettle copier, white-noise fans, mouse clicking, distant automobiles, one slow-moving plane. #
- When the MUNI bus passes the house at midnight, it sounds empty. #
- The surveillance sign near the giant Zhang Huan sculpture in San Francisco at city hall seems like an addition courtesy of Ai Weiwei / @aiww #
- Five of us are discussing the new Oval (aka Markus Popp) album, Oh, this week here: http://is.gd/cyeHa His first such effort in a decade. #
- Morning sounds: hard drives, virtually no cars. Is it simply early, or is the Memorial Day holiday quiet extending further into the week? #
- Buying music online after hours on a national holiday. Such a pleasure. #
- From Grandpapier's 24hr-comic session Pascal Matthey on hearing loss, sound, airplanes: http://bit.ly/9qiltE via @madinkbeard @mmaddencomics #
- Which is more annoying: Nigerian Craigslist frauds? Publicists who don't identify musical characteristics of acts/records they're pitching? #
Angelic Four Tet / Caribou Remix MP3
The title character in Four Tet‘s song “Angel Echoes” is the female voice, a snippet of which ekes out one sentence, more like a half-mumbled clause, that slowly repeats with what amounts to ethereal insistence for the track’s full length. It echoes, as the title suggests, with slight variants as time passes, each appearance sliding in behind the main voice like so many cards in a deck, always the same voice, less a chorus than a figment in a hall of mirrors. The track opened the recent Four Tet album, which arrived with the blissfully naive title There Is Love in You, and it manages to approximate with cloudy gestures what the musician (born Kieran Hebden) more frequently has accomplished with dastardly percussion: a shifting field that has a club-friendly downbeat yet endlessly flirts with abstraction.
For a recent 12″ release, Hebden tapped Canadian beatsmith Caribou for a remix, and then posted it online at soundcloud.com/four-tet. Caribou has muddied the angel, and the track is all the more memorable for it:
For comparison’s sake, here’s Hebden heard live (streaming-only, no download) in a BBC session playing “Angel Echoes,” also at soundcloud.com/four-tet:
The 12″ also includes a Jon Hopkins remix. More on Four Tet at fourtet.net, and on Caribou (born Daniel Victor Snaith) at caribou.fm.
Kid Koala’s “Moon River” (MP3)
Belatedly and apologetically, an important download announcement: get your browser over to ninjatunexx.com, where the MP3 giveaway of the week — in celebration of the Ninja Tune label’s 20th anniversary — is “Moon River,” as reconsidered by turntable expressionist Kid Koala (aka Eric San). The song is only available for about another eight hours, and (free) registration is required for access (which is why there’s no streaming version or direct link here).
Koala takes the original, as sung by Audrey Hepburn, and burnishes its antiquated affect — the glossy, gauzy dreaminess of Hollywood theme songs past — by using turntable effects to mimic the cavernous echo of early recording equipment. By emphasizing the fragility, the malleability, of the vinyl, he celebrates the illusions at the heart of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the movie that the song made famous (and vice versa). His is the lightest of touches, barely skimming the surface of the original, just reworking it at times, nudging it — less a remix than a massage.
Remember, only eight hours to go for this, the latest in Ninja’s weekly celebratory free giveaways. By breakfast (at least here in San Francisco), it’ll be gone. More information at kidkoala.com, including news of recording he’s done for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the film version of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series.
MP3 Discussion Group: Oval’s ‘Oh’
The Disquiet.com “MP3 Discussion Group” returns with its first full-length-recording consideration since last December, when the subject was the Monolake record Silence (see: disquiet.com). The latest object of our collective, occasionally obsessive, close listening is the forthcoming EP Oh by Oval, aka Markus Popp, who is making a return to commercial recording for the first time in almost a decade (not counting one record as part of the duo So). Popp/Oval is synonymous with so-called “glitch” music, in which the errors inherent in digital technology become part of the composition process. Oh marks a new direction for Oval, with its inclusion of recognizable instrumentation. The EP will be released later this month, on June 15, by the label Thrill Jockey.
Participating with me in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are:
Colin Buttimer: “I publish Hard Format, a website dedicated to the sublime in music design. My writing archive and photography is at eleventhvolume.com.”
Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”
Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”
Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.”
The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section, below.
A little note on the MP3 Discussion Group format: This is by no means a closed conversation, so do feel free to join in. The initial posts by participants were all written before they had an opportunity to see each other’s take on the EP in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.
More on Oval’s EP Oh at the website of its releasing label, thrilljockey.com.
Top 10 Posts & Searches from May 2010
Two of the 10 most popular posts on this site during the month of may relate to Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album (cover shown at left), the recent free album download I compiled. 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 is (1) the album itself and (2) the announcement of a 10th, additional track to the set, as well as news of coverage.
The majority of the most popular posts this past month were drawn from the site’s week-daily free (and legal) download recommendations, the Downstream department: (3) a Grassy Knoll demo circa 1998, (4) one minute of instrumental hip-hop bliss, (5) a sample track off the Oval album O (due out later this year, to follow up the album Oh), (6) a slice of Bruce Kaphan pedal-steel atmospherics, (7) a sample of the collaboration by experimental electronic duo Matmos and percussion quartet So Percussion (plus guests), (8) electronica lullabies from Athens-based Naono (that’s Greece, not Georgia), and (9) news (and free WAV files) of a Peter Gabriel / “Games without Frontiers” remix contest.
And, finally, (10) a brief bit on the return of the patch cord, which is cementing its role as a visual metaphor in software-based instruments — such as this screenshot from the iPhone/Touch app Circuit Synth by Michael Daines:
The most popular post of both the last 60 and 90 days was the Despite the Downturn: An Answer Album link noted above. The second most popular post of the last 60 and 90 days was the initial response I wrote to the McArdle article, “What, After All, Is the ‘Music Industry’?”
The top 9 search terms on this site for the month of May were: “rss,” “performances,” “oval” (as in Oval, see above), “drone,” “oversteps” (as in the album by Autechre), “autechre” (as in the duo that just released Oversteps), “loops,” “topic,” and “mcardle” (as in Atlantic writer and editor Megan McArdle, as noted above). Tenth place had so many words tied, it’s just silly to list them all.