Top 10 Posts & Searches from March 2010

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Seven of the top-10-most read entries of the past month were from the Downstream department, collecting legally free downloads of recommended music. These included (1) broken folk music by Scott Tuma (cover art pictured here), (2) remixed African recordings by Madlib, (3) a brief excursion into atmospherics by King Crimson, (4) slowed-down pygmy recordings by Alan Morse Davies, (5) ambient procedural music by Mark Harris, (6) nostalgic Hungarian techno from tOOk, and (7) perhaps my favorite Downstream entry of the month, a melding of jazz-like performance and hip-hop by Spinach Prince.

Also making the top 10 were entries on (8) a cassette tape re-purposed by Marc Fischer as a tape loop (no doubt due to welcome coverage over at murketing.com), (9) one of the site’s weekly twitter.com/disquiet roundups (perhaps because of a mention of the Shutter Island soundtrack?), and (10) an excerpt from Kyle Gann‘s recent book on John Cage‘s 4’33”.

The most popular post of the last 60 days was the Mark Harris piece mentioned above.

The most popular post of the last 90 days was an MP3 of sound art produced from recordings made at an Indian call center.

The most searched-for words of the last 30 days were, in declining order: performances, laptop, ito, vinyl, arty, rss, dgmlive, no country for old men, npr, seeming, souns, and topic (the last handful were tied, which is why this list has more than 10 entries).

Quick McLuhanian Guide for Transmigration (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Quick McLuhanian Guide for Transmigration by
Leonardo Martins is not a Cliffs Notes guide to the media-technology clairvoyant. It’s an album of eight blippy bits (or bit-y blips) of retro-simple computer music, one tantalizingly brief at 39 seconds, the others extended forays into bare percussion, sinewy synth lines, and pattern extrapolations that sound like entry-level calculus made visual. The Guide‘s highlight may be “Tathagata Trouble Dance,” at 3:13 the collection’s second shortest piece — it’s a mix of martial percussion and an ever so pixelated single-note, keyboard-like lead line.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/pf019/TATHAGATA-TROUBLE-DANCE.mp3|titles=”Tathagata Trouble Dance”|artists=Leonardo Martins]

Get the full release at archive.org. And at the website of the releasing netlabel, pandafuzz.com, where it is the label’s 19th release.

Skittery Soundscape MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cole Pierce refers to his track “Too Late Distracted” as a “textured electronic soundscape exploring a structure in flux,” and he goes a step further by employing the word “skittery” to qualify the effort.

The work in question is reportedly derived from a collaboration with Tyler Carter, who like Pierce houses his music at the great community site soundcloud.com. Pierce is at soundcloud.com/colepierce, Carter at soundcloud.com/tyler-carter, and the two of them apparently can make beautiful jittery ambience (or skittery soundscapes) together.

Like many solid efforts in abstraction, the piece includes its own decoder ring. While it eventually expands into a spacious if serrated sound field, it opens with the sort of all-rough-edges effect that Pierce’s chosen adjective, “skittery,” suggests. The introduction’s distinction from the majority of the track is plainly evident in the waveform that appears in the SoundCloud player (see above); it’s the short, bottle-brush tail that wags the music’s dog.

That initial segment is all stop’n’start glitch noise, and it sets down the textural equivalent of a downbeat before Pierce ventures into more quasi-ethereal realms. While the work does achieve a certain level of cloudy haze, it’s still marked throughout by the stuttered, broken-glass vibe of its opening salvo.

Original track at soundcloud.com/colepierce. More on Pierce at colepierce.com. He was previously featured on this site in mid-October of last year (disquiet.com).

Fognozzle: Live Noise (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Nine minutes of controlled chaos. That’s Fognozzle‘s “End Game,” a live, nearly nine-minute recording from late last year posted this past week at his bandcamp.fognozzle.net account. If a sound can be harrowing and comforting at the same time, this is it. It’s the sonic aura of urban tension (sirens, wailing voices, radio interference) transformed into a slow symphony of dessication.

<a href="http://bandcamp.fognozzle.net/track/end-game">END GAME by fognozzle</a>

The piece moves from found noises set on short-turnaround repeat, to a raucous feedback solo, before a dénouement of introspective white noise — from routinized to improvised to an ever so patient fade. That transformation is key to Fognozzle’s accomplishment. The divide between the early looped work and the later-on freeform squall isn’t sharply determined. There’s a slow transition, and it’s only in retrospect that you might note that certain riffs have been done away with.

Recorded live during the Godwaffle Noise Pancakes event at the Golden TrapperKeeper Lodge on September 26, 2009. More on Fognozzle (born Pete von Petrin) at fognozzle.net and pete.vonpetrin.com. More performances from the series at woundedsquid.blogspot.com.

Image of the Week: Analog Synthesis in Your Pocket

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

While Disquiet.com is not a gearhound guide, objects developed for music-making, especially those that can be described as gadgets, are not by any means off the site’s beat, especially when they can be seen as democratizing the production of sound. This forthcoming pocket-size analog synth from Korg, dubbed the Monotron, will have a relatively limited audience, even with its almost philanthropic $85 MSRP, but its size speaks to something larger.

It’s no surprise that Korg is making this thing. Analog synths have been seeing a renewed interest, as a generation of musicians raised in a digital bubble have sought out first-hand experience with what preceded software-based composition and performance.

And Korg has shown a unique aptitude for small-sized tools, from its “Nano” line of controllers, to its hand-held Kaoss Pad and Kaossilator — and let’s not forget its licensing of the Korg DS-10, a fully functioning simulation of an analog synth designed for the Nintendo DS gaming platform.

And yet while the Monotron will sit nicely alongside, and interact well with, all of those devices, what it really seems like is a test — if the Monotron does well, perhaps we’ll see even more (and larger) analog synths returning to the market. (This isn’t to suggest that no analog tools are currently being manufactured.) For all the attention that will be paid to software-based synthesis in the coming weeks and months, once the Apple iPad is released, the Monotron hints that a whole other storyline may be brewing.

Found via createdigitalmusic.com. Video at youtube.com. Details at korg.com/monotron.