- "What happens when artists take control of television": 1969 broadcast w/ Nam June Paik, James Seawright, Allan Kaprow. http://is.gd/7OBBL #
- Good news for fans of Audio Palette app, a looper from Venn Diagram School of Music. Now allows user-generated samples: http://is.gd/7OulM #
- I wish "Favoritings" were clickable in @SoundCloud so you could see who else enjoys a given track, and then see what else they enjoy. #
- NYT: "symphony of violence w/ no adagio"; "hip-hop suite precisely calibrated w/…agitated cinematography" I'm seeing From Paris w/ Love #
- It might be necessary at some point to have tab-by-tab mute options in web browsers. #
- Is this new Android phone, the Devour, the first to include Bluetooth HID support? http://is.gd/7GUt3 #
- The TV show Damages doesn't have a score so much as its sonic effects punctuate transitions and undergird scenes. It's splendid. #
- Great site dedicated to late Peter Schmidt, co-creator w/ Brian Eno of Oblique Strategies, turns 3 today: peterschmidtweb.blogspot.com #
- RIP, Jane Jarvis (b. 1915), Muzak programmer & background-music player of stadium proportions, as New York Mets organist: http://is.gd/7nyur #
Penultimate Avant-Hop Track from WHY?Arcka (MP3)
Philly-based avant-hop producer WHY?Arcka hit the penultimate this week: the 25th entry in his Exhibits A-Z series of tightly wound, conceptually circumscribed, left-field funky remixes. Each cut takes small slivers of existing songs and refashions them into sonic trinkets. The samples he selects are too purposefully limited to be radio-friendly, and too broad to fit into the abstract world of granular synthesis. WHY?Arcka (born Shawn Kelly) has, in the process of cutting up other people’s music, also fashioned his own special place in the world of sonic appropriation.
In the case of “Exhibit Y: Jones’ Wars: Episodes 1”‹-”‹3,” the source material appears to be rooted in the Billy Paul r&b classic “Me and Mrs. Jones,” though Kelly never fully exposes his tools. What he does, however, is stretch vowels until their internal waveforms become new melodies, crisscross string sections until they take on slasher-film intensity, and knit new beats from micro-filaments of the original.
Get the full set at arckatron.bandcamp.com. The final track in the series, “Exhibit Z,” should be out shortly.
SoundCloud-Hosted Installation Audio (MP3)
Maybe the equation is this simple: SoundCloud.com = Twitter.com + BandCamp.com. But such cursory Web 2.0 mathematics doesn’t do justice to the resulting combination.
Thanks to a clean and smoothly functioning mix of friend-collecting, list-making, track-favoriting, and general music-uploading (and -downloading, including the ability to charge/pay for tracks), not to mention -listening, the SoundCloud music community has rapidly become a highly active international hub, especially when it comes to electronic music. One thing the Internet has yet to perfect is music collaboration, and given its clean engineering and emphasis on communal activity, if any site is going to become the Google Docs of music (especially in terms of share docs), it might very well be SoundCloud. And perhaps SoundCloud will expand further still, moving beyond its spartan focus and embrace video in addition to audio.
Then, musicians like Michel Banabila will have a field day. That transition came to mind while listening to “Harbour set (excerpt),” Banabila’s nine-minute trip through an evocative industrial sonic environment. The track moves expertly from a hazy atmospheric opening through a head-nodding, pneumatic-drills-on-pause middle, to an extended fade, but as it turns out, the audio is just part of the overall scenario.
Banabila’s piece is the audio to a collaboration with video artist Geert Mul — with visuals, such as the one below, available at a flickr.com, a site from which SoundCloud.com clearly drew information-architecture inspiration.
More details on the track at soundcloud.com/michel-banabila. Video of live performance at youtube.com. More on Banabila at banabila.com.
Truly Minimal Techno from Switzerland (MP3)
Minimal techno isn’t as minimal as it once was, or as the name might suggest — or as it thinks it is. Popularity and populist impulses can lead to creeping complexity, density, and, God forbid, flamboyance. Tracks of self-described minimal techno can come thick with flourishes, weighed down by chimes, and keyboard tones, and a grab bag of “look-at-me” (or at least “listen-to-me”) elements that fail to evidence compositional, let alone atmospheric, restraint. And then along comes a track like “Selun,” the one that opens Alessandro Crimi‘s recent EP, Changements, on the Broque netlabel (MP3). With a beat that pulses like a bald tire, stereoscopic claps that sound like they were sampled from a subdued fly, and a bass line that couldn’t wake a baby, the piece is the perfect accompaniment to a midnight drive — or a good book. And at a healthy eight minutes, it’s long enough to get lost in.
[audio:http://web0.pv220.ncsrv.de/music/brq59_alessandro_crimi_-_changements_e_p/brq59_alessandro_crimi_-_changements_e_p_-_01_selun.mp3|titles=”Selun”|artists=Alessandro Crimi]
Give the full release a listen at broque.de. More on Switzerland-based Crimi at myspace.com/alessandrocrimi.
oVdk & Bunk Data: Discourse of the Other (MP3s)
Dread is rarely as efficient, as sacrosanct, and as suggestive as it is on Discourse of the Other, a collaborative seven-cut album by oVdk and Bunk Data. The record is a sequence of stark gray audio, tracks of manipulated voices (along with other sonic material) that strain to be comprehended. In “Feel Thier Präcoxgefuhl,” the constricted neigh of a horse is more understandable than anything uttered by the muffled minions heard throughout; the hushed voices sound like rough, chaotic crowds — bringing to mind the rushing mall-like prisons of THX-1138, or the nightmarish totalitarian society of 1984 (MP3). By contrast, “Flight of the Yameil Jyuravli” has a serenity to it, but it’s a serenity whose prevailing mode is that of resoluteness — it’s the serene in stark contrast to the prevailing world; the tones are attenuated, the feeling that of ritual atonement, but it’s shot through with tension and a feeling of foreboding (MP3).
[audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw066/dw066-oVdk%26Bunk_Data-02-Feel_thier_Pr%e4coxgefuhl.mp3|titles=”Feel Thier Präcoxgefuhl”|artists=oVdk & Bunk Data]
[audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw066/dw066-oVdk%26Bunk_Data-05-Flight_of_the_Yameil_Jyuravli.mp3.mp3|titles=”Flight of the Yameil Jyuravli”|artists=oVdk & Bunk Data]
Those are just two of the album’s seven tracks. Full release at darkwinter.com. More on oVdk at usyugana.hp.infoseek.co.jp, and on Bunk Data at bunkdata.com.