Cello-Tronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Oo-ray project of musician Ted Laderas is an ongoing exploration of the intrinsic properties of the amplified and electronically processed cello. He has been regularly posting freely downloadable recordings, at both his 15people.net site and, more recently, at his soundcloud.com/ooray space, that display the digitally enhanced cello in a variety of settings and combinations. The result often seems at once epic and modest, sweeping and introspective. Those are not contradictory impulses. The modesty results from the solo activity — in the end, for all the layers of looped playing, for all the reverberance enacted by technological assistance, it is one person on his distinctly singular instrument (of the standard quartet line-up, the cello is the one most generally relegated to a collaborative or supportive role).

Take the recent “Cnia – TOTW 12-21-09,” which opens with familiar, gentle sawing before unfolding into a hall-of-mirrors of (presumably improvised) multi-part arrangement and billowing echoes:

Click the down-arrow to download. Visit the track directly at soundcloud.com/ooray. (Full disclosure: I wrote liner notes for Laderas’s album One Bow to Infinity.)

Benoît Pioulard Live at Decibel Festival (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The podcast of Percussion Lab has been regularly posting live sets by prominent and up’n’coming musicians. The most recent is an hour-long performance by Benoît Pioulard, of the Kranky label, recorded at the 2009 Decibel Festival, held annually in Seattle, Washington.

The post lists the source material as “Harmonium drones, distant vocals, guitar loops and dictaphone recordings,” and the resulting music indeed starts off as a thick drone. But soon enough, the drone is not enough; melody appears, a snake of a tune, running through the drone, sunken deep inside — it’s like some lone guitar being played in the center of a stadium filled with sonic jelly (MP3).

The set is a wide-ranging one. There are even extended period of folky singing that suggest the Waterboys at their most sedate. It’s the earthy quality, the flavor, of Pioulard’s singing that makes it fit in perfectly well with the more amorphous, almost song-less droning.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.percussionlab.com/audio/mp3s/639/01_Live_from_Decibel_Festival.mp3|titles=”Live from Decibel Festival (2009)”|artists=Benoît Pioulard]

Original post at percussionlab.com (from which the above photo is borrowed). More on Pioulard at pioulard.com.

Bone Machine Music from D’incise (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sounds on D’incise‘s Cendre et Poudre are as precise and brittle as his explanatory note is poetic and image-laden. The record sounds like a version of that hardscrabble aesthetic once described as “bone machine” music by Tom Waits. It’s all rusty metal and clanging springs and bouncing objects and other slowly shuffled ephemera, all fixed in a soundfield against a backdrop of noise, the noise of the lightly brushed surface of a microphone. But in the English translation of D’incise, Cendre et Poudre (or Ash and Powder) is also all the bittersweet aura of the past:

a still inhabited space meticulous archaeology,
on half-earased pages remained open books,
that others meant and nobody knew how to don’t tell,
silky mineral prints,
time put in flesh and bones,
notes without stave and rhythms without fasteners,
to the powder indifferent breath,
to the ash return cycle.

Among the highlights is the opening track, “Achever la Page à Tourner” (roughly “Complete Page to Turn”) (MP3). Throughout there is the sense of digital processing, but it is no more in the foreground than that surface noise; it’s merely the equivalent of a digital breeze rattling D’incise’s chimes.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/Dincise-CendreEtPoudreantisocial028/01-dincise-achever_la_page_a_tourner.mp3|titles=”Achever la Page à Tourner”|artists=D’incise]

More at the releasing netlabel, antisocial.be, and at archive.org, where the audio is housed. More on D’incise, aka Switzerland-based musician Laurent Peter, at dincise.net.

Reactive Flight of the RJDJ Hummingbird (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This past Sunday afternoon, the hummingbirds were swarming in the backyard — beautiful little antic flying machines that they are. From a distance, they resembled large, stoic insects, and the sound they emitted was less than birdlike. I took a moment to note this at twitter.com/disquiet: “Not only are hummingbirds loud, they click like Geiger counters.” And shortly thereafter, two replies in quick succession arrived from twitter.com/qdot:

qDot @disquiet I actually managed to get a very nice recording of hummingbirds by duct-taping my iphone to a feeder, heh: http://is.gd/5vn4z #

qDot @disquiet And it came out in @rjdj sounding like http://www.rjdj.me/user/qdot/recording/23198/ #

This qDot is computer engineer, musician, and experimenter Kyle Machulis, who was writing to report on one of his experiments. As the annotation to his YouTube video explains,

“Duct-taped my iPhone to a hummingbird feeder, since they’re fairly shy and wouldn’t come close while I was hanging around by the feeders. War insues.”

Machulis had used his iPhone to record the sounds and sights (screenshot above) of the hummingbirds. But that was not enough. He then fed the audio through RJDJ, a popular application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that serves as a programming environment for the creation of all manner of audio-games and sound-toys. One such toy is Eargasm (see rjdj.me), which its creator, Damian Stewart, likens to science fiction (“Smooth harmonic voices right out of the Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy”) but that might also bring to mind the vocal processing in a song by Underworld. Eargasm takes sound and flings it back in a swirl of hazy, short loops that speed up as they get quieter, all atop its own inherent sound bed of ambient-pop tones — a process that is quite effective with those hummingbirds, their chatter-like clicks providing some grit to the soft background music (MP3):

[audio:http://www.rjdj.me/recording/download/recording-23198.mp3|titles=”Stuck to the hummingbird feeder”|artists=qDot]

Original RJDJ entry at rjdj.me/user/qdot. Video at youtube.com. More on qDot at nonpolynomial.com.

Industrial Portland Ambience (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The truth is in the tags. Want to begin to get your brain around the delicate, half-real, half-synthesized sonic gem that Marcus Fischer uploaded recently, then look at how he labeled it: “industrial north portland, iphone built in mic, xylophone.”

Those three tags don’t do justice to the elegance of the track, but categorization is about orientation not interpretation. The soundscape of Portland, the lo-fi quality of the iPhone microphone, and the childlike percussive-melodic mode of the xylophone conspire in Fischer’s digital soundwork to create a gentle stroll of a piece, in which field recording and sound design result in something richly solitary and nostalgic.

The three-minute track, posted with the heading “Building to Building” (MP3), is given a little more information. Writes Fischer in a brief note at unrecnow.com/dust:

“you can hear the rain pooling near the gutters and the the neighbors moving 55 gallon drums in and out of trucks. all the rest of sounds come from my suzuki tone bells.”

[audio:http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/12_18_09m.mp3|titles=”Building to Building”|artists=Marcus Fischer]

Fischer uploads new things each day to his Dust Breeding site, unrecnow.com/dust — sometimes a snapshot, sometimes a drawing, often as not an experimental bit of audio, such as this one. The Dust Breeding site’s subtitle is “making a thing a day (maybe more) for a year.” Here’s to hoping that daily, even weekly, delights continue in 2010.