MP3 Discussion Group: Monolake’s ‘Silence’

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Every week or so, the MP3 Discussion Group gets together online to talk about a recent release. Monolake‘s new album, Silence, is the latest object of our collective, occasionally obsessive, close listening. The album’s 10 tracks are a resolutely percussive minimal techno from an individual with a unique vantage on the tools that generate his sounds. Monolake, aka Robert Henke, works on the development of Ableton Live, a popular music software suite. As a form of “production notes,” Henke included the following paragraph on his website, monolake.de, where brief snippets of the album’s tracks are all available for listening:

“Sound sources include field recordings of airport announcements, hammering on metal plates at the former Kabelwerk Oberspree, Berlin, several sounds captured inside the large radio antenna dome at Teufelsberg, Berlin, dripping water at the Botanical Garden Florence, air condition systems and turbines in Las Vegas, Frankfurt and Tokyo, walking on rocks in Joshua Tree National Park, wind from the Grand Canyon, a friends answering machine, a printer, conversations via mobile phones, typing on an old Macintosh keyboard and recordings from tunnel works in Switzerland. Synthetic sounds created with the software instruments Operator, Tension, Analog and the build in effects inside Ableton Live. Additional sound design and sequencing using MAXMSP / MaxForLive. Additional reverb: various impulse repsonses via Altiverb. Composed, edited and mixed in Live with a pair of Genelec 8040s. Mastering by Rashad Becker at Audioanwendungen September 2009. Field recordings captured with a Sony PCM D-50.”

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.

A little note on 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 album in question, but after that it’s intended to play out in real time.

A Little Norwegian Black-Ice Music (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The rumbling might be mistaken for boiling water, were the overall crunch not clearly indicative of some ice-cold thing being broken, likely ice itself. The slow-paced beat, a kind of ritual rattle, serves as a score to a blank-screen movie about walking in the dark, in the cold, all alone. It’s a single, 45-minute piece (MP3) by Terje Paulsen, recently released on the Tecno Nucleo netlabel. Paulsen, who’s based in Norway, explains that he recorded it as a mix of processed field recordings, and “an old three-stringed folk instrument.” The field recordings are processed such that, as the piece goes on, they become ghosts of the original source material — more texture than sound, and as a result, the “musical” content, that scraping beat and distant held chords, come more and more into prominence — much as night slowly consumes a space, only to reveal new details. Paulsen describes the circumstances of the piece, which is titled “The Abundant Emptiness Between Cold and Heat,” as follows:

“It’s a midwinter day. It’s freezing cold, and the snow and ice is creaking and groaning when walking on it. When opening the door to the living room, the heat hits me from the wood-burning stove. I want to freeze this very moment, this ’emptiness’, and want it to last for long. Because I like it here – just be[t]ween the cold and the heat; I find it very abundant…”

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/tn019/terje_paulsen__the_abundant_emptiness_between_cold_and_heat_vbr.mp3|titles=”The Abundant Emptiness Between Cold and Heat”|artists=Terje Paulsen]

More details at tecnonucleo.org. Get it in the FLAC and OGG formats at archive.org. More on Paulsen at myspace.com/terjepaulsen and google.com/site/terjepaul.

Images of the Week: Sound Art via Flickr

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

For all the utility of flickr.com, the image-sharing community, it seems far too frequent that images are posted there with all rights reserved. The sound-art tag is a great way to track experiments with audio, and when I come across an image of special resonance on Flickr, I usually go through the process of contacting the poster of the image, obtaining consent to post the image, and only then doing so. Sometimes this correspondence can take weeks. The past week was a particularly rich one for the sound-art tag, and so here are a few (blind, as it were) links to the images:

BoyWithAProblem (aka Tristan Louth-Robins) posted images of a project involving modified condenser microphone: flickr.com.

Troutfactory (aka Trane DeVore) posted a shot of a sound sculpture outside the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; identification of it would be appreciated, if anyone knows who created the sculpture: flickr.com.

And pôlo (aka Paulo Henrique Gallian) posted a likewise not-fully-annotated image of what appears to be an indoor sound-art installation employing multiple sound emitters in São Paulo, Brazil: flickr.com.

My occasionally updated space is at flickr.com/photos/disquietpxl.

Quotes of the Week: Brian Eno’s Lovely Bones Score

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Lovely Bones marks not only director Peter Jackson’s return (to semi-realistic film-making, following his Lord of the Rings blockbusters) but also that of musician Brian Eno. Lovely Bones is the first feature film since 2005’s The Jacket with a full, original Eno score. Here’s a survey of how various film critics reacted to it:

A.O. Scott at nytimes.com, on the film’s more fantasy-laden sequences:

“It’s a mid-’70s art-rock album cover brought to life (and complemented by a score composed by the ’70s art-rock fixture Brian Eno), and while its trippy vistas are sometimes ravishing, they are also distracting. ‘Heaven,’ a Talking Heads song once pointed out, is ‘a place where nothing ever happens.’”

David Denby at newyorker.com:

“Heaven is notoriously harder to make interesting than Hell, but Jackson has outdone other artists in cotton candy—there are luscious hills and dales, and gleaming lakes and fields of waving grain, and sugarplum fairies with music by Brian Eno rather than by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.”

Todd McCarthy at variety.com:

“Jackson shows his low-budget horror-film roots in the way he shoots the sinister scenes, with silhouetting white lights, heavy fog effects, wide-angle closeups and generic synth backgrounding from Brian Eno’s otherwise effective score.”

All of which said, the majority of reviews at major publications didn’t even seem to note the Eno score, except with the occasional credit-bundle sidebar: washingtonpost.com, latimes.com, villagevoice.com, slate.com, guardian.co.uk, chicagotribune.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • JJ Abrams always sonically coy: last night's episode of Fringe, Bishop expounds on mental illness while Thelonious Monk plays in background. #
  • RIP, Jeff Clyne (b. 1937), bassist with, among other folks, the UK fusion groups Nucleus and Turning Point: http://is.gd/5iYFQ #
  • ♫ Afternoon audiostream: Dominic Dixon's "Year's of Dust": Mellow yet visceral lofi piano, surface noise, & long tones: http://is.gd/5iAyZ #
  • Spent the morning reacquainting myself with Son of Bazerk's 'Bazerk Bazerk Bazerk' (1991). I'd visit an alt-universe where they broke big. #
  • Thursday morning sounds: frost on the ground = very few birds. Rough wind, plane overhead, hard drives. #
  • First mix that involving the Gristleism gadget that I've come upon — Source: http://is.gd/5gV8g Thoughts: http://is.gd/5gV7s #
  • RIP, arranger and conductor Torrie Zito (b. 1933), who wrote the string orchestrations for John Lennon's Imagine album: http://is.gd/5gq8q #
  • ♫ Afternoon audiostream: 3 dark industrial drones at the http://soundcloud.com/seek2track0 page of (UK) Birmingham's Steve Kavanagh. #
  • The early netlabel Monotonik is on hiatus, maybe forever, after 13 years of operation, per founder @simoncarless: http://bit.ly/6je2Dx #
  • Unnerving to see flames in public and not hear sirens. VW van on fire near San Francisco Zoo. #
  • RIP, Jack Rose (b. 1971) of drone-folk band Pelt, via @pitchforkmedia — http://bit.ly/5gO70U #
  • There's a special satisfaction to being first to add new restaurant listings to yelp.com. Just did two today. Crowd-sourcing at its best. #
  • After a steady diet of ambient and drone music, all it took was one 8bit chiptune album on repeat to totally send my heartrate skyward. #