- 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. #
Kazuo Umezu’s Chiptune Horrorshow (MP3s)
The world of video-game music is just that, a whole realm unto itself, with its own rules, its own obsessions, its own stars, it’s own logic. Judging by the sheer density of video-game-music sites, there is a large group of people much of whose listening time is spent on pixelated tunes that, by tone and intent, might just as well have been recorded in the early 1980s. But where there is healthy obsession there is absurdity, and there is humor. And all that insular hyperactivity isn’t uniquely characteristic of chiptunes, as the 8bit-music world is called. It describes numerous rich subcultures, notably the world of manga and anime.
Thus it’s no surprise, except in terms of delight, that something along the lines of the The Drifting Classroom: The Game: The Soundtrack should exist. The album is a parody of a parody, or a tribute to a parody, or a parody of tributes, or something like that. What it is is an album of 8bit video-game music, purported to be sourced from an old Famicon video-game, based on the manga Drifting Classroom by Japanese horror legend (and a personal favorite of mine) Kazuo Umezu. Except there is not such Famicon video-game. What there is is a thoroughly imagined suite of shortz esrzatz video-game music, built around the theme of Umezu-sensei’s series, in which an entire school goes missing, leaving a gaping hole where it once stood. The titles of the tracks (“Mutant Mushrooms,” “Killer Cult”) are drawn from scenarios in the story, and the music is fully envisioned: rapid themes for fight sequences, minor-key horror-film cues elsewhere. There are 14 tracks in all. One favorite is “Stage 5 ”“ Underground,” a spooky, downtempo piece (MP3).
[audio:http://www.beepcity.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/10-Stage-5-Underground.mp3|titles=”Stage 5 ”“ Underground”|artists=Moldilox]
The collection is credited to Moldilox, aka Joseph Luster. Full release at beepcity.com. More at thejosephlusterreport.blogspot.com, including a photo of Umezu-sensei himself holding a CD of the ersatz soundtrack. Lots more Moldilox music at his page at 8bitcollective.com.
Sonic Tours of Artisanal Production
From “audible drawing” to “audible printing.” Just yesterday (disquiet.com), the Disquiet.com Downstream focused its headphones on an ongoing experiment by musician Werner Pfarr, which involved paying close attention to the sound of a drawing in process. Today’s Downstream recommended listening is by Ken Montgomery, and it is a field recording of, among other things, a printer in Brooklyn. The rough noise of printing is one of two artisanal production processes in Montgomery’s recording, along with a “sonic tour” of a ceramics department at an art school in Cincinnati (MP3).
[audio:http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/touchradio/Radio46/TouchRadio46.mp3|titles=”1f Noise Smoothing Out The Press”|artists=Ken Montgomery]
The latest in the Touch Radio series of podcasts. More at touchmusic.org.uk.
First Gristleism Mix? (MP3)
What is the sound of one hand drawing? That’s something Werner Pfarr, a German living in the South of France, regularly sets out to determine.
Barely a week or so on the market, and the first — to my knowledge — Gristleism mix is up on the web. Gristleism is an inexpensive sound gadget that’s the result of a collaboration between the legendary band Throbbing Gristle and Christiaan Virant, of the duo FM3, on whose Buddha Machine it is modeled. It is a small plastic box, the front of which is simply a speaker. It contains 13 loops, all segments of industrial drones from the dank Gristle archives, and includes rudimentary controls to alter the volume and speed of a given loop.
The mix in question is a two-minute experiment by Pfarr (MP3), and it was posted at archive.org. (It’s an excerpt of a piece that Pfarr estimates at being half an hour in length.) There’s additional information on the project, titled “Audible Drawing 10,” at Pfarr’s website, wernerpfarr.blogspot.com.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/AudibleDrawing10/AudibleDrawing10.mp3|titles=”Audible Drawing 10″|artists=Werner Pfarr]
“Audible drawing” is just that: the sound of the pencil on paper, as well as whatever sounds might be in the background. In the case of Pfarr’s very first audible drawing, that meant a field recording of the natural environment in which he drew. For the Gristleism audible, it’s the purposeful addition of the grungy gurgle of a loop from the gadget, whose shadow he roughly sketches on Bristol board, as shown in the before (photo) and after (drawing) images here:
The loop Pfarr used is the very first one on the Gristleism box, “Persuasion.” The recording is titled “Audible Drawing 10” because it is his 10th such experiment.
Trip in Fluorescent Bulb (MP3)
Last week was a full-on SoundCloud.com celebration. All five of the daily Downstream entries were sourced from SoundCloud, a fantastic service for sharing, discovering, and discussing music, and the subject of the week’s “MP3 Discussion Group,” Alphabet 1968 by Black to Comm, was likewise available for free listening via SoundCloud (albeit streaming, not download, it being a commercial release). Here’s another recent SoundCloud discovery, a hovering drone credited to EdP of Portugal:
The track is a rich, warm drone, but for all its frothy effluence, it has an interior momentum that’s anything but somnolent. If the intention is a “trip in a fluorescent bulb,” as its instructional title suggests, the point of view is not that of a third-party perspective, but of a moth transfixed by the beacon. More info at soundcloud.com/edp. You can download the track using the little down-arrow in the above interface. More on EdP at doporto.pt.to.