- Tonight at Mills: music by Nick Didkovsky, Krys Bobrowsky, and (back from Antarctica) Cheryl E. Leonard. Looking forward. http://is.gd/4cezQ #
- Freeware I love: Firefox, Mozilla, Pidgin, Input Director, Quintessential, Songbird, Dropbox, Volumouse, Dark Room, AVG, GIMP, Evernote #
- Make that RIP, Robert Kirby (b. 1948). (What I get for Twittering while waking.) Excellent Guardian obit by Colin Irwin: http://is.gd/47BzN #
- RIP, Roger Kirby (b. 1948), Nick Drake's arranger (and that of many others, including Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello). #
- Hadn't noticed this: Gristleism box won't have audio out or DC socket; "hacks" page will post how-to's: http://is.gd/46Tkb #
- Afternoon sounds — and for much of the weekend: the ear-shattering, nerves-ratting, "Get Your War On" fly-by whoooooosh of the Blue Angels. #
- Hey, the Eno/Chilvers music app Bloom has upgraded to v. 2.0 — new operation modes, new moods, new sounds. And … "humanised tuning"? #
- RIP, Suzanne Fiol (at 49), founder of the New York City arts space Issue Project Room: http://is.gd/44ZE3 #
- New "MP3 Discussion Group" on Vertical Ascent, the new Moritz von Oswald Trio album of techno-less techno: http://is.gd/41k3k #
- My Android phone updated to OS 1.6. Still no support for USB (preferred) or Bluetooth external keyboard. … Whom do I need to bribe? #
- Afternoon sounds, in court for jury duty: no audible wheels of justice, but an imposing HVAC system whose undercurrent whispers, The System. #
- Setting up home wifi shouldn't take three hours and three overseas calls. Do AT&T & Belkin willfully make things difficult for each other? #
- Amazing how many basic tasks Songbird does better than iTunes, especially for file import, speed, & album art. Still, no record-label field? #
- Call for assistance: Anyone out there have old issues of epulse, the email zine I founded in 1994 and edited on and off through 2004? #
- Safely at home, listening to the world outside blow around like something out of The Wizard of Oz. Cozy. #
- Fave producer-songwriter: Pharrell? Kanye? Missy? Nah, it's Nick Lowe, live four blocks from my house at this very moment. #
Russian Electronica from Sergey “Slow” Suokas
Sergey Suokas (aka Slow) is a Russian musician with a penchant for placid surfaces and anxious undercurrents. His still compositions may or may not run deep, but what’s active just below the surface taunts and attracts undeniably. His new, six-track album Dual Box on the Resting Bell label includes quickly vibrating shoegazer minimalism set above a richly throbbing bass and interspersed with backward-masked motives (“Dreaming,” MP3), and prayer-bowl meditations layered above whispy figments of anxious noise (“Chinatown,” MP3), among other things.
[audio:http://raw.media.sonicsquirrel.net/restingbell/rb071/03-dreaming.mp3|titles=”Dreaming”|artists=Slow]
[audio:http://raw.media.sonicsquirrel.net/restingbell/rb071/01-chinatown.mp3|titles=”Chinatown”|artists=Slow]
More details at restingbell.net.
Nanoscale Chamber Music by Gavin John Sheehan (MP3)
The drone that is Gavin John Sheehan‘s Shell of the Curved Centennial begins like nothing so much as the sound of a speaker attached to a stereo system that is not fully grounded. There is that low level buzz, less like a headache than a stray but insistent thought. It’s the electrical-audio equivalent of a breeze or, depending on one’s mood, a smell. What follows that opening drone, which quickly rises in volume, can be heard as a variety of things — as a down-the-rabbit-hole voyage into its dense drone-ness, or as a carefully delineated composition that explores the initial drone’s pulse and tone. One needn’t make an immediate decision — just listen as secondary and tertiary sounds make their appearance, slowly shaping the initial drone into an organ-like musical instrument. Pulses become beats, layers suggest harmonies, and gentle beading turns into an internal variety akin to some nanoscale chamber ensemble (MP3).
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/pan040/pan040-gavin_john_sheehan-shell_of_the_curved_centennial.mp3|titles=”Shell of the Curved Centennial”|artists=Gavin John Sheehan]
More details at the releasing netlabel, notype.com.
Century-Spanning Ambient Mix MP3 (by Ronen Givony)
If great mixtapes often express inspiration through contrast, then the centuries-spanning The Varieties of Ambient Experience, compiled by Ronen Givony, is truly something. Opening with a particularly introspective reading of one of J.S. Bach‘s Goldberg Variations, it moves back to the future and forth to the reconsidered past, from recent glitchy-ambient pieces by the likes of Boards of Canada and Loscil, to early works that serve, in this context, as precognitive glimpses of the importance, often hundreds of years in advance, that near-silence and a meditative pace would (eventually) play in music (MP3).
Thus laptop-wielders such as Tim Hecker and Stephan Mathieu (the latter collaborating with Ekkehard Ehlers) are heard interspersed with half-century-old Johannes Ockeghem (by Huelgas Ensemble) and Christopher Tye (by Kronos). The classical components of most recent vintage provide a kind of pivot — these include a 99-year-old piano piece by Claude Debussy and, even more literally, the 40-year-old Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars in a 2003 remix by Aphex Twin. Also heard: Grouper, Broadcast, Múm, and others.
[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/media.percussionlab.com/audio/mp3s/355/The_Varieties_of_Ambient_Experience__or__Music_for_Staying_in_Bed__-_A_Wordless_Music_Mix.mp3|titles=”The Varieties of Ambient Experience”|artists=Mix by Ronen Givony]
Givony is the founder of the excellent Wordless Music concert series in Manhattan. Get full details on the mix at percussionlab.com.
MP3 Discussion Group: Moritz von Oswald Trio’s ‘Vertical Ascent’
For the next few days, several fellow ardent listeners will join me here for the latest edition of Disquiet.com’s “MP3 Discussion Group.” We’ll be discussing the recent album by the Moritz von Oswald Trio, Vertical Ascent (Honest Jons). The trio is von Oswald, plus Max Loderbauer, and Sasu Ripatti. (Ripatti’s album Tummaa, recorded under the name Vladislav Delay, was the subject of last week’s “MP3 Discussion Group here.) Give a listen to the Vertical Ascent album via streams available at the website of its record label, honestjons.com. The week’s discussion will occur in the comments section below, and participation is, certainly, open to anyone who would like to join in. Thanks to the folk who have agreed to participate:
Colin Buttimer: I’ve contributed to Jazzwise, e/i, Signal to Noise, The Wire, Absorb, and themilkfactory.co.uk, and I currently write reviews for BBC Online. I’m responsible for Hard Format, a website dedicated to the sublime in music design. My listening habits since 2004 can be checked out here and everything else is at www.eleventhvolume.com.
Julian Lewis: I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog with the accommodating mandate of covering “less obvious music.”In practice, this tends to mean most points along the electronica spectrum from drone to post-dubstep, and should probably include more jazz.
Alan Lockett: I’m a dabbler in electronic music reviews and commentary. Used to be a contributor to e/i magazine before it folded, but these days my writing is up on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org. Main interests currently lie in the ambient/drone area, but I also like to rummage around in the bins of the more adventurous quarters of techno/house and post-dub, picking up the odd scrap of IDM. I’m based in Bristol, in the Wild Wild South-West of England, which I like to think is a useful vantage point, being a breeding ground for stylistic currents that have impacted variously in recent decades on the electronic music landscape.
Joshua Maremont: I am a player of guitars, oscillators, and computers, based in San Francisco. My musical adventures on record have been with M-1 Alternative, Freezer, and ATOI, while I reserve the names Dazzle Painting and Thermal for my solitary sonic ruminations and keep Boxman Studies as my little label for noises without other homes. My listening obsessions wobble toward everything from mellotron prog and old metal to organic drones and installation music, from cold wave and minimal synth to shoegazing pop and head-nodding ambient dub, and I have written about a sliver of these in e/i magazine and elsewhere, as well as occasionally slipping them into DJ sets before anyone can stop me. I go to record stores by bicycle and only use headphones at home.
Michael Ross: I use a career as a music journalist to support my other career as a musician and producer. As the former, I write for Guitar Player, EQ, Sound on Sound, and puremusic.com, among others. As the latter, when not playing funk, country, and blues, I compose and perform guitar/laptop electronica under the moniker prehab.