Disquiet – Page 1258 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

MP3 Discussion Group: Vladislav Delay’s ‘Tummaa’

September 30, 2009October 19, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

For the next few days, several fellow ardent listeners will join me here in discussing the recent album by Vladislav Delay, Tummaa, released last month on the Leaf Records label. Delay is the adopted moniker of Sasu Ripatti, of Finland, who has made not one but several names for himself, also as Luomo and as Uusitalo, and in several ensembles, including the Moritz von Oswald Trio. The Tummaa album mixes abstract elements and found sounds into a dramatic whole. That abstraction can come to distract from its lulling sensibility, and from its rhythmic impulses. But more about that tension in the ensuing discussion.

Thanks to the folk who have agreed to participate:

Colin Buttimer has contributed to Jazzwise, e/i, Signal to Noise, The Wire, Absorb, and Milkfactory, and currently writes reviews for BBC Online. He’s responsible for hardformat.org, a website dedicated to the sublime in music design. His listening habits since 2004 can be checked out last.fm, and everything else is at www.eleventhvolume.com.

Michael Ross uses a career as a music journalist to support his other career as a musician and producer. As the former he writes for Guitar Player, EQ, Sound On Sound, and puremusic.com, among others. As the latter, when not playing funk, country, and blues, he composes and performs guitar/laptop electronica under the monicker prehab.

Alan Lockett is a sometime writer of electronic music reviews/features. Previously a contributor to e/i magazine, recent writings are mainly viewable via igloomag.com and furthernoise.org. His main interests are in ambient, drone, and the more experimental end of techno/house, post-dub, and “IDM.” He is based in Bristol, UK — a useful vantage point in being a breeding ground for stylistic tweaks which have impacted crucially in recent decades.

The track listing for Tummaa is:

1. Melankolia
2. Kuula (Kiitos)
3. Mustelmia
4. Musta Planeetta
5. Toive
6. Tummaa
7. Tunnelivisio

Details on the album at theleaflabel.com and at vladislavdelay.com. Delay’s own site includes a free download of this edited version of the album’s opening track:

[audio:http://www.vladislavdelay.com/site/content/mp3s/vladislav-delay_melankolia-edit.mp3|titles=”Melankolia (Edit)”|artists=Vladislav Delay]

The Beauty of the Tape Cassette

September 29, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

This stunning photo-illustration accompanied a piece by Amos Barshad in the September 20 issue of New York magazine, on the subject of the Brooklyn-based record label Woodist, which is one of a growing number of companies bringing the cassette tape back into circulation:

The photo, by Hannah Whitaker, is just stunning, arguably as great a tribute to the beauty of the cassette tape as is the music on Woodist. The piece brought to mind nothing so much as the hallucinogenic filigree of the late illustrator Al Hirschfeld; truly, my first instinct was to look for his “Ninas” in it. The photo captures the fragility of the tape itself, and the cold solidity of its hard plastic cartridge — and the fin de siÃ¨cle flourishes pun visually on the recording material’s past glory.

Original article, with a larger version of Whitaker’s image, at nymag.com. More of her work at hwhitaker.com.

Funky Conceptual Art from WHY?Arcka (MP3)

September 29, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Philly hip-hop producer WHY?Arcka has uploaded one of his strongest beats yet, the elegant dissection of rhythm and soul that is “Street Walkin’ (Gone).” The track has been entered in as Exhibit G at arckatron.bandcamp.com, his ongoing A-to-Z of abstract instrumental beats, deeply felt crate digging, and all around metric ingenuity.

As is WHY?Arcka’s mode, he takes a small slice of a pre-existing song — nowhere near as nanoscopic as would be an experiment in granular synthesis, but neither is it as reductive as a P. Diddy pop production — and inspects the fragment until it yields something akin to a funky piece of conceptual art.

The track opens with a quick loop, all rhythm and moan, a moan so sublimated it might be mistaken for a nuance to the bass line, which is exactly what it becomes as “Street Walkin’ (Gone)” takes shape. Then comes a smattering of guitar, hinted at before it’s allowed to be heard fully. And then the vocal, a tantalizing snippet of the song’s title. And then the whole thing goes into breakdown mode, even more spare than at the opening, a slim mash of beat and vocal, allowed to go about its own staunch business.

Forgive the play-by-play appreciation, but this review is really just mimicking exactly what WHY?Arcka himself enacts upon the sample at hand: teasing out the encoded beauty.

The excellent bandcamp.com interface provides its own proprietary mode of sharing and providing free download, encapsulated in this tidy widget:

Processed Mexican Jumping Bean MP3

September 28, 2009September 29, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The tones are soothing, but there’s something about the rhythm, something about the way the different elements arrive, how the gentle motion and exotica-ready tune go in and out like a rocker that’s slightly off kilter. This is “Lupita,” a great new song credited to Jumping Beans and .tape. — .tape. (yes, lower case, with bookending periods) being a musician who’s handy with using external triggers to launch sound samples, and the jumping beans being exactly that: three so-called Mexican jumping beans, whose unpredictable action is used by .tape. to initiate the samples (MP3).

The jumping-bean mode seems especially appropriate for this release, since the song in question popped up this past weekend, out of the blue, on the RSS feed of the great netlabel Yo Yo Pang (visitable directly at ambulatore.com/yoyo). The reason for the surprise was that Yo Yo Pang, which specializes in single-song releases, hadn’t made a peep since October of 2008.

[audio:http://www.labisogno.org/pet-o-matic/yoyo07-pom01-jumping_beans_&_.tape.-lupita.mp3|titles=”Lupita”|artists=Jumping Beans and .tape]

Though the song works well on its lonesome, there’s a video of the beans in action at labisogno.org. Screen shot below — that’s the laptop running the receptive software to the left, and the little dish with the Mexican jumping beans to the right:

More details at ambulatore.com/yoyo. More on the human part of the recording group at ambulatore.com/.tape.

Tangents: Eno App, Turntable Art, Consumer Sound …

September 27, 2009August 21, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● On the Making of Brian Eno/Peter Chilvers iPhone/Touch Apps Bloom & Trope (usoproject.blogspot.com): Interview with Peter Chilvers on his development, with Brian Eno, of the iPhone apps Trope and Bloom, and the app Air: “It was something of a two way process,” he says of the development process. “I came up with the effect of circles expanding and disappearing as part of a technology experiment — Brian saw it and stopped me making it more complex! Much of the iPhone development has worked that way — one of us would suggest something and the other would filter it, and this process repeats until we end up with something neither of us imagined.” Story by Matteo Milani. More information at generativemusic.com, according to which a revised Bloom (version 2.0) will be released in early October: “New features include a sleep timer, stereo panning, two additional sounds, three new moods, and two new operation modes. The update will be free to anyone who has already purchased Bloom.”

● The Chimes of New York; and Their Ringers (nytimes.com): “Simple rope pulling it ain’t,” goes coverage of the North American Guild of Change Ringers recent convergence in Manhattan. “Change ringing is a surprisingly difficult and subtle art that involves a series of coordinated hand movements and a sensitive touch. Ringers time their strokes partly by listening, partly by watching the movement of the ropes around them. A sense of timing is essential because of the one-second gap between the pull of the rope and the sound of the bell. The ‘music’ consists of cascades of bell strikes, called rows or pulls.” Why the article’s author, Daniel J. Wakin, or his editor saw it necessary to put quotation marks around the word “music” is unclear, but the enthusiasm of the bell-ringers interviewed in the article is infectious — you come to imagine a religion in which the ringing of bells isn’t ceremonial, but the ceremony itself.

● Kind of Bloop Update; Participant Critiques Time Magazine Coverage (ocremix.org): Musician Sam Ascher-Weiss was quoted in Time 's coverage of the Kind of Bloop compilation, an album that rendered Miles Davis's classic Kind of Blue, on its 50th anniversary, as "chiptune" music — that is, as if it had been programmed for ancient arcade video games. Ascher-Weiss, whose music moniker is Shnabubula, feels that he was quoted out of context about the limitations and potential of this sort of music-making. Original Time piece at time.com. Kind of Bloop available at kindofbloop.com.

● Book Review: Sara Maitland on Silence (nytimes.com): From Dominique Browning‘s review of the new non-fiction book by Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence: “The first kind of silence requires an emptying out of the self in order to be receptive to God; the other fortifies the self in order to be inventively godlike. ‘Silence has no narrative,’ she concludes. ‘Silence intensifies sensation, but blurs the sense of time.'”

● Video-game Website Joystiq Interviews Nine Inch Nails‘s Trent Reznor (joystiq.com): Says Reznor: "Rob [Sheridan, NIN Creative Director] and I are working on a project together that's moving forward and focuses on the creation of content from a developer's perspective. Would I do music for an everyday game? Meh. I'm not thrilled about the idea, but if someone cool came to me and had this great game, then I'd consider it." The interviewer posted quotes that didn't make the Joystiq cut at superdunner.blogspot.com.

● The Art of Turntables (interviewmagazine.com): Overview of contemporary artists making turntables as art, including Simon Elvins's paper cone (image below, top), Dennis de Bel's sewing machine, Sean Duffy's triptych (image below, middle), Yuri Suzuki's five-armed mutant (image below, bottom), and Tom Sachs's presidential podium. Story by Fan Zhong.

● Tauba Auerbach‘s Organ as Art (nytimes.com): It “requires two players, each pushing foot pedals to pump bellows for the other. Every afternoon at 5 Ms. Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow of the band Glasser — hence the name of the instrument, the Auerglass — perform a transporting, specially composed duet.” Photo below by Adam Reich for the New York Times:

● On Rock and Joysticks, the Beatles and Nirvana (nytimes.com): The online version of the paper’s lengthy piece about the making of Rock Band – The Beatles, “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” lacks the intention of the title the article was given when it appeared, originally, as the cover story of the August 16 issue of the newspaper’s Sunday magazine: “The Music Will Matter to You Because You Are Pretending to Make It.” Story by Daniel Radosh. A few week’s later, the paper’s video-game critic, Seth Schiesel, brought some sanity to the hysteria that has followed the appearance of Kurt Cobain, of the band Nirvana, in the game Guitar Hero 5: “Assuming that Activision got [Courtney] Love to sign the proper contracts, it appears that the main potential legal issue (if Ms. Love actually fulfills her threat to sue) is whether having a digital Cobain re-enact songs by other artists in some way damages his image. I am as big a Deadhead as my generation was able to produce (Jerry Garcia died when I was 22, and I had already seen about 90 Grateful Dead concerts and a dozen Jerry Garcia Band shows), so I know what it’s like to be a fan. Hypothetically, would it be weird to see a digital Garcia playing a Jimmy Eat World song? Of course, but after about 15 seconds of shock, I’d find it totally hilarious.”