“Ethiopium” = Oh No’s African Hip-Hop (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Hip-hop producer Oh No, brother of Madlib and constructor of some tracks off the recent Mos Def album (The Ecstatic), has his own new full-length out. Like his older sibling, Oh No (born Michael Jackson to Madlib’s Otis Jr.) has a taste for non-western sound sources, deep grooves, and old-school hip-hop. The result this time around is the 18-track Dr. No’s Ethiopium, whose title hints at its sense of globe-spinning disorientation. As a sample, releasing label Stones Throw (which also just posted Madlib’s latest, Fall Suite, credited to the Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble) has made available an MP3 combining two tracks off Ethiopium. There’s the jazz-tinged “Concentrate,” all whispery vocals, tightly looped ensemble play, and a rain storm’s worth of vinyl surface noise. And, the topper, the heavy funk of “The Funk,” with a hard beat and a vamping lead line that won’t stop (MP3). At a time when every other hip-hop producer seems to have discovered Nina Simone, Oh No’s back-to-Africa effort is a refresher course in crate digging on a global scale.

[audio:http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/ethiopium.mp3|titles=”Concentrate/The Funk”|artists=Oh No]

More details at stonesthrow.com. The highly recommended full release is currently available for $9.99 as a digital download, with CD and LP info yet to be announced.

Image of the Week: Birdsong on a Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

With no apologies to Leonard Cohen, composer Jarbas Agnelli saw a photo of birds on telephone wires in the pages of a newspaper, and created a melodic composition based on the relative placement of the birds, thanks to the similarity between the telephone wires and a piece of music paper. The following is a still from a video he has posted of the recording:

Full video at vimeo.com. Newspaper coverage (auto-translated to English from the original Portuguese) at is.gd/36UK1. (Found via Molly Sheridan‘s artsjournal.com/gap.)

PS: According to npr.org, Agnelli is now working on a children’s book based on this project. (Thanks to Geoff Nicholson, of geoff-nicholson.tripod.com, for the tip.)

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Listening to Breakbeat Era's Ultra-Obscene on vinyl while tidying cable spaghetti in my office. How is this album already a decade old? #
  • This so-called "dry lightning" over San Francisco is insane. The house just rattled like a big bass drum in some sludge-metal song. #
  • Story hed from today's @nytimes uninformed, obnoxious, or both: "At Last, Artists Harness the Internet" At last? http://is.gd/3bQVd #
  • Crazy bright light flashes over San Francisco at 4am while foghorns drone. Straight outta Close Encounters. Lightning storm? #
  • Someday soon, I'm gonna go to a chamber music concert, and listen to the whole thing through @rjdj #
  • Friday morning sounds: foghorns out in force. #
  • Excellent in empty office to not be at all confused to hear cute melody emanate from someone's cellphone buried deep in an unseen handbag. #
  • Man, Ennio Morricone to conduct his own work at the Hollywood Bowl? This may require a trip to Los Angeles: http://is.gd/37yx3 #
  • Glad iTunes 9 includes liner notes. Wondering if the ones I did for the Nina Simone: Nina Sings Nina album I compiled will be part of this. #
  • Morning listen: an interview with Italian prog-rock group Goblin about scoring Dario Argento's art-horror flicks: http://is.gd/34Zcp #
  • Uploaded my first @audioboo field recording (of a ceiling fan), inspired by the @hearthisworld project of @alexismadrigal http://is.gd/33oCW #
  • One of the great things in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is hearing music out of context, especially Ennio Morricone score cues. #
  • While shopping for oven, thought of a guy in junior high who named his RPG character Electrolux. I'd laughed. Others hated the anachronism. #
  • Seems meaningful/fitting that the opening of Miles Davis's "Freddie Freeloader" covered on Kind of Bloop compilation sounds like Steely Dan. #
  • Installing all of Ableton Live 8's libraries seems to take longer than installing Windows 7. #

Quote of the Week: The Unheard West

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Jeff Rice (pictured above) and Kenning Arlitsch’s efforts in constructing an audio archive of the sounds of the American west was the subject of a recent story in the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com). Says their colleague Gordon Hempton of the contraction inherent in their endeavor:

    “You don’t know what you’re listening for because you haven’t heard it.”

Rice’s audio provides a score to Maya Lin’s “What is Missing?” installation, due to open September 17 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. More on the Lin piece at sfgate.com and at mayalin.com. Visit Rice and Arlitsch’s westernsoundscape.org. (Thanks to Rob Walker of robwalker.net, murketing.com, significantobjects.com, unconsumption.tumblr.com, and various other projects for the tip.) Photo by Allen J. Schaben for the Los Angeles times.

Lunar Rambles MP3 by Terry Fox (circa 1977)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The hovering sounds of Terry Fox‘s “Excerpts from Lunar Rambles” (MP3) will strike many as otherworldly, and when their source material is revealed, they may appear, to the contrary, all too familiar. These slowly cycling sounds, rich in overtones, were made not by visiting UFOs but by an artist working “a metal bowl and steel plow disk.” But even with that fact sheet, it’s informative to take into consideration the date of the recording: April 1977. Long before today’s ubiquity of contact-mic performance sound and remixed field recordings, Fox was experimenting with a minimalism that had as much to do with its raw materials as with its pulsing, rhythmically informed, melodically-untethered music.

[audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/close_radio/closeradio_018-Fox.mp3|titles=”Excerpts from Lunar Rambles”|artists=Terry Fox]

The following images are stills of Fox performing variations on the piece in the videos Lunar Rambles: Canal Street (left) and Lunar Rambles: Brooklyn Bridge (right), released in 1976 and available from eai.org.

Fox passed away in 2008. This audio recording, made available as part of the holdings at ubu.com, was broadcast on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles on the show Close Radio on April 25, 1977. More on Close Radio, founded by John Duncan and Neil Goldstein (and organized by Duncan, Paul McCarthy, Nancy Buchanan, and Linda Frye Burnham), at getty.edu.