Quote of the Week: Byrne on Edison’s Legacy

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

An excerpt of a recent journal entry by David Byrne:

    I’d read in a new book about recorded sound (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner) that [Thomas] Edison arranged demonstrations of his “perfected”wax cylinder recorders at various theaters around the continent. He’d have a known singer sing along with their own recorded voice, and then at some point the singer would stop and the recording took over. Testimonials claimed that the audience gasped and couldn’t tell the difference between the live singer and the recording (like “Is it real or is it Memorex?”for those who remember those cassette tape ads).

    This seems a little far-fetched, though it’s true that we do hear what we want to hear to a large extent, and the amount of hype Edison was capable of generating was considerable — and hype can affect what we see and hear. There was indeed some information that surfaced alleging that Edison had “trained”the singers to imitate the quality and sound of the recordings — slightly pinched and not very loud — to make the gag work. This seems likely, as any decent singer could sing far louder than the volume of those old machines.

    Although this may make Edison out to be a bit of a three-card Monte showman (as, like that game, the demonstration was rigged), it also shows what a talent he had for marketing and promoting his inventions. Coming up with an amazing idea and even patenting it was only half the battle”¦ at least as far as getting it out there goes.

    The rigged demonstration also gives an early hint at how performance is influenced by technology. Technology feigns neutrality — to simply record and capture (photography, audio, digitizing) — but not only does each technology skew the copy in some direction, the copy soon becomes the gold standard against which performance is measured. Even if the copy is not 100% faithful, in a weird backwards turn it becomes the “real”thing. While this seems almost comic — early singers imitating wax recordings or photographers imitating Impressionist paintings — with multi-track and now digital recording the worlds of recorded (and manipulated) sound and live performance drift ever further apart.

Full entry at journal.davidbyrne.com.

Melanie Velarde Found-Object Performance MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is rough texture, footsteps, animal noise, broadcast detritus, and voices. Voices in the background, on the edge of intelligible, just below a surface of friction and irritation, and a rising sine wave, so pure that it stands out, so quiet that it blends in. Plucked guitar, strings taut like barbed wire, enter. Then the flash of a camera — sound that connotes image — and then so much more, including a segment when the musician herself, Melanie Velarde, is heard explaining her process (gathering nearby materials, working by chance). It’s a self-conscious work (MP3), in a productive sense — the camera sounding earlier on, for example, is echoed later, more quietly, when Velarde is heard speaking. If the first camera appearance is a sound for its own sake, the second is a sound recorded, per Velarde’s own mode, by chance — a camera that is photographing her, while she speaks about and performs her own work.

[audio:http://www.binauralmedia.org/news/wp-content/uploads/MelanieVelarde_FinalPresentationNodar.mp3|titles=”Nodar Presentation”|artists=Melanie Velarde]

The work was recorded last month, when Velarde was an artist-in-residence sponsored by binauralmedia.org, which has more information on the event. More on Velarde at melanievelarde.com.

Listening Louder Than Purple (MP3s of Olafur Eliasson)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Probably no artifact has stood as strongly for the touring Olafur Eliasson art exhibit Take Your Time as have photos of the purple refractions of his “One-way Color Tunnel” (2007). The tunnel, a narrow shoot of glass the color of a refined kaleidoscope, provides a physical entry point into his richly visual world. Much of Eliasson’s work involves such immersion, and it’s to sound innovator John Kannenberg‘s credit that he thought to focus in the audio dimension.

In a recent post at his johnkannenberg.com/synesthetech blog, the third in a series of field recordings taken surreptitiously around Chicago, Kannenberg provided MP3s recorded in two Take Your Time settings. There is the “fine mist,” as he puts it, of “Beauty” (1993), heard here as an almost impossibly luxurious spray (MP3), and the imposing threat of “Ventilator” (1997), in which an over-sized fan swings overhead like a chaotically threatening guillotine (MP3).

[audio:http://www.johnkannenberg.com/sound/fieldrecordings/may2009-EliassonBeauty.mp3|titles=”Velcro Beauty”|artists=John Kannenberg taping Olafur Eliasson] [audio:http://www.johnkannenberg.com/sound/fieldrecordings/may2009-EliassonVentilator.mp3|titles=”Ventilator”|artists=John Kannenberg taping Olafur Eliasson]

More on the Eliasson exhibit at the websites mcachicago.org, where Kannenberg saw it recently, and sfmoma.org, where I did, back in late 2007.

Early (ca. 1992) Monolake MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Before he helped foment minimal techno, Monolake (aka Robert Henke) was, by his own recent admission, working on what he called “’emo’ synthesizer tracks.” As part of his ongoing “free download of the month series at monolake.de,” he’s been uploading some of these way early works, under the heading “Sonic Archaeology.”

The second such effort in autobiographical spelunking is a seven-and-a-half-minute track, “Der 517. Tag de Mission,” which he dates to roughly 1992 — which is to say, a good three years prior to “Cyan,” the first 12″ he released under the name Monolake, back when Monolake was a duo that also included Gerhard Behles, who went on to found the software company that produces the audio-production software suite Ableton Live.

“Der 517” is a mini-suite of sorts itself, in the compositional sense, including periods of monastic ambience, chirpy computer percussion (reminiscent at times of Tangerine Dream), melodic play worthy of a period video game, and an extended denouement of suggestive noise. He explains the narrative arc as follows: “I imagined this rusty spaceship, somehow lost far out, and things started to become a bit odd after 517 days in space. A little Major Tom moment…”

Still there are moments that foretell the techno yet to come: dubby bass figures as “Der 15” approaches the two-minute mark, and that decaying-tech vibe at the tail end of the piece.

Henke posts these free tracks with certain rules, including an admonition against linking directly to the MP3 file, so just proceed to monolake.de/downloads. It should be up at least through the end of the month.

Junior Kimbrough v. Grassy Knoll MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Junior Kimbrough remixed by Grassy Knoll? Now, that’s my idea of a sonic Reese’s Pieces, my mix of musical chocolate and peanut butter — two wonderful things that are even better in combination. Kimbrough was one of the great late-generation bluesmen (hard to believe he passed on over a decade ago), a major presence on the inimitable Fat Possum label. Grassy Knoll is Bob Green, an influential figure in electronic music, especially where late fusion and early sampling overlap. “Done Got Old” is one of two remixes Green reports that he did for the label. It’s a slow, rumbling cut, ace repetitions emphasizing the Zen rigor of Kimbrough’s stoic blues, hazily echoed vocal soundbites lending an understated trip-hop allure, and the whole thing laced with rippling instrumental jamming (MP3).

[audio:http://www.feedtheenemy.com/audio/donegotold.mp3|titles=”Done Got Old”|artists=Grassy Knoll remixing Junior Kimbrough]

More on Green at his feedtheenemy.com website.