Tangents: Jon Hassell, Gavin Bryars, BuddhaPod …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Jon Hassell on Diagonal Composing, the Curses of Cliché & Abundance (theaustralian.news.com.au): Thorough newspaper profile of Jon Hassell, in advance of his first visit to Australia. Notes his work with Terry Riley and La Monte Young, and his association with Brian Eno. For a musician whose work is founded on a blurring of cultures and modes, he proves refreshingly opinionated: "I've avoided jazz clichés. You'll never hear a ride cymbal or certain intervals. Clichés are rampant in jazz." And: "We're living in an age of musical addiction. People think they have to have 20,000 songs on their lipstick-shaped iPods. But you have to put on the filter or you'll perish." And he talks at length about Indian drones: "If you think of music as horizontal, being melody, and vertical, being harmony, I think of what I do as diagonal, because there's a harmonic loop repeating in the background. That's my take on the tamboura. With the loops, all the notes, the three chords, are in the air. That's the harmonic cloud to play within. The combined harmony is there, and yet I can play around it." … Hassell’s latest album, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, was the subject of a recent “MP3 Discussion Group” here (disquiet.com), 22 comments and counting.

● Gavin Bryars Pays Tribute to Nicholas Maw (guardian.co.uk): In a letter to the Guardian, Gavin Bryars elaborates on an obituary for Nicholas Maw, published a week earlier: "His example enabled me, 15 years ago, to leave the cushioned environment of academia for the more dangerous one of the full-time professional composer, and I have always been grateful to him." Original obituary at guardian.co.uk. … In related news, Bryars has posted his upcoming events: gavin-bryars.livejournal.com.

● Buddha Machine Creators FM3 Note iPhone Shortcomings When Bringing Updated App to Market (twitter.com/buddhamachine)

● Mike Tajima of New Humans Is This Month’s UbuWeb Guest Curator; Focus on Xenakis, Paik, Cage (ubu.com)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

Image of the Week: Tower of Clocks

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are 1,111 clocks ticking away in the tower of Perrott’s Folly in Birmingham, England: one on the ground floor, ten a floor up, one hundred the floor after that, and, as pictured here, one full thousand on the top floor. Thus it is a tower of clocks, rather than a clock tower:

The exhibit, titled “The Tower of Time,” is by Japanese sound artist Yukio Fujimoto. I’m disappointed I didn’t make it to the exhibit during my trip, this past week, to Birmingham, but it’s up through July 26 — perhaps I’ll still make it back. The Folly was reportedly an inspiration for the Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, who grew up in the area. (And, yes, this is now the second Tolkien reference on this website in as many days.) More on the exhibit at ikon-gallery.co.uk, and on the re-opening of the tower at bbc.co.uk.

Quote of the Week: Sounding Vampires

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From The Strain, the new vampire novel by Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth, the forthcoming two-part The Hobbit) and Chuck Hogan (The Prince of Thieves):

    “Now she was hearing it again. Same noise she’d been hearing since arriving for her shift, only steadier now, louder. A humming. A droning sound, and the weird thing was, she heard it at the same volume whether she wore her protective headphones or not. Headachelike, in that way. Interior. And yet, like a homing beacon, it strengthened in her mind once she returned to work. … The noise sounded like no machine she had ever heard. A churning, almost, a rushing sound, like coursing fluid. Or like the murmur of a dozen voices, a hundred different voices, trying to make sense. Maybe she was picking up radar vibrations in her teeth fillings.”

The “she” above is an airport employee who’s now twice been drawn toward the airplane that serves as the initial mystery driving the plot of The Strain. The novel’s pretty solid, if far more told than written, the words focused on getting the story across effortlessly and quickly, rather than in using language to get deeper into the characters (the major ones, with the exception of an aging vampire-hunter, being fairly cookie-cutter, though there are a lot of strong incidental character sketches) and the narrative. The novel is a sort of “hard fantasy,” a parallel to hard science fiction, in that del Toro and Hogan go into great detail about how vampirism functions. Del Toro fans will find examples here of the sorts of fetishized objects that have served as touchstones of revelation in films such films of his as Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and the Hellboy series.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • No China Mieville in the book stores at Heathrow, so I picked up a co-authored novel by Guillermo del Toro instead. #
  • Says something about the challenge to DJ Hero (the turntable’s Guitar Hero) that publicity focuses largely, still, more on rappers than DJs. #
  • Morning sounds in London: hotel building settling, neighboring HVAC whirling, alien cellphone ringtone chirping through door to hallway. #
  • Great four-act show at Fleapit in London — excellent way to end week in London. Thanks to @sideb0ard & @douglasbenford for hanging. #
  • London agenda: Berg’s Lulu at Royal Opera tonight, Boduf Songs et al. at Fleapit tomorrow, Martin Ware’s SoundLife in Leicester Sq … #
  • Morning sounds in Birmingham (UK): hotel HVAC, distant rumble (presumably traffic), (healthy) laptop fan. #
  • In Birmingham (not the one where they love the governor) for 36 hours or so. #
  • Troubling changes @ emusic: major price hike, change in pre-set contracts, http://bit.ly/so9pf http://bit.ly/1548iO (RT @Billforman et al.) #
  • Morning sounds in London: hotel’s vague attempt at air conditioning, cars racing down Kensington High Street eight floors down. #
  • Buying tickets at roh.org.uk/myroyaloperahouse with @defjaf. There are over 140 titles when you register: Mr, Ms, Duke, Earl, Queen, etc. #
  • Landed in London! T-Mobile will soon make my G1 work here. Had chicken-tandori newsagent sandwich. Reading Time Out. Food later with @defjaf #
  • Morning sounds: ice pops in coffee, cars pass, kid next door stumbles around, milk bubbles amid corn flakes. Older computer, smoother fan. #
  • Twitter rocks. I mention Burmese restaurants. Now I’m “followed” by one a few blocks from work. I’m going, soon as I’m back from London… #
  • Video of John Cage’s 4’33, performed on a Nintendo DS running the DS-10 cartridge: http://is.gd/KiGc #

Dark Exuviae MP3 Album from Dark Winter

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Lots of aural turmoil on the new Dark Winter netlabel release, Swallow the Ghost by Exuviae. More like Gargling the Ghost, there’s so much retching static, sonic jetsam, and masticated sampling going on. There’s the occasional slowing of pace, such as in “Lazarus Requiem,” with its syrupy synths, all ringing like banged metal (MP3). “The Thirteen” similarly unfolds at a more patient speed than much of the album — speed here is relative, less a matter of pounding downbeats than of rapidly circulating sine waves, and chaotic grinding of noises — though true to the ghosts of the album’s title, the end effect is arguably more, rather than less, settling (MP3).

[audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw058/dw058-Exuviae-03-Lazarus_Requiem.mp3|titles=”Lazarus Requiem”|artists=Exuviae] [audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw058/dw058-Exuviae-05-The_Thirteen.mp3|titles=”The Thirteen”|artists=Exuviae]

Get the full set of 10 tracks at darkwinter.com. More at the artist’s website, exuviaemusic.com.