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.

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.