Michael Raphael’s Brooklyn Audio Documents (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Michael Raphael moved from the midwest to Brooklyn recently, an event he described as a “homecoming of sorts.” He commemorated his first weekend in his adoptive borough with a pair of field recordings. Both were recorded in the same spot, in the window of his new living room, but at different times: one at 5:00pm (MP3) on a Saturday night (May 9, if you’re time-stamping as well as geo-coding your downloaded MP3 files), and the second 12 hours later (MP3). One before sunset, the other before sunrise. One rife with human activity (children, and ice-cream truck), one relatively bereft. More details at his blog, sepulchra.com.

[audio:http://sepulchra.com/blog/wp-content/pod/2009/05/090510brooklynpm.mp3|titles=”Brooklyn Landing PM”|artists=Michael Raphael] [audio:http://sepulchra.com/blog/wp-content/pod/2009/05/090510brooklynam.mp3|titles=”Brooklyn Landing AM”|artists=Michael Raphael]

Tangents: Oliveros Award, Dalek Sounds, Byrne House Music …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● PDF: Pauline Oliveros Wins 2009 William Schuman Award (millertheatre.com): As music awards go, the William Schuman has been particularly open-minded. It's gone to classical-tradition figures like David Diamond, jazz-informed mavericks like Gunther Schuller, minimalists like Steve Reich, and out-jazz characters like John Zorn. There's something particularly gratifying about Pauline Oliveros being the recipient of the award this year, given that her work is so apart from the orchestral and chamber mode, in that she regularly emphasizes instructional works over precise written scores, employs electronic effects, and involves site-specific ephemerality. (She is also, it appears, the first woman to receive the Schuman.) The award will be presented to her on March 27, 2010.

● Four Sound Effects That Made (British) TV history (bbc.co.uk): For the BBC, Tom Geoghegan recounts accomplishments of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop on the 50th anniversary of its founding — and a decade after it was closed. The focus of this piece is four sounds, and how they were created, among them the "Dalek voice" from the fabled science-fiction series Dr. Who: "'We tried to give the impression that whenever a Dalek spoke, it wasn't speaking like we do, it was accessing words from a memory bank, so they all sound the same — dispassionate, mechanical and retrievable.' He [Dick Mills] used a centre-tap transformer plugged into the microphone of an actor standing at the side of the set, and the threat in the voice was all in the performance." (Via londonsoundart.wordpress.com.)

● More on David Byrne‘s London Edition of ‘Playing the Building’ (davidbyrne.com): I missed this when it occurred in downtown Manhattan last summer, by just a day. Now, in advance of its August 8-31 run in London (at the Roundhouse — see image above), on David Byrne's site there is substantial coverage of his "Playing the Building" piece, including documentary video footage — not only of the Battery Maritime Building event, but also the earlier one in Stockholm from 2005 — and links to press accounts.

● 11 Things to Do with a Buddha Machine 2.0: Jesse Jarnow lists almost a dozen options for the FM3-created sound-art object the Buddha Machine 2.0, including #7: "Go to LaMonte Young's Dream House. Upon exit, use pitch control to match drone, carry vibe home with you."

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

Spoils of a Beat Battle (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The message boards at stonesthrow.com, like those over at cratekings.com, are filled with up’n’coming beatcrafters, sharing their productions and looking for feedback.

Looking to battle, too. Like the cratekings.com forums, stonesthrow.com hosts ongoing Beat Battles, in which entrants take a communal sample and make something new from it. The most recent battle, number 115 (you read that right), had over 50 participants (you read that right, too).

The house rules are simple, and purposefully restrictive. You’re allowed that one sample, which you can cut’n’splice as you please. There’s an admonition against keyboards, and you can submit only one mix per contest.

There are some masterful little productions among the submissions in contest 115. Dubman‘s upbeat “Chicken of the Sea” (MP3) is an organ-crazed, uncharacteristically upbeat affair, while AJ‘s “stmb bb 115” uses some backward masking to bring a turntablistic flair to the work (MP3). And while most of the productions have a rap-ready appeal, there’s some abstraction afoot: the cut’n’paste “kvu_STMB115” has some extended breaks that are downright leftfield — for fun, call its creator Will.i.am S. Burroughs (MP3).

While they’re enjoyable on their lonesome, the best way to appreciate a Beat Battle like this one is to listen to the whole group, which provides a broken-kaleidoscope view of the original track. That organ so central to the Dubman track (which won the battle vote), for example, is reduced to a halting cadence on Saphyre‘s “Stonesthrow15” (MP3)

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/34825c90-2038-012c-c6b3-f6cc3660e2f2/dubman-chicken_of_the_sea.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242486653&Signature=3VDgKwZJ3CRwzGj4A7%2Bv5tLhbK8%3D|titles=”Chicken of the Sea”|artists=Dubman] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/69975e90-1fe6-012c-cff7-f6bf56e7cd97/day_15_-_stmb_bb_115.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242487086&Signature=jFG0entJ5snv%2BtOAmIUz712Q7DI%3D|titles=”stmb bb 115″|artists=AJ] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/f42e0110-2331-012c-f0b5-f4a74bf81570/kvu_stmb115.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242487219&Signature=qpVCtjbFXDMjzWBLqpM1OpqdtyY%3D|titles=”kvu_STMB115″|artists=unkown] [audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/stlth/assets/production/0c820310-1e81-012c-e38a-f5813d38e151/b6078630-2115-012c-95ed-f0076b6183d9/saphyre_-_stonesthrow15.mp3?AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82&Expires=1242486561&Signature=beAwT7EhhuRrKvbvJBoDXjHQn3Q%3D|titles=”Stonesthrow15″|artists=Saphyre]

The original post is at stonesthrow.com, and voting closed this past Friday at stonesthrow.com. The full set is at drop.io (the track titles veer toward the unintelligible, and I’m not sure which of them is the original sample). There appears to be an expiration date built into those MP3 URLs, but it’s not clear when it is, so if you find the material of interest, download sooner than later.

The next Stones Throw Beat Battle, number 116, is based on “The Paisley Window Pane” by late-1960s folk-pop duo Wendy and Bonnie. This time around, the source is helpfully titled “This Is What You Need to Sample” at the drop site, drop.io/stmb116. (The song was apparently sampled previously by Super Furry Animals on the opening track to their 2003 album Phantom Power, titled “Hello Sunshine.”)

Tangents: Eno’s Optimism, Ubu’s Curation, …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Brian Eno (aka Dr Pangoss) on the Recorded Object’s Bright Future (prospect-magazine.co.uk): Prospect magazine has serialized a column by Brian Eno, aka “Dr Pangloss,” each month since March 2009. The latest, May 2008, wisely distinguishes the "record business" ("in the doldrums") from the music business, noting that "the live music scene is exploding." And in Pangloss mode, Eno senses that even the recorded object may have a future: "The duplicability of recordings has had another unexpected effect. The pressure is on to develop content that isn’t easily copyable — so now everything other than the recorded music is becoming the valuable part of what artists sell. Of course they’ll still want to sell their music, but now they’ll embed that relatively valueless product within a matrix of hard-to-copy (and therefore valuable) artwork." For all three columns, as well as a firewall-protected book review from June 2006 by Eno of the memoir of producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Fairport Convention), White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, visit prospect-magazine.co.uk.

● David Toop & Pauline Oliveros Guest-Curate UbuWeb (ubu.com): Each month, the great archive of the avant-garde that is ubu.com asks an individual to select items from its archives for its Featured Resources section, a kind of virtual curatorial act. In May, it's author/musician David Toop (Ocean of Sound), who links to a lot of film, as well as music by La Monte Young and Group Ongaku (Takehisa Kosugi, Syuko Mizuno, Mieko Shiomi, Yasunao Tone, others). In April, the guest curator was Deep Listening guru Pauline Oliveros.

● Video: Curtis Roads on Granular Synthesis (via usoproject.blogspot.com): A three-part video on computer-music figure Curtis Roads is being widely distributed, thanks to easy YouTube embedding. The video's circulation appears to coincide with a new Roads book, Composing Electronic Music (Oxford), and a new edition of his Computer Music Tutorial (MIT). It’s pretty darn informative, with frank talk by Roads about his development of his mode of synthesis, called “granular synthesis.” Of one early piece he says, “I wouldn’t call it a composition. It’s really an experiment.”

● ‘Soundscapes & Listening’ Conference Held in Vienna (soundscapes.fhstp.ac.at): The program this past weekend (May 14-16), included Ellen Waterman's "When it Rains: Experimental Music and the Cultural Ecology," Hein Schoer's "The Sounding Museum," Helmi Järviluoma‘s "Soundscapes and People's Environmental Relationships in Change — from 1975 to 2000," Michael Hanisch's "Soundscapes im Computerspiel Grand Theft Auto IV," and Tadahiko Imada‘s "Music Education and the Concept of Soundscape: Experiencing the Earliest Grain of Music", among other presentations, plus numerous concert performances. (Via mediateletipos.net.)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

MP3 Discussion Group: Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”/”Wolf Cub”

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

For the next few days, several people whose reflections on music — whose enthusiasm and insight — I admire have signed on to do in public what I, for one, have been doing in private for a week-plus now: playing over and over, as well as pondering, the recent two-song 12″ by Burial and Four Tet, a pair of songs (“Moth,” “Wolf Cub”), released on the Text Records label earlier this month.

Joining me are:

  • Robert Gable is a listener and musical enthusiast who has been blogging at aworks (rgable.typepad.com) about “new” American classical music since 2003. Earlier, he played jazz saxophone and blues harp until realizing he would always pale in comparison to Sonny Rollins and Little Walter. He works for a company that develops software and hardware IP used in multimedia devices.
  • Lauren Giniger is possessed by a deadly sense of the absurd and so is often paralyzed when composing her biography. When she is able to get over herself, she can be found organizing large productions, most recently including the 24th annual World Jewish Music Festival. She lives with two adorable rabbits; her current project is developing a vaccine to fight the overblown and imaginary scourge of lagomorph influenza. Also, she occasionally write about music for the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
  • 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.

You can listen to streaming versions of the two tracks here, which I first came upon at pitchfork.com.

The discussion will play out in the comments section below.

Burial/Four Tet’s “Wolf Cub”

Burial/Four Tet’s “Moth”

PS: This is not, per a reader’s inquiry, a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in. And for anyone reading this after May 19, for the first day the tracks below were mis-titled. Sorry about that.

PPS: Given the willful opaqueness of the “Moth”/”Wolf Cub” 12″ — it comes on black vinyl in a black sleeve — I looked around for how it was being visually represented. Directly below are three such representations via, from left to right, createdigitalmusic.com, which made the requisite Spinal Tap joke; stereogum.com, which described the release as “a black sleeve and pressed onto a slab of 12″ vinyl with a black label”; and residentadvisor.net, which ignores the package and fairly thoroughly describes the music in its write-up:

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