The World in B-flat (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What a difference a common key makes. The ingenious inbflat.net website displays 16 videos in a 4 x 4 grid. Each video is of a solo instrumentalist, playing guitar or keyboards or trumpet or xylophone (all in B-flat, per the work’s title), and the listener/user is invited to initiate the clips simultaneously, or at any interval. Here’s an image detail:

The resulting music is ever-shifting, but free of anything approximating tension or dissonance — it’s lilting, subtle, peaceful, and quite beautiful. The site was developed as an experiment by Darren Solomon, of the group Science for Girls. He’s made a formal, fixed recording of one “performance” of the installation (MP3), and has invited individuals to contribute their own videos. He proposes that the MP3 be listened to while you perform, in order to provide some sense of inner coherence to the otherwise open-ended work. For anyone looking at what culture as formed by “Web 2.0” — which I’d define as a situation in which the network is greater than the sum of its participants — sounds like, this is a good starting point.

The title of Solomon’s piece is presumably a nod to Terry Riley’s In C, which pioneered the idea of a composition that consists of various parts that can be played in freely associated, musician-determined permutations.

[audio:http://www.inbflat.net/bflatmix.mp3|titles=”In B-flat”|artists=Darren Solomon & Co.]

For an early iteration of the work, check out Solomon’s January 22 post at scienceforgirls.net.

As a follow-up (this is the Internet, in which there is an answer-song to every song, including for every answer-song), someone developed tikirobot.net/BbBuddha, which invokes an “auto-replay” function, meaning the loops will play forever (a la the Buddha Machine), making for great background listening. (Several people recommended the inbflat.net website, so special thanks to the first of them, Michael Ross of myspace.com/prehab.)

Young Communicator

The self-education of the adventurous, Philly-based hip-hop producer Y?Arcka

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Whether pushing the lesser-known Jacksons to center stage, forcing a spotlight on a backing musician from Sly and the Family Stone, or taking Sade’s words and re-sequencing them to make a point, the Philadelphia-based hip-hop producer Y?Arcka (aka Shawn Kelly) has made a strong impression on his first two full-length albums. The Un-Herd Vol 1 was released last year by Ropeadope, and Y?Arcka followed it up more recently with a freely downloadable collection called The Appreciation SP. On both albums, he’s shown a knack for creative sampling, using less familiar parts of staple pop and r&b songs — even a bit of Afrobeat, courtesy of Fela — in unfamiliar ways. The end result is exemplary instrumental hip-hop: listenable to on its own merits, no matter the absence of a rapper.

The Temple University-educated musician took time out recently to talk about his self-education on the tools of the hip-hop production trade, his personal philosophy of sampling, and the producers who’ve inspired him. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

 

Marc Weidenbaum: First off, thanks a lot for making time for this interview. I really dug Un-Herd Vol 1 when it was released on the Ropeadope label, and your The Appreciation SP in particular got my head going — I wrote about it [at disquiet.com] when you posted it for free at your myspace.com/youngarchitect page.

Y?Arcka: I had that The Appreciation project [cover pictured at left], actually done before I did Un-Herd, but at the time, I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna have enough time to promote it and do stuff with it. Un-Herd kind of came up out of nowhere, where I was like, I could put something together a little different from Appreciation — because Appreciation was something you couldn’t really have rappers over, because it’s unusual, the unusual loops I did were not your ordinary stuff. I liked it more, because it’s different, but maybe it’s too different for people to start off with, as my first project. Continue reading “Young Communicator”

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The plan is for this automated tool to post, every weekend, the entries I’ve made at twitter.com/disquiet in the previous seven days. This post shows the entries from April 26 through May 16, because for reasons beyond me the tool didn’t work for a while. That said, it didn’t skip anything, since the previous such post (disquiet.com) was on April 26.

  • Saturday morning sounds: grinding laptop fan, bus riding by, breathing. #
  • If you Twitter, it’s #followfriday: Godflesh in the flesh @JKBroadrick; Stanford Laptop Orchestra @slork; classical activists @classicalrev #
  • Pretty cool for Brian Eno/Oblique Strategies fans. A website dedicated to the work of Peter Schmidt, Oblique’s co-creator: http://is.gd/zWKg #
  • Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt @Oblique_Chirps Twitter app says, “Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard.” Reminds me to visit New Langton exhibit. #
  • Gym music: new Metallica, again. Need to dig out something else with energy. But it’s way good, like Load, ReLoad, & St. Anger didn’t exist. #
  • Pre-afternoon sounds: percussive typing, conversation below (consonants muted by floor), plane drone overhead, texture of chairs shifting. #
  • Hoping to catch laptop/recorder show Thurs @ Luggage Store. Sunday’s Willits/Deupree show @ du Nord was great, especially http://is.gd/zaLY #
  • Psyched re: tonight’s Christopher Willits & Taylor Deupree show. Opening: Classical Revolution, doing Glass, Russel, Becker, Novik, Brown. #
  • Gym music: new drones, old metal. #
  • Morning sounds: laptop whir, the world’s tiniest bicycle racing downhill; kitchen fridge, doing usual morning-after minimal-techno mumble. #
  • Gym music: The recent collaborative single by Burial & Four Tet: “Moth,” “Wolf Cub,” repeat. Lo-fi streams of both here: http://is.gd/xhll #
  • Wondering if/when next week my G1 cellphone will update its operating system. Wondering how to make my Twitter posts more Facebook-friendly. #
  • Contractions in @tannermenard’s re-tweet (is.gd/y4N9) of my post (is.gd/y4NV) suggests re-tweeting as version of Lucier’s Sitting in a Room. #
  • Kyle Gann transcribes solo piano improv by Harold Budd. Budd writes back to say he couldn’t play it in a thousand years: http://is.gd/y3P5 #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

Tangents: DJ Shadow on Hero, Dan Hill on Cities …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● The Copyleft Potential of Ripped ‘Rock Band’ Music Tracks (gamesetwatch.com): Like CDs, the musical content of music video-games is making its way to the Internet’s back alleys, leading to a new layer of copyright issues — which is to say, opportunities for cultural appropriation and remixing. Writes Eric Caoili, "This might not seem any more remarkable than the pirated MP3s that we're already so familiar with, but you should remember that these are based on the songs' masters and stored as 'multitracked audio with isolated guitars, drums, vocals, etc.', perfect for remixing." More at the website of Flash developer Mike Nowak, the-inbetween.com. (Via twitter.com/Nobuooo.)

● Dan Hill on the Sound of Cities (cityofsound.com): A thorough survey by Dan Hill on his ever-excellent blog of the issues involving the sound of transportation, from cars to bicycles to buses, and what they mean as the contemporary urban environment wrestles with increasing density and the rising price of energy. The piece presumes that cars are on their way out, something I think it's too early to be sure about, and also seems to perpetuate the idea that bicyclists have less responsibility than drivers when it comes to looking out for the best interest of pedestrians ("A bell suffices, and after that it’s about taking due care and attention on both sides"). It is packed with rich examples on the challenge, easily dispels the recent myth that there's any concern about the relative quietude of hybrid cars, and colorfully proposes curated city sounds: "SND score Sheffield as a series of pulsing, jittery staccato tones; cars pausing at a stop-light in Ginza are suddenly part of a DJ Signify tune; Steve Roden pins up a series of aleatoric triggers across Echo Park…" (Via twitter.com/djrupture.)

● Holger Czukay on Karlheinz Stockhausen (newstatesman.com): “[Karlheinz] Stockhausen, however, couldn’t handle pop or rock music — it was not his field. And his music is mainly scored. In my group, Can, we did exactly the opposite: we improvised everything — performed with an ’empty head’ — and composed the music afterwards by editing the tape. When Can started in 1968, it was understood we wouldn’t speak of him, because we had to do the opposite. We had to kill him so that we could start something new.” From an essay by Can’s Holger Czukay on Karlheinz Stochausen.

● DJ Shadow on ‘DJ Hero’ (gameinformer.com): The game will attempt to do for turntables what Guitar Hero did for guitars. As DJ Shadow, who advised on the game's development, said, the real test of the DJ Hero controller is: “Would this make some eight year old kid who got it for Christmas want to try the real thing?” He also comments on a unique distinction between guitar heroes and DJ heroes: "I mean some of the best DJs I’ve ever seen play do nothing on a technical level that would blow any turntablist’s mind, but they can read the crowd really well and it’s all about their song selection and the progression of the music that they play over the night." (Via nobuooo.com.)

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.