Quote of the Week: Sponsored by the Letter C

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A few of the long list of highlights that Sidney (thestandingroom.com) Chen reported, having participated in the performance of Terry Riley‘s In C at Carnegie Hall on April 24:

    Feeling the pulse emerge from Evan Ziporyn‘s bass clarinet before consciously hearing it …

    Looking upstage and seeing Adam Sliwinski from So Percussion clapping the pulse, and realizing that the clapping I was hearing wasn’t from the monitors but from the audience …

    The almost shocking sense of portent in figure 21 …

    The instrumental ensemble receding in figure 22 to reveal the canon already underway between the adult singers stage right and the children’s choir stage left (and then feeling Trevor Dunn come in under that!) …

    The bass frequency leviathans surfacing in figure 29 …

    The moment when the pulse was taken over by the accordion …

    David Harrington‘s limpid melody in figure 35, softly dancing above the pulsation, and all the raucous individual voices that followed his lead …

    So many overtones! …

    The sudden appearance of a banjo in the texture, and knowing that it’s from Dan Zanes directly upstage …

    Morton Subotnick playing a clarinet (instead of a Buchla Box) …

    The stillness of figure 48, everyone recharging for the final push …

    Dave Douglas‘s augmentation of the rhythm in figure 52 or 53, soaring above a massive crescendo …

    The beautiful, resonant silence that followed, which was all the indication we needed to know that people had been with us the whole way.

More on the performance at carnegiehall.org.

Top 10 Posts from April

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The top 10 posts for the last 30 days are as follows, grouped here for the sake of comparison:

Again, free MP3s were the major draw, though the second most popular post of the month was … (1) the list of the most popular posts of March (which included material on DJ /rupture, Langston Hughes, David Foster Wallace, Marina Vendrell Renaut, and others).

The two other non-MP3 entries to make the top-10 list were (2) an Image of the Week of a small instrument used at a Nicolas Collins/Hans Koch concert in Chicago, and (3) Twitter-based riffs on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt‘s Oblique Strategies by science fiction author Richard Kadrey (which provided a Quote of the Week).

The remaining seven most read entries of April included (4) Buddha Machine-infused music by Terge Paulsen, (5) the first single of the new Moby album (with a video by David Lynch), (6) a full set of tunes created on the Nintendo Korg DS-10 cartridge (plus some thoughts on the new Nintendo DSi, which has some promising sound tools built in), (7) an experiment in 3D sound, (8) a live noise performance by Fognozzle, (9) Justin Hardison‘s sound journal, and a (10) video-game-inspired three-track release from the Surreal Madrid netlabel.

Hildegard Westerkamp / Roy Kiyooka MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Last year, Hildegard Westerkamp joined several other artists in investigating the work and life of Canadian art figure Roy Kiyooka. For her piece, Westerkamp created a sound collage, 15 minutes long, that puts Kiyooka’s own words in various contexts, some literal, some documentarian, some representative, some abstract. In the five-minute excerpt at her website, sfu.ca/~westerka, one hears at times his voice plainly stated, and at other with electronic effects that emphasize certain points, as well as various real-world sounds, including other voices, that comment on or illustrate his thoughts and thought processes. For example, when Kiyooka recalls speaking to his mother in Japanese, voices in Japanese appear quietly in the background — a word that plays an important role as the work, titled MotherVoiceTalk, unfolds.

[audio:http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/assets/mp3s/mothervoiceexcerpt2.mp3|titles=”MotherVoiceTalk”|artists=Hildegard Westerkamp]

8-Bit Video Game Remix MP3 (Super Dodge Ball)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Just over 20 years ago, Nintendo released Super Dodge Ball for the NES system. Not only have gaming consoles evolved since those 8-bit times, but so too have the passions of gamers. There are entire online communities devoted just to outdated tech like the NES, something Nintendo has acknowledged by packaging classic games, and putting titles like Super Dodge Ball up on its virtual Wii store for inexpensive downloadable fun.

There are also communities devoted to the music of those old-school games. One such community is Overclocked Remix (at ocremix.org), where members post reworked versions of video-game theme songs. Case in point, a mix by Avaris (aka Shaun Wallace) of a tune from Super Dodge Ball (MP3), which adds field recordings to the original, cuts it up into something new, and plays with what Avaris/Wallace himself describes as “the most stereotypical representation of China in sonic form ever created.”

[audio:http://ocrmirror.iiens.net/songs/Super_Dodge_Ball_Breakbeat_Market_OC_ReMix.mp3|titles=”Breakbeat Market”|artists=Avaris]

There are, as of this writing, not one but four Super Dodge Ball remixes up at Overclocked, including a second, earlier “Theme of Team China” revision (see ocremix.org).

More at on Avaris’s mix at ocremix.org.

Serenade for Six German Sirens (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you’ve ever experienced the phenomenon when a distant siren takes on an enjoyably melodic quality, then “Russando” (2008) by Hallgrimur Vilhjálmsson is a must listen. When the sonic aggression of such sirens is diminished by space — that is, when civil-service sounds are rendered civil — what’s revealed is a taut melodic cycle, an inherently minimalist patterning that is immediately comparable to the compositional stuff of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Those composers’s works echo in “Russando,” which Vilhjálmsson (who is from Iceland) describes as a “Serenade for six German Sirens” (MP3).

[audio:http://mediamogul.seas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Valjalmsson/Valjalmsson-Hallgrimur_Serenade-for-Six-German-Sirens-Op-43.mp3|titles=”Serenade for six German Sirens”|artists=Hallgrimur Vilhjálmsson]

It helps, of course, that the sirens have that toy-like quality that European sirens often do, at least to an American ear, but even tone aside, Vilhjálmsson’s playful settings and use of stereo to exaggerate contrasts is highly pleasurable.

More information at ubu.com, where the audio is housed.