Two and a Half Minutes Out Steve Roach’s Inner Window (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest from widescreen ambient figure Steve Roach is the double-CD Dynamic Stillness on the Projekt label. As always, he’s posted healthy excerpts of all his newly recorded aural vistas, and one highlight is “Further Inside,” close to two and a half minutes of droning, cloud-like sonic structures (MP3). These aren’t clouds that merely hover. They’re clouds that slowly and continuously transform — vapors ever twisting, expanding, contracting, and convulsing. The sounds are most easily comprehensible if you think of them as being distant, horizon-spanning phenomena. Roach on his recordings characteristically employs a sense of scale far more massive than do most musicians, even if the music itself is quite fragile.

[audio:http://www.steveroach.com/MP3/files/2248.mp3|titles=”Further Inside”|artists=Steve Roach]

More at steveroach.com.

Nintendo Korg DS-10 Album from DS-10 Dominator (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The MP3Death netlabel has done the Nintendo Korg DS-10 a great service by releasing Cheap Dirt, a 20-track album by DS-10 Dominator (aka Rutger Muller). The DS-10 is a port of a proper Korg synthesizer, which has been fully reproduced as a cartridge for the ubiquitous portable Nintendo gaming system. And no one has previously made available such a wide range of fully considered DS-10 music as Dominator has here.

While much of Cheap Dirt consists of party-ready techno, there’s some heady listening: the downtempo industrial sway of “Sea Son” (MP3), the 8-bit dance noise of “Garage Party” (MP3), and the clanging thrills of “Dubstep Gives Me Food” (MP3).

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_06_Sea_Son_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Sea Son”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_11_Garage_Party_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Garage Party”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/m3d053-cheap-dirt-by-ds10-dominator/m3d053_Cheap_Dirt_18_Dubstep_Gives_Me_Food_by_DS-10_Dominator.mp3|titles=”Dubstep Gives Me Food”|artists=DS-10 Dominator (Rutger Muller)]

Muller says of the release’s conceptual purity: “No post-processing of the audio has been done. All sounds are synthesized, there’s no sampling involved.” Get the full set at archive.org. More at mp3death.us and rutgermuller.nl.

The Korg DS-10 cartridge runs on the Nintendo DS and the newly released Nintendo DSi. I’m looking forward to what folks with the new Nintendo DSi do with the DS-10, given that the DSi has some advanced internal sound-transformation tools. The DS-10 includes the ability to create a master-slave relationship between multiple DS machines. The DSi’s sound-tweaking tools mean that a second machine will now also be able to capture segments of the music and allow the musician to alter them. This is especially promising.

Live Marina Rosenfeld MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Newly listed in the ubu.com holdings is a 34-minute Marina Rosenfeld composition, recorded back in September 2005. According to the brief introduction, “participants performed Rosenfeld’s animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.” It’s a group improvisation, in which some 40 musicians followed her graphically notation, the work moving from sinuous layers of amplified strings, through ecstatic waves of drones, out-classical cat-screech noise-making, and glossolalia (MP3).

[audio:http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/rosenfeld_marina/Emotional-Orchestra/Rosenfeld_Marina_Emotional_Orchestra_Sept_2005.mp3|titles=”Emotional Orchestra”|artists=Marina Rosenfeld]

Back in 2003, when the Orchestra was a work in progress, she told an interviewer at textura.org about the piece:

    “I am trying to connect the ideas of emotion in music and improvisation itself — and making the claim that both the idea and the practice of improvisation are essentially feminine — a female art derived from female so-called vices: emotion, volatility, variability, fickleness. Being called fickle, for instance, is never a compliment, but I think it can actually form a kind of structure for a work of orchestral music.”

More on Rosenfeld at marinarosenfeld.com.

Glacial MP3s from the Duo Kalte

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Things change on Glaciations, the five-track album from the duo Kalte. They just change, well, glacially. On the opening cut, “Obliquity,” thin wisps of sound give way to rumbling machinery and ghost echoes (MP3). And on “Luminosity Function,” metallic reverberations are slowly swallowed up by a mix of bird song and semi-melodic effluence (MP3). Such is the manner in which Kalte (aka Deane Hughes and Rik MacLean) itself functions, drawing on field recordings — a common thread for releases on the responsible label, Dark Winter — and bending them, often subsuming them, to their will. The result is a murky electronica, whose impact is strong even if — or, more to the point, because — the sounds themselves are mysteriously muffled.

[audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw056/dw056-Kalte-01-Obliquity.mp3|titles=”Obliquity”|artists=Kalte] [audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw056/dw056-Kalte-04-Luminosity_Function.mp3|titles=”Luminosity Function”|artists=Kalte]

Get the full release at darkwinter.com. More info at kaltemusic.com.

Quote of the Week: The Kaiser Library

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is Henry Kaiser on the book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas C. Schelling (Norton, 1978):

    I took a course from this guy in College. It was probably worth more than all of the time that I spent in all my other classes combined. He deals with a special area of his own where economics meets human behavior meets unanticipated results. How does behavior in the aggregate become more than the sum of simple individual behavior? How do a group of musicians playing and improvising together create music that transcends their individual contributions? Why are artists who nobody likes so popular? Why does the music industry behave the ways that it does…often in ways that are bad for music? This work, for me, provides an interestingly different starting point for discussing such subjects (while of course the book never mentions music).

Read Kaiser’s full list, which also includes books by Derek Bailey and Marvin Minsky, at analogartsensemble.net. More on Kaiser at henrykaiser.net. (Found via rgable.typepad.com.)