DJ /Rupture Reworks Langston Hughes (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The New York radio station WNYC invited various musicians to rework Langston Hughes‘s poem Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz, among them the prolific DJ /rupture (born Jace Clayton), whose “Is It True?” (MP3) takes a recorded version and puts it through voice-tweaking technology that speeds up the spoken word, even as the music veers deep into the downtempo.

[audio:http://audio.wnyc.org/culture/dj_rupture-is_it_true.mp3|titles=”Is It True?”|artists=Langston Hughes & DJ /rupture]

No doubt Rupture — who is a conceptualist remixer at heart — was tempted by the Hughes poem’s investigation of recorded sound:

    From the shadows of the quarter
    Shouts are whispers carrying
    To the fartherest corners sometimes
    Of the now known world
    Undeciphered and unlettered
    Uncodified unparsed
    In tongues unanalyzed unechoed
    Untaken down on tape—
    Not even Folkways captured
    By Moe Asch or Alan Lomax
    Not yet on safari.

    …

    And the whispers are unechoed
    On the tapes—not even Folkways.

More on the project at wnyc.org, and on Rupture at negrophonic.com.

Andreas Bick Holocaust Tower MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sound artist Andreas Bick got permission from the Jewish Museum in Berlin to record the room tones of its purposefully claustrophobic Holocaust Tower. He’s posted the resulting drones and ambient noise at his website, silentlistening.wordpress.com (MP3).

[audio:http://silentlistening.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/judisches-museum-exc.mp3|titles=Holocaust Tower Field Recording|artists=Andreas Bick]

By leaving the microphone in the space, he not only captured its inherent sounds, but also those of passersby, at least one of whom was intrigued by the recording equipment. Writes Bick:

    Finally you hear the steps of a visitor approaching the recorder who was attracted by the red and yellow LEDs in the dark. He ran into my microphone, put it back in place and left the tower immediately, passing me by with a somehow sorrowful expression on his face. I thought if I would have to desribe the German guilt complex towards the holocaust, it would have looked somehow like that.

More on the museum at jmberlin.de.

Disquiet in Los Angeles Gallery Exhibit

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca is a talented writer and artist who lives in Los Angeles. I’m particularly fond of his texts, which have a richly atmospheric quality, and often involve a kind of literary remixing. He has, in the past, taken classic science fiction stories, as well as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and twisted them to his own purposes.

I was invited to contribute to an upcoming gallery exhibit focused on Vaca. With a nod to Jorge Luis Borges, he has written brief texts describing 14 different imaginary libraries, and various individuals are presenting works that riff on or otherwise illustrate, illuminate, or pay tribute to Vaca’s fictional institutions. Mine has to do with an Instrumental Music Library that Vaca dreamed up. More details to follow.

Below are images of the front and back of the flyer for the exhibit. There’s an opening reception on Saturday, April 4, at the gallery, Crewest in Los Angeles, that is hosting the show, which will run through April 30. The show is titled Infinite Libraries.

More information on the gallery at crewest.com. Visit Vaca at chamanvision.com.

Prefuse 73/Savath & Savalas MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Not every electronicist’s venture into song pays off. For every successful Matmos-inflused Björk track, there’s a Photek-backed rap to provide a counterbalance. Ãœber-prolific Guillermo Scott Herren (better known as Prefuse 73), gets his song-form energies out as part of Savath & Savalas, which teams him with Eva Puyuelo Muns and Roberto Sarlos Lange for languorous pop where the vocals are ethereal and choral, and the groove is slow as a summer breeze. The group’s new album, La Llama, is also its debut on the Stones Throw record label, which means it’s something of a stretch for everyone involved. For Stones Throw, it’s a welcome step toward broadening its roster, which tends toward the indie hip-hop (it’s where Madlib makes his home, as did the late J Dilla). For Herren/Prefuse, it’s a moniker under which he can put aside his emphasis on rhythm and glitch in favor of something soothing, but still headphone-centric. The label put up the title cut for free download (MP3), and the album is due out this coming Monday.

[audio:http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/savathysavalas-lallama.mp3|titles=”La Llamaa”|artists=Savath & Savalas]

More details, including a brief interview with Herren, at stonesthrow.com.

Two Hours of Buddha Machine Loops (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Two hours of unadulterated streaming Buddha Machine loops are what DJ Cactus (aka Daniel Hintz) provided to listeners of his KUSF (90.3FM San Francisco) radio broadcast this past weekend. Check out the original post at kusf-archives.com, which has the set available as two streaming audio files (MP3, MP3). The sound quality is strong, and the loops are pretty much bare, with the exception of some humorous cues for the station’s call letters (which refer to the University of San Francisco), including one with the voice of William S. Burroughs. There are also some introductory comments by Hintz, who is using the first of the two generations of Buddha Machines created by the China-based duo FM3. (The image associated with this post isn’t entirely accurate, as Hintz mentions that his Buddha Machine is orange.)

The KUSF site has them as two separate streams, but they’re shown here in this interface as one playlist, so it’ll play for two hours in a row (or you can flip back and forth between the two parts using the little arrows):

[audio:http://kusfarchives.com/Music/KUSF%2003.08.09%206-8%20PM%201st%20Hour%20Spotlight%20Buddha%20Box%20by%20FM3%20DJ%20Cactus.mp3,http://kusfarchives.com/Music/KUSF%2003.08.09%206-8%20PM%202nd%20Hour%20Spotlight%20Buddha%20Box%20by%20FM3%20DJ%20Cactus.mp3|titles=”Spotlight Buddha Box (Part 1 of 2)”,”Spotlight Buddha Box (Part 2 of 2)”|artists=DJ Cactus,DJ Cactus]

What’s been noticeable as time has passed since the machine’s initial commercial release is how different settings highlight different aspects of the devices — how a given environment influences the Buddha Machine’s sound. This is partially the result, no doubt, of a low-budget production process, which results in slight variations between individual devices, but more than anything it’s a testament to the FM3 duo’s sound-design ingenuity, which involves brief loops whose ambient properties are just as capable of being subsumed by a given listening situation as they are of subsuming it — sounds that are just fragile enough that they’re easily, if subtly, altered by whatever technology mediates their presentation.

More on the station at kusf.org. Visit Hintz online at myspace.com/danielhintz and danielhintz.com.