To celebrate the 100th anniversary this past September of the birth of famed sound tinkerer, the Japanese toy manufacturer Presspop, working with musician and artist Archer Prewitt, has released an collectible figurine of Raymond Scott:
Scott is pictured by a replica Clavivox, one of his many inventions, and the whole thing comes with a CD. More info at raymondscott.com and presspop.com, according to which, an earlier figure of Bob Moog is sold out. (Thanks for the tip, Mike.)
Two characters speak early on in Aetheric Mechanics, a new graphic novella by writer Warren Ellis and illustrator Gianluca Pagliarani:
Q: What’s it like in space?
A: It sings. The vibrations from the spin of the drive arms, sir, and the motion of the heat through the casements to space, which is very cold. The whole ship sings quietly, like a gently struck tuning fork. The Earth and the sea, sir, they have a mighty number of things to recommend themselves to me. But once you’ve heard the song of a spaceship, you’d never be anything but a Royal Naval outer serviceman.
An “outer serviceman” is an astronaut in this alternate history sci-fi story. Elsewhere in Aetheric Mechanics, two other characters — steampunk visions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson — discuss a “spring heeled jack,” but they’re talking about the British mythological figure, not the electronic-music duo.
More at the website of the publisher, avatarpress.com, and the author, warrenellis.com.
There’s an aviary in the rotunda of the City Hall of San Francisco, and water features, too. Well, at least it sounds that way, and will through May 8. That’s the last day of Bill Fontana‘s “Spiraling Echoes, an installation that uses echolocative technology to beam specific sounds to specific spots in the public space. The sounds, which include tweety birdsong and watery glushing, as well as the ring-ring of cable car bells, are all taken from the San Francisco soundscape.
Up at his website, resoundings.org, Fontana has provided two means by which to experience the sounds of “Spiraling Echoes” from afar. There’s a stereo mix of the four-channel projection (MP3):
As well as a field recording of the rotunda floor, and the mix of its inherent ambient noise and the projected sounds (MP3):
As the latter recording shows, the sounds are subtly applied, and can even be subsumed by the goings-on within City Hall. That was certainly the case this afternoon when, in between having lunch in the Mission and catching The Watchmen a few blocks north of the Civic Center, I stopped into City Hall to experience Fontana’s “Spiraling Echoes” first-hand. It was difficult at best to tease out Fontana’s sounds given all the civic-wedding-related festivities going on. I’ll go back on a quieter day, to check it out again.
One important facet of Fontana’s installation is that the sounds aren’t still. The sonic projections move through the rotunda, thanks to motorized systems such as the one pictured below. (Photo courtesy of the Fontana website.)
More information at sfacgallery.org, and in an interview with Fontana by Jesse Hamlin of the San Francisco Chronicle at sfgate.com. The article describes the piece’s source material as follows: “it’s a shifting wash of ambient sounds that subtly evokes the Bay Area: nautical bells and red-winged blackbirds, foghorns, skylarks, the melodious flow of underwater currents recorded near the Farallon Islands, streetcar bells and bits of speech from a post-election Proposition 8 protest.”
Browsing the shelves at the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco this past Wednesday. More info at archive.org. (This is a test post, to see if I can upload images from my phone.)
The “AM” that serves as the title of Justin Carter‘s Buddha Machine remix compilation isn’t related to the AM-radio quality that the device emanates, both in terms of cheap-plastic substance and rattly audio. It has to do with the opening hours of the day. Each of the nine tracks on Carter’s AM is named, in sequence, from “1AM” (modulating loops given to deep echo and frog-like gurgles, MP3) through “9AM” (a taut repetition that slowly veers into rich white noise, MP3). And while each takes as its starting point a droning, lo-fi loop from the Buddha Machine (the surprise-hit sound-art device by the China-based duo FM3), that’s not all that’s in Carter’s toolbox. He also brings electric guitar and, as he puts it, “various synths,” into the mix, though all for textural, rather than melodic, purposes.
Listened to in sequence here, the full length of AM is 25:44:
Get the full set, in compressions up to 320kbps, at archive.org. For reference, this album is based on version 1, not version 2 of the Buddha Machine.
