Disquiet – Page 1310 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Eno/Byrne Re-Mix: Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet

March 3, 2009October 3, 2010 / By Marc Weidenbaum

About Disquiet.com’s “Listen?”:

Welcome to Disquiet.com’s streaming-audio service. The interface immediately below will stream in sequence the 12-track compilation album Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, a project I curated in September 2006 of remixes of tracks off the Brian Eno and David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which was then celebrating its 25th anniversary. To promote the rerelease, Eno and Byrne had embraced open-source music-making, and uploaded to a website, bush-of-ghosts.com/remix, the constituent parts of two tracks off My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: “Help Me Somebody,”a pulsating bit of ersatz African juju, and “A Secret Life,”a more languorous stretch of elegiac atmospherics, and made them available for remixing. I asked a dozen musicians to participate, and this compilation was the result of that request. Since Byrne is currently touring in tribute to his revived association with Brian Eno, which also included the album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, this seemed like a good time to make this set available for streaming.

There’s additional information at disquiet.com/bushofghosts, and the project is housed at archive.org. You can flip back and forth through the playlist using the small arrows.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-01-AllThatFall.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-02-RoddySchrock.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-03-Pocka.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-04-StephaneLeonard.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-05-djmorsanek.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-06-MrBiggs.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-07-johnkannenberg.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-08-MyFun.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-09-MarkRushton.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-10-Prehab.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-11-EgoResponseTechnician.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet/OLitBoD-12-doogie.mp3|titles=”Help Me Help Me”,”If You Make Your Bed in Heaven”,”Leftover Secrets to Tell”,”Secret Life Remix”,”The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)”,”Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)”,”Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)”,”Somebody Help Us”,”Hey”,”My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts”,”Not Enough Africa”,”Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)”|artists=AllThatFall,Roddy Schrock,Pocka,Stephane Leonard,(dj) morsanek,MrBiggs,john kannenberg,My Fun,Mark Rushton,Prehab,Ego Response Technician,doogie]

The duration of this album of remixes is 56:23.

Playlist Guide:

Please note that most of the links below in this post will result in pop-ups, so as not to interrupt the streaming audio.



Track  1. (Duration: 02:59.) "Help Me Help Me" by AllThatFall [Musician: allthatfall.com.]

Track  2. (Duration: 03:48.) "If You Make Your Bed in Heaven" by Roddy Schrock [Musician: fundamentallysound.org.]

Track  3. (Duration: 05:04.) "Leftover Secrets to Tell" by Pocka

Track  4. (Duration: 08:30.) "Secret Life Remix" by Stephane Leonard [Musician: stephaneleonard.net.]

Track  5. (Duration: 05:25.) "The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)" by (dj) morsanek [Musician: morsanek.blogspot.com.]

Track  6. (Duration: 06:01.) "Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)" by MrBiggs [Musician: mrbiggs.com, dancerobotdance.com.]

Track  7. (Duration: 03:52.) "Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)" by john kannenberg [Musician: johnkannenberg.com.]

Track  8. (Duration: 04:08.) "Somebody Help Us" by My Fun [Musician: thelandof.org.]

Track  9. (Duration: 02:37.) "Hey" by Mark Rushton [Musician: markrushton.com.]

Track 10. (Duration: 07:37.) "My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts" by Prehab [Musician: myspace.com/prehab.]

Track 11. (Duration: 04:28.) "Not Enough Africa" by Ego Response Technician [Musician: xtrasauce.com.]

Track 12. (Duration: 01:54.) "Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)" by doogie [Musician: fluxed.net.]


I plan to do these mixes every month or so. Special thanks to boon/Brian Scott (boondesign.com), who provided the album's "cover."

Two Japanese Drones from Saito Koji (MP3s)

March 2, 2009March 2, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The two drones that comprise the equal halves of Saito Koji‘s Time / Line have this low-level buzz, this saw-tooth subtext, that keeps them from being ever fully capable of rendering themselves invisible. That isn’t to diminish the drone-ness of the pieces, and of the album as a whole. These are drones, thick, rich drones, with the heft of a milkshake and the gravitas of a sermon. They’re complementary more than similar, “Time” (MP3) starting off all ethereal-cloud-scape, before wandering into regressive loops of slightly off-kilter waveforms, and “Line” (MP3) just treble-y enough to veer toward a kind of subtle pain threshold.

The links above will go directly to the downloads for the individual MP3s, but because the two tracks, each at just over half an hour in length, make for a solid hour of listening, for this post’s streaming feature, I’m putting them together into one stream. (Note, though, that the little arrows allow you to move back and forth between the tracks.)

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/rb053/01-Time.mp3,http://www.archive.org/download/rb053/02-Line.mp3|titles=”Time”,”Line”|artists=Saito Koji,Saito Koji]

Additional information at the releasing netlabel, restingbell.net.

Images of the Week: Mind the Guggenheim

March 1, 2009February 28, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Two images used to promote the ongoing Guggenheim exhibit The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860”“1989.

This is a photo of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela and fellow performers, used in a promotional email for the show:

And this is a still from a video on the museum website, at guggenheim.org/third-mind, showing Paul Kos‘s “The Sound of Ice Melting,” which focuses eight microphones on two 25-pound blocks of ice:

A series of performances and conversatios associated with the exhibit will feature Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Robert Wilson, Merce Cunningham, and others.

The caption for the Young/Zazeela photo reads, in full: “La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Dream House, 1962”“present. La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and The Just Alap Raga Ensemble performing Raga Sundara, ektal vilampit khayal by La Monte Young in Raga Yaman Kalyan in a setting of Imagic Light, June 27, 2008. Dream House: Seven + Eight Years of Sound and Light, 275 Church Street, New York. Photo: Jung Hee Choi, Â© Jung Hee Choi 2008.”

Whole Lotta Talkin’ Goin’ On

February 28, 2009 / By Marc Weidenbaum

As of this morning, uploaded 16 interviews to Disquiet.com, including what appears to be now the earliest interview on the site, one with Randy Greif, speaking in 1992 on the occasion of his reworkings of Alice in Wonderland (“The Mad Sampler”).

There are also two new (well, old, but newly re-uploaded) interviews with Amon Tobin (“Bric House,” from 1997, and “Evolution & Permutation,” from 1998), in addition to the one that’s already been up, and one new DJ Krush interview (“Krush Groove”), from 1996, in addition to the Krush interview that’s been on the site for some time now.

Also newly made available again are interviews with these musicians, in rough chronological order:

Matt Black (of Coldcut; “Pump Up the HTML,” 1997)

Patrick Carpenter (of DJ Food, performing a post-mortem on a David Byrne remix; “Anatomy of a Remix,” 1997)

Bogdan Raczynski (“Turning Japanese,” 1999)

Martin Gretschmann (of Console; “Rocket Man,” 2001)

Chad Mossholder (of Twine; “Splices That Bind,” 2002)

Garry Cobain (of Future Sound of London; “What Is Is,” 2002)

And, finally, the heads of six record labels, some of whom are also musicians. Seven, if you count Ninja Tune’s Matt Black, above, but then again, who doesn’t run a record label these days?

Moonshine’s Steven Levy (“Digital Libations,” 1997)

Extreme’s Roger Richards (“Extreme Measures,” 1997)

Asphodel’s Erik Gilbert (“Electronic Flora,” 1997)

Carpark’s Todd Hyman (“U.S. Robotics, Part 1,” 2002)

Projekt’s Sam Rosenthal (“U.S. Robotics, Part 2,” 2002)

Foundry’s Michael Bentley (“U.S. Robotics, Part 3,” 2002)

The publication dates associated with some of the articles are rough estimations. All these articles had been on Disquiet.com in the past, but had to be re-uploaded after the site was moved to WordPress on July 26, 2007 (disquiet.com). Previous to that, it had been, since December 1996, published in HTML by hand. Before that, material that later became Disquiet.com appeared on several generic URLs, hosted at places like “netcom” and “calweb.” Those were the days.

With these interviews up, the post-WordPress-upgrade cleanup is pretty much complete. There’s a backlog of small news items, which I’ll get to in the near future.

There are also older, and newer, interviews yet to be published here, including a brief Hank Roberts piece from 1988 or 1989. More to come.