Solo Cajun Triangle MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The New York Times’s music critic Jon Pareles wasn’t joking when he wrote up an album of solo triangle this past Sunday. Christine Balfa Plays the Triangle is exactly that, a baker’s dozen of cajun classics played on nothing other than a bent piece of metal. One full track is available for free download, a willfully monotonous “The Balfa Waltz,” in which the triangle, closely mic’d, has the metallic resonance of a distant cowbell (MP3). On that track, there’s also some yelping punctuating the goings-on, a kind of half-mumbled hog call. It’s rhythm, pure and simple. The persistence of the triangle is downright trance-inducing, and worth a listen.

[audio:http://www.valcourrecords.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/The_Balfa_Waltz.mp3|titles=”The Balfa Waltz”|artists=Christine Balfa]

As for the releasing label, Valcour, it’s unclear if it’s doing this as a joke or not. The write-up at the label’s website, valcourrecords.com, describes the CD as “the perfect gag gift,” but an appended note by musician Dirk Powell, for all its deadpan delivery, has a ring of truth to it. He writes:

    An undeniable need to express the sounds she heard around her without limitation — mama stirring coush coush in the pan, cowbells tinkling as the herd came back in for the night, daddy grinding the school bus gears in the morning — became the dominating force in her life. This CD realizes, at long last, her vision of liberation for the instrument. Unfettered by melodic or harmonic content, she can finally tell her story, and the story of her people, to the world.

It may all be a joke of sorts, but I for one eagerly await the remixes. I couldn’t help but think of Balfa’s spartan triangle while listening to the lonesome waveform that gets transformed over the course of the Brian Biggs track I posted about yesterday (disquiet.com).

site maintenance / MP3s Now Playable

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This has been a long time coming, but I finally added some code to Disquiet.com that allows MP3s to be played within given posts. You can try it right here:

[audio:http://www.antipop.net/audio/ForCorners/07.mp3|titles=”Fat Sal”|artists=Diego Bernal]

That little interface above will play one of my favorite recent Disquiet Downstream subjects, the crackling, static-encrusted, Satie-esque instrumental hip-hop of “Fat Sal” by Diego Bernal.

One other splendid thing about this audio player is it can create playlists of multiple MP3s in one single interface. Below are three great Buddha Machine remixes, by Kill Ugly Radio, Aymeric de Tapol with François Martig, and MediaSlinger. Note the little arrows that allow you to move backward and forward between cuts:

[audio:http://uglyradio.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/buhdda-piano-triad.mp3,http://www.adozen.org/releases/adz007/%5Badz007%5D-03-nord_est_-_ijslandgnol.mp3,http://www.mediaslinger.com/blogAudio/buddhabox.mp3|titles=”Buddha Piano Triad”,”Ijslandgnol”,”Tired Buddha”|artists=Kill Ugly Radio,Aymeric de Tapol and François Martig,MediaSlinger]

All the posts on the front page of the site currently have this code implemented. I’m not going to go back through 13 years of posts to add the tags. I know there are some ways to implement this automatically, with other audio-player plugins, but after testing a bunch of them, I went with one that is elegant, simple, and takes care of exactly what’s needed. And I’ll continue to provide direct links to the MP3s, for downloading purposes.

Well, not all the posts on the front page of the site have the code implemented. The plugin player only works with linkable MP3s — so FLACs, WAVs, etc. will not work with it. Nor will MP3s (or any other source) archived within, say, a ZIP or RAR file. Still, the vast majority of legally freely circulating music on the Internet is in the MP3 format, so this doesn’t seem like a deal-breaker.

By the way, more on Diego Bernal, “Fat Sal,” and the album on which it appears in the February 16 disquiet.com entry. And more on that trio of Buddha Machine remixes at Kill Ugly Radio, Tapol/Martig, and MediaSlinger.

As for the audio-player plug-in, it is by developer Martin Laine, and it’s available for free at wpaudioplayer.com.

Mr. Biggs’s Dancing Waveform (Via Soundcloud)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The website dancerobotdance.com is a public spot for the music of Brian Biggs, the great illustrator (Shredderman; Dear Julia,) and a good friend; he drew some music-related comics I edited back in my Pulse! magazine days. He was also a participant in the Brian Eno/David Byrne remix project I curated, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet (at archive.org). The “Dance Robot, Dance” site is built on the soundcloud.com web platform, a Berlin-based service that is fast becoming a kind of WordPress/Tumblr for audio exhibitionists. It’s a place where musicians, often for whom music is something of a side project, can share their work. Thanks to its community tools, it’s even closer to LiveJournal than to WordPress, but more on that in a moment.

My favorite of Biggs’s first batch of uploads is “Wawaraw,” the track’s title being onomatopoeia for what it sounds like. It’s little more than a waveform going through some transformations, and it clocks in at barely a minute and a half, but it’s a crystalline little audio experiment that’s endlessly listenable. The first 40 seconds are just this wave, which speeds and slows (you can virtually see the oscillator), until it hits a steady rhythm. A proper beat kicks in, matching the pace of the wave — and then the fun starts, as Biggs cuts and splices and mutes (among other actions) the wave itself, which in turn becomes a bouncy melodic line. The simplicity of the concept, combined with the verve of the result, brings to mind a sound check by the band Underworld.

What appears below is a window into Biggs’s Soundcloud-powered music site. The interface, which is embeddable (I guess that’s self-evident), just like a YouTube or Vimeo video, allows for downloading, sharing, and playing. It also displays a visualization of the track:

Soundcloud’s a useful platform. Like the more text-oriented self-publishing tools (WordPress, Tumblr, LiveJournal), it provides a turnkey solution with easy personalization. As for embedding, the above code dropped in without any editing on my part. (I did add a “padding-bottom” element for spacing, but it wasn’t essential, and I edited the song-attribution text a tad.) The downloadable file is a sizable WAV file, but the player itself seems to contain a well-compressed MP3, produced by Soundcloud to reduce the bandwidth demands. (The same is true of the great freesound.org website’s player.) This link should go to that file within the interface-wrapper: MP3. But if it doesn’t, just enjoy the downloadable and streamable versions listed above.

As for Soundcloud’s community tools, that’s where it really gets interesting. In addition to the dancerobotdance.com URL, there’s a soundcloud.com/dance-robot-dance page, which shows whom on the service Biggs is following, and who’s following him. As with MySpace, it’s a closed community, to the extent that it doesn’t, currently, allow for integration of “followers” outside the universe of Soundcloud-powered sites, but should the service reach a profitable threshold (there are tiered payment plans for “pro” users), it could blossom into a place for not just shared music, but for dispersed, asynchronous collaboration.

Visit Brian Biggs’s home page at mrbiggs.com, which houses not only his illustrations but some additional music (on the Noise page). Among other things, Biggs has done numerous posters for concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Below is one of my favorites:

It’s pretty much superfluous to include this MP3 player in this post, since the embedded Soundcloud widget above should suffice, but for consistency’s sake, here it is:

[audio:http://media.soundcloud.com/stream/ZI0c6JoxMa3a?track=wawaraw&color=00b6ff&auto_play=false&show_comments=true&consumer_key=sc_player|titles=”Wawaraw”|artists=Brian Biggs]

Diego Bernal’s Old-School Hip-Hop MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Nineteen tasty tracks built from snatches of melodrama and semi-forgotten pop make up For Corners, a new album from San Antonio, Texas-based Diego Bernal. This is truly old-school hip-hop, with loops shorter than a goldfish’s memory, and beats as taut as a piano wire. Much of it is crowd-pleasing party music, like the reconstituted disco of “Velcro Flow” (MP3) and the cop-show braggadocio of “Bring It On Home” (MP3).

But there’s plenty of subtlety here, like the swelling soul of “Fat Sal” (MP3), which brings to mind Luke Vibert’s Throbbing Pouch (recorded as Wagon Christ), and the ’80s b-boy celebration that is “MC Rakim Cool Kane and the DJ Furious Boyz Crew” (MP3), the title for which suggests much of the source material. Get the full set at antipop.net. More on Bernal at myspace.com/diegobernalmusic.

“Bring It On Home” was released earlier as a single, featuring a giddy virtual B-side remix by Mexicans With Guns, and available for free download (via a nifty Flash-based interface) at exponential.bandcamp.com.

PS: I’m testing a little audio plugin (see below), which allows for playing the MP3 files within a given post. Many readers have requested such a thing over the years, and this is an attempt to do it somewhat elegantly. It isn’t a perfect solution, as the plugin only works with MP3s, and I occasionally link to WAV files, to FLACs, etc. If you have any thoughts on the implementation, lemme know at [email protected]. I’m going to leave the MP3s links in the articles, because I’m more of a “downloader” than I am a “streamer,” though I do appreciate the opportunity to read and listen at the same time.

[audio:http://www.antipop.net/audio/ForCorners/17.mp3|titles=”Velcro Flow”|artists=Diego Bernal] [audio:http://www.antipop.net/audio/ForCorners/03.mp3|titles=”Bring It On Home”|artists=Diego Bernal] [audio:http://www.antipop.net/audio/ForCorners/07.mp3|titles=”Fat Sal”|artists=Diego Bernal] [audio:http://www.antipop.net/audio/ForCorners/13.mp3|titles=“MC Rakim Cool Kane and the DJ Furious Boyz Crew”|artists=Diego Bernal]

Image of the Week: Otomo’s Feedback

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This weekend, the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University is hosting a two-day interdisciplinary conference on sound, titled Listening In, Feeding Back. And on Friday, February 13, 2009, several participants gave a concert. Below is Tokyo-based musician Otomo Yoshihide in a solo performance:

Also performing that evening were Alvin Lucier and, as a trio, James Fei, Kato Hideki, and Nakamura Toshimaru. The above photo is reproduced courtesy of Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net, an amazing resource of photo documentation of outward bound music in the New York City area.

See the full set of related photos at downtownmusic.net. More on the conference at ethnocenter.org.