Alternative Sheet Music Techniques at New Langton Arts (San Franciso)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is just one of the many pieces of avant-garde sheet music on display as part of the Every Sound You Can Imagine exhibit at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. The show opened last night, February 5, and will be on display through March 28:

That is one of the panels depicting Morton Feldman‘s “Intersection 2” (1951). More coverage, including additional photos, will follow shortly.

Also on display is work by William Basinski, Cornelius Cardew, Alvin Curran, Philip Glass, Ryoji Ikeda, Joan Jeanrenaud, György Ligeti, Christian Marclay, Barry McGee, Phill Niblock, Carsten Nikolai, Raster-Noton, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Steve Roden, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, Stephen Vitiello, Iannis Xenakis, and others. The show was curated by Christoph Cox and Robert Shimshak, and was organized and previously exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. More details at newlangtonarts.org.

Dusty Drone MP3s from Eluder

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a texture to all four tracks of Eluder‘s Drift (Archaic Horizon) that suggests the music was copied — surreptitiously, perhaps — from some rare, dusty old vinyl record. The static in the background is at times as loud as anything in the foreground. This static, this noise, is a scratchy, rough-hewn thing, immediately summoning mental images of fuzz-encrusted turntable needles and fingerprint-coated LPs. From an initial listen to Drift, you’d think you’d discovered some ur-drone, some ancient (well, in pop-music terms) album that predates today’s drone-rich ambient-music community not just by decades, but by several significant generations of recording technology.

Truth be told, though, all four of these pieces are of recent vintage. The vinyl texture is just a foundation, above which Eluder places elegiac tones, soothing embraces like the organ modulations of “Drift With Me” (MP3), which eventually peaks out like some brilliant sun coming over a distant mountain, and the more atonal “Moon Plea” (MP3), a thick pool of gorgeous dissonances.

Get the full set of four MP3s at archaichorizon.com. More info on Eluder (aka Boise, Idaho-based Patrick Benolkin) at myspace.com/eludist.

Dubby 8-Bit MP3s from Simon Mattison

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If ever there were two lo-fi sounds destined to meet, they would be dub and 8-bit. The former is the Jamaica-born body of studio techniques that put groove-heavy soul music through an echo chamber, elevating percussion elements into vapor trails of hallucinogenic effects. In dub, a simple snare drum can open up like a flower, and rim shot can ricochet like a SuperBall.

The latter is a nostalgia-infused computer music, one in which the rudimentary sounds of early arcade games are employed to make blippy, often happy-go-lucky tunes.

The realms collide on Simon Mattison‘s Leaves, a six-track collection on the MP3 Death netlabel (mp3death.us). Just listen to “Deltoid,” which has the bleeping spunk of Pac Man in heat; it’s kicked up a notch above average 8-bit goofiness thanks to a swaying, sideways-motion rhythm (MP3). And the dub feel is nowhere as pervasive as on “Ovate,” in which flanging repetition into extended fade-outs gives some needed heft to the bippity melodic line (MP3). Get the full set at archive.org. (Via twentygoto10.com.)

Laptop-Enabled Improvs from Diatribes (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The group Diatribes mixes percussion, piano, and software in the interest of sonic exploration. As heard on their recent Insubordinations netlabel release, they take an approach firmly rooted in the clanky, fluid, theoretically rigorous yet sonically elastic techniques of European free improvisation. Witness Cyril Bondi (drums, percussions) and D’Incise (laptop, objects) mixing it up with a pianist (Jacques Demierre on three of the album’s five tracks, Johann Bourquenez on the other two): “Chants Évadés” (MP3) is all fragmented pianism and round-the-outside drumming, but shot through with wavering synthesized sound, a groggy drone that holds the whole thing together. “Et Puis Partir,” in contrast, is more willfully haphazard, less about anything closely approximating song, and more a matter of noise for its own intrinsic sake, each instrumentalist locating small sounds, from hazy upper-register playing by Demierre, to tribal taunts from Bondi (MP3). The introduction of D’Incise’s laptop into the sound world of free improv makes perfect sense, given free improvisation’s ever-present focus on using familiar instruments to make all manner of unfamiliar noises. The laptop expands that palette considerably, and at no point in these sets stands out as inappropriate or jarring. All five tracks were recorded live, the Demierre ones in Geneva in May 2008, the Bourquenez in Lausanne in September 2008. Get the full set at insubordinations.net. More on D’Incise at dincise.net.

1970s MP3 Documents of Tangerine Dream, Live

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

William Gibson once noted that the future is already here, but just isn’t evenly distributed yet. William Faulkner noted, further back, that the past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past. On the web, what’s past isn’t necessarily readily accessible, but when it is, broad distribution happens quickly. The Internet is filling up with documentation of times gone by, case in point a pair of deeply trippy Tangerine Dream concert recordings from 1976. Reportedly recorded on February 9 of that year, the two MP3s showcase the group when it was a keyboard trio of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann. If you tend to avoid Tangerine Dream, do understand that there is here none of the turbo-charged momentum or florid exhibitionism that led to the pervasive negative associations with the group’s name, virtually making it a synonym for everything wrong with synthesized pop music. No, this is heady stuff, rarely grounded in any sort of melody — it’s all free-flowing, an analog-synth stream of consciousness. [Update June 20, 2009: There had been a link here to the Zip files, which were hosted elsewhere, but I received what appeared to be an email from Edgar Froese of Tangerine Dream (an attempt to reply got an error message) that appeared to be asking me to delete the link, so I’ve done so.] By coincidence, the concert was recorded in Brussels, as was the live Amon Tobin show posted last week here (disquiet.com). (Found via justanothergarden.blogspot.com, via synthtopia.com.)