You have to work for this free MP3. The Warp Records “micro-site” for the new Harmonic 313 (aka the long-running, moniker-happy, and prolific Mark Pritchard) EP is a set of color-coded word problems, after the fifth level of which you are rewarded with a free MP3, “Problem 7.” Check it out at harmonic313.com/wordproblems. If you imagine a bunch of pixel-graphic characters having their own little after-hours party inside the shell of an old arcade game, then this is what it would sound like. The track opens at the end of a video game, with some sudden bursts followed by an 8-bit death march, and then the tune itself kicks in. The track is great, a slow-stepping bit of beat-driven nostalgia, equal parts Timbaland and Super Mario. (Thanks for the tip, Shawn.)
Videos by Blaylock, Lavitt at Michael Rosenthal (San Francisco)
There are, among the wall-hung instructional art, and the decorative ceramic hands, and the collage constructions, and the ambiguous paintings, two small televisions on two small pedestals at the Michael Rosenthal Gallery on Valencia Street in San Francisco.
The current group show at Rosenthal is titled The Big Three, and the two small televisions each loop a brief video, one by Lauren Lavitt and one by Sara Blaylock.
Both videos show kaleidoscopic imagery, and both are backed by a melange of quiet music (each TV has a pair of headphones), and both televisions are set against a wall on which a fixed image gives some representation of what is on the screen. The two photographs directly below, borrowed from the Rosenthal Gallery site, show the Blaylock (top) and Lavitt (bottom), in situ:
Neither framed image is a true still. The Lavitt shows cut ups of what appears to be a female figure in various acrobatic poses, the face unclear, and the body diced as if it had been pieced together from other images — the body equivalent of a half-finished ransom note. On the small screen, similar segments of the human form travel with too much viscosity, with too much affect, and too rapidly, to be as discernible as the same ones on the wall, but to see them both — the video and the framed print — in the same place is to know they are of similar origin. The title of the work is “Blackout Treatment 1.2” (and while it’s of no consequence, I can’t help but mention that I believe it’s the first piece of art I’ve seen this year that is dated 2009). This is a detail of the still image:
The Blaylock wall print is an over-sized depiction of rural and city imagery, the placid — all alpine hillsides and somnolent wildlife — trumping the urban, which is marked by physically diminished apartments and straining satellite antennae. The colors are garish, and lovely for their garishness, the digital equivalent of paint-by-numbers. The televised image — like the Lavitt, it is delivered via DVD — appears to pan around the large-scale image, focusing on elements, and drawing attention to what, on the wall, might be subsumed in the breadth of landscape. The title of the work is “A Land That I Heard Of” (2008).
The sound in the Lavitt is soothing and epic — a mix, the artist informed me later via email, of Eog, Sigur Ros, Terry Riley, and some sounds of her own creation (she plays in a band with the excellent name Jacked Up Blazer, which is performing at the Silver Lake Lounge in Los Angeles on January 20). Any of those elements would have provided a suitable salve to the confusion and heightened visual activity in Lavitt’s work, but the combination is certainly stronger, and more elusive, than any individual item would have been. Both the video and the sound that accompanies it are built from small things.
The sound in the Blaylock is, likewise, a combination of pre-existing elements. According to Blaylock (again, thanks to email correspondence), there’s some droning music by Phil Kline (the composer, perhaps best known for his annual, global sound-art event, Unsilent Night), and a variety of field recordings sourced from freesound.org, a website that will be familiar to anyone who’s a regular visitor to Disquiet.com. There are more than a half dozen such samples in all, ranging from wind, to a Japanese festival, to a chorus, to a tabla credited to RHumphries (who has, by coincidence, twice been listed in the Disquiet Downstream section of recommended free MP3 files). As with the Lavitt, Blaylock’s video benefits from a somewhat lulling audio accompaniment, though in the case of “A Land That I Heard Of” — especially in how the very title brings listening to the foreground — the realism of those field recordings can’t help but be heard as a framing construct, a further critique, of the artificial beauty examined in the video.
If you’re not in San Francisco, you can see Blaylock’s video at her website, sarablaylock.com. Lavitt’s website is laurenlavitt.com. Visit the gallery’s site at rosenthalgallery.com. The exhibit opened on January 10, and it runs through February 11.
One-Song Mash-Ups from Y?Arcka (MP3s)
It’s a hip-hop spin on the old zen koan: What’s the sound of a one-song mashup? Y?Arcka (formerly Young Architect) seeks to answer it on a free, 11-track album, titled The Appreciation SP, he’s released via his myspace.com blog. Each piece takes select sections of various soulful tracks (including work by Donald Byrd, the Commodores, Fela, J Dilla, and Dolemite, among others), generally not the “greatest riff” elements, but little side bits, which he then works into songs of their own.
Perhaps because the source material is the best known of what’s made available here, the Jackson 5 entry may be the most exemplary. On Y?Arcka’s “Come, Teach,” the Jackson 5‘s “ABC” is reduced to the Jackson 2: Jackie and Jermaine from the original song’s bridge, trading back and forth for just over a minute. By removing the most familiar elements — the “ABC” chorus, and the precocious genius of the young Michael Jackson’s high-pitched voice — Y?Arcka has unearthed the heavier song within. The persistent bass is the star of this cut. “Come, Teach” is The Appreciation SP‘s shortest track, and as with many of them, you’ll just want to set it on loop.
The Sly & the Family Stone edit, “Out of School,” functions similarly, lifting Freddie Stone‘s yelped “out of school” from “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and spinning from it a song unto itself, clipping bits to add some phrasing — and, if I’m not mistaken, slowing it a tad, which lowers the pitch and deepens the sound. The manner in which Y?Arcka repeats small phrases is reminiscent of how a scratched CD, a dust-clogged turntable needle, and a distracted mind can each, in their own way, fixate on a specific sound.
This link should go directly to the Zip archive of the full batch: zshare.net. If not, follow the links from the myspace.com listed above. Y?Arcka’s criminally under-appreciated album Un-Herd Vol. 1 came out on Ropedope last May (ropeadope.com).
Heavy Rotation: Monolake’s Balloons, Baraclough Live Noise
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) Monolake’s Ballooning Sound-Art Career: The man behind Monolake, which is to say the man behind much of what came to be known as minimal techno, is Robert Henke. And like any solo artist who inhabits a pseudonym, Henke is of two minds. Broadly speaking, the more beat-driven work that emanates from his studio is attributed to Monolake, and the more atmospheric gets filed under his own, given name. But as with anyone accustomed to multiple personalities, two modes of cultural participation haven’t proven sufficient for Henke, who has in recent years been expanding beyond electronic music — and into sound art.
The latest document of his gallery and museum work defines itself precisely as a document. It is titled Atom/Document, and it consist of nine tracks that exemplify the sorts of sounds one might hear if one attends the performance installation work, Atom, which he produced with artist Christopher Bauder. Atom is an eight-by-eight grid of helium balloons, each containing an LED, and each with its motion controlled by a computer. Henke’s music follows and pushes the balloons according a set of self-constraining rules: Anything percussive must trigger an LED, for example.
Of course, this is not a DVD, but a CD — just the sound, though what sound it is. “[First_Contact]” has repetitive piano parts amid clinking percussion; “[_Convex]” verges into that subset of white noise that’s either freeway or surf, or both; and “[_Flicker],” just to point to one more example, has the expansive dynamism of the final moments of some grand Hollywood epic, all wavering rumbles, but the drama is restrained by a sense that whatever is occurring is doing so at some significant distance — if the remixed metal of Godflesh perfected the “avalanche on pause,” then these are thunderstorms at a remove.
Speaking of acknowledged distance, each track on Atom/Document has brackets as part of the title, as if to say, “This is just a part of the whole.” For that’s what it is — just the sound, not the vision. And while this is a Henke, not a Monolake, outing, there is plenty of rhythm. It seems that Henke has found a percussive palette all his own, less echoed, less subterranean than Monolake’s, more alive with precision and counterpoint.
There are beautiful still shots (along with a video) of Atom in action at monolake.de, such as this one, of Henke and Bauder at play in the field of their making:
(2.) Quiet Noise from the UK: The choice Disquiet Downstream entry of last week is an in-studio recording by Baraclough, the UK-based trio of Paul de Casparis, Dale Cornish, and Eddie Nuttall. Together they build noisy latticeworks from little more than squiggly rumbles, choked static, rhythmic shorthand, gray drones, and other modest noises (disquiet.com).
Image of the Week: Kusmirowski’s Studio
This is UHER.C, a recording studio constructed by artist Robert Kusmirowski inside the Guido Costa gallery in Turino, Italy (November 8, 2008 – February 28, 2009).
From the Costa site:
Mechanics and electronics are the ideal borders of artistic experimentation. … This could be November 1971, but also a summer day in 1967, in the company of Laura Spiegel; that could also be Hawkwind at the mixing desk, or a youthful Brian Eno in a raging hormonal storm, more drag-queen that sculptor of sound than those we get nowadays.
Or, it could be none of all that.
These are machines that simply talk to each other and only about each other.
UHER.C gets its name for phonetic, geographic and historical reasons (respectively Hertz; UHER a mountain region in the environs of Lubin; and Mr UHER.C, a celebrated researcher into the physics of sound).
It is an extraordinary sculpture with a thousand souls, keyboard, oscillators, microphones, amplifiers, recording devices, cables, mysterious objects, pure inventions, sounds, voices and lights. It is a living sculpture that now and again unplugs one of its souls, caged in its circuits for decades, or it gives a voice to other souls born especially for the occasion. Kusmirowski is both the father and slave of UHER.C, at once squashed by the monolithic power of its technology and seduced by its complexity.
UHER.C is a classical, archaic sculpture that has gone berserk: it is both the nightmarish and joyous side of machine.
At the end of the exhibition a limited edition LP will be produced of music by Robert Kusmirowski
More at guidocostaprojects.com, which has an English-language page. Biographical material on the artist at culture.pl. (Via a thoroughly illustrated post at we-make-money-not-art.com.)