The band Growing earlier this year released All the Way, among its tracks one they opted to distribute via free download. Titled “Green Flag” (MP3), it’s the piece with which the album opens, a raucous drone, solidly in the Glenn Branca / Lou Reed school, and layered with increasingly extravagant flanging madness, eventually encompassing heavily machine-altered vocals, or what sound like they once were emitted by a human mouth. As one listens to “Green Flag” take shape, and to that shape change, it becomes difficult to track the means by which this duo found itself in this sonic space, so far from the rangy, generally pastoral, earlier efforts. But that trajectory is less important that the thoroughness of Growing’s approach to noise here. With repeated listens, the past becomes past, and the subject of concentration becomes that melodic material that struggles to make itself heard, to come into focus, as “Green Flag” comes to a close. More information at the releasing record label, Social Registry (thesocialregistry.com).
Have a Very 8-Bit Christmas (MP3s)
Tis the season for blippy, retro fun. The 8-bit mode has infected everything from toys to fashion, so why not seasonal favorites? Enter Doctor Octoroc‘s 8-Bit Jesus: Classic Christmas Songs in the Style of Classic NES Games, a compilation of 18 Christmas songs rendered like something likely to emanate from an arcade game in which Santa has to deliver presents via ever more complicated chimneys. The song titles hint at the provenance of the sounds: “Have Yourself a Final Little Fantasy” (MP3), “Joy to Commando” (MP3), “Silent Knight Man” (MP3), etc. There’s also beautiful cover art, in the colorful pixel mode, by Jude Buffum (judebuffum.wordpress.com). Get the full release at doctoroctoroc.com, and, due to the set’s popularity, various mirror sites (located via twitter.com/ario).
Free Jonathan Coleclough Performance MP3
The musician and “sound organizer” Jonathan Coleclough takes small sounds and amplifies them. As a result of his careful, artful alchemy, it isn’t just the sounds that are expanded, but the spaces within the sounds. The Rare Frequency podcast (rarefrequency.com/radio) recently posted a live performance by Coleclough, recorded November 20, 2008, for WZBC (wzbc.org) while he was in Boston, Massachusetts, for the Brainwaves Festival. His instrumentation is reported to have consisted of laptop, fishing twine, and an oud (MP3). The work is a plaintive, spectral journey, marked by watery waves of sound, string resonances, and casual percussive elements. The strings undergo the most striking transformation over the course of the piece, moving from rough textures to a chiming presence. It’s a bit hard to imagine in advance that something as common and utilitarian as twine might have sonic complexities as rich as those evidenced here, but such is the wonder of Coleclough’s exploratory art.
More on Coleclough at his website, coleclough.plus.com.
Tag Clouds: Ambient, Noise, Plurality
Finally got around to cleaning up the tags that are attributed to this site’s posts. The “tags” are terms such as “turntablism,” “classical,” “gadget,” and the ever popular “free,” which help categorize the coverage.
There had been a lot of redundancy, due to sloppiness over the years. Several categories were listed in both the singular and the plural (gadget, gadgets; field recording, field recordings; score, scores; etc.). Those now all have been reduced to the singular.
I removed the “electro-acoustic” tag, as it seems in retrospect like it could refer to just about anything on this site. That’s the reason, by the way, there’s no post tagged “ambient” here: everything should, by definition, fit that descriptor. I may do the same with “noise” down the road. It’s intended to refer to outright noise, but noise arguably is in the ear of the beholder, and I’m not sure relative volume/amplitude should be a requisite when employing the term.
As a result of this effort, the “tag cloud” on this site’s archive page (disquiet.com/disquiet-archives) is now more useful.
Oh, and for the record, as of today, the tags for the site are as follows, in alphabetical order: classical, comics, copyleft, field-recording, film, forum-digger, free, gadget, i-hop, installation, live-performance, netlabel, noise, remix, science-fiction, score, site-maintenance, software, sound-art, turntablism, TV, video, video-game, voice.
Image of the Week: Sky Eavesdropper
From artist Steve Roden‘s deep bag of sound-related esoterica:
Writes Roden, “a detail from a 1940’s ‘linen’ postcard (so called because of the texture of the paper), of some military men with an incredible listening device to hear approaching airplanes. i suppose it is the equivalent of a telescope for ears.” More at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com.