Quote of the Week: Matmos, Post-Experimentation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From an excellent interview, dated October 1, by Molly Sheridan with the duo Matmos, aka M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel:

MCS: What we do is not experimental music in the sense of a lot of people’s work where it’s, “We did the experiment; these are the results.” We want to make something that’s listenable music.

DD: And to us that’s pop music. Pop music and noise texture might be the formula for what we’re doing, in that we don’t have any squeamishness about atonality and obnoxious, disgusting, or unpleasant texture, but we have the kind of ears that like bass lines and snare parts and high hat rhythms and the sort of architecture of pop. I want both.

Read the full piece at newmusicbox.org.

Static-on-Speed MP3 from Hourglass Drops

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s rare for static buzzing to get as downright rollicking as “Adrenaline State,” a recent single by Hourglass Drops (aka N. Pavlov) on the tibprod.com netlabel. The track has all the hallmarks of white-noise music-making: the between-channels fuzziness, the hints of radio-interference chatter, and that crackling pre-digital warmth that practically smells of frayed wiring. But it’s also got momentum. None of that call-signal Zen for Hourglass Drops; this is static on speed, a static composed of whirring cycles of sound that carry you along with them (MP3). It’s balanced by the more sedate and vaguely tuneful “Sleep State,” which has an almost digeridoo-like quality (MP3). More on the musician at hourglassdrops.com.

40-Year-Old Trevor Wishart Archival MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The British label Paradigm has re-released Machine, Trevor Wishart‘s almost 40-year-old mix of automation and spoken texts. The label’s website, stalk.net/paradigm, has posted a three-minute excerpt of one of the album’s five pieces, in which the ratatatat of gears and the ringing of bells mix with vocals clips and a torrent of water. It’s a collage wonder (MP3), one in which the (then) newness of the technical operations inherent in the sound editing is self-evident in the free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness nature of the goings-on. Wishart locates an eerie parallel between the routine of mechanization and the monotony of human speech, placing the recording on a continuum between, say, Charlie Chaplin and Pink Floyd. More on Wishart (born 1946) at his website, trevorwishart.co.uk.

Anton’s Tinkling MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Piop EP credited to Anton on the bumpfoot.net netlabel is comprised of the sort of nursery-rhyme electronic pop melodies that bring to mind the less aggressive work by Aphex Twin. Of the set’s seven tracks, especially promising are the second (“Sinetune I,” MP3), its lead tune plucked out as if on a cellphone keypad, each note rendered in a slightly sour envelope, and the fourth (“Betchgard Morning,” MP3), which is enlivened by twinkling little trinkets that seem almost random in their patternlessness. Get the full set at bumpfoot.net.

Bumpfoot’s two syllables apparently distinguish its two sonic realms. According to the site’s “about” page, “bump” is for “Techno, House,” and “foot” is for “Ambient, IDM, Electro Pops, etc.” By those guidelines, Anton’s Piop fits squarely in the “foot” category.

Burn After Listening / New Carter Burwell MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As with No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers called upon Carter Burwell to score its quasi-thriller comedy, Burn After Reading. While the movie plays the genre for laughs, Burwell, their cinematic foil, plays it straight. He’s said he looked for inspiration in Jerry Goldsmith’s percussion-oriented score to the laugh-free zone that was Seven Days in May, directed by the late great John Frankenheimer. In other words, where No Country was extremely silent (more details at disquiet.com), Burn After Reading is loud and present.

That comment from Burwell appears on his website, carterburwell.com, where for each score he’s completed he provides sample music files and explanatory text. Among the Burn After Reading examples is “Earth Zoom In,” an intense minute and a half of barreling, doom-laden percussion (MP3). Also available from the Burwell site are two other percussive Burn pieces, each of which layers something into the mix, chanting n “Night Running” and Philip Glass-style strings on “How Is This Possible.”

One graphic-design side note: the poster for Burn After Reading shares with that of Burwell’s preceding film-score work, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, the classic Saul Bass-style text treatments from The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Vertigo and countless other Hollywood classics — all films with excellent soundtracks, suggesting something of a music-typography correlation.