The Noisejihad netlabel is back in action, returning with uncharacteristic quietude. Its most recent release, a beautiful trio of live performances by soundscape guitarist Aidan Baker, is arguably the label’s most peaceful offering yet. Noisejihad’s stock in trade has long been, true to its name, destructive recordings along the lines of a sonic equivalent of Sherman’s March — pure scorched audio. Recorded on April 24 of this year, this live Baker concert, quite the contrary, ekes out a splendid haze, from slow-build dawn-break stateliness (MP3), to spacey trance effects with echoes of early sci-fi movie scores (MP3), to, at its best, a gently percussive sway of pizzicato latticework and deeply undulating motion (MP3). The latter is a prime example of a fine instrumentalist making music from elements (notably casually brushed strings) that other musicians might ignore or even consider mistakes. More details on Baker at his web page, aidanbaker.org. The netlabel’s base of operations is noisejihad.dk/netlabel.
Four Color Sound MP3 from Stephen Vitiello
The annual process of selecting a Disquiet Downstream entry for September 11, anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, always brings to mind one thing — the eerily prescient sound recordings by Stephen Vitiello, who had an artist’s residence in the World Trade Center in 1999 for six months and who produced, as part of his time there, recordings of the buildings swaying in the wind. The motion of such enormous structures is imperceptible to the naked eye, but to Vitiello’s microphones and recording equipment, that give is all too real — and, due to the events of 9/11, those tapes serve as a ghostly memorial.
Up on Vitiello’s website, stephenvitiello.com, is audio of a National Public Radio show (MP3) that reported on his residency at what became “Ground Zero,” and the sound art he produced during his tenure there. The photo of that WTC work (below, from his website) was shot by Johnna MacArthur. The windows double as images of the towers’s parallel structure, and Vitiello’s delicately attached microphones are in view:
As unbelievable as it might seem at times of intense tragedy, life goes on, as does art. I’ve mentioned Vitiello’s WTC recordings in the past, and some of his other work, so for today check out the most recent audio on his website, “Green” (MP3), which was recorded as part of an exhibit, titled Four Color Sound, he had at DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, with lighting design by Jeremy Choate. The exhibit ran from May 9 through June 14 of this year. The following image of the exhibit is borrowed from the DiverseWorks website, diverseworks.org:
The brief DiverseWorks write-up on Four Color Sound refers to Vitiello’s penchant for “installations that transform incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes,” and likens his effort in the gallery to “a virtual meditation chamber.” The sound on the eight-minute “Green” suggests a helicopter emerging over an insect-laden field, the microsonic crackle of buglife giving way to a much larger flying object. A full-length recording of audio from Four Color Sound is due out soon as a commercial release.
Houston radio KUHF 88.7 FM Houston interviewed Vitiello on June 9, audio of which is available for download (MP3) and streaming at the station’s website, kuhf.org. Vitiello explains that some of the source audio in Four Color Sound was recorded by him in Brazilian forests. In the interview with KUHF, he says, “In some cases I’ve made electronics sound like birds, but in some cases I’ve made birds sound like electronics.”
MP3s of Jessica Rylan’s Little Blue Boy
Musician Jessica Rylan‘s enterprise Flower Electronics makes small-brew noisemakers, including the Little Blue Boy, pictured below.
The Little Blue Boy contains a handcrafted assortment of electronics, including two voltage-controlled oscillators, which get a work out on several sample MP3s located at the company’s website, flowerelectronics.com. A “testdrive” (MP3) by Tara Rogers (aka Analog Tara, safety-valve.org) is all rapidly pinging waves, while “lbb1” (MP3) by Cody Ranaldo (myspace.com/codyranaldo, son of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo) is a thorough noisefest. And Dwight Anderson‘s “Small High” (MP3), which appears to be processing guitar noise, rambles through string scrapes, drowsy doppler shenanigans, and a wealth of colorful feedback. More on Rylan at her irfp.net website.
Eggshell-Sourced MP3s
The image to the left plays with perception of scale. That circular saw diving headlong into the white dome is not, in fact, a saw at all, but a tiny exposed contact microphone whose sharp metallic edge has cleanly sliced through a halved eggshell. What that mic, along with others like it, located in such brittle environs is exposed in four MP3s posted in a LiveJournal entry by Steve Burnett (aka Subscape Annex, at badger.livejournal.com), one of the participants in a recent sound-art festival, The Sound of Re-use, held in Australia.
Two of the tracks are inherently abrasive, less compositions than topological tours of the objects, all rough surface and grainy detail. Burnett states that he deemed these too noisy for his performance at the festival, the munchy rhythms of “Shards 2: Steam Time” (MP3) and the scratchy activity of “Shards 3: Steam End of Time” (MP3), the latter of which rises into a violent whorl. The two tracks that made Burnett’s fest set list are, indeed, less antic, more exploratory, and both benefit from a healthy does of echo, which no doubt smooths the edges inherent in the source material. “Shards 1: Monks of Dagon” (MP3) rides a dubby mantra, which provides a foundation for a rumbling scrim of scraping noises. And “Shards 4: Garuda Wakes” (MP3) opens with the ebb and flow of breaking waves, only to become a hall of sonically reflective mirrors, like some nightmare sequence from Dr. Who or The Prisoner.
More details on the festival at soundoffailure.com. Other festival participants included Ian Andrews, Nick Wishart, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark and Caroline Huf.
Joy of Hexadecimal MP3
There are specialty netlabels, and then there are truly fixated netlabels. There are, in other words, those netlabels that select to focus on a clearly named aesthetic (noisejihad.dk/netlabel), on field recordings (wanderingear.com), or on individual songs (ambulatore.com/yoyo), for example. And then there is Hexawe (hexawe.net), the releases on which have just one simple thing in common: they’re all made on a specific piece of software, the Little Pig Tracker (littlegptracker.com), which is designed to work on game platforms but comes in other builds as well, including for Debian-based systems, as well as Mac- and Windows-based machines.
A “tracker” is about as simple a sequencer there can be, locating musical tidbits along a basic time line. In Little Pig Tracker, all the instructions are handled in a user interface that looks like it powered the payroll at the DMV during a previous gas crisis. How bare bones and old-school is Little Pig Tracker? Well, just for starters, it counts in hexadecimal. See the screenshot below, which is borrowed from the software’s instructional wiki, wiki.littlegptracker.com:
The most recent entry from the Hexawe netlabel as of this writing is “You Put a Smile on My Face” (MP3), a lo-fi, lo-rez bit of lovingly routinized dance music by sm0hm (more at sm0hm.blogspot.com). It’s all club vibes, pixelated hand claps, and zoned out beats. “You Put a Smile on My Face” is release #21 from Hexawe, but true to the label’s name, that’s in hexadecimal (counting backwards it follows on releases #20, #1F, #1D, etc.).