Can something be searing and sedate at the same time? More to the point, can some single thing, a single slice of sound, be mistaken from a distance just as easily as one of those or the other? It’s certainly the case for “Molotov” (MP3), a free track off the new Bass Communion album, Molotov and Haze, the very title of which touches on the inherent duality between fire and cool, cacophony and calm. (It was released recently on Important Records.) The two and a half minutes of “Molotov” could be a bonfire of epic proportions, vast charges of energy unleashed in stop motion and melting everything in their path — or it could be the comforting undertone of some slow natural process, a cozy lull that fills your room with an artful rendering of white noise. The deciding factor may merely be a matter of volume. Turned up high, “Molotov” is a wanton force, akin to the sludge rock of the band Earth. Turned down low, it’s a subtle background pattern, a quiet composition that flavors your room without filling it. Bass Communion is a moniker of Steve Wilson. More info on the full release at importantrecords.com. More on Wilson at swhq.co.uk, where he describes the record as “Multi-layered (and sometimes very noisy) pieces generated from guitar.”
Jon Wozencroft Field Recordings MP3 from Touch
For his entry in the Touch Radio series, its 33rd, Jon Wozencroft has compiled 15 archival recordings, ranging from train sounds he taped for a Neville Brody exhibition, to overheard conversation, to rain and birdsong, to a field recording of the coast of France mixed with a bit of cassette surface noise (MP3). The majority are real-world recordings, but there is the odd bit of analog-synth humor. Some of the samples receive a modicum of post-production, notably the looping of brief moments.
The “field” sounds heard here are somehow both delicate and earthy, refined and raw. They’re generally simple noises, the aural equivalent of casual snapshots, and it may require a certain amount of attention to discern individual elements. There is a surfeit of silence, within which a handful of footsteps, or a passing car, or a dash of thunder, might suddenly and briefly make its presence heard. Wozencroft has also made available a digital document summarizing the provenance of the various source material (PDF). More info at touchradio.org.uk.
Image of the Week: Rock Around the Clock
Beastie Boys‘s “So What’cha Want,” the Cure‘s “Close to Me,” the Jackson 5‘s “ABC”: DJ playlist from a high-school reunion? No, just three of the nearly three dozen samples from which Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) constructed the mash-up “What It’s All About.” Below is a chart from the September 2008 issue of Wired magazine, showing a dissection of all the samples in the song. The article is credited to Angela Watercutter. The chart bears no attribution.
Read the full piece at wired.com.
Quote of the Week: Radio Free Korea
This Baruch Gottlieb, director and co-founder of SFX Seoul, as quoted in The Korea Times on August 20:
Radio is a presence in our lives. It’s kind of like a soundtrack to our lives. Something that you don’t know quite what to expect from, something always in the background and usually it is something that you don’t pay attention to directly. … That’s something similar to the way sound art is. Sound art is not an artwork that you can focus on. It is always affected by other sounds. There are a lot of parallels to that with radio. Radio is a medium for presenting sound art.
The occasion of the article (koreatimes.co.kr) is the Sound Effects Seoul Radio 2008 festival, which runs through August 26 More info at sfx.yonsei.ac.kr. Gottlieb, ,professor of Media Art at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication and Arts and a media/sound artist, co-founded SFX Seoul in 2006 with Ji Yoon Yang, a curator.
Buddha Machine-Infused Tapol/Martig MP3s
This delicate collaboration between Aymeric de Tapol & François Martig has extended periods of held tones, like a phone call cut off or a distant foghorn. There’s one such moment early in the three-track EP’s final cut (“Ijslandgnol,” MP3) and on first listen it may seem static, but in fact it slowly — ever so slowly — gets louder, rising as a result in intensity, before more natural sounds emerge, small rustlings that suddenly emphasize the foreground. Such is the music on Nord/Est, which ranges from microsonic simplicity to lush, evocative drones, more like soundtracks to mundane journeys than like songs. Among the duo’s listed resources are computers, analog synthesizers and the Buddha Machine, the latter of which is less immediately recognizable here than in any previous re-use I’m familiar with. Get the full set at adozen.org, where it is the netlabel’s seventh release.