The new album on the Highpoint Lowlife label, Magnetism, That Electricity, is less a various-artists collection than it is a set of four individual EPs — one on each side of a double vinyl set (also available via DRM-free digital retail and as a CDR). Two free full-song downloads on the label’s website, highpointlowlife.com, provide enticing entry points. Mandelbrot Set, as represented by “Astronomy and Allied Sciences 1b,” moves from a monastic drone to a thick slurry, from a pulsing swath of minimalism to a layered embrace, packed with variously paced strings, like some Gypsy ritual (MP3). “The Ratio,” by the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, is plucky and rhythmic to the swampy vibe of Mandelbrot — a blippy confection of phaser sound effects, stereoscopic synth tones, and virtual-waterdrop percussion (MP3). Also featured on the album are tracks from Fisk Industries and Village Orchestra.
Image of the Week: Byrne’s Squawking Floor
Art student turned pop musician turned sound artist David Byrne takes the idea of flooring the pedal literally with an upcoming installation:
Byrne describes the piece at journal.davidbyrne.com:
I’m currently working on a piece for a benefit supporting the local arts organization, The Kitchen. The event, scheduled for May 21st at the Puck Building, will honor artist and DJ Christian Marclay. I like much of Marclay’s work, so my piece is sort of a tribute to him — or at least it’s fairly inspired by his work. My piece will be comprised of a kind of carpet of one hundred guitar pedals, which benefit attendees must walk on in order to enter the main dining and performance space. A guitar will be plugged into and run through all the pedals, and then into an amp. We’ve tested a portion of it to see if there are any unexpected problems and I was surprised to discover how well it works. Of course, the sounds are fairly random, and stepping on one or two of the distortion or fuzz pedals raises the screaming noise level pretty high, but that will be adjusted. Happily, some pedals will loop whatever is going on at the time of their activation, and so there will be constant sound changing all the time.
One thing Byrne is still sorting out: dealing with guests who wear heels.
Quote of the Week: Meta Rucker
This is from Rudy Rucker‘s recent novel, Postsingular:
But you have to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it’s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame.
The speaker is one Darlene, the proprietor of the store Metotem Metabooks, a “hangout for the Mission metanovelists” in the sci-fi-ified San Francisco, California, that is the setting for Rucker’s book. This San Francisco exists in a world rapidly, and only recently, transformed by the arrival of ubiquitous sentient technology. Darlene is speaking to one of the book’s main characters, a street urchin named Thuy, who had just proposed including in her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Wheenk, all of the meta-texts in Darlene’s shop — “to capture,” as Thuy puts it, “the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.” Darlene educates her on the value of judicious editing.
Postsingular was published by Tor in October of last year, and it is also available as a free download in various formats at rudyrucker.com/postsingular.
Live Greg Davis Drone MP3
The pastorally minded electronic musician Greg Davis played a show at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan back on April 30, and within days, on May 5, he’d posted news of a publicly available MP3 of the set. The recording opens with him welcoming the audience — “Feel free to get comfortable again, and sit on the floor, and, uh, you know, clear your mind, become one with the sound, all that” — and then venturing into a thick warble of a tone, one that changes ever so slowly over the course of its nearly half-hour life (MP3). The tone seems to expand in subtle increments, losing its density while it fills the room (or the space between your headphones) and edges into the higher regions of the audio spectrum. As it slowly fade, don’t fear — the live recording ends with no sudden shock of applause that might rattle your eardrums.
The performance was recorded during a tour of the East Coast with the trio Megafaun (myspace.com/megafaun). Davis, on his website (autumnrecords.net), recounts how he “got into some deep synth drones in some different spaces.”
Loren Chasse and Jason Honea MP3
The one free sample track off Music Heard Far Off by the Child Readers plays like a mixtape set on random. It opens with piercing, lo-fi accompaniment paired with a nu-folk vocal that’s buried in the mix (the album’s title couldn’t be more factually accurate), only to fade into a droney wisp of a sea shanty, replete with field recordings and bell-like scintillate. Then come deeply echoed elements of pop, and then a murky dub. The deeper the song, titled “Fortune (Incl. The Morningnight/A Hated Art),” gets into its three and a half minutes, the quicker the segments fly by, yet the slower the seeming overall pace (MP3). That incongruity is but one of the track’s mysteries. The Readers are Loren Chasse and Jason Honea. More details at softabuse.com.