The great wired-world guru Marshall McLuhan commented that artists are the antennae of the human race. That is perhaps nowhere as close to literally true as with artists who use radio and field recordings in their art, and the phrase will linger in your mind when listening to a recent pair of files made available at archive.org (MP3, MP3). Recorded by Jean-Louis Derche during travels in India back in 1971, the subjects include temple music and street sounds — the latter in particular putting a world distant in time, space, and culture just outside your window, and just inside your headphones. On occasion the recordings pause so that Derche can talk about his experience with Other Minds founder and out-radio personality Charles Amirkhanian.
MP3 of “Wordless Music” from Cepia
A live half-hour Cepia set recorded at the Wordless Music Series in Manhattan back on November 28, 2007, is true to its name — not the “wordless” part, because in fact voices are heard low down in the mix, but the Cepia part. The track is deeply imbued with a sense of nostalgia, from the water-logged amusement-park melody with which it opens, to the funereal goth-pop through which it proceeds. Even as the performance builds a rhythm and, slowly, begins to speed up, it has a maudlin quality — a touch of echo, a feedback-enhanced drum beat, a minor-key melody — that connects the decaying audio with a concern for memory and reflection. (Speaking of reflection, those sublimated voices are, most likely, emanating from the audience.)
More on Cepia, aka Minneapolis-based Huntley Miller, at cepiamusic.com, and on the Wordless Music Series at wordlessmusic.org.
MP3s Damaged by Sega Genesis
In the world of 8bit music there are retro tunes and there are reanimated tunes.
Retro tunes are newly recorded pop melodies that sound like they’d been programmed toward the end of the Carter administration to provide background music to simple video games.
Reanimated tunes are punk-damaged efforts in noisy hindsight. Numerous musicians today infuse the rudimentary wave forms of early video-game music with a kind of hardcore energy and aesthetic — they take Pac-Man out of his familiar maze and stick him in a sadomasochistic dungeon from one of the Saw movies. The goofy, electroid tunes become the score to a pixelated horrorshow.
What’s remarkable about the 16 brief songs on the free EP 16 Bits from Hell is that they’re reanimated-style tunes created with nothing more than the retro equipment on which they were intended to be played — no drum’n’bass presets, no techno samples, no modern-day software effects. Working under the name Sega Death, the duo of Lucas Aldrich (sickmode.org) and Ian (dramacore.com, ehafh.com) have stumbled on a neat defect (or, to their and my ears, a sonic Easter egg worth trumpeting) in the old gaming system called Sega Genesis. (In Sega’s native Japan the system was named Mega Drive.) It turns out that if you yank a game cartridge out of the Genesis just as it starts to emit a sound, and then pop in another cartridge, the resulting music will range from unintended multiple layers to utter cacophony that could easily be mistaken for nihilistic contemporary chiptune electronica.
The 16 tracks are available as one 20-megabyte file (ZIP) and include broken beats, slurry melodies, and utterly obliterated childhood memories. The track titles are part of the fun, especially the ones that hint at Lucas and Ian’s compositional method: “99 Cartridges Later,” “We Just Sat There,” “Cheat Codes and Blunt Smoke.”
A video that Ian has posted at youtube.com shows how 16 Bits was constructed. When he says, “Me and a friend discovered something very interesting,” there’s something in his tone that’s downright conspiratorial, like he and his buddy had found shards of alien artifacts inside the nearly 20-year-old Japanese technology. In fact, what they discovered was an unintentional chaos engine. (Thanks to C. Reider of vuzhmusic.com for having directed me to this release.)
Larry Johnson Gets Vozme MP3 Religion
A week ago, I posted an MP3 I’d created in a matter of seconds at vozme.com, a free service that takes any text and transforms it into an audio file (disquiet.com). Shortly thereafter I received an email from Larry Johnson, who’d taken a small chunk of the Bible, fed it into vozme.com, funked it up in the freeware Audacity, and added a high-pitched background noise he’d nicked from freesound.iua.upf.edu. By a few days after that, Johnson had fine-tuned his first piece, added two more similarly constructed audio tracks, and released them at archive.org as the mini-EP Vozme Reads Religious Works.
“Genesis 3:19” (MP3) starts with a familiar phrase, before the sub”“Hal 9000 voice multiplies to become a robot choir, and then an ear-ringing noise (that’s the freesound.iua.upf.edu sample) pushes it over the edge. “Isaiah 57:20-21” (MP3) gets into the rhythm of the spoken word, looping the sound so that the phrases become a kind of motor. And “Job 10:15” (MP3) pushes the syllabic overlays to the limit, until they take on the attributes of a cushion of air. In each, especially the Isaiah and the Job, what’s remarkable is that the voices never sound like static samples that have been cut up after the fact; they sound like they’re transforming in real time.
Heavy Rotation: Lou Reed’s Zen Machine, Snöleoparden’s Child’s Play, a sci-fi reprieve, more
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. In fact, the album, Hudson River Wind Meditations (Sound True), collects music that Reed has explained he first recorded entirely for himself — “as an adjunct to meditation, T’ai Chi, bodywork, and as music to play in the background of life — to replace the everyday cacophony with new and ordered sounds of an unpredictable nature.” Heard in sequence, “Move Your Heart” has the sing-songy ebb and flow of an everyday drone, rocking back and forth like a small boat, while “Find Your Note” adds ringing tones that suggest a prayer bowl was sourced. Then comes “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance),” which is comprised of the white noise of field recordings. And then the whole thing closes on “Wind Coda,” which begins with a refrain from “Move Your Heart,” and soon moves to elements from “Find Your Note” and adds in some of the atmospheric material from “Hudson River Wind (Blend the Ambiance).” That last piece serves as a kind of meta-coda, a form of compositional reflection applied to inherently reflective music. More info at soundstrue.com.
(2) A Xylophone’s Spots: It’s true that Snöleoparden‘s self-titled album, due for March 3 release on the Rump label, isn’t as inherently electronic as Rump’s usual fare, but with its emphasis on a child’s xylophone and its communal, folk-core vibe, it’s right at home. The opening track, helpfully titled “Nr. 1,” layers sleepytime mallet-work above an increasingly squelchy noisemaker. “Xylofon” is a multitrack wonder, all pointillist glee, like if Steve Reich had written music for Sesame Street; “Lillecykel” employs the same tool set, but toward a more dissonant and quasi-ethnomusicological end. With a nasal whine in the background and cabal of guitars in the foreground, “Water Puppet Theatre” is what T-Rex might sound like if it were still recording today. And those are just a few of the album’s 11 tracks. Snöleoparden is a pseudonym for Jonas Stampe, of the groups Mofus and Badun. More info at rump-recordings.dk.
(3) A Quiet Legend: The great movie-score composer James Newton Howard can fill modern cineplex with the ethereal and the bombastic. Those are his minimal-techno tone poems in Michael Mann’s Collateral and Tony Gilroy’s recent directorial debut, Michael Clayton. But he’s also capable of potting up the orchestral and ethnic percussion, matching the music’s histrionics to the starring actors’s wattage, as he has of late in Blood Diamond, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and I Am Legend, with Will Smith — not to mention the old-school romanticism he’s brought to M. Night Shyamalan’s films. Howard’s scores, like the movies they accompany, have different audiences — and, as the ongoing awards season suggests, different admirers. Tellingly, his Blood Diamond work was nominated for a Grammy, while Clayton is up for an Oscar. Minus the introspection of the latter or the globalization topicality of the former, I Am Legend (Varèse Sarabande) is unlikely to attract many nominations. But fans of Howard’s less volatile scores shouldn’t pass it by. The cue titled “I’m Sorry” strikes the perfect balance between melodic infusion required in a Hollywood blockbuster and the hazy sound design to which the composer seems more naturally inclined. In it, a piano part is echoed and amplified by a string ensemble, each note setting off low-key undulations in the orchestration, and later the piano gives way to an elegiac horn. More info at varesesarabande.com.
(4) Test Tube, Baby: The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks to which I keep returning most often is the title track off The Door by Multi-Panel (aka Dutch musician Ludo Maas), on the Test Tube netlabel. The song is a mere shimmer of a recording, but it’s lent some texture thanks to a heavily processed vocal sample.(MP3, disquiet.com). More info at monocromatica.com/netlabel.