Half-hour Robert Henke MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It may be my imagination, but it seems that with each new “Free Track of the Month” that Robert Henke posts at his website, his descriptive abilities get stronger, more precise, and more illuminating. The latest download is an uncut version of the track “Plankton,” which originally appeared, in shorter form, on his Floating.Point collection in 1997. The Floating.Point version was just under 10 minutes in length, while this take is three times that. Over the course of its half hour, the piece, an effort in abstract and often beatless techno, gets muddier and thicker; there’s a kind of glistening scintillate overlay early on, though by the end a certain inherent insistence has been revelead, and what sounded like aural fairy dust has become a kind of treble grind.

Here’s a bit of what Henke says of the track himself:

The toy which made this track possible was our Boss RSD-10 sampling delay, a small digital delay unit that made it possible to feed back its output to the input. Unlike in modern delays, the feedback was realized analog, so each repetition of the signal went thru the (cheap) analog digital converter, into the memory and back to the digital to analog converters. As a result, the delays get more and more deconstructed and noisier with each repetition. This effect can be clearly heard in the last 10 minutes of the take. The unit also allows to change the delay time by continuosly changing the sample rate, which also alters the pitch.

The two altering chords in the background sounds like being created with a Prophet VS. I must just have gotten it at that time, maybe even at exactly that day… The other sounds including the flickering and the alien-like backgrounds come from the SY 77, manipulated by Gerhard Behles, while I operated the Boss delay, the other effects, and the mixing desk.

There’s additional information, including technical specifications, at monolake.de. Henke posts free MP3s monthly, but with a strict stipulation that no one link directly to the file, only to the webpage itself.

One interesting note about attribution. The Floating.Point album was released as a Robert Henke album, not a Monolake album — back then, Monolake was a collaboration between Henke and Behles, the latter of whom went on to found the audio software company Ableton, where Henke also works. Despite that distinction between “Henke” music and “Monolake” music, apparenlty Behles also worked on this “Henke” track.

Early 1970s India Field-Recording MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.