Kikapu Netlabel Closes with Mikronesia MP3 Album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest Kikapu netlabel release, Mikronesia‘s vxvii, is one of its best ever — nine tracks of Satie-esque electronica. The Mikronesia set is also Kikapu’s last. Kikapu was founded in 2001 by Brad Mitchell, who records as Pocka. In the intervening years, the label has released, for free download, over 100 singles, EPs, and albums. The Mikronesia set is the label’s 109th.

While Kikapu wasn’t the first (Thinner and Monotonik, just to name two, opened for business in the late 1990s), it has been a steady and substantial presence on the netlabel scene. Mitchell has much to be proud of, and a search for “kikapu” on this site will bring up several recommended recordings, as well as a Mitchell interview from 2004 (“Shawnee for Laptop”). Since its recent closing, the kikapu.com website has been elegantly reduced to a single page, linking from a list of the releases to the individual pages at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org) where the music is stored.

The Mikronesia collection serves as a fitting endpoint for the label, which has long emphasized gentle atmospherics, field recordings, and light glitch. (Kikapu also hosted its share of melodic, beat-driven electronica, which is virtually absent on this album.) The comparison to Satie is particularly strong in the watery piano on the opening piece, “She Brings” (MP3), but it’s reinforced throughout due to an approach by which every track, no matter how loudly it is played, seeps into the background. Haunting voices are filtered through bells and reverb on “Hibersea” (MP3), and other high points include the textural white noise of “Moke Cene” (MP3) and the insectoid field recordings worked into “Part” (MP3). Get the full set at archive.org. More on Mikronesia, aka Michael McDermott, at mikronesia.com.

Stellar 7-Track Instrumental Hip-Hop EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The seven-song EP Senses Overloaded, from the instrumental hip-hop DJ team of Lamont and 2tall, opens with the exotic: a slinky track that uses as its base a romantic bit of koto, the string instrument of Asian antiquity. The cut is titled “Perpetual Patterns” (MP3) and it’s one of the few here to include a vocal. Still, that vocal is cut and sliced and folded back upon itself thanks to edits that bring to mind a Houston-style screwed & chopped remix — that is, one in which the syllables, while remaining recognizable, come to be more about sound than meaning.

Other highlights include “First Inspiration” (MP3), which opens like mid-period Beastie Boys, all whistle samples and low-slung organ riffs, and the title track (MP3), which extends the downtempo mode even further, with strings, some taut drum loops, and deep acoustic bass lines.

An included remix of the title track (MP3) doesn’t so much break the original’s beats as it shoots them through with elegant fissures; the remix emphasizes the quieter elements and adds some spectral turntablism. Get the whole set for free at sensesoverloaded.com (warning: the site loads slowly). More info at the duo’s myspace.com/sensesoverloaded page.

Lucier-in-a-Shower MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Here’s an aquatic take on Alvin Lucier’s classic “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening.” Over on the freesound.iua.upf.edu website — a community where users share field recordings –  an audio document of a shower has expanded into a collaborative series of recordings, each displaying how the original shower sounds when a recording of it is played in other bathrooms.

The effort may seem mundane or peculiar, or both, but it’s very much in the tradition of Lucier’s explorations of how enclosed spaces have their own intrinsic sonic properties, and of how sound degrades with successive reproductions.

One of the many great things about the Freesound site is that every sound object is complemented by a slew of data, including a visualization of the sound. Those images are reproduced below, with links to a compressed MP3 version of each iteration of the experiment. For a higher-resolution recording, click through to the given entry’s page. Each track is about 47 seconds long. Any descriptive text within quotation marks was supplied by the given file’s poster.

1. The original recording sounds as much like rain shower as it does a shower stall — it’s a gentle if insistent precipitation (MP3, page): “Mono recording of a shower running in a bathroom. Oktava MC-012 cardioid capsule straight to hardisk.” It was uploaded by Freesound contributor Hell’s Sound Guy.

All the subsequent mixes are by different Freesound regulars. I’m not sure that when Hell’s Sound Guy turned on his tape recorder he realized how many people were going to jump into his shower.

2. The second version has a much higher treble end, like water against a plastic sheet (MP3, page): “Second recording of the shower sound. This time played and recorded in an old stone house’s bathroom in Girona, Spain. Played through a couple of studio monitors and recorded with a minidisc and a stereo microphone on october 16th 2006.” It was posted by Freesounder LG.

3. The third is noisier still, more noise than water (MP3, page): “Second recording of the shower sound. This time played and recorded in an old stone house’s bathroom in Girona, Spain. Played through a couple of studio monitors and recorded with a minidisc and a stereo microphone on october 16th 2006.” Posted by bebops. (Bebops and LG may be the same person using different accounts.)

4. The fourth has a lulling quality (MP3, page): “Another recording in the shower-in-shower experiment. The bathroom this time is a very small 2 meters by 2 meters bathroom with a half-size bath tub. The recording of a recording of a recording of a recording of a shower.” It was posted by Bram — that’s Bram de Jong, founder of the Freesound website.

5. The above renditions of the shower are all part of the Freesound community’s “Remix! tree” (freesound.iua.upf.edu). There’s also a rendition, by morendaman, that doesn’t appear in the remix tree (MP3, page): “Part of the ‘shower in the shower’ experiment. The 3rd re-recording. Recorded with an rode nt4.” The morendaman file’s title, which includes the phrase “broken speaker,” may explain the resulting music’s rusty, minimal-techno feel.

Quote of the Week: Artemiev’s Solaris

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From composer Edward Artemiev‘s notebook as he worked on the score to director Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, released in 1972:

The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kinds of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identify out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises.

The quote is from the recently published book Edward Artemiev’s Musical Universe (Vagrius), written by Tatiana Yegorova. Yegorova is the head of the Department of Research of Modern Culture at the Moscow Institute of Social and Cultural Studies. The source of the Tarkovsky film was the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, which was later re-adapted by director Steven Soderbergh, with a score by Cliff Martinez.

Jim Nollman’s Music for Cigarettes MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The score to Jim Nollman‘s “Cigarette Piece” is a classic example of instruction-music, a work in which the score is a set of rules, not of musical notes on ruled paper. The piece was performed live on KPFA radio in 1973, and a recording of that show was uploaded to the Other Minds catalog at archive.org earlier this month. The instructions are as follows:

The piece is scored for ten cigarette smokers and each night’s performance lasted as long as it takes each of them to finish one cigarette. In this performance one smoker whirls a noisemaker for the duration that smoke is in his lungs. In addition three other smokers each ring a bell for the length of time each one inhales smoke. Three others performers exhale against suspended wind chimes, while the final three sound a gong at each time they flick an ash.

The sound of breathing, of smoking, might be somewhere in the deep background, but the music as heard in the recording is all dispersed bells, chimes, and an enveloping gong against the semi-mechanical rotations of the noisemaker (MP3). The result could easily be taken for a meditative ritual — which, in some respects, is what smoking is in the first place.