Heavy Rotation: Lou Reed’s Zen Machine, Snöleoparden’s Child’s Play, a sci-fi reprieve, more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

Quote of the Week: Kitano’s Dragonflies

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From the opening story in the book Boy (Vertical), the newly published collection by Takeshi Kitano, who is best known in the United States as a filmmaker (Sonatine, Fireworks/Hana-Bi, Zatoichi):

Soft sunlight was pouring in through the classroom windows and dancing on the floors. Outside, red dragonflies were hopping between the top of the exercise bars, the drinking fountains, and the instrument shed.

It looked like someone had sprinkled musical notes all over the field. I rested my head on my hand and just took it all in.

That descriptive passage is from the story “The Champion in a Padded Kimono.” The book was published as Shonen by Shinchosha in Japan in 1987, two years before Kitano’s directorial debut, Violent Cop, and four years after his starring role in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. This new English-language edition, with a tremendous die-cut cover by graphic designer Chip Kidd, was translated by David James Karashima. More info at vertical-inc.com.

James Tenney Guitar MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s hard to keep track of the ever-expanding catalog at ubu.com, but among its “Recent Additions” is a slew of old Tellus cassette compilations. Tellus number 14, issued in 1986, was focused on just intonation and included recorded work by Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, John Bischoff (in a trio with Jim Norton and Tim Perkis) and others. One exemplary track is James Tenney‘s “Septet for Electric Guitars” (MP3), five or so minutes of multi-string activity that sounds like gentler, more introspective takes on what Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca were also up to at the time.

More details and related downloads at ubu.com, where a photo of Yoko Ono smiles down on all the sound-related pages.

Alireza Mashayekhi Iranian Electronica MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The biggest surprise in the music of Alireza Mashayekhi is that it hadn’t long ago planted itself in the sample repositories of illbient, dubstep, and adventurous hip-hop DJs. Last year the Sub Rosa label released Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006, a two-CD collection that focused on Mashayekhi’s recordings and those of Ata Ebtekar aka Sote. A few Mashayekhi tracks are part of a recent podcast from Resonance FM (MP3) and those pieces reveal Mashayekhi, born in 1940, as exactly the sort of musician the collective subconscious of electronic music wished existed. He melds the lessons of 20th-century Western classical forms (especially the emphasis on tonality) with Middle Eastern modal music and digital media. The result is an aural color field blending familiar elements that are rarely heard together. More info at resonancefm.com and at subrosa.net. (Also included in the podcast entry is an interview with artist Anahita Rezvani Paraava.)

Heavy Circuits

The lo-fi electronic musician Jamie Allen talks about hand-crafted circuitry, digital academe, and the beauty of the square wave.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the gallery and performance space Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, I was fortunate to catch a show of electronically mediated music, art, installations, and short films. Among the participants was a musician and tinkerer named Jamie Allen whose set-up was a revelation in its simplicity.

His instrument was a wooden wine crate filled with custom-made circuitry and six joystick-like levers. Allen called his tool circuitMusic, and it emitted a throbbing, old-school sound — the sort of sound that’s often called “feedback laden” when in fact it was more like he was exploring the feedback, simultaneously navigating and lending shape to the noise. (There is additional coverage of the event, including photos, in an August 2007 disquiet.com entry.)

The music got more abstract as his set went on, and Allen’s hand-crafted instrument provided a comforting focus throughout. Each of its six joysticks was paired with a single headlight on the front of the box. That trigger system, in a highly economical manner, provided helpful signals to the audience: visual orientation amid the increasingly self-obscuring sounds. In a world of ever more powerful technology, it was downright inspiring to experience the sort of communication that could be accomplished with a simple on-off switch.

It’s no surprise that Allen’s skills in communication in regard to electronics and electronic music are not limited to stage performances. He’s taught classes in such subjects as “Performing Technology,” “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” and “Sensor Workshop” at New York University and Pratt Institute. And after finishing up an early-2008 residency at Eyebeam in Manhattan (eyebeam.org), he’s relocating to Newcastle, England, to help start a new Masters program in Digital Arts with Atau Tanaka, formerly of Sony Paris. “The Masters,” he explained via email, “will be held in coordination with the Newcastle Culture Lab, headed up by Sally-Jane Norman.” (More info at ncl.ac.uk/culturelab.)

Allen took time recently to talk about the tool he played at Galapagos, the implications of musicians crafting their own instruments, the intersection of academia and the electronic arts, and the politics of 8bit music, among other things.

Marc Weidenbaum: When I saw you perform at Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, you used one machine for the performance, and it was something you’d designed yourself. I’m very interested in musical instruments created by musicians. Could you describe what it was and how it functioned?

Jamie Allen: The rig you saw is a piece called “circuitMusic.” It’s really very simple — it’s a set of square waves built with raw electronic components, inside an old wine box. I have a few ways of varying resistances in the circuit — photo-resistors, force-sensitive resistors, and regular old potentiometers. Each of the square waves is coupled to a set of very bright light-emitting diode arrays, such that whenever a new oscillator is thrown in, a light comes on. There are six sound elements, and six lights.

I really started this piece out of a frustration with the possibilities for improvisation in electronic music. I wanted something I could get lost in while performing. I wanted something that wasn’t just moving through a set of presets or known “fields”I had created prior to a show; circuitMusic often surprises me, as does the incredibly positive reaction I get to the simple on/off “visualization”it provides the audience.

Weidenbaum: You’ve taught courses related to electronic music at a variety of schools in and around Manhattan. I imagine these schools each has a different take on music and technology, and I was wondering what you’ve learned about different scholarly takes on the field.

Allen: The often surprising thing about music in academia is that the spectrum of motivations is really broad. There are many communities, viewpoints, conferences, styles, and philosophies represented. Coming to accept this as a cultural reality when I first became involved was a bit of a challenge for me, actually. I come out of playing in bands, in bars, etc., primarily for the rawness and fun of it — the blood-and-sweat school of music. So I came to computer electronic music with a kick-ass “let’s fucking do this thing”kind of motivation. I had a real problem accepting any motivation other than those that were a direct reaction to the lack of relevancy I perceived in the computer and experimental music scene. As is often true, I’ve mellowed out a lot, because, as I am now quite fond of saying, “Hell, it’s only music.”

There are scholars who approach technological, musical, and other creative decisions as a kind of scientific “problem”to be “solved.”There are a lot of people out to do a lot of things so they can be “first”at it. There are also far too many music-technology scholars in higher learning who use academia a kind of hustle or dodge, or to bolster a failing “commercial”music career — whatever that means these days.
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