The Playlist as a Literary Genre

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Before it recedes too far into my memory, a quick note about a panel discussion I attended last month. On December 11, 2007, at the San Francisco offices of the software development company behind Songbird (songbirdnest.com), a quartet of seasoned technologists involved in media web development talked about “portable playlists.” The four were Tantek Çelik (tantek.com; former Chief Technologist of technorati.com), Tom Conrad (tomconrad.net; CTO of pandora.com), Lucas Gonze (gonze.com; a director at music.yahoo.com and co-creator of ccmixter.org), and Scott Kveton (kveton.com; Open Technology Lead at mystrands.com). The moderator was Chris Messina (factoryjoe.com).

Gonze (pictured above) gave a pre-panel talk during which he provided an overview of portable playlists, which is to say — in my own super-uninformed, less than syntactically rigorous language — groupings of songs in list form that can be shared. Back in 2003, Gonze produced a detailed survey of existing playlist formats, from the ubiquitous M3U to the iTunes Library’s proprietary system, some 16 in all (it’s still online at gonze.com). Gonze joined Yahoo! when that company absorbed his webjay.com service, a pioneering playlist-sharing website that has since closed down; the XSPF playlist format was developed hand-in-hand with webjay.com.

The field of playlist formats has expanded further since 2003. Among them is hAudio, Çelik’s explanation of which was a highlight of the evening (more on hAudio at microformats.org) — as was his impassioned critique of Flash-intensive websites; subsequent to the panel he created a webpage summarizing his notes from the evening (at microformats.org). Kveton also blogged after the panel, following up on some thoughts he felt he hadn’t explored fully during the discussion (kveton.com).

There was a lot of talk about web standards, about non-musical data that can be associated with music files (such as year of release, genre, author, performer, etc.), and about how the growth of the playlist as a “literary genre,” so to speak, is dependent on the general public taking more interest in sharing playlists.

What I came away with most was thinking about music in context. Much of what I write about is music as a standalone object, a song or album or performance as some independent node of critical, aesthetic scrutiny. What context or perspective I try to provide is generally restricted to the given musician’s previous work, and to work associated with the music in question, whether related by genre, geography, record label, era, instrumentation, what have you. That’s all helpful, certainly, but it doesn’t allow for how musical context can itself provide a kind of commentary — the sort of gloss, for example, that a DJ provides.

Along those lines, I’ve been thinking for some time about supplementing the Disquiet Downstream MP3 recommendations with something along the lines of a playlist, a kind of listening station or set of listening stations of grouped musical content — for example, the five most recent Downstreams, or a set of atmospheric Downstreams, or beat-oriented Downstreams, or Downstreams that have in common some particular source material (acoustic guitar, piano, voice, field recordings) or time period (WWII, 1960s). Anyhow, we’ll see what comes of that, but the panel discussion strengthened my interest in this idea.

More on the December 11 discussion at songbirdnest.com. The event was filmed, so perhaps it will appear online in the future. A separate interview that was done with Gonze coincident with the panel discussion has been posted, in video form, at the website openmediaweb.org, which co-sponsored the event with Songbird. The image of Gonze above is a still from that interview, in which he talks about the nature of “open” media, the importance of having a URL for any media posted to the web (something closely related to Çelik’s critique of Flash), and other related subjects.

By the way, the credits to that video introduced me to something I wasn’t aware of previously. The theme music is credited to Moby, and below his name is listed the URL mobygratis.com. True to the “open media” model, Moby apparently provides a variety of backing tracks for, as his site states, “independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.”

Tim Coster Live Processing MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

New Zealand’s Tim Coster is a musician, label owner, and concert promoter whose own creative output often focuses on the use of field recordings. There’s a nearly 20-minute live performance by him available at archive.org. Titled “three parts of the night, second try,” it was originally recorded in 2005 — the “second try” refers to Coster having edited it last year for this free release. The materials involved include “laptops, microphones, walkman, glockenspiel, ipod” and Coster describes it, aptly, as an “intimate journey into the evanescent sounds of live processed electroacoustic textures, a subtle organisation of manipulations and loops.” The result slowly makes its way from glistening whirls to a sing-songy downtempo creak to warm lull, those being the three parts mentioned in the title (MP3). The latter third strongly suggests the break of dawn. More on Coster at myspace.com/timcoster.

tangents / Eno, Autechre, Chopin …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Brian Eno is advising the British Liberal Democrats leader Nick Clegg on “youth issues” (bbc.co.uk). … (2) The sign for the Long Now Foundation’s museum and store at the gate of Fort Mason in San Francisco reads: “Open Daily, Weekly, Millennially.” The clock-like sign in the window reads “Will Return in Minutes, Years, Decades, Centuries” (longnow.org). … (3) It’s kind of funny to see an Autechre album release treated with the same sort of story-arc trajectory as a mainstream pop release. Does the announcement of the track list (warprecords.com) really benefit many people? Here, for the record, are those track names: “Altibzz,” “The Plc,” “IO,” “Plyphon,” “Perience,” “SonDEremawe,” “Simmm,” “Paralel Suns,” “Steels,” “Tankakern,” “Rale,” “Fo13,” “fwzE,” “90101-51-1,” “bnc Castl,” “Theswere,” “WNSN,” “chenc9,” “Notwo,” “Outh9X.” The album, titled Quaristice, is due out March 3. The image to the left appears to be the cover to Quaristice. … (4) A new journal-on-CD: Popular Noise (popularnoise.net) — thanks for the info, Rob. This makes me wonder: Was there ever a volume two of the journal-on-CD Relay Project? Volume one, which included Alvin Lucier speaking with Stephen Vitiello, was excellent (therelayproject.com). …

(5) Upcoming redbullmusicacademy.com interviews will include DJ Krush, Arthur Baker, and Bonobo. … (6) The fällt label is doing a special download promotion, with contributions from Tonne, Taylor Deupree and others: fallt.com. … (7) Make a speaker with a plate (engadget.com) and (8) make music with old ink cartridges (engadget.com). … (9) Some more 2007 best-of lists worth checking out: Jacob Arnold of gridface.com and Alan Lockett of igloomag.com. … R.I.P., (10) Beat-era artist Liam O’Gallagher (1917 – 2008; nytimes.com: “In some circles, he is probably best known for sound art that combined performance, chance and technology to create surreal, sometimes funny works like ‘Border Dissolve in Audiospace’ from 1970, a fuzzy, echoing recording in which directory operators are called and asked to look up various numbers”) and (11) sound poet Henri Chopin (1922 – 2008; dbqp.blogspot.com).

Heavy Rotation: Japanese jazz, Fahey-esque guitar, Madlib, Splatter, processed vocals

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is what I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) If it’s possible to imagine a merging of Charles Mingus’s muddy, deeply felt jazz and Morton Feldman’s proto-ambient classical arrangements, this may be it: The track “Itsuki no Komoriuta” off the Fujin Raijin album by the Sakoto Fujii Min-Yoh Ensemble (Les Disques Victo, 2007). While the rest of the set tends toward artful chamber-jazz singed with cacophony, this piece starts with  quiet yet feral cat-like noises from piano and strings and ventures into long tones before rising to a late-in-the-game climax.

(2) Even with the John Fahey-esque guitar runs that constitute such as albums as Sunshrine and O True Believers, the latter spiced with sitar, there was little in introspective guitarist James Blackshaw‘s output to necessarily prepare listeners for the Metal Machine Music-quality industrial drone that is “Clouds Collapse” off his excellent recent The Cloud of the Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007). (A review last week by nytimes.com‘s Jon Pareles, who described “Clouds Collapse” as “the album’s brief textural diversion,” induced me to check it out.)

(3) There’s a sped-up vocal, yeah, on rapper Percee P‘s “Watch Your Step,” produced by Madlib (it’s off Percee’s Perseverance album — both single and album on Stones Throw, 2007), and those tweaked whines certainly are de rigueur these days in hip-hop (and, perhaps someday soon, they’ll be déclassé), but it’s how that unnaturally high-pitched voice alternates in the spotlight with some taut, 1970s-style strings that truly distinguishes the track. The result, with its almost swinglessly strict 4/4 beat, is like some sort of industrial Zen soul music. Instrumental available on the 12″.

(4) The track “Glitchfarben” on last year’s Clear the Club (Rastascan, 2007) by the Splatter 3 + N (that’s the Splatter Trip plus guests, including Dave Slusser and Les Paterson) homes in on an unlikely genre-parallel: the sqwonky up’n’around-the-instrument of out-jazz horn playing and the pixel-level randomized noise of so-called “glitch” electronica. The Splatter Trio, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, consists of the multi-instrumentalists Dave Barrett (saxophones, ocarina), Myles Boisen (doubleneck guitar/bass, keyboard, sonics), and Gino Robair (drums, synths, organ, theremin, rhythm guitar).

(5) Last week’s Disquiet Downstream entries were a particularly rich group, including archival Morton Feldman (disquiet.com) and a preliminary sketch of a Leafcutter John track (disquiet.com), but perhaps the most singular piece was a live performance of Vesna Pisarovic‘s voice reworked by Roberto Garréton (disquiet.com), posted for free download at dnk-amsterdam.com. For the most of the piece, Garréton’s electronics send the voice through an exhausting exercise course of techniques, from waifish chorale to spectral whisps to data chatter (MP3).

site update / Archival Interviews: Autechre, Spring Heel Jack, Photek, Tilliander, Dub Assassin

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Re-uploaded six additional archival interviews I’ve done, dating back to 1995. Here they are in something approximating alphabetical order:

  • Autechre‘s Sean Booth (circa Chiastic Slide and Cichlisuite) on architecture and technology, 1997 (“More Songs About Buildings”)
  • Dub Assassin on learning from Bob Marley’s own deck-hands, 1999 (“Straight Outta Chapel Hill”)
  • Photek on DJing and remixing, 1998 (“Smile for the Camera”)
  • Spring Heel Jack‘s John Coxon and Ashley Wales (circa 68 Million Shades……) on their roots in dub and jazz, 1997 (“Low Sparks”)
  • Skylab‘s Matt Ducasse (circa #1) on working with his international bandmates (Howie B, Toshio Nakanishi, and Kudo) and learning to appreciate exotica, 1995 (“Ground Control”)
  • Andreas Tilliander on the Clicks & Cuts series and electronica’s hip-hop soul, 2002 (“Click It”)