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.

Live Sawako/Chartier/Yamaguchi MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest release on the netlabel called term, a subsidiary of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label, is a live performance recorded back in November of last year, featuring three eminent electronicists: Sawako (computer and voice), Richard Chartier (computer), and Shinjiro Yamaguchi (mixing board, feedback loops, sampling). The concert was part of the festival Atlantic Waves, held at the ICA in London. What opens as a very low-volume-level mix of white noise and disparate, distant voices evolves quickly, and then it does again, and again. The recording is less a single piece than it is a series of very different sound environments that the trio coaxes the listener through. Not that much coaxing is required, given how inviting and rich those environments are; they include heavenly swirls of sound, deep and mysterious rumbling, synthetic aviaries, and lulling bell tones (MP3).

At each new stage, the sound is fairly uniform and concentrated — to the extent that a listener to the MP3 might infer that an individual, rather than a trio, is playing. The transitions between stages occur quite quickly and efficiently. One warning: when the piece is over, the enthusiastic response from the audience kicks in fast and loud. After the applause dies down, you can hear a man say, “I don’t know what it was.”

Missing from this MP3 experience is João Silva’s video improvisation, which accompanied the sound work and for which he received co-billing; Silva also engineered the recording of the performance. The quartet (trio plus video) performed on an evening, November 9, billed as “Grain of Sound Night,” which featured two other ensembles: Terre Thaemlitz, Manuel Mota, Jonas Olsen, and Stilb, as well as Tim Hecker, Safe & Sound, and Morph3u.

More on Sawako at troncolon.com, Chartier at 3particles.com, and Yamaguchi at two-lines.org/asamoya. More on the release at 12k.com/term. And more on the festival at atlanticwaves.org.uk.

Polish Drill’n’Dubstep Mix MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The peaceoff.c8.com website, a music retailer, last year posted its first free download, a mixtape of breakbeat, beatcore, drill’n’bass, dubstep, call-it-what-you-will contemporary hard electronic music, all sewn together by DJ Trippmatic, who’s from Poland. The set, colorfully titled Break Beathoven Got Heroin, is an hour-plus mix of music that was a mix to begin with, highlights including the broken metal of Aaron Spectre‘s “Alien vs. Rodigan” and the timely dub of Krumble‘s “Usual Terror.” There’s also Spectre’s take on a Math Head track, “Bonafidekilla.”

The complete lineup is as follows:

1.  Aaron Spectre -- "Alien vs. Rodigan"
2.  Math Head -- "Bonafidekilla (Aaron Spectre Mix)"
3.  Krumble -- "Gazoline Serious Blast"
4.  Rotator -- "Get So ExXxcited"
5.  Electric Kettle -- "Dogmind Ball"
6.  Krumble -- "Usual Terror"
7.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Punished"
8.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Cease and Desist"
9.  Dr. Bastardo -- "Rungleclaart"
10. Dr. Bastardo -- "Murderation Warrior Sound"
11. Repeater -- "Collision Repair Specialist"
12. Venetian Snares -- "Hand Throw"
13. Cardopusher -- "In the Power of XTC"
14. Maladroit -- "Beware of the D.E.R.O.s"
15. Ronin -- "Pissing on the Gates of Hell"
16. Maladroit -- "Thieves (Remix)"
17. Kos + Raw & Uncut -- "Babilon Life"

What’s particularly bracing about the mix is hearing so much music once considered an onslaught in its own right — the mechanized punch of industrial music, the apocalyptic riffs of heavy metal, the elastic rhythms of jungle, the fluorescent theatrics of house, along with some borrowed pop hits, which were already abrasive in their own treacly way — ripped into little pieces and put back together on computers and turntables, yielding something all the more visceral and powerful. Download the full set, including a cover image (ZIP), and get more info at peaceoff.c8.com. More info on Trippmatic at myspace.com/trippmaticsk.

Archival Robert Henke MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The “free track of the month” at the website of Monolake (aka Robert Henke, at monolake.de) continues his excavation of his old hard drives. The January 2008 entry, titled “Fragment Endlos,” layers a rising and descending single-note piano line through a slowly evolving audio montage of field recordings, silence, and synthesis. That’s “through,” not “over” or “under.” The piano at times stands alone, but for most of the piece it’s heard in a specific setting: complemented by artificial strings or muddied by crowd noise, for example. Henke describes the track’s origin as follows:

On one of those tapes I found the track Fragment Endlos, and I immediately remembered when it was made and under which circumstances. This is a very personal piece for me, created in a time where I felt quite dark and lived in an appropriate environment. I just had moved from West-Berlin, Neukoelln, to the east, to Prenzlauer Berg, which at that time was not the expensive hippster neighborhood it is now, but the very opposite. I lived in a small place on the ground floor in a backyard, with a coal oven and a toilet outside the building… It was the end of winter, cold, unfriendly, and very dark. …

Musically this is influenced by ‘The Pearl’ (Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Sound design wise it shows that I just go the TG-77 and SY-77, and then there is this one long brass-like sound that I made as a result of listening to John Chowning.

For the free track of the month version I slightly edited the original 45 minute version and added field recordings of Bahnhof Zoo and the S-Bahn here in Berlin which I also captured in 1992.

There’s additional information, including technical specifications, at monolake.de. Henke posts these MP3s on a regular basis, but with a strict stipulation that no one link directly to the file, but instead to the page itself.

Beatbox Poetry MP3 by Christian Bök

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The discussion about whether rap counts as poetry is still ongoing (count me among the affirmative), but how about human beatboxing? That’s the performance practice in which the voice emulates the instrumentals of hip-hop, instrumentals usually performed on technology, such as turntables and drum machines. Beatboxing is a nimble onomatopoeia that yields music.

The writing.upenn.edu/pennsound website, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, is to modern poetry what Charles Amkirkhanian’s Other Minds catalog at archive.org is to 20th- century (and now 21st-) composition. It’s a deep repository of audio (and video, and much more). And allowing for a particularly expansive definition of poetry, among those many files is a recording by Christian Bök, titled “Synth Loops,” that is, in fact, a human beatbox performance (MP3).

It’s an excerpt from his Cyborg Opera. In an interview at the academic journal Postmodern Culture last year he described the project as “a kind of ‘spoken techno’ that emulates the robotic pulses heard everywhere in our daily lives” (virginia.edu). There’s some sibilance in the track that made me wonder if Bök is German (the umlaut helped, too), but he’s from Canada. Perhaps it was the accent of techno I was hearing.