Quote of the Week: God’s Tone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From an obituary of Joybubbles, born Josef Engressia (May 25, 1949 — August 8, 2007), the “original granddaddy phone phreak”:

Someday there will be no need of the dial tone, and for a few of us it will be as if the voice of God has gone dead.

Written by Elizabeth McCracken: “Dial-Phone Phreak” (nytimes.com).

Haunting Screwtape MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is beauty in decay. The beauty in destruction is more complicated, ethically and artistically. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s all-too-timely comments about the spectacle that was the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 9/11 haunted him right up through, and will no doubt long past, his recent obituaries. In “Requiem for a Dead Church,” a musician who goes by the name Screwtape has forged a sonic consideration of a church in Moonee Ponds, Australia, that was destroyed back in 2004. The destruction occurred in an arson attributed to a drunk fan of black metal.

Writes Screwtape, “One can lament the destruction of a building that has community value even if the community is not one’s own. One can also admire the beauty of its present form, forlorn, forgotten, fenced off, charred, blackened and ruined yet still retaining a sense of past dignity.” The sound in “Requiem for a Dead Church” (MP3, mp3.com.au) allies itself with both those interpretations of the church’s fate. The nearly 10-minute track can most easily be imagined to be a rendering of the haunting of the space: phantasmal voices slurring by, the portal to another realm symbolized by ruptured textures that signify liminality, trespass and dread. The sorrow and sense of loss are unmistakable, but one listens just as much for the care taken with, and the resulting beauty of, the sonic transformations.

Leafcutter John Folk-tronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One man’s hard-drive-cleaning is another’s hard-drive-filling. Well, maybe not “filling,” but a solid 3.16 megabytes that might never had been heard widely had Leafcutter John (born John Burton) not decided to clean out his computer in advance of recording a new album. From the digital back pages came a three-and-half-minute track that starks in static and whir, veers into olde-timey songcraft, and then fades back into the electronic ether (MP3).

John explains: “Also while foraging around old hard-drives found this which is a kind of glitchy atmospheric demo version of the ”˜this is the right way’ bit of ”˜Go Back’ from my 2006 album ”˜The Forest and the Sea’.” More info at leafcutterjohn.com, along with four additional, more song-oriented tracks.

Willits + Sakamoto Duet MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits has posted a track from the album Ocean Fire, a collaboration with Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto (Yellow Magic Orchestra; Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence). The track, “Toward Water” (MP3), is more ornery than one might expect from either musician. It has neither Willits’s penchant for spry randomness, nor Sakamoto’s for melody. It’s a deep, wavering drone with occasional highlights in the treble end, but a much more constant underlying bass end, like something slowly twisting in the dark. The album was released Commmons/Avex (commmons.com) in Japan in October 2007, and will be released this month in the United States on 12k (12k.com). The cover of the 12k version appears to the left. More info at Willits’s website, christopherwillits.com.

site update / Various Archival Articles, 1994 – 2003

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Re-uploaded another batch of past “essays/reports” I wrote, plus one interview I did, dating back to 1994. Here they are, in roughly chronological order:

  • “Good Neighbors” (1994): How rock music and classical music face similar creative obstacles — and how so-called “crossover” projects aim for a mirage of a middle ground. What, for example, does lo-fi punk-rock holdover Billy Childish have in common with early-music keyboardist Malcolm Bilson?
  • “Rock Slide” (1995): Are independent pop-music labels going classical? Albums by the ensemble Rachel’s (on Quarterstick) and the composer Timothy Brock (on K) suggest the answer is yes.
  • “Ambient: A Starter Kit” (1996), “Electronic for Dunderheads” (1999), “What’s That Buzz About, Anyhow?” (2001): Three different introductions to electronic music, all originally written, like several of these articles, for Pulse! magazine, and its sibling mag, Classical Pulse! It was interesting for me to look back to 1996 and see what I considered “essential” introductory listening at the time. These are the compilations I listed: Macro Dub Infection, Volume One (Caroline, 1995), Earthrise.Ninja.2 (Shadow/Ninja Tune USA, 1996), Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip (WaxTrax!/TVT, 1996), Synthetic Pleasures, Volume One (Moonshine, 1996), Source Lab 2 (Source/Gyroscope, 1996). They were selected for breadth and timeliness and they still hold up, though for a snapshot of that moment, at the risk of missing club music, I’d probably replace the Moonshine one with the Mille Plateaux set In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze.
  • “Higher Sources” (2001): Fatboy Slim, Miles Davis‘s estate, and String Cheese Incident offer up raw material for your inner sampler.
  • “Robots Without Attitude” (2001): An appreciation of Kraftwerk.
  • “Beyond the Froth” (2001): An appreciation of Tangerine Dream.
  • “6-String Synthesizer” (2002): The guitar is the tool of choice among a certain breed of atmospherists, including Steve Roach, Greg Davis and the duo Dual.
  • “Sonic Anomaly” (2002): An interview with the ubiquitous turntablist named DJ Logic, the Moby of the musicians’ union. (Ties in with the Jazzfest review from 2003, below.)
  • “Industry Standards” (2002): The esteemed jazz label Verve takes a trip down memory lane with a host of DJs, including Rae & Christian and Richard Dorfmeister — and, just to hedge its bets on electronic music, retro vocalist Diana Krall.
  • “Into the Mystic” (2002): Enya‘s stillness in times of terror and fantasy, plus more soothing sounds from Scott Tuma and Monolake.
  • “2003 Gift Guide” (2003): Fairly self-explanatory. I should do these more often.
  • “Toil and Trouble” (2003): Concert review of the trio Mephista, which consists of Sylvie Couvoisier, Ikue Mori, and Suzi Ibarra.
  • “Rockapaloozer” (2003): When the Lollapalooza touring festival came out of hibernation, it forgot about electronic music, despite founder Perry Farrell having headed in that direction himself.
  • “Laptop Folkie” (2003): Concert review of pastoral Japanese electronicist Ogurusu Norihide.
  • “Digital Voodoo” (2003): Festival review of the 2003 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, focusing on its electronic undercurrent. To stumble upon electronic elements at Jazzfest is a bit like running into an old friend while traveling abroad. It’s exciting to see how comfortably your buddy has settled into an exotic locale. Coverage includes the fest’s willful myopia about hip-hop, the ghost of Charles Ives, the debut of Nicholas Payton‘s Sonic Trance, and various satellite evening concerts, including a visit to Quintron‘s Spellcaster Lounge.

As of these uploads, all the entries in the “reports/essays” section of Disquiet.com have been (re)posted, following the July 26, 2007, upgrade of this website. That leaves a batch of interviews and some old “field notes” items. Almost there…