Abstrakt Machine MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the ironies of netlabels is the prevelance of full-length recordings. The mainstream record industry (MRI? — maybe “mainstream music business,” MMB?) is slowly adjusting to an iTunes business model, in which songs are purchased individually. But so many aspiring netlabels — which are forward-looking enough to post their music online for free — persist in pushing multi-song releases.

There are occasional outliers, like the excellent, if less than prolific, Yo.yo pang (ambulatore.com/yoyo), which I wrote about back in October (disquiet.com) and which only releases individual songs. More often, an ongoing concern, like the ironically named netlabel top-40.org — a Moscow-based netlabel that likes its tunes dank and glitchy — takes a break from weighty albums for the occasional single, such as Abstrakt Machine‘s Motor (MP3), a through-composed survey of surface noise, distant voices and microsonics that suggests we’re evesdropping on a terrarium.

DJ Premiere Lecture MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Nothing like waiting for a nearly 40-megabyte MP3 to download, only to find little of interest inside. Earlier this year, a podcast popped up in the Red Bull Music Academy that included interviews with three producers: Martin Ware, Rob Bowman and, foremost, the great beatmaker and turntablist DJ Premier. But Premier’s segment was brief, and the most memorable part was hearing about how he got lost at a Tina Turner concert when he was a kid, and how she called out for his parents from the stage.

More than making up for that, Red Bull has now posted over an hour and a half of Premier (born Chris Martin) reflecting on his work in hip-hop, most famously as one half of Gang Starr (MP3, redbullmusicacademy.com). He talks frankly about appreciating the beauty of static, hearing beats in his head, crate-digging for fresh samples, and cutting the line at James Brown’s memorial. He freely explains he was no fan of Christina Aguilera before teaming with her for the horn-drenched, retro hit “Ain’t No Other Man,” one of the few memorable moments on pop radio in 2006 — and a 12″ worth tracking down for the instrumental edit. The Red Bull file is almost 90 megabytes, but it’s more than worth the bandwidth.

Elemental Calypso MP3s by Nikita Golyshev

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The following song titles are not likely to find themselves lodged on any pop charts: “Oil, Glass, Acoustic Possibilities,” “Infra-Red Oil Analysis, Metal Source, Glass in Non-agressive…,” “Molecular Oil Structure Analysis with X-Ray and Metal…”

Those are three of the tracks on Nikita Golyshev‘s 15 Songs from Glass, Oil and Other Sources, which was released earlier this year on the Musica Excentrica netlabel (netaudio.ru/musica-excentrica). They are each the result of research on Golyshev’s part “to detect some acoustic properties of oil as substance, placed in different capacities such as crystal glasses and medical bulbs.” The brief liner notes explain further: “The obtained 15 sound fragments are collected by the frequency and spectrum analysis of oil behaviour, its molecular changes in various environments (aggressive and non-agressive) and wide range of oil interactions with metal.”

The sounds are expectedly delicate, such as the elemental calypso of “Oil (Light X-Ray), Glass, Metal pt.2” (MP3) and the shamisen-like scratches amid the drone of “Infra-Red Oil Analysis, Metal Source, Glass in Non-agressive…” (MP3).

Uncut Monolake Cinemascope MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s uncut, and then there’s four times the original length. That’s how Monolake‘s expanded edition of “Indigo,” the track that closed his 2001 album Cinemascope, sizes up. The original track, at about eight and a half minutes long, is now available, for free for the month of December, at Monolake’s website, monolake.de. The key elements are a swelling bassy substructure and a high-fidelity recording of water drops. Now for more than half an hour, those raw materials collude and collide in slow motion, occasionally gathering in a deep dub. That found sound, it turns out, is almost a decade older than the album. Says Monolake of the recording:

… I came across a long deep ambient session that I had already edited down into a shorter track that was incuded in the Cinemascope album in 2001.

Here comes the original session, from the moment where I decided to press record till the point when I thought it is enough. I do not remember so much of that session, but I am quite sure it was late at night, and there were some friends present and we were all a bit stoned…

Tech stuff: The water drop sample has been recorded in my bathtub in april 1993. It is played back and processed with an ASR-10 sampler, which also contributes most of the other sounds. Which were themselfes recordings of sounds created with a Juno-6 and a SY77. All mixed together on a small mixer and with lots of reverb from the ASR-10, from a PCM-80 and a Quadraverb. Sequenced with Logic 1.0 running on a Apple Macintosh IIcx, recorded straight to DAT.

Monolake posts a new free download almost every month, but with the stipulation that no one link directly to the file, so just click on the above link — while the calendar still reads 2007.

tangents / Ike, albums, Dylan

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick News, Links, Bits: (1) Ike Turner, the rock’n’soul legend who will forever be remembered as Tina Turner‘s abusive husband, passed away earlier this week (November 5, 1931 ”“ December 12, 2007). I’ll never forget standing in the refurbished Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and being told the story of the chance damage to a speaker, the sound of which reportedly permeated Turner’s “Rocket 88,” thought by many to be the first rock’n’roll song (abcnews.go.com, guardian.co.uk, sunherald.com). What I didn’t know until today is there’s a brand of home-entertainment cables called “Rocket 88,” and they’re billed — with no apparent intended irony — as follows: “Solid conductors prevent strand interaction, a major source of cable distortion.” Maybe the marketing department at audioquest.com.au should take a field trip to Memphis. (Image at left from a timeline of recording-technology history at history.sandiego.edu — which borrow it from tefteller.com.) …

(2) It isn’t just that the album as a format is dying; it’s that the whole idea of a multi-song release as an even somewhat constant entity is dying. Case in point, the new EP of remixes of Amon Tobin‘s song “Kitchen Sink” (pictured left) off his excellent album Foley Room (both released on Ninja Tune). It contains four different mixes, one each by Clark, Sixtoo, Nosia and Boxcutter — but if you buy it digitally through ninjatune.net itself, there’s a fifth track, a special vocal mix by Sixtoo. (Complicating things further — that fifth track is available on the emusic.com edition of Kitchen Sink Remixes.) … (3) Among the remixers on Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, an album of takes on Nine Inch Nails‘s Year Zero: Ladytron, Bill Laswell, Kronos & Enrique Gonzalez Müller, Fennesz and Saul Williams (nin.com). NIN’s Trent Reznor produced Williams’s recent The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which, in light of said liberation, is available for free download in its entirety at niggytardust.com.

(4) Alex (therestisnoise.com) Ross proposes that today, December 17, 2007, marks the 100th anniversary of atonality: “On that date in 1907, Arnold Schoenberg sketched the song “Ich darf nicht dankend” (“I must not in gratitude [sink down before you]”), music in which conventional tonal harmonies grow exceedingly scarce.” … (5) Composer and critic Kyle Gann buys a scanner for his computer and treats readers to a 1989 photo of him with the late Conlon Nancarrow — no player piano in sight (artsjournal.com/postclassic). … (6) Also via Gann, Peter Cherches‘s new “Downtown Music” blog, downtownmusicguide.blogspot.com, focused on the years 1971-1987. … (7) Review of one of Matmos‘s first concerts since the formerly San Fransisco Bay Area duo relocated to Baltimore (citypaper.com). … (8) In a spin on its own “Who Flipped It Best?” series, the great hip-hop blog soul-sides.com pits two uses by Cut Chemist (both for the group Jurassic 5) of the same sample against each other. … (9) How a “bass trap” speaker (from bagend.com) can make your space quieter: wired.com. … (10) Post sounds, geo-code ’em, and share: soundtransit.nl. … (11) A 21st-century kalimba, Thumbtronics: thummer.com. … (12) Another “Lemon”? U2‘s next record, produced with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, said to be “trance” (launch.yahoo.com).

(13) Speaking of Lanois, I’ve received some thoughtful responses to the essay I published at newsmusicbox.org last week (“Juiced In It: Bob Dylan and the Consequences of Electricity”). I finally, last night, caught the new Todd Haynes film, I’m Not There, in which six actors play variations on Dylan over the course of his career. I noticed that Moondog, the maverick blind composer (and himself the subject of a new biography, albeit in book form), appears during the opening credits — and that there appears to be a little boy playing a young version of Moondog (complete with horned helmet) in what are most easily termed “the Richard Gere sequences.” Also early on, the subject of the film — who is and is not Dylan — is described in a voiceover (by Kris Kristofferson) as a “star of electricity” and later, a British TV host (played by Bruce Greenwood) interrogates the Dylan figure Jude Quinn (played by Cate Blanchett) about his embrace of “electronic music.” The movie is a messy jumble, all in all, and my favorite part is the haunting drone of a harmonica solo just before the end credits roll, as Dylan appears to melt into an alien from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Oh, and totally off topic, David Cross does a mean Allen Ginsberg.