Erasing Yorke’s Remixes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This just in, via email:

Subject: fRm thm y
From: [email protected]
Date: 7:08 AM

please excuse this addiTion to YouR pile of email.

ThIs is not stricTly junk.

this is a quick notE to Let YoU know thAT there will be shorttlY be a bunch of rmxs of some of the songs from the ERAser album made available to download from boomkat.com.

on the 17th of Dec a BURIAL rmx of anditrainedallNight a ModeSeleKtOR rmx of skipdivideD & a VAriouS rmx of aNaLYse

on the 18th of Dec a FoURtet rmx of AtoMS for PEace & two Christian Vogel rmxs of ‘Black sWAn’

on the 19th of Dec the SuRGEon rmx of the CLock a rmx of HarrOWdown HiLL by THE buG & a rmx of Cymbal RUsh by The FIEld

that’s it. apoloGIes for the disturbanCE. check themm out if you get amoment.

i Hope yours is a pEaceful CHRistmas.

>

thom yorke.

Judging by the pricing structure at boomkat, an excellent web-music retailer, these may not be inexpensive. Most single songs go for a pound, which is about two bucks. Still, that’s an excellent line-up of remixers.

Quote of the Week: Glass on Moondog

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From “Remembering Moondog,” Philip Glass‘s preface to Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue, the authorized biography written by Robert Scotto and published this year by Process:

“I wondered how, as a blind man, he managed to cross the street without an instant of hesitation until he showed me how he listened to traffic lights; I had never heard them before in this way.”

Dying Buddha Machine MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you meet the Buddha on the road, you know what to do: kill him. But what if you meet the Buddha on the Internet, and he’s already dying?

Back in early August of this year, at a website called santafesound.blogspot.com, the site’s owner posted a unique sound sample of the Buddha Machine. Now, the Buddha Machine, that little box of lo-fi sound loops, has been written about a lot since its initial release, and it has been a source of sonic inspiration for musicians as diverse as minimal-techno guru Monolake, dark-metal band Sunn O))), and dub figure Adrian Sherwood, among others.

But this santafesound post is special. The half-minute recording is that of a Buddha Machine dying (MP3): “I was thrilled the other day when I switched it on and heard a brand new sound — the sound of the almost-dead Made-In-China Gaosheng batteries trying to drive the built-in speaker.” That image to the left accompanied the original post and shows the back of the Buddha Machine in question.

As the name of the santafesound website suggests, it’s focused on sound. Other previous entries include a nearly five-minute field recording in an apartment where a new swamp cooler and some window blinds colluded to create a haunting sonic atmosphere (MP3, santafesound.blogspot.com):

For this recording I cranked up the mics and made the background very foreground. It’s actually a mix of 2 recordings, one done at 4:30 pm and the other at 10 pm. I’m not usually the sort to say “listen to this on headphones” but in this case there are lots of low frequencies that will be lost on the average laptop speaker so whatever you can do to hear the low end would be good.

Steve Roden Found-Music MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Los Angeles-based sound artist Steve Roden isn’t just a master of quiet music, the coiner of the related term “lowercase sound,” and a thoughtful and meticulous visual artist.

He is also a flea-market regular. Roden is a major diver into the literal dustbin — make that the dumpster — of history. And a few days ago he posted a snapshot of one of his more recent finds, pictured here to the left. It’s a small plastic record album that he found inside another album he’d come upon (inbetweennoise.blogspot.com):

i found this strange 6 inch thin plastic 78 stuffed inside the paper sleeve of a regular 78 a few days ago. like one of those russian wooden dolls, where a smaller version is hiding within the larger, i had no idea it was living there. although the “label” is similar to the “canary records” standard 78’s that i have, i have no idea when this is from, but probably 1940’s based on the plastic.

He also posted a short recording of the work, a martial tune that’s been warped by time and the elements and is now heard beneath a fuzzy blanket of static (MP3). In other words, it has a lot in common with Roden’s own music. He writes:

it’s the kind of song you might see in an [filmmaker Yasujiro] ozu film when older men get together, talk about grade school, drink sake and eventually fall into song.

because the surface of the disc is a bit wobbly, the band sounds slightly out of tune (or perhaps, more so than they did already). the whole thing feels a bit like a micro-version of gavin bryars “jesus blood never fails me” (the original version on the obscure label LP, which is one of my favorite recordings of all time…

Listening to the MP3 on repeat, as Roden suggests, made me think about how art, especially contemporary art, is often about framing the familiar, lending it a new or otherwise unexpected context that expresses the insight and perspective of the artist. The use of “readymades,” or found objects, in art still attracts derision from some regular museum-goers, yet the practice is a close corollary to one of the most traditional of fine-art forms, “still life” painting — or, as it is termed in French, in a peculiar reversal that’s fascinating, “nature morte” painting. In this Roden MP3, the ghosts are with us, and they’re singing.