From the website of the organization Ear to the Earth, eartotheearth.org:
Modern ecologists may have reached a limit on how effectively they can convey messages to the public, and they may now need to draw upon the emotional vibrancy offered by the arts.
The purpose of Ear to Earth is “to engage the public in environmental issues through environmental sound and sound art.” (Found via intentionalaudio.com.)
Some netabels neither die nor go on an extended hiatus — they just reserve their releases to a modest few each year. Take the Sine Fiction series — housed at notype.com — which commissions soundtracks to classic and lesser known science-fiction novels. Last year saw three, including Hinyouki’s appropriately intense backing track for Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and this year two, first Philip K. Dick’s Lies, Inc., by A_dontigny, who oversees Sine Fiction, and more recently Érick D’Orion‘s music for Kurt Vonnegut‘s Sirens of Titan. D’Orion doesn’t map a track per chapter; nor does he — harddrive forbid — try to match the length of the reading experience. Instead he provides 11 distinct, loop-reading cues, each between a minute and a minute and a half in length, and each thick with industrial rigor. Get the full thing as a ZIP file. Additional info at notype.com.
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.
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.
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).
