Still filling in some of the last few empty spots in the site’s archive. With the end of 2007 near, I’ve (re)uploaded the best-of lists for 1996 (the year Disquiet.com launched), 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. The lists for 2005 and for 2006 were already online.
Steve Roden Found-Music MP3
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.
Interviews Up: Charest, Kermani, Sideboard, Krush, Artemiev
I’ve uploaded five more of the backdated interviews, from 2002 through 2003: Canadian composer Benoît Charest, on his score for the film Les Triplettes de Belleville; composer Elise Kermani, on revisiting “retro” multimedia performance and remixing Vivaldi; London-based Thorsten Sideboard, online-music mogul; Japan’s premiere turntablist, DJ Krush, on his seventh full-length album, The Message at the Depth; and Moscow-based composer Artemiy Artemiev, head of Electroshock Records and son of Edward Artemiev, best known in the West for his groundbreaking soundtracks to films directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, including Solaris.
Bob Dylan and the Consequences of Electricity
“Bob Dylan is by no means a key participant in the history of electronic music. But as rock figures go, none may be more closely affiliated with the consequences of electricity.”
That’s how a new essay I’ve published at newmusicbox.org begins. The essay went up today.
In the piece, “Juiced In It: Bob Dylan and the Consequences of Electricity,” I parse his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, for what it has to say about electronically mediated sound: “Now, if only due to his legendary act of having plugged in, Dylan’s autobiographical musings would be worth parsing for their electric content. And as it turns out, the exercise rewards Brian Eno completists, copyleft advocates, and, especially, students of the recording studio as musical instrument.”
Read the full thing at newmusicbox.org.
Swampy Chef Menteur MP3
There’s a new album out by the New Orleans-based trio Chef Menteur, whose electronic-oriented sound has long distinguished the group from the city’s richly analog musical culture. However, there has always been a swampy and nostalgic tone to what Chef Menteur has perpetrated, as evidenced on their new album, The Answer’s in Forgetting (Backporch Revolution), and more specifically by a determinedly slow-paced, proggy, emotionally moving track, “Trebuchet,” they’ve made available for free download (MP3). More info at chefmenteur.org and backporchrevolution.com.