Quote of the Week: Talking Guns

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From African Feedback (Errant Bodies), the new book by Alessandro Bosetti:

For example, there are old men who have guns, weapons that they killed animals with. Then you put the sound of these guns into the computer and they can talk about the animals they killed.

That’s the recorded statement from an unidentified man in the African city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, responding to music that Bosetti, an Italian musician and sound artist, plays for him on a pair of headphones.

The music auditioned by Bosetti for the man included pieces by Bernard Parmegiani, Steve Lacy, and Linoel Marchetti. Bosetti traveled around Mali and Burkina Faso, playing experimental music and simultaneously recording the reactions of individuals to the presumably unfamiliar sounds.

African Feedback contains a CD pieced together from those reactions, which are paired with the original music. The text of the book is a transcript in English of the interviews, most of which had been conducted in French or, with the assistance of an interpreter, in the languages Moré or Dogon.

A free MP3 download of African Feedback was the subject of the August 21, 2006, Disquiet Downstream (disquiet.com). More info at errantbodies.org and at Bosetti’s homepage, melgun.net. Thanks again to Aaron Ximm, of quietamerican.org, who introduced African Feedback to me, and to Bosetti, who agreed to an interview when he passed through Berkeley late last year.

Christian Marclay Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sound artist Christian Marclay, the creator of such landmark works as “Video Quartet” and “Guitar Drag,” doesn’t listen to much music. He’s a big Marcel Duchamp fan — not a big surprise for one of the most prominent utilizers of “readymades,” like found records and record covers. He’s not a philosopher. He thinks nostalgia isn’t a bad word. He ignores copyright issues — this from the man who ran the video of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup against the audio of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. His mother was a collector of Christmas music. He thinks it’s too early to employ an iPod in his art.

We know this, and much more, thanks to a lengthy and highly informative interview recently distributed as part of a podcast series of the British museum conglomerate, the Tate (MP3). Interviewed by art historian Gilda Williams, Marclay talks in detail about numerous of his individual works, and takes half an hour of questions from the audience, most of whom are surprised (as am I — as probably would be most people familiar with his work) about his stated relative distance from music.

Robot Jazz MP3 from Pierre Bastien

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

He’s one of electronica’s great Doctor Moreaus, and there’s an hour-long performance from early 2005 available for download. His name is Pierre Bastien, and he makes automaton orchestras that plink and pound, scratch and hum, like a collective of Pinocchios grasping at the fainest hint of sentience. His recordings may not always pass a Turing test, but they’re immensely enjoyable nonetheless, with all the organ-grinder, steampunk funk of a Kid Koala (think dusty turntables warping old music-hall faves) or Konono No. 1 (think homebrew instruments torquing feedback out of makeshift magnets).

In this extended piece, recorded live, Bastien can be heard playing along with a raspy horn that gets simpler and simpler, rattier and rawer, as time passes (MP3). He enters around 14 minutes in and it comes to feel as if his machines are slowly gaining their humanity as he loses his. Perhaps they’ll meet some day.

More info at the website where the MP3 is housed, transportsciberians.net, and at Bastien’s digital home, pierrebastien.com.

John Cage Microtonal Ragas MP3s — Live

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Other Minds catalog of recordings housed at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org) contains decades of recordings, an ongoing history of 20th- (and, now, 21st-) century classical music. And it’s updated regularly.

Perhaps setting its own record for the shortest period from performance to broadcast, just two days ago it posted the live performance from November 2, 2007, of Italian vocalist Amelia Cuni , who is trained in traditional Indian dhrupad singing, and a trio of musicians — percussionists Raymond Kaczynski and Federico Sansei, and Werner Durand on a variety of electronics — performing John Cage‘s 18 Microtonal Ragas. This is the same concert that I attended and later wrote about back on November 17 (disquiet.com). The piece is available as four MP3s (MP3, MP3, MP3, MP3). More info at archive.org.

Icelandic Field Recording MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Touch Radio is the online audio-station (cum netlabel) offspring of the excellent record label Touch. Previous freely downloadable entries in the occasional series have included work by the likes of Steve Roden (coiner of the term “lowercase sound”) and field-recording eminence (and Cabaret Voltaire member) Chris Watson, as well as Fennesz, Brandon LaBelle and Stephan Mathieu, just to name a few.

The most recent Touch Radio ‘cast, its 27th, was posted just yesterday. Titled “notturno,” it’s a naked field recording by Guðni Franzson — an hour-long tape of birds in the woods about an hour east of Reykjavik, Iceland (MP3). Even at a mere 96kbps, the file contains a delightful array of natural song. And one should probably be thankful for the compression, which keeps the file under40mb in girth.

Franzson writes, briefly, on the site, providing some context: “I wasn’t at all tired in the morning but started listening to the incredible birds in the woods and down in the mob until day broke. I was sorry not to have the recording machine with me that night but decided to return the night after with my gear, hoping the birds would still be there.” Fortunately for us, they were.