News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) As of my first viewing, I can’t say if there’s enough of a proper score in No Country for Old Men to fill a 7″ single, but what there is is evocative, as blissfully mundane and forebodingly arid as the movie’s setting. It was composed by Carter Burwell, regular colleague of the film’s directors, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, and includes guitarist David Torn among its musicians. … (2) It’s way early on The Road, the next film adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country, but the movie is currently associated with director John Hillcoat, whose The Proposition was scored by Nick Cave (who also wrote it) and Warren Ellis (of Dirty Three), which is quite promising. … (3) Control, the bio-pic of Ian Curtis‘s brief life and briefer career with rock band Joy Division, features a score by New Order, which Joy Division became after Curtis’s 1980 suicide. Reportedly, Curtis watched director Werner Herzog‘s Stroszek (1977) that final night, which means some of the last music Curtis heard — in addition to Iggy Pop‘s The Idiot (also 1977), which he’s said also to have played that night — was by country guitarist Chet Atkins and blues harmonica player Sonny Terry, who contributed the score to Stroszek. … (4) Under-recognized ambient musician (and longtime sound designer) Kent Sparling is on The Princess of Nebraska by director Wayne Wang (whose Slam Dance had music by Mitchell Froom) and on Seventh Moon by Eduardo Sánchez (The Blair Witch Project, which was scored by Tony Cora, who’s also on Seventh Moon). … (5) David Holmes (Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight) is on director Aisling Walsh‘s The Daisy Chain. … (6) Clint Mansell (Requiem for a Dream) is on The Calling, from director Jan Dunn. … (7) The excellent, score-centric blog theplaylist.blogspot.com discusses Jonny (Radiohead) Greenwood‘s work on the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, There Will Be Blood, which had previously been associated with Jon Brion, who scored Anderson’s Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love; the piece quotes a recent Entertainment Weekly profile of Greenwood and focuses on the composer Krzysztof Penderecki‘s influence. … (8) Is there another credit more bittersweet for the movie-music professional than “Additional Music By”? … (Much of the above film-composer associations via imdb.com.)
Japanese Ambience MP3s from Sound Designer Tim Prebble
Sound designer and musician Tim Prebble went to Japan and, like many of us might in similar circumstances, he picked up a handy new gadget. Fortunate for us, he immediately put that gadget, a self-contained digital audio recorder, to use. Prebble’s film credits include The World’s Fastest Indian, Fracture and, most recently, 30 Days of Night, and the recordings he made during his travels show his interest in room tones. Included are several segments of the ambience of a temple in Kamamura (MP3, MP3, MP3), also from a temple in Kyoto (MP3, MP3, MP3), and water drips inside a cavern (MP3).
In the post on his website, substation.co.nz, Prebble reflects on the way recording sounds (much like taking a photograph) impacted his experience of the places he visited:
I am so happy to have all of these recordings, and no doubt some of them will make it into a film one day, but imagine the opposite ie no recorder, no mic”¦.these would all be sound memorys, slowly fading as time passes with no ability to reference them – I know which i prefer”¦ US$200 well spent! And its like the size of two cell phones”¦ and it makes you listen, be quiet and listen”¦ I stopped counting the number of times I suddenly realised I had stopped breathing & was starting to hear my heart pouding in my chest, why? Simpyl because of the sonic beauty of engaging with the environment in Japan
More details on Prebble’s audio-tourism, and additional recordings of train sounds and other settings, at his website, substation.co.nz. Also included for each of these MP3s is a quadraphonic version, from which the MP3s were derived.
tangents / Sound Art (Vitiello, Roden, RareBeasts …)
Recent Items from the World of Sound Art: (1) Open call for entries for the Zeppelin Sound Festival, sponsored by the Centre de Cultura Contemporà nia de Barcelona. The premise for the festival: “There are many kinds of deafness. This year’s Zeppelin Sound Art Festival will focus on those that are barely noticeable, slowly and steadily undermining our hearing. We like to listen to noise and work with it, but we are aware that some noises often inoculate in us a sort of ‘mental deafness’”(sonoscop.net, via elsa4sound.blogspot.com). Due date is February 15, 2008; performance will occur the monthly following.
(2) Happening right now in Taipei, through December 2: Openplay is the name of a sound and otherwise digital-arts festival (dac.tw/daf07, via taipeitimes.com). Participants include the Canadian audio-video performance team Skoltz_Kolgen and Valentina Vuksic, the latter of whose entry is as follows (related image to left, borrowed from the festival’s website):
Her presentation, Harddisko, uses defective hard disks collected from different PC shops, companies and institutions. Each of the 16 hard drives has the casing removed, with a special sound pickup mounted on the drive’s read head and connected to a sound mixer. As soon as the drive is powered, an initialization procedure begins with the head moving in a specific pattern and sounds are generated. These patterns vary with the disk’s manufacturer, model, production series, firmware version and history. The result can be compared to an orchestra of various instruments, with the artist playing the role of the conductor, but instead of directing the music with a baton, she uses a simple on-off command to supply or stop power, and perform fantastic electronic pieces according to the score-like procedures of the computer program interwoven with the richly textured mechanical movement and rhythm.
(3) Interview at flyingcircusproject.blogspot.com with Chinese sound artist Yuen Chee Wai: “I want to break out of the gallery framing.”
(4) The Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin, Texas, just wrapped up, on November 17, a show of work by Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello, titled Reverberations and curated by Regine Basha. The gallery’s website (lorareynolds.com) has an archived presentation of information about and images from the show, though no sounds. Among the pieces were Vitiello’s “The Butterfly Collector (Speaker/Book)” (2007), pictured to the left (image from the website), and Roden’s “lines and spaces” (2006), which consisted of “two 12-inch portable turntables with internal amps, two single sided 12-inch records.” Another Roden piece in the show, “Another, Another Green World,” consisted of 14 ceramic sculptures with wood bases, inspired by the Brian Eno album Another Green World.
(5) Review in Miami Herald of The Killing Machine, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller‘s exhibit at the Miami Art Museum and the Freedom Tower: “Inspired by cinema, radio, theater, and the literature of classic storytellers like Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, the installations weave their own narrative, using audio and video to evoke a range of feelings and speak to social issues” (miamiherald.com, miamiartmuseum.org). The exhibit runs from October 21, 2007, through January 20, 2008.
(6) An interview with Cardiff and Miller at transition.turbulence.org, home of the excellent Networked Music Review. Says Cardiff: “George turns on music when he gets up in the morning and I hardly ever listen to music”¦until it’s martini time that is.” And Miller, on David Lynch: “The way he uses sound ”¦ that scene in Mulholland Drive where the singer seems to be singing, then the microphone falls over but the sound keeps going. I think we try to play with creepy, strange, mysterious moods in similar ways.”
(7) The website etsy.com is largely home to homemade, small-batch prints, clothing, knitware and the like. However, a virtual shop called RareBeasts, out of Canberra, Australia, is selling hand-crafted sound devices, including a random music generator called the Orb of Sound (etsy.com, youtube.com; image at left, from webstore), a two-fisted thing called the SwoofTronic Pi that lets you “change the frequency and duration of a basic sound wave using your thumbs to control light sensors”
(etsy.com, youtube.com), a digital synthesizer called the SwoofTronic 2000 Sound Designer (etsy.com), and the reportedly un-flute-like FluteTronic 8-Bit (etsy.com, youtube.com). Check out the full set at rarebeasts.etsy.com. (Thanks for the tip, Rob.)
Tom Moody’s 8bit MP3s (and Other Media)
The artist Tom Moody applies the same lo-fi, lo-tech tools to visuals as he does to sound, an approach generally described as “8bit.” Even when he is using acrylics instead of software like MS Paintbrush, he ports over the pared down geometries and limited color palettes of early digital media, sometimes including the pixel patterning. Much as Agnes Martin would restrict herself to rarefied grids, and Robert Ryman himself to a stark white canvas, Moody works within the confines of such time-honored devices as the animated GIF and the Korg Electribe Groovebox.
Two recent music files on his website provide a back beat to his modus operandi. “Song 8 (Blip)” sounds like a rave for pixel characters (MP3, tommoody.us) while “Reggaedrome II” employs the genre’s dubby rhythms and then layers in tentative effects; the latter, he explains in the post, were an attempt to convey “students learning to scratch” (MP3, tommoody.us). For the sake of audio-visual comparison, the image above is Moody’s digitally produced “sketch_a4 (dutch remix)” — click through to see the full-size original on his site.
tangents (Ballard, netlabels, DS …)
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Generative music-maker Kenneth Kirschner is the subject of a new interview up at tokafi.com: “[Q:] Your music is electronically processed to a large extent. Why then, are you still interested in the piano as a basis? [A:] I think piano is often for me the clearest and most direct way to get across a harmonic or emotional idea.” … (2) Interview with Cousin Silas on his two albums of music inspired by J.G. Ballard, Ballard Landscapes and Ballard Landscapes 2: “I’ve never really considered Ballard or [Brian] Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction” (ballardian.com, via blissout.blogspot.com). … (3) Paul Simon talks about his work with Brian Eno and Philip Glass on one of the 26 tracks in the new “iTunes Originals” collection, a mix of new recordings, spoken reminiscences and classic tracks from Simon and from Simon and Garfunkel (apple.com).
(4) The “audioTagger” project at moolab.net lets you geocode a sound sample sent to the website via email from your cellphone (see image at left). The result is a map of the sounds, sorted by city. … (5) There’s a promising “coming soon” message at the website cybersonica.tv, which the originating organization, cybersonica.org, says will host audio and video from its past festivals. … (6) Other Music, the great Manhattan record store, has added a blog to complement its (DRM-free) online store. This link goes to a breakdown of its store’s various features: othermusic.com/wp. … (7) The Wire, the excellent British music magazine, has relaunched its website: thewire.co.uk.
(8) The netlabel Surreal Madrid (surrealmadrid.net) has, after 15 freely downloadable releases, put out a proper 12″, Kill the Headliners!!!, with music by Floex, MMtm, Karaoke Tundra, Zavoloka and Luke Warm. … (9) And the great Lisbon-based netlabel Test Tube has collected its first 75 releases on one DVD-R (testtube.monocromatica.com). That’s over 400 songs and over40 hours of music. … (10) The netlabel Dark Winter has an open call (through December 15) for holiday-themed music, specifically “dark ambient holiday tracks” (darkwinter.com). … (11) Peter Rojas, founder of engadget.com, has launched “a network of ad-supported online record labels and blogs offering completely free music streams and downloads from emerging and established artists”: rcrdlbl.com.
(12) A program called DScratch (gorgull.googlepages.com) is “a little audio manipulation software running on [the Nintendo] DS which ables you to play with an existing .wav file or recorded audio sample; you can pitch it, scratch it, rewind, mute and apply effects on it. Moreover, DScratch sends MIDI through wifi connection, which ables you to control external applications, like VJing software as I do, and can be motion-controlled.” The image to the left is a screenshot of a demo video up on youtube.com (the-palm-sound.blogspot.com) … (13) A homemade gramophone, built from LEGO Mindstorms (josepino.com, via engadget.com and hackedgadgets.com). … (14) Another sonic weapon, the Police Rumbler (engadget.com).
(15) New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has posted brief soundclips for a selection of musical works mentioned in his recent book, The Rest Is Noise (therestisnoise.com). … (16) The pandora.com Internet radio service has added classical music to its repertoire (downloadsquad.com, blog.pandora.com). … (17) Another entry in the soul-sides.com blog’s occasional “Who Flipped It Best?” feature, which compares various rap productions that utilize the same sample. The raw material this time? “Nautilus” by fusion figure Bob James. The end results? Tracks from Lord Shafiyq (“My Mic Is On Fire,” 1987), Main Source (“Live at the BBQ,” produced by Large Professor, 1991) and Ghostface Killah (“Daytona 500,” produced by RZA, 1996).
(18) On his blog earlier this month, writer William Gibson posted a photo of some seals by the shore and wrote, simply, “In their mating season, they sound like motorcycles” (williamgibsonbooks.com).