Kudos to an act named Antendex for out-minimalizing minimal techno on the opening track of the four-cut EP Diagram. That song, titled “Asteron,” is true to the album’s title — it’s little more than a rarefied beat pattern, just slow-paced, antiseptic, pin-prick percussion, plus tidy little melodic elements that sound like swells, but only by comparison (MP3). A truly refined little nugget of electronica. Get the full set at the website of the releasing netlabel, Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod).
Sound Art Clarity (Ian Burns, David Kwan)
Two artists whose work I’d written about recently here on Disquiet.com have contacted me via email with additional information about their art. That information has now been appended to the original reviews.
Ian Burns, whose “Ice (Version 3): Ode to Lady Jane”was exhibited as part of a group show at the Spencer Brownstone gallery in Manhattan earlier this year, explained how sound is generated in real time — which makes me all the more enthusiastic about what he accomplished (disquiet.com).
And David Kwan, whose solo show Emergence is at the Mission 17 gallery in San Francisco through November 24, explained how radio signals were transformed into the lovely and hypnotic images of his piece titled “Solaris” (disquiet.com).
Audiodump Techno MP3s
There’s a thin line between steady-beat, boutique-friendly techno and true minimal techno. The line is often a matter of absence. It’s called “minimal” techno for a reason.
Take, for example, the latest release from the Pozitron netlabel, the Reminiscences EP by Audidump. It’s four tracks of relatively slo-mo, decidedly 4/4 background music, but there’s arguably one track of the bunch, “Dream Reminiscence,” that stands out — or, more to the point, that doesn’t stand out. Aside from some abrasive gestures toward vinyl fetishism and, toward the close, some gossamer synths, the track is comfortable lingering below the level of attentive listening (MP3).
By contrast, the other entries each have something that draws attention to itself: ghostly synth sounds and a plinky melody reminiscent of the Cure (“7 pm.”), haunting vocal samples and an Angelo Badalamenti”“quality lushness (“Old Radio”) and a single-note whimper of a lead line (“People”). Of course, tastes will vary; one person’s foreground is another’s background — so check out the full batch at protonmonkz.uw.hu.
David Kwan’s Emergence at Mission 17 (San Francisco)
In a dark room curtained off almost entirely from the world, the six video screens of the exhibit Emergence comprise two different “video + sound” installations by the artist David Kwan. It’s showing at Mission 17, a gallery in San Francisco, through November 24.
Five of those screens belong to Kwan’s “Terminus” (2007). Four small ones, each about the size of a personal DVD player, are suspended along one wall, showing different footage of the natural environment. The images are fixed-camera, horizon-view landscapes and coastal vantages. The fifth screen is an enormous, nearly floor-to-ceiling projection on an adjacent wall. This wall shows a rotating composite of the sequences on the small screens. The video (and, apparently, the audio) from those sequences overlap, fading in and out. Thus the distant mountains of one sequence emerge from a coastal sequence as if from behind a cloud bank. Rooting the ever-changing permutation of screen correlations is a soundtrack of field recordings: fog horns, water, wind, perhaps some distant birdsong. Without those sounds, the images might be mistaken for mistaken for stills — even for paintings. The changes on the main screen are slowly paced, so any given intersection can be, for a moment, considered as a single, static image.
This shot, from the exhibit’s promotion materials, displays four different combinations of the source material:
The sixth screen on display is “Solaris” (2006), another floor-to-ceiling projection with a sonic element. Three small wooden folding chairs face the screen from the opposite wall, and hung above each chair is a pair of headphones. This is a pretty elegant, and not uncommon, solution to staging multiple pieces of sound art in a single room: the sounds of “Terminus” fill the space, while the sounds of “Solaris” require one to don a headset.
The images and sound of Kwan’s “Solaris” provide a clear contrast to those of “Terminus.” “Solaris” feels more manufactured, more digital, less “natural.” The piece is a series of closely related shorts, each involving animated images of muted, golden lines contorting against a rich, brown backdrop. Here’s a still from the show’s promotional materials:
The sound is blissed-out ambient music, with occasionally gritty textures that suggest the effect of Max/MSP programming, or some other audio-manipulation tool. The piece’s documentation provides an explanation of how the audio and video relate, though it’s a little opaque:
Kwan uses terrestrial sound in the form of radio waves as the basis for generating patterns and then shaping the space in which they inhabit. Following the notion that sound waves propagated the earliest clustering of matter, he reveals a wealth of images from the electromagnetic signature of present-day sound phenomena.
The person I attend with asked me at one point, “Does yours have static, too — is that part of it?”
PS: The artist, David Kwan, wrote to me via email after having read this review, and helpfully provided additional information about what makes his “Solaris” tick:
I recorded very short loops of in-between station or near-station noise from shortwave radio, pitch-shifted or down-sampled them and applied a series of EQ (band-pass and notch). I then combined the looped audio with an LFO (for signal bias) into a video Time Base Corrector to create the striated patterns. Then I applied the electromagnetic current from the stereo playback of the radio waves to the yoke of the CRT inside a television set, which in turn deflected the electron beam inside the tube and shaped the raster image on the television screen. So, the pieces are essentially sound-to-video translations of the radio waves, static and all.
Related links: the artist's webpage, davidkwan.net, and additional information at the gallery website, mission17.org.
Downtempo MP3s from Zengineers
The German duo Zengineers specializes in the sort of lounge-ready downtempo that on first listen might be dismissed as mere shopping-mall background music. But there’s more than just louche mood-setting on its 16-cut ideology.de netlabel release, A Gesture of Irritation. The best tracks have a mix of sampled jazz, light-touch turntablism and found voices that bring to mind early Funki Porcini, DJ Cam and other stalwarts of the start of the Warp, Ninja Tune and Mo’ Wax labels.
Irritation opens strong, with the soundbite melodic bursts and surface-noise textures of “ni:esahp” (MP3) and the raspy groove of “Aspheric Focus” (MP3). Other strong entries include “Fast Asleep,” all heavily muted horns and deeply sublimated piano (MP3), and the gingerly dubby “Time Travel (forward)” (MP3).
Not every song on Irritation is great. “Heroine” and “Monster” suffer from vocals whose delivery just don’t match the quality of the instrumental parts, and “Into the Tomb” strives for an industrial rigor it can’t attain.
The otherwise highly recommended set is available in MP3 and OGG formats, and the website is in both German and, helpfully, English. More on the group at myspace.com/zengineers.