Indie-Pop-Tronic MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The album Frerk by My First Trumpet is less electro-acoustic than it is indie-electronic. The Hamburg, Germany-based Trumpet (born Kevin Hamman) mixes the shopworn rhythms and mood of indie pop with lo-fi digital instrumentation and effects. The Frerk track “Autonarkose,” for example, blips along like the perfect soundtrack to a bike ride through suburbia: clackety, downtempo instrumental pop just this side of maudlin (MP3). Well, a very short bike ride, unless you put it on repeat.

Another track, “D Kitt,” sets a simple guitar line above one of the most minimal drum patterns imaginable, but the piece eventually blossoms into something fuller, even if the result feels more like a rough draft than a finished piece (MP3). Of course, that sketchbook quality is part of the album’s considerable charm. The songs on Frerk add layers as if they had been recorded on an old four-track, and a bridge always arrives just in time to keep your feet from getting too cozy with the groove.

What’s enticing about all of Hamman’s songs is the threadbare elements from which they’re built. And if you desire to focus on the sounds themselves,  then the song that closes the album, “The Owl Likes to Bowl,” is worth hanging around for, or jumping ahead to. Sedative little tones inch their near-melodic way above a lightly squelchy foundation, and the song effortlessly resists the urge to become anything more than it is (MP3). It’s like a song that consists entirely of a bridge, just an elegant, attenuated pause.

Get the full album, all 12 tracks, at the releasing netlabel, aerotone (aerotone.300l600.de). More on Trumpet/Hamman at his myspace page, myspace.com/myfirsttrumpet.

Vancouver Field Recording MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To this day, the name of the field-recording netlabel wanderingear.com still suggests an extra “g” — it still reads like “wandering gear,” which is no less applicable a term. The label collects high-grade recordings of raw sound caught out in the world, and occasionally remixes thereof. That is to say, it collects the sound work of individuals who carry microphones like the rest of us carry megapixel digital cameras. The label’s latest collection is of eight tracks caught off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. The sound-spotter is Lance Olsen, who says of the set, “With minimum editing and interference I have tried to present an aural experience of the harbour both then and now. The work is designed for careful listening through headphones and is deliberately low key.” His depiction is fully accurate, for even by field-recording standards, these are blissfully mundane documents, from mild creaks against a diminishing background whir (MP3) to slow lapping that dissolves into a mix of birdsong and ambiguous electronic buzzing before a final, almost humorous plunge (MP3). Olsen has edited to maximize the minimal, to emphasize the understated. The set is titled Edges: An Audio Portrait, and the word “edges” might refer as much to the periphery of perceived hearing as to the coastline. Get the full release at wanderingear.com. More on Lance Olsen at lanceolsen.ca.

OCP’s Self-Remixed MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are few musical pleasures as singular as listening to a remix side by side with the original. It’s a unique, even if increasingly common, experience to hear something and to then hear it reworked by someone other than the creator of the original song. Neither individual track is the full experience; the experience is what your ears do and what your mind does as they reconcile, as they collate, the two versions.

The new release Interludes Part Two by OCP (born João Ricardo) on the excellent Complementary Distribution netlabel is a peculiar case. The song “Mindelo” has all the hallmarks of a house track: soulful tones, fusoid keys that modulate up and down, light percussion, glistening effects. Yet the song plays as if all those elements were set on random (MP3). The beats arrive in small batches, promising a rhythmic center, but then the bass, so thick and slow that it could be mistaken for someone speaking, goes in a different direction. It’s strong stuff.

Then there’s the “Mindelo” remix by Ferenc Vaspoeri. It’s tagged on as the mini-album’s seventh and final track. It opens with elements not particularly reminiscent of the original: a knock like a hard wood block, and a keyed bass line as simple as could be. As it moves along, the beat picks up and, surprisingly, the song becomes the dance music that the original put so much effort into avoiding (MP3). Vaspoeri’s version is less a remix than a de-mix: simplifying the complexities of what had preceded it.

The whole album is recommended, especially for how it plays with rhythm, how little bristling fillips fight to serve as the main beat on “Camuflagem” (MP3), and how generally ignorable sounds such as surface noise and slow pulses constitute the entirety of “Worm,” one of the album’s strongest tracks (MP3).

Also great is “Thin,” which like “Mindelo” sounds familiar even as it studiously avoids strict classification. What it sounds like is dub, with which it shares such hallmarks as deep echo and a certain Jello-y way with the beat, not to mention some accented, if sparse and heavily buried, vocals. But “Thin” slows everything down and strips it apart so the music becomes beautifully broken, something all its own (MP3).

Get the full release at bitlabrecords.com/cod. More on OCP/Ricardo at ocp.pt.vu and on Vaspoeri at myspace.com/ferencvaspoeri.

1970 Harold Budd MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another treat from the Other Minds archive at archive.org: a “text-sound composition” by Harold Budd, perhaps best known for his collaborations with Brian Eno and with Cocteau Twins. Reportedly dating from 1970, it begins with him saying, “I’m in the same room but with the addition of an echo signal.” The statement echoes the Alvin Lucier composition, “I Am Sitting in a Room,” of the same year, but whereas the Lucier slowly devolves over repeated re-recordings, the Budd almost evaporates into thin, singular strata of noise that play for almost 40 minutes. The recording was originally made available as part of Source magazine (not to be mistaken for the hip-hop publication). Judging by the archival material at deeplistening.org and ubu.com, the Budd piece appeared in volume 6 of Source, alongside work by Lucier, Fredric Rzewski, Daniel Lentz, Morton Feldman and others. Deep Listening has back issues, priced at well over $100 a piece, which makes the Internet Archive download a true bargain (MP3).

Western Figments

The musician William Fowler Collins talks about his guitar-fueled solo album, Western Violence & Brief Sensuality.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are moments on William Fowler Collins’ album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality when the echo gets so deep that the original sound is lost in a well of reverberations, when the effects overcome the raw source material. It’s a remarkable experience to follow the familiar down the rabbit hole, only to come up in a terrain of abstraction and nuance.

Raised in New England, educated in the San Francisco Bay Area and now living in New Mexico, Collins has a penchant for grounding even his most expansive gestures. He never quite loses sight of where he’s coming from. The sound may be a surreal wind chime on the album’s “Evening,” but it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the original guitar within the figment — likewise the harmonica on “Night Watchmen.”

Though Western Violence was released in 2007, after Collins had relocated from San Francisco to Albuquerque, its rural appeal is, according to him, something of a coincidence. Much of the album was recorded before he ever left the West Coast, which seems fitting. All that aural expanse and all that seeming soundscape-as-landscape artistry is, in the end, the result of his imagination.

Collins took time in the early fall of 2007 to talk about the album’s construction, his pursuit of an MFA, and the difference between rock and experimental audiences, among other things.

Marc Weidenbaum: One of the things that strikes me foremost about the album Western Violence & Brief Sensuality is the balance of field recordings and the mesh of instrumentation and effects that you impose on the field recordings. Do you seek out field recordings to serve a sound you already have in your head, or do you take a field recording that intrigues you and then work on it?

William Fowler Collins: I think in actuality I only use field recordings prominently on one piece, “Untitled Dream 1,” but there is a good possibility that there are more buried deeply in the layers throughout the album. But on that piece, and throughout the album, I manipulate and mix the electronics to suggest sounds such as explosions, helicopters, rain, etc. In that sense I have created the illusion of field recordings. In “Untitled Dream 1,” I included a stereo mix of two different urban environments that I had recorded. One was the busy street outside of my apartment in San Francisco; the other was of the bus terminal downtown, where all the buses would pick up and drop off passengers. I believe there is also a recording from rural Ashland, Oregon, where I recorded some evening sounds with my laptop. My purpose in including those in the mix was to give the listener a sense that there were multiple environments within the piece. I was also working on two particular electronic pieces that seemed to mimic the sound of bombs exploding and helicopters flying overhead. So, to answer your question, I do take field recordings that intrigue me and work them into the mixes and I also create sounds that seem as though they might be field recordings. Continue reading “Western Figments”