Music for Shuffling (100 MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yesterday would have been John Cage’s 95th birthday. What better way to belatedly celebrate his serendipitous musical philosophy than to fill your MP3 player with 100 short tracks, select gapless playback and hit shuffle?

That’s the theory behind “One Hundred Ambient Tones,” a collection of, well, 100 very short sound clips credited to Zen Pho, which I take to mean a kind of zen soup, packed with tasty goodness — and that’s exactly what this is.

The files range in length from 4 seconds to just under a minute and a half. All but three are under a minute. Half are half a minute or less. Sonically, they don’t so much range across a continuum as they do hit lots of specific spots, from feedback to clatter, pings to lush drones, noisy constructions to raw field recordings, concise tone poems to jagged fragments. On shuffle, they stream into a montage of mundane fantasies.

In the brief liner notes at archive.org, where the set is housed, Zen Pho (born Phill Phelps) explains that a few of the tracks have specific models in mind. One, titled “Laputa Clouds,” in reference to Hayao Miyazaki’s Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (aka Castle in the Sky, aka Laputa: The Flying Island in the U.K.), “pays respects to Japanese film sound designers Kazutoshi Satou and Hironori Ono of Studio Ghibli,” Miyazaki’s production house.

The 100 tracks are available as individual files (like “Motif – Flurry 1,” MP3, and “Fake Rain,” MP3), but it’s best to download the full set as an archive of the 100 MP3s (ZIP). More on Zen Pho at www.zenpho.co.uk.

Vibraphonic Teamup MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What’s the best way to handle a mallet instrument? Maybe hit it with a nice broad piece of wood, all the better to get some solid tone out of those hard metal or wood bars. Maybe with a drumstick, for some pointillist sense of economy. Maybe with something soft and pillowy, all the better to summon up dozy, dulcet sounds.

Well, how about treating that same vibraphone with a sampler? That’s the modus operandi at work on the new teamup of Karaoke Tundra and Luke Warm, “Miss Testosterone,” from the surrealmadrid.net netlabel. It’s an upbeat, single-track release, one that gently takes the inherently momentum-infused vibraphone and glitches it up just enough to make it sparkle (MP3).

One of the things that makes a vibes performance so captivating is that tightrope tension, the question as to whether the performer can keep all those rolls, trills and thrills going; what the Tundra/Warm duo has done is let accidents happen, these little fritz-outs and short circuits that give the track an energy all its own.

Bush of Disquiet Anniversary

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A year ago today, I uploaded a project called Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 26-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album.

In the year since the set’s release, the files have been downloaded some 5,732 times as of this writing (9:00pm Pacific Time), according to the Internet Archive (archive.org), where they’re housed — and that thrills me to no end. They’re all available for free download in various formats (192Kbps MP3, 64 Kbps MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3) at:

archive.org/details/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet

Here’s the lineup, with links to the 192Kbps MP3s and to the websites of the contributing musicians:

  1. (MP3) “Help Me Help Me” — AllThatFall
  2. (MP3) “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” — Roddy Schrock
  3. (MP3) “Leftover Secrets to Tell” — Pocka
  4. (MP3) “Secret Life Remix” — Stephane Leonard
  5. (MP3) “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” — (dj) morsanek
  6. (MP3) “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — MrBiggs
  7. (MP3) “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” — john kannenberg
  8. (MP3) “Somebody Help Us” — My Fun
  9. (MP3) “Hey” — Mark Rushton
  10. (MP3) “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” — Prehab
  11. (MP3) “Not Enough Africa” — Ego Response Technician
  12. (MP3) “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — doogie

More info at disquiet.com/bushofghosts. Thanks, again, to all the contributors, including Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), who produced the beautiful “cover” (shown above) and “back cover” for the collection. The project would not have been possible without the instigation of Eno and Byrne, who posted the raw materials of the original songs at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.

Archival Pauline Oliveros MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In both dog years and electronic-music years, the early 1980s is a lifetime ago. That’s when Pauline Oliveros released her Accordion and Voice, an album of insular, searching drones. The Important Records label this year remastered the analog master tapes and rereleased the album on CD. A free download, “Horse Sings from a Cloud” (MP3), has been made available for promotional purposes. On it, she chants like an introspective shaman while her trademark accordion holds long, singular notes and simple chords. Those bellows-powered tones resemble the machine-generated sine waves of an even earlier generation of electronic music, a generation she helped motivate as one of the key figures in the original San Francisco Tape Music Center. More info at importantrecords.com.

Felix Schramm’s Turntable at SFMOMA (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you didn’t snag a flyer on your way into the New Work space at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, you’d think a plane had crashed through the wall, and somehow the external shell of the building had healed itself.

The artist Felix Schramm, working with a set of constraints imposed by SFMOMA, has filled much of several upstairs galleries with Sheetrock constructions that force their way through one space and into the next. The result is like one of Lebbeus Woods’ impossible architecture drawings made real.

That piece is titled “Collider.” Schramm has one other sculpture on display: “Soft Corrosion” (2006), a busted hemisphere of wood and plaster, within which is placed a functioning turntable. (Photography isn’t allowed at SFMOMA; the following image is scanned from a handout made available at the museum.)

On that turntable is a record, which rotates at 16rpm to what SFMOMA curator Aspara DiQuinzio describes as an “irregular eclipse,” owing to a second, off-center hole that Schramm has punched into the vinyl. The record is Guitarrenträume in Gold, a collection of sentimental guitar melodies including “House of the Rising Sun” and “My Darling Clementine.” When I visited this past weekend, the player had already locked into the groove at the center of the record, and it didn’t so much fill the room as accent it with a low rumble of surface noise. DiQuinzio says in the handout, “The sound distortion heightens the experience of spatial disorientation that is central to Schramm’s overall practice.” With a mind to the chance inherent in Schramm’s constrained spatial and sonic play, DiQuinzio opens the handout with a full John Cage mesostic poem, based on the word “circumstances.”

There’s more going on technologically in “Soft Corrosion” than just a turntable hooked up to a speaker. A fairly complex bunch of electrical cords is packed inside the wood semi-circle, including an exposed bit of circuit board that turns the power to the record player on and off every minute or so.

Just down the hall from the Schramm is the entrance to a massive retrospective of related paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse. The proximity might seem incongruous, even jarring, did the Matisse exhibit not open with this 1951 quote from the master: “I did not sculpt like a sculptor. Sculpture does not say what painting says. Painting does not say what music says. They are parallel ways, but you can’t confuse them.”

The Schramm is open through September 30. More info at sfmoma.org. I’ll be headed back at least once before the exhibit closes. Every day at 10am, noon, 2pm and 4pm someone resets the “Soft Corrosion” needle to the start of the record album.