Tangents (Shuffle, Cage, plasma)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quote of the Week: “They do not need to be correct because they are symbols; they stand for the essence of music, not specific notes. Their unconventionality also reminds me of the graphic scores of experimental music; they are their kitschy cousins.” That’s Christian Marclay, as quoted on the back of his new box-as-book collection, Shuffle, published by the Aperature Foundation. It contains 75 cards, each a photo that Marclay has shot of some musical notation out in the world: on a hat, a tattoo, suspenders, etc.

By the way, if you’re near Oakland this coming weekend, musicians will be, per Marclay’s suggestion, playing Shuffle as if it were intended notation on Friday, September 7, at the 21 Grand. Damon Smith organized; participants will include Aurora Josephson, Weasel Walter, Jacob Lindsay, Phillip Greenlief and Kristian Aspelin (21grand.org).

News, Quick Links, Good Reads: There’s 24 hours and 33 minutes of John Cage airing on WYNC from Wednesday, September 5, at 12PM until 12:33PM on September 6th. It’s streaming at wnyc.org. That’s 24’33” — get it? … Sound-activated clothes designed by Tomoko Ueyama (engadget.com), sound-based search engine (engadget.com), multi-touch interface innovations from the Jazzmutant folks (engadget.com), a USB drive resembling a cassette tape (engadget.com), a potential guitar controller for the DS edition of Guitar Hero III (engadget.com). … Audio-recognition research from Google (googleresearch.blogspot.com). … The CD turned 25 on August 17 (slashdot.org, cnn.com). … The 12k record label, run by Taylor Deupree, has launched a forum (12k.com/forum). … Useful tips on how to get music on and off your iPod (howto.wired.com); I can recommend the YamiPod software (yamipod.com). … R.I.P. Tony Wilson, Foundry Records head (Joy Division, New Order), Hacienda founder (news.bbc.co.uk).

Score Keeper: The website of Clint Mansell (clintatthecontrols.com) has gone dark; according to Network Solutions it “expired on 08/11/2007 and is pending renewal or deletion.” … Charlie Clouser (Nine Inch Nails cohort) is on a fairly consistent roll: Death Sentence, Dead Silence, Resident Evil: Extinction and Saw IV (he did the first three,too). … Cliff Matinez is on Stiletto. … I’ve added a set of links to the Disquiet.com Elsewhere page that lead to the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) entries for film-music composers with a penchant for underscoring (disquiet.com/elsewhere).

Fellow Travelers: How did Rick Rubin improve hip-hop in the mid-1980s? “Before Def Jam, hip-hop records were typically really long, and they rarely had a hook. … Those songs didn’t deliver in the way the Beatles did. By making our rap records sound more like pop songs, we changed the form” (nytimes.com). … Art stars the Starn twins moving to sound art? “Some day we hope to make it talk,” they say of one of their large-scale photo projects. “Plasma makes a great speaker”(nytimes.com). … According to the September 2007 issue of Vibe: Notch (born Normal Darnell Howell, of the duo Born Jamericans): “I drive to clear my mind. The best place to drive is the turnpike in Miami ’cause the sky looks like Windows XP”; Corbin Bleu of High School Musical: “A lot of music comes to me on the plane — it’s the hum of the engine. The other strange place is … a lot of movie ideas come to me in the shower. I sit there, let the water run on me, and procrastinate. I guess there’s something about a continuous noise.”

Heavy Rotation: Pauline Oliveros‘ Accordion and Voice, dating from the early 1980s, reissued by Important, in all its droney glory. … Galactic‘s latest, From the Corner to the Block, teams the group largely with rappers, which means it uses its updated take on New Orleans party jazz to fill the space where loops and beats might have been; the highlight is an exception: “Bounce Baby,” featuring DJ Z-Trip … Disquiet.com Downstream of the week: a you-are-there field recording by Cabaret Voltaire‘s Chris Watson (disquiet.com, MP3).

Banks Violette Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Among the individuals responsible for bringing drones into the modern museum, one key one is Banks Violette, who has collaborated with black metal musicians from Scandinavia and with the band Sunn O))’s Stephen O’Malley in the construction of installations that combine painting, sculpture and sound. The PS1 podcast series, broadcast from the Queens-based arts center, has an old interview with him in which he discusses how the audio complements his physical structures, how MFA programs prepare (for better and worse) students for the art world, and how youthful indiscretion may be the most potent cultural detritus of all (MP3).

Page-spotting Reloaded

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Page-spotter section of Disquiet.com has been sorted out. It was one of the remaining items to be re-uploaded to the website following Disquiet.com’s backend upgrade this past sumer.

Page-spotter is a bibliography-in-progress on the subject of ambient/electronic music, sound art and related fields. Currently it’s only up to date through 2004 and the earliest entry is George Antheil’s 1945 autobiography — with more to come. It’s at disquiet.com/page-spotter.

Elsewhere 2.0

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As the Internet expands, links pages can become less useful, but Disquiet.com nonetheless has long maintained a page of links, titled Elsewhere, related to the subject at hand. I’ve just reworked that page today so that it draws automatically from the links I archive at the highly recommended web service del.icio.us.

The Disquiet.com Elsewhere links are categorized as follows: acts (musicians, bands), blogs/webzines, discussion groups (email and web-based), event listings, galleries (with some history of focusing on sound art), record labels, museums (with some history of focusing on sound art), netlabels and record retailers. The page also lists, at the very top, the 20 most recent links I’ve added. No doubt the section will expand to include other categories in the future.

Because I’m in the process of porting the links over, the page will look a little sloppy for a little while. As always, recommendations are appreciated.

Post—Cabaret Voltaire Field Recording MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the website of Chris Watson — a founder of the experimental pop band Cabaret Voltaire — there are several free downloads culled from now out-of-print samplers from the Touch record label. One is titled “Out of Our Sight.” Watson’s brief description, pulled verbatim from the original sampler, reads: “Motionless anticipation, along the dry sandy banks of the Zambesi a Mozambique nightjar is sucking in all the remaining light.”

Aside from choosing the location, turning on the microphone, selecting start and end points to the recording, and deciding that the resulting audio document (MP3) was of sufficient quality to present to the public, all Watson did is assign a title and a subsequent descriptive line — but, of course, each of those decisions is no haphazard thing. And the resulting track, so full of life to be alarming, and certainly far more vibrant that the phrase “motionless anticipation” might suggest, is breathtaking in its detail — the voyeuristic sense of proximity it conveys.

A raw field recording is the among the purest forms of electronic music — sound mediated solely by technological and aesthetic decisions. And Watson is a master.

More at chriswatson.net.