The new entry at term (12k.com/term), the occasional netlabel for experimental music that’s a branch of musician Taylor Deuree’s 12k label, is a half-hour drone recorded just last month by Swiss musician Pe Lang. Drones are categorized more often by flavor than by structure. This one has, as its key ingredient, a static (as in noise, not as in stasis) texture that suggests either rain or a needle on vinyl (MP3). Of course, in an age as technologically mediated as ours, don’t both those possible interpretations have the same basic impact on the listener: a mix of romance and mild annoyance? The title of the piece, “Shellac,” tips the scales toward the surface noise of early analog recording technology. More info on Pe Lang at untitled-sound-objects.ch.
Solo Frippertronic MP3s
The guitarist Robert Fripp, a pioneer in live looping, regularly posts free MP3s of his work — solo, in unique small ensembles, and with his various bands, most notably King Crimson. These files don’t remain online at his site, dgmlive.com, forever, so be sure to snag them while they’re available. Among the recent selections, “Improv II and Solo,” recorded June 18, 1979, in Chicago, is somewhat unusual, in that it uses the accrual-based improvisatory mode he was mastering at the time to achieve something far more noisy and abrasive than he generally is associated with (MP3). The more recent “Pastorale Mendoza,” recorded in Mendoza (presumably Argentina) on June 2 of this year, shimmers where “Improv II” assaults (MP3).
Live & Studio Tommy Guerrero MP3s
Former skateboard champ Tommy Guerrero makes either the closest thing the jam band circuit has come to slo-core, or the closest hip-hop has come to ambient music, or the closest thing the graffiti world has come to lounge music — but picky genre triangulation aside, do check out his six-track live set available free at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org).
Recorded at the Moonshine Festival in Laguna Beach, California, back in early October 2004, it’s been downloaded just shy of 5,000 times, despite the fact the majority of it consists of him noodling cautiously on guitar over tersely looped backgrounds of strings, pianos and rudimentary beats. The occasional vocal sample kicks in, the most prominent of which could serve as a manifesto for Guerrero’s supreme understated-ness: “Music, like other art forms, is a means of articulating concepts, viewpoints and emotions that are not easily verbalized.” (This is something he kinda forgets when he attempts to elaborate on political issues, so you might just avoid track five.) The keeper is the fourth track, which has Kid Koala’s way with a somnolent groove (MP3).
There’s also a bunch of MP3s up at his website, tommyguerrero.com, including sample tracks off several of his past albums. One highlight is “Insomniac Remix,” or “fotraque-insomniac” if you go by file names (MP3), which is about as far as one could get from Moonshine’s crunchy vibe: it’s polished and studio-honed, but has an artful slackness that is pure Guerrero.
Tangents (Ludwig, Cage, Primo)
Quote of the Week: Osamu Tezuka is the subject of a retrospective exhibit, Marvel of Manga, at the Asia Art Museum (asianart.org) in San Francisco. (Full disclosure: I am employed by one of the exhibit’s corporate sponsors.) Of a Beethoven manga by Tezuka, titled Ludwig B, the exhibit notes state, “Possibly because of this silence, Tezuka’s manga pushes the medium to staggering heights of abstraction in its representation of music.”
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: Seattle Weekly on Paul Rucker‘s sound art, including a laser interface called the Happy Ending Machine (seattleweekly.com); Rucker’s Catalyst exhibit at Jack Straw (jackstraw.org) in Seattle closed on Friday. … Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program for 2007 divided over $200,000 among 17 separate commissions, at least two of which have electronic components: Annie Gosfield is a solo work for piano and electronics (for pianist Lisa Moore) and David First‘s Elegies for the Afterland, which investigates “3D tuning,” is a work for string quartet for string quartet and computer (meetthecomposer.org). … Among the pieces at this year’s installations at the Paradise Ridge Sculpture Garden in Sonona County, California, are sound-related work by Nicolas van Krijdt and Robert Ellison; view images at paradiseridgewinery.com; get the story at the North Bay Bohemian (link). … Among the events during the upcoming Japan! Culture and Hyperculture series at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. are a tribute to composer Toru Takemitsu (February 9, 2008) and a performance by a Tokyo-based laptop orchestra working with the sho, a traditional Japanese mouth organ (February 11, 2008); more info at kennedy-center.org. … A mention on downloadsquad.com and and a subsequent search for “sound art” yielded this result at findarticles.com — as of this writing some 76 entries, the majority of them free, from such publications as Art in America and Artforum. … The eMusic.com edition of Mexican Institute of Sounds‘s Pinata album has two extra cuts. … A rotating disco ball for your floor — think R2D2 rumbas with the roomba (miuro.com). … A massive, battery-operated guitar pick productizes air guitar (rocktamashii.com, via we-love-technology.com). … Two anthropomorphic music toys: Mr. Tengu is a USB box that responds, albeit with limited variations, to sound and other input (gizmodo.com, solidalliance.com) and bleeplabs.com makes the cutest little analog synth you ever did see (thanks, Brian, for the latter). … The hipDisk by Danielle Wild (audiomulch.com/~danielle), according to engadget.com, “goes about its noise making ways by utilizing soft switches on the two discs, which create a variety of chimes based on one’s movements.”
YouTube Goodness: A 10-minute, handheld recording of Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin‘s “Listening Post” installation, about which I wrote yesterday (youtube.com); the footage is better as a memory aid than as a viewing experience. … John Cage performing “Water Walk” in January 1960 on the TV show I’ve Got a Secret (youtube.com).
Heavy Rotation: The first single off Common‘s new album, Finding Forever, has “The Game” on the flipside, and the instrumental is producer Kanye West at his best, which is to say minus the goofy, feel-good hyper-vocals: just hard-nosed studio beats; the only downside is that the guest scratching on “The Game” by DJ Premier is only heard on the version of the song with Common’s vocals. … The Disquiet Downstream entry of the week is Stephen Vitiello‘s remix of Scanner‘s “Sleepless City” (disquiet.com, MP3).
Listening to Warren Ellis’s Debut Novel
“The design is such that the sound of the book being opened onto a table has infrasonic content, too low for human hearing. The book briefly vibrates at eighteen hertz, which is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. … It’s a book that forces you to read it.”
That bit of sci-fi product design is from Crooked Little Vein, the debut novel by longtime comics writer Warren Ellis (Planetary, Transmetropolitan, Fell, Desolation Jones). Given that Ellis’ blog (warrenellis.com) regularly includes MP3s, often of the industrial-electronic variety, it’s no surprise that music has a solid place in his novel. It also features a woman who listens to Manhattan traffic the way Native Americans “listened for the future in the sound of horses,” an apparent radio-dial-surfing side reference to the Conet Project (“some weird broadcast of a woman doing nothing but reading numbers very slowly”), a government assault on a pirate radio station (“Pirate radio operations have been reclassified as Broadcast Terrorism”), and a pimp’s associate whose ringtone is Harold Faltermeyer’s Bevery Hills Cop ditty, “Axel F.”
Oh, and Ozzy Osbourne peeing on the Alamo. As that last reference might suggest, it’s a dirty little book, quite purposefully so. There’s a woman on my bus who seems to only read novels by people like Dorothy Sayers; she happened to peek over my shoulder during a sequence involving a sexual predilection for Godzilla — I don’t think we’ll be sharing a bench on the bus again any time soon. To say it’s a dirty book is an understatement. I continued reading it after I got off the bus, walking the last quarter mile to work and laughing out loud quite often — and I wondered if it is illegal to read this book near an elementary school. In Ellis’ paranoid near-future, no doubt, the airspace between a book and one’s brain is policed by the FCC.