Sleepless Scanner-Vitiello MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The passing of film director Michelangelo Antonioni this week brought many things to mind, many of them sound-related. This is in part due to Antonioni’s pop instinct, as exemplified by the rollicking soundtrack to his film Blow Up (1966); in part due to Brian De Palma’s remake of Blow Up, the film Blow Out (1981), which ingeniously transfered the theme from photography to sound; and in large part due to 52 Spaces, an audio-visual adaption of Antonioni’s L’Eclipse (1962) that Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) has released on CD and performed live (I caught it at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art several years back).

Like Antonioni, Scanner is a student of the urban — a realm of aesthetic scholarship that is exemplified by his nightjam.org.uk project. Back in 1996, Scanner got some young British men and women together to talk about, as the Nightjam website puts it, “how the city at night looks and sounds to their ears and eyes.” Among the results of this project was “Sleepless City,” a maudlin track opening with dolorous piano that, characteristic for Scanner, places spoken word, by his young subjects, amid a soundscape that lends drama and emotional context (MP3). Keeping the project alive, he subsequently invited various musicians to remix the work he created at Nightjam, and one highlight among many is a “Sleepless City” remix by Stephen Vitiello (MP3) that adds percussion and ups the ratio of music/noise to voice, but without jeopardizing Scanner’s initial narrative intent.

More on Scanner at scannerdot.com and on Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com.

If You Meet the Buddha in the Times…

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Many new readers have come through thanks to the Buddha Machine article in Rob Walker‘s “Consumed” column in this past Sunday’s magazine section of the New York Times (nytimes.com).

Here’s a quick rundown of Buddha-related material on Disquiet.com: (1) A December 2005 interview with Christiaan Virant of the duo FM3, who made the Buddha Machine (“I’m quite happy with the gritty, lo-fi digital sound that comes out of the boxes on the market right now”); (2) my “best of 2005” list, in which I list the Buddha Machine alongside proper CD releases; (3) video of FM3 in performance, playing chess with their Buddha Machines at the De Appel museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam, November 2005; (4) free MP3 downloads by Mark Rushton, based on the Buddha Machine loops; (5) my “best of 2006” list, which includes an album of Buddha Machine remixes (Layering Buddha, with work by Blixa Bargeld, Adrian Sherwood, Monolake and others) and mention of Monolake’s Jukebox Buddha full-length; (6) news of FM3’s plans, including a high-end ceramic edition; (7) free live Monolake downloads derived from his Buddha Machine fiddlings.

And for regularly updated information about the Buddha Machine, visit FM3’s dedicated fm3buddhamachine.com website.

Turntable Trio Downloads

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In the photograph up at the website of the Four Directional Doubt netlabel (fourdirectionaldoubt.free.fr), the three men look more like keyboard players than turntablists. To many ears, they may sound like something other than turntablists as well. But turntablists they are: Jonas Olesen, ErikM and, by far the best-known, Christian Marclay — caught playing together as djTRIO at the Spor Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, in May this year.

The label has collected recordings of their group performance as a set of free downloads. These aren’t really four separate tracks, but a single piece divided into quarters — the first track, for example, ends with a jab of a horn sample that’s immediately repeated as the second part opens. This is also, as far a turntablism goes, more abstract than 90 percent of what gets recorded associated with that rubric. The trio mashes found sounds, from spoken word, to jazz, to noise, and the techniques they employ have far more in common with the chaos, clatter and attention to detail of European free improvisation than with the scratching and beat-matching of hip-hop. Still, Marclay and company share with their hip-hop brethren a fascination with the material fact of vinyl, and the result, for all their willful confusion, finds its own groove.

More on the festival at spor.kunde.siteloom.dk, on ErikM at erikm.com and on Olesen at xskalleper.adr.dk. (Marclay doesn’t appear to have his own webpage.) The music files are saved in the OGG format. Try the opening salvo (OGG) before visiting Four Directional Doubt to dive into the complete piece.

Mitzvah for an MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When, thanks to an MP3 file posted at the Internet Archive, Paul Zukofsky‘s rendition of “Mitzvah for the Dead (for Violin and Tape),” by composer Michael Sahl, is heard, some 37 years after its broadcast on KPFA-FM, the experience is doubly nostalgic.

First, there is the matter of the time that has passed since a young Charles Amirkhanian, heard introducing the work here, was coaching listeners about the ins and outs of (so-called) new music on his radio show — a role he still plays, of course, through the Other Minds performance series, as well as related Internet downloads and audiostreams.

Second, there is the Eastern European tinge to Sahl’s writing for violin, those sour notes and that modal vibe that together suggest gypsy or Ashkenazi ritual. What isn’t nostalgia-inducing at all is how Sahl interpolates collage and found sounds into his work, from what seem like snippets of analog synthesizers and radio broadcasts, to cut-ups of marching bands that bring to mind the work of Charles Ives.

For the broadcast, which Amirkhanian has posted as part of the Other Minds section at the Internet Archive (archive.org, MP3), Sahl’s work is paired with “Violin Phase” by Steve Reich, also performed by Zukofsky; it’s a characteristically bracing work, in which electronically mediated layers of snatches of riffs are played against each other, finding variation of timbre, tone and tempo in a highly constrained compositional environment. The result is as vibrant as it is economic, with happy accidents of rhythmic coincidence that surprise on every listen.

Aghost’s “Break Beep” MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Is “Break Beep” the title of Aghost‘s latest free download (MP3) from the kracfive.com collective? Or is it the name of the nascent genre that the track aspires to exemplify, evangelize and propagate? Perhaps both. A mix of snare-happy percussion and blippy, fizzy melodic fragments, for all of its 2:17 running time the piece swells and dips to a head-nodding groove until, in the closing moment, it upticks to weekend-techno thump. More on Aghost myspace.com/wwcarpen.