The event xxxxx23 held at Limehouse Town Hall, London, on March 23, 2006, brought together various speakers on esoteric subjects broadly associated with “the rich consequences of expanded software.” Among them was Swedish sound artist Leif Elggren, who opened his 20-minute performance with a simple but strange pronouncement: “This basic sound material was recorded in my biological mother’s uterus,” he says, “with my not yet developed teeth used as a fundamental and simple recording device a few days before my birth. This sound material was kept recorded and hidden until recently inside one of my wisdom teeth, but has now been brought to daylight and exposure. Digitally mastered, reproduced and sent out into the room which we all mutually share and which we usually call reality, the world, sent out with the main purpose to change that room.” He then pursued a voluminous approach to noise that matched the rhetorical structure of his statement, opening with a the sonic equivalent of a simple declaration that accrues noise, or wilful confusion, as it proceeds. A recording of the track was recently included in the Touch record label’s occasional podcast series (MP3, RSS). It’s also available as an OGG file, along with all of the evening’s other presentations, at 1010.co.uk.
Kracfive Remix MP3
 You’ll come for the brittle beats, but you’ll stay for the supple curves. That’s Colongib and Octopus Inc‘s “Remix of Freeform Audio Tourism” in a nutshell. The track, the latest free monthly entry from the kracfive.com collective, starts with a crack of fire that could, alternately, be a radio signal coming into focus (MP3). What follows includes wood percussion, taut guitar strings plucked like bicycle spokes, and all manner of ticking, beating, thrumming goodness. But after a few listens, what becomes apparent is that for all the percussive elements, what distinguishes the track is its good old fashioned groove. There’s a pause and release at work that is downright addictive, and occasional rubbery sonic touches that bring the low-key funk to the foreground.
Procedural MP3s
Bruno Ribeiro creates short, narrative-like tracks from found sounds, B-movie atmospheres and vaguely mechanistic rhythms. The four songs that comprise his Edit, Transform, Renew, Create album on the MiMi netlabel (clubotaku.org/mimi) include shimmering noise set against glistening shards (“Na Passagem Das Horas,” MP3) and what seem like broadcast snippets forged into something sinister (“The Post-Orgasmic Sleep or the Dream of the Magenta and Blue Organic World,” MP3). The album’s title lays bare Ribeiro’s technique: taking existing sound and reworking it until something new is exposed, and that somehow the exposing suggests a story.
Live Buddha MP3
The Buddha Machine has taken on a life of its own. It was created as a portable sound-art automaton, but far more music has resulted from the battery-operated Buddha than was anticipated by its creators, the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian). The pocket-size device, which retails for around 25 dollars, contains a chip with nine short sonic loops. Those loops gain a certain lo-fi grit thanks to cheap plastic and a rudimentary, cyclopean speaker. Like the potato chip commercial used to say, one isn’t enough; there’s something about the machine that makes people want to buy two or more and play them simultaneously, enjoying the out-of-phase quality of the same loop playing on different Buddhas or pitting contrasting loops against each other. I was at the store Turntable Lab on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles yesterday, and the guy behind the counter told me people purchase as many as 10 Buddha Machines at a time.
Merely daisy-chaining the devices hasn’t been satisfactory for everyone. Last year at least two full-length albums of proper studio remixes paid tribute to the plastic Buddha, the compilation Jukebox Buddha (Staubgold) with tracks by, among others, Adrian Sherwood, Blixa Bargeld and Robert Henke (better known by the moniker Monolake), as well as Henke’s own Layering Buddha (icm). He’s followed that up with a lengthy free download at his website, monolake.de. (That link goes to the page where the MP3 file is currently located, not to the file itself. The MP3 is the latest in Henke/Monolake’s monthly free downloads.) The set was recorded live on January 31 of this year in Berlin as part of Club Transmediale festival. Where his Layering Buddha album was a series of investigations that riffed on the inherent qualities of the various Buddha loops, this live performance, clocking in at an hour and a quarter, brings in a wider array of more complicated, often abrasive textures.
Writes Henke of the set, “The material for this performance is derived from material I created for the Layering Buddha album. During the performance the audience is placed in between a ring of six speakers with the performer sitting in between them in the center. The layers of sound were dynamically distributed in space, providing an experience of being really placed in between the sonic cloud where the acoustic result depends on the position of the listener. The recording is only a poor protocol of something much bigger. However, it sounds surprisingly cool and this is why I decided to make it public. The track is more a documentation and a teaser for the real thing; the live performance. The recording has some clippings and other technical flaws but I like it anyway.”
In the end, Henke suggests listening to his Buddha recording as one might to the Buddha Machine itself: “If you have two or more computers running in the same room try playing back the track on all of them, starting them at different times.”
True Open-Source MP3s
We discover music that’s new to us in various ways: a snippet heard in a movie, a fragment caught mid-broadcast on radio, an entry in a random podcast and, certainly the most dependable system, tracking down original work attributed to someone with a small supporting credit on an album one already admires. Well, here’s a new route entirely: if you have a favorite piece of shareware, check out the website of the software’s programmer.
Aaron “Jomdom” Ransley wrote a popular plugin for Firefox, the web browser, that allows one to use another piece of web-based software, YubNub. None of that matters in this context, except that a routine scan of Ransley’s site reveals an entry that begins “Yeah, believe it or not, I also make music!” (jomdom.net). He does indeed, and it’s music with an ear for detail that may correspond with the skills required by his day job. Listen to the range of individual sonic layers that make up the pointillist opening of “Rastafarian Hackysacks” (MP3) or how the piano-like lead on “Creative Bandwidth” (MP3) is echoed and reflected in subtle ways. Those are just two of the recommended tracks currently available.
Comfortable in the open source world of shareware, Ransley/Jomdom has released his work through the Creative Commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. “Feel free to do what you will within the restrictions of that license,” he writes, “and please give proper credit if any works are used in remixes, performances, or public broadcasts. Also, while it’s not required, I’d love to hear from you if you decide to use my works.”
All of which has left me wondering what music composed by YubNub’s own programmer (Jon Aquino) and by the programmers behind my other favorite freeware and shareware (NoteTab, FileZilla, SlickRun, AVG, QReader, Fring, Handy Safe, etc.) might sound like.