Lou Harrison MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The wayback machine that is the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org) has set its dial to May 14, 1977, when a concert at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, celebrated the 60th birthday of composer Lou Harrison, who would have turned 90 this year (MP3). The recording was originally broadcast on Los Angeles radio KPFK, and was the inaugural show of the Imaginary Landscape radio series, cohosted by composer Carl Stone, then 24 years old, and Leni Isaacs. The nearly two-hour segment includes biographical information and several Harrison performances including, as identified in the archive.org descriptive text, “Song of Quetzalcoatl,” “Double Music” (composed by Harrison and John Cage, whose own “Imaginary Landscape” lent its name to the radio series), “Suite for Cello and Harp,” “Happy Birthday,” “Canticle No. 1,” “Fugue,” “In Praise of Johnny Appleseed,” “Cinna” and “Schoenbergiana.”

The concert was produced by composers Paul Dresher, Peter Garland and Rae Imamura. “Quetzalcoatl,” “Double Music” and “Appleseed” (the latter in its 1976 revision of the original 1942 score) are of particular interest, feats that they are of loose percussion counterpoint. The dreamy “Cinna” (1954-55), considered one of the first pieces written for prepared piano (in this case a retuned tack piano), was performed by Imamura; as with all the pieces heard here, it’s given a brief and informative musicological introduction by the show’s hosts. “Cinna” can also be heard, thanks to archive.org, in a rendition performed by Linda Burman-Hall at an 85th birthday celebration for Harrison in February 2002, a year before he passed away (MP3).

These MP3s Were Made for Walkin’

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you follow, or are simply intrigued by, sound art, then one date is well worth pencilling into your calendar: September 22 is the fourth annual Sound Walk in Long Beach, California. And if you make sound art, there’s a second, more pressing date to note: July 1 is the deadline for entry proposals. The Sound Walk is an installation-oriented affair, during which speakers are attached to walls, hung as art, hidden in shrubbery and otherwise worked into the Long Beach landscape; it’s a day in which landscape becomes soundscape, as the more inventive contributors try to transform available, quotidian noise into art. Past participants, many of whose work has been featured in the Disquiet Downstream, include John Kannenberg, Steve Roden, Sumako and the ensemble that organizes the event, FLOOD.

Audio and documentary photos from all three previous years are available for download at soundwalk.org. Highlights from the 2006 Sound Walk include Kabir Carter‘s “Shared Frequencies” (MP3), in which broadcast signals appear to be mixed in real time; Philip Curtis‘ “Tracking Feldman 2” (MP3), with its mysteriously churning overlays of bustle and tone; and Philip Stearns‘ “Burlap,” a sequence of varying, high-pitched buzzes (MP3). As with much installation art, the sound alone doesn’t quite do the original presentation justice. For example, the posted photo of an upturned, oversized horn in no way explains the dramatically ticking audio, “Time Out” (MP3), attributed to last year’s effort by Eric Strauss. You sorta had to be there, which is all the more reason to head to Long Beach come September.

Dubstep Lecture

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The term dubstep may just be a new branding experiment for illbient, but one of the genre’s most proficient enactors, Kode 9, lagging from a recent flight, shed some light on its dark contours when he spoke at length as part of the Red Bull Music Academy late last year. Kode described the music as a sideways outgrowth of the more reggae side of UK garage, which is to say music of choppy velocity that makes room for some dubby swing. The discussion is sadly lacking in many musical examples, but it’s rich with details, such as how much it costs to cut your own dubplate, who Kode’s working with, the pleasures in dispensing with 4/4 beats, and which British record stores are central to the scene. The file’s available as an M4A, which is, essentially, an MP3 with images embedded.

Insectoid MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Machines may not yet have gained sentience, but in Paul Feyertag‘s work they certainly achieve an insectoid fervor. The opening track on Suburban Decollage, “Contrary Motion,” suggests a nightmarish scenario of constant death in the classic arcade game Centipede, whose familiar 8-bit synthetic tones were as chunky and mechanoid as the avatars to whose battles they lent a soundtrack (MP3). The later “Ostinato” has a thick overlay of burbling noise, but just below is a quickly shifting hive of activity (MP3). Of the four tracks on Suburban Decollage, the real keeper is “Drone/Musing,” which in headphones can come across as a tinny prickle of static, but which when played on proper speakers evidences Feyertag’s attention to minute details; shards of harsh noise spring from the bristling quietude (MP3), even if no further insect metaphors apply. The album is the latest free download from the Luvsound netlabel (luvsound.org).

Sound Performance MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.