Many netlabels are devoted to electronic music, and much of that music is based on field recordings, but few of those netlabels are devoted to field recordings. Enter wanderingear.com, the most recent release on which, Lori Beckstead and Dave Rose‘s Winanga-li: Australian Soundscapes, includes bird calls at dawn, frogs after rainfall and, the real keeper, the sound of the Sydney Orchestra Hall as the musicians tuned up (MP3). Also among the album’s 11 tracks is a “composite,” combining two different field recordings, both recorded at the same locale under different circumstances (MP3).
Virtual DJ’ing Tonight
In the 10 years I’ve published Disquiet.com, I’ve been asked twice to DJ, both in the past month or so. The first was for an event featuring Annie Sprinkle, and I explained that my reluctance had nothing to do with prudishness, and everything to do with not feeling up to the task of playing music in front of people.
The second was for an event this evening in San Francisco, a book party for cartoonist Keith Knight, whose new collection, Are We Feeling Safer Yet?, is being published by Top Shelf. Again, I didn’t feel capable of DJing for an audience, but Keith suggested, as an alternative, that I put together some mix tapes of instrumental hip-hop for the evening.
So, I’ve programmed three hours of i-hop (three hour-long sets, really, each with an intended starting and closing), which will play in the background tonight at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, at 655 Mission Street, around the corner from the SF MOMA. I’m amazed regularly by the studio-forged electronica that pulses beneath rap, and tonight’s set list includes plenty of DJ Premier, Timbaland and Neptunes productions for various vocalists, plus some less often heard edits by the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC and Cypress Hill, and some hip-hop purposefully composed without vocals, including work by DJ Krush, just to name some of the material.
The event runs from 6pm to 9pm. Humorously enough, the San Francisco Chronicle included my name when featuring the event in its listings: “Music provided by Mad Marc Weidenbaum.” I am, apparently, the DJ; I am what I burn.
New-Folk MP3
Late last year, the five-strong Primordial Undermind released Loss of Affect on the Strange Attractors label. The album’s a triumph of less-ism, not so much minimalism, with its Zen patterns and often terse vocabulary, but music far more select and simple than its various contributors’ involvement might suggest. Specifically, on tracks like the freely available “Breathe Deep” (MP3), the group explores the revived folk-as-art realm with a heady, deeply strummed, lithe romanticism. Fellow traveler Douglas Ferguson guests on “electronics” elsewhere on the album. This is quintessential less-ism: music that is less than the sum of its parts, and all the better for it. More info at strange-attractors.com.
Ambient Metal MP3
Wondering what Disquiet.com’s humble suggestions as to the best commercial recordings of 2006 might sound like? Well, for starters, the Southern Lord record label’s “Listen” page includes a full track from numerous among its recent releases, including the dirge-rock of bands SunnO))) and Boris, who teamed up for last year’s Altar. “Etna,” presumably named for the active Sicilian volcano, is a voluminous, slo-mo surge of, well, darn near molten metal, all the energy of hard rock, but stripped of its rhythmic vertebrae, left to writhe on the ground fearfully, or sumthin’ like that (MP3). More on the bands’ collaboration at southernlord.com. More on Disquiet’s top 10 of 2006 at disquiet.com/new2006.html.
5 Vantages on an MP3 Theme
In the classic story “Rashomon,” several individuals witness or are involved in a crime, but when they each recount the event after the fact, they tell markedly different versions. That tale, published by writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa in 1915 and immortalized 35 years later in a film version, directed by Akira Kurosawa, has the quality of a fable, and its lessons are of self-evident value during our ongoing Age of the Remix. Fitting, then, that a song by the group Rashamon (note distinct spelling) has been offered up in five different post-production versions by four artists (Motion, Fisk Industries, Duff Parker, si-cut.db), each of them providing different vantages on the original. You might argue that the original stands apart, but in fact when they’re played as a set of six it’s difficult to point to the “real”one.
The original is the heaviest by far, certainly. It begins with a tamped down piano figure and a sampled voice, that of a crazed man, complete with tape-deck surface noise, soon muddied with elastic percussion of the exaggerated drum’n’bass variety, which is flanged until it sounds like the heavy flaps of metal used to summon thunderstorms in motion pictures. Motion’s “Mix One” is almost impossible to reconcile with the original, built as it is from little more than slow aquatic pulses, intoned on distant gongs, details that go by almost unnoticed in Rashamon’s track. Si-cut.db’s lengthy entry (seven minutes, compared with the original’s 5:41) comes closest to Motion’s “Mix One”for its estimable attempt at weightlessness — but how Si-cut employs the little offbeats is even more enticing, bringing them in on occasion, making them swing; those tidy rhythmic cues alone make it the choice cut among the interpretations here. Duff Parker likewise emphasizes the delicate moments that the original used as mere accent marks, and his piece is widely varied, with periods of intense echo and others of pristine silence. Motion’s “Mix Two”shares Parker’s interest in veering off in various directions. Fisk Industries retains the original’s throaty holler, burying it in a watery dub, interspersing bits of the original syncopation, their pitch raised considerably, to a tinny consistency. They’re all for free — the original, and the five remixes — on the Highpoint Lowlife record label’s “download”page: highpointlowlife.com/downloads.shtml.