Since 1992, the composer Phil Kline has hosted an annual event between Thanksgiving and Christmas that serves as a kind of semi-secular carolling, a hybrid of sound art and holiday festivities. His “Unsilent Night” is a four-track participatory composition. Individuals put one of the constituent parts, each 45 minutes in length, onto tape, CDR or an MP3 player, and broadcast them in unison in public, originally on boomboxes, now on all manner of equipment. The trick is that unison is hard to achieve, even if everyone assembled listens closely as the lead caroller counts down on a megaphone. The sounds are a mix of chimey percussion, resonant synths and some church-ready vocalizing. The four tracks are compressed into Zip files on Kline’s site and make for seasonal listening, before, during and after Xmas, philkline.com (ZIP, ZIP, ZIP, ZIP).
Japanese Pop-Noise MP3s
Taeji Sawai offers up several free downloads on his personal site (taeji.org) that find various means to balance two divergent tendencies: noise and pop. “BBBB” plays static like it’s a tenuous vocal above a minimal techno beat, drums entering tentatively, breaks lending a certain drama (MP3). Ditto “erty” (MP3), which is a little more straightforward, with its cash-register metrics and android birdsong. A track titled “losi” is a real ear-opener (MP3); it starts with this escalating interference that suggests another entry in the ever-expanding catalog of Japanese noise, but then that raspy sound tapers into a rough rhythm, with a light melody that plays at quarter speed.
One other highlight is “Something in the Way” (MP3), which pairs Sawai with vocalist Aco for a lovely bit of trip-hop that brings to mind how fruitful, not to mention natural, are the overlaps between hip-hop and experimental electronic music in Japan. There is also an inexplicable cover of Madonna’s “Material Girl.”
Early Clark MP3s
The latest album by Clark, Body Riddle (Warp), was preceded by a flurry of his own blogging promotion: three free downloads in quick succession at throttleclark.com; all of them were mentioned as part of the Disquiet.com Downstream. A model Warp Records musician, he torques rhythms until they bleed melodies and enjoys the pliant space between abstraction and danceability. Over at his myspace page (myspace.com/throttleclark) are a handful of additional tracks, two of ’em downloadable, one from 1998 (MP3), the other from 2002 (MP3). The former is elastic and fuzzy, the shifting give’n’take percussion of drum’n’bass filtered through a minimal-techno sound pipe, all compressed and tensile. The latter is more vibrant and chaotic, with a gooey, chiming lead line amid the drummy madness. It closes on a snippet of what sounds like TV theme music, which in this context brings to mind the great Throbbing Pouch of Wagon Christ, which in 1998 may well still have been ringing in Clark’s ears.
Sparkly MP3s
All the music, none of the dank. Three days of experimental music went down in Glasgow at the Arches back in mid-October of this year, under the broad banner of the Instal festival, and much of it has been uploaded for free download. One highlight (well, two) is a pair of pieces by Lee Patterson, both performed on October 14. Judging by a small photo on the Instal site, the 15-minute “Sparklers” was recorded with just that, the safe firecracker alternative miked for all its fizzy complexity (MP3). Patterson’s “Table Top Set” has a more diverse pallette, including “syrup, tiny bottles and boiling water” (MP3). More info at arika.org.uk.
Japanese “Room” MP3
Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” is one of the cornerstones of electronic music. Dating from the late 1960s, it is more a process than a composition. Famously, Lucier recorded the phrase “I Am Sitting in a Room,” then played it back, recorded that, and so on, the phrase dissolving as if in successive generations of photocopies.
More to the point, Lucier’s piece solidified the idea of process as composition. Earlier this year, Japanese artist Kanta Horio applied “I Am Sitting in a Room” to the feedback created by flat panel speakers (MP3). Information is posted at Horio’s blog (kanta.but.jp/blog). The track, in which near silence slowly becomes a woozy pile of circulating noises, speaks for itself. But a friend of mine was gracious enough to do a rough translation of Horio’s blog entry:
“Feedback with flat panel SP / Feedback experimentation using the flat panel speakers / [The set up] looks really desolate [lit. ‘cold colors’] but it was really [literally] so cold that my feet lost sensation. / I simply let it emit ‘feedback,’ using [a system programmed in] Max/MSP that resembled ‘I am sitting in a room.’ I didn’t process the seams between recording and playing well enough, so you hear some static, or noise, but I did various experiments. It was cool that the metals being heated up in the air conditioner made sounds from time to time. / This is the version started from no sound (3.2MB). / BTW, this but.jp [web address] is on a server that I rented from a company called lolipop. But no matter what browser I use, I cannot log into the page where I can make the payment from my Mac. The trial period is going to end soon!” More info, albeit largely in Japanese, at media.t-kougei.ac.jp/~horio/.