Pithy Noise MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The ten brief sound segments posted at the Polarity Records website (polarityrecords.net) by musician Haruna Ito bring to mind the Buddha Machine. Insectoid noises, termed “grainbugs” (MP3), sit side by side with metallic chatter, “shpfb” (MP3), and soft tones, “pohwomb” (MP3), just to point to a few. They’re independent little flavors, ranging from seven to forty two seconds in length. But unlike the little sounds that fill the Buddha Machine, Ito’s loops are intended to be savored in various permutations, not individually.

According to Ino’s bio, she was born in Japan but raised in the U.S., before returning to Japan in her teens. These days, in addition to crafting her own solo sound art, she’s in the band Skist with Samm Bennett. Bennett was arguably the most song-minded musician among the core figures in the early days of the Knitting Factory, the downtown Manhattan club that was once the epicenter of the local out-music scene. One full track from Skist’s latest album, Taking Something Somewhere, is also up on the Polarity site; “If There Is Any News” sets her light, half-spoken vocal above a buzzy, equally fragile foundation of mechanized noises (MP3).

Language Poetry MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Clark Coolidge doesn’t so much write poetry as build it with words. The latter may seem like an unnecessary recasting of the former, but there’s a difference. Check out the recent upload to the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org); it’s an hour-long survey of the collage minimalism that is his language poetry. The track consists of two pieces, each comprised of a series of individual words spoken in various sequences, sometimes overlapping. One is built from “once,” “harp” and “rice,” the other from “but,” “if,” “it,” “though,” “its,” “thus,” “is,” “what” and “and” (MP3). The result is a kind of literary riff on Steve Reich’s patterning.

Wire and Drum MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The October 2006 Instal festival hosted three days of experimental music, and much of it has been uploaded for a broader audience than was able to make it to Glasgow. Among the many MP3s is a 45-minute set that pairs Ellen Fullman and Sean Meehan. Fullman is a master of an instrument of her own devising, a series of long (like, room-length) strings that allow her to produce music whose simplicity is so dense that, counter-intuitively, it becomes opulent: single notes resound as if from a gargantuan sitar, wave forms become almost visible, harmonies take on a macroscopic lushness.

In an inspired bit of programming, she played with Meehan, who focuses on one of the simplest instruments imaginable: a single drum. While percussion may seem antithetical to Fullman’s tone-centric agenda, that’s not the case here. Meehan can coax a wide range of textures and sounds from that drum of his. And given how prone drums and strings are to sympathetic vibrations, as heard here the instruments at times appear to play each other (MP3). More info on the festival at arika.org.uk, on Fullman at ellenfullman.com and on Meeham at earthlink.net/~overturnedbowl.

Willits Raw Remix MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Many remixes involve little remixing at all. Often as not, a so-called remix entails someone cutting up a pre-existing track, rather than working with the individual elements (bass, drums, vocals, what have you) that were mixed to achieve the original. The laptop-enabled guitarist Christopher Willits, thus, deserves double credit for lending a song, “Colors Shifting,” to the latest remix contest at ccmixter.org (specifically ccmixter.org/ghostly). Not only has he made his music freely available to be mangled by anonymous web-based musicians; he has gone above and beyond in providing sufficient resources. Between vocal tracks, isolated sound sources, several mixes and “the original distortion tracks,” we’re talking about well over 100 gigabytes of sound (available in a variety of file formats). Just to produce one song.

And as always with open-source remix projects such as this, the individual tracks can have their own inherent listening value. One set of sounds provided as part of the contest includes five tracks: drums, French horn, guitar, strings and synth. If you’re a fan of Willits’, the guitar track will be a real eye-opener; considering how he’s usually heard funnelling his six-string through a massive feedback loop programmed in the Max/MSP language, it’s a rare opportunity to hear him unembellished. You can also get the full song, a mere seven megabytes of his characteristically intoxicating, centerless guitar layers, off his latest solo album, Surf Boundaries, on the Ghostly International label (MP3). More info at christopherwillits.com.

Live Grassy Knoll MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In the late 1990s, shortly before Bob Green, aka Grassy Knoll, moved back to Austin, I spent an afternoon in the stark San Francisco apartment where he’d been residing. I spoke with him about his final major label album, III, while he played me what he was then working on, what he called his un-commercial work. Not un-commercial because it wouldn’t be popular. Popularity wasn’t Green’s concern in the first place. The Knoll had created its own space, somewhere between prog rock and jazz fusion, in that it eked out the improvisatory opportunities in beat-driven music that wasn’t afraid of tunes. Still, he sublimated those tunes, often below the hearing range of a general audience.

No, by un-commercial, Green simply meant that what he was working on was virtually impossible to release commercially. Why? At the time, the term “mashup” wan’t yet in general circulation, but Green was taking banks of samples, drawn from radio staples, rarities and found sounds, and working them into inspired collages. Imagine a rockist DJ Z-Trip and you’ve got a sense of what he was after. The sample clearances would have been impossible to obtain, thus relegating this new Grassy Knoll stage to, in essence, performance art.

While in Austin, Green started a new record label, Sixty One Sixty Eight, which released a Grassy Knoll album, Short Stories (2002), plus work by a small number of other artists. Up on the label’s website (sixtyonesixtyeight.com) is a six-track live Grassy Knoll show recorded in 2001 at SOBs, the New York club, just a month after 9/11. Particularly recommended is a hazy confection titled “Bucky Fuller” (MP3). It’s considerably more artful, more subtle, than what he’d auditioned for me in his apartment. What Green played on October 10, 2001, included sourced material, from an Aerosmith cue to jazz snippets to spoken word, but for the most part the ingredients don’t speak more loudly than the recipe. Highly recommended.