The performance of the play In the Solitude of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltes, earlier this year at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, sure must have been quiet. That’s judging by the score, which its composer, John Chantler, has posted at inventingzero.net. The six MP3s, ranging from a seven and a half minutes to close to eighteen, consist almost entirely of soft, held tones, rarely more than two or three appearing simultaneously. Though the tones and timbres are numerous, the individual sounds have far more in common than they have to distinguish them from each other. They’re round and the appear slowly, occasionally evidencing the rhythm of a sine wave in action, once in a while approaching something that might be taken for friction, but only because of the relative placidity of the overall surroundings. Writes Chandler in his brief description, “Its meant to be fairly quiet – so turn yr system down.”
DJ Duo MP3
Call it post-rap, call it i-hop (or instrumental hip-hop). At just 45 seconds, “A Stroll Down Sutter Ave” (MP3) is less a track than a teaser, but this collaboration between DJs Wally and Willie Ross, off their recent Mrs Millers House album, is tasty as can be, a groovy collage trinket of turntablist beats, found sound and fusoid touches. More info at the releasing label’s website, theagriculture.com.
Apologetic Dub MP3
Sample-clearance payback is sweet, for listeners. Apparently DJ Olive used some music by a group called Sounds from the Ground on one of his tracks. They call him on it, and by way of apology he offered/agreed to remix one of their songs. “Speed Bump Dub” is a nearly six-minute excursion by Olive posted at his myspace.com webpage (myspace.com/theaudiojanitor). It plays with the standard symbols of sonic depths (cymbals at the high end, bass at the low, synths in between) but is entirely enjoyable, even if you don’t know the original (MP3). More info on the originators at soundsfromtheground.com.
Pete Kemble Drone MP3
Among the many overused words in the description of drones is “quotidian.” It suggests daily experience so pervasive as to have become nearly invisible, but such a word, and such an experience, best sums up much of the sound art perpetrated by Pete Kemble as part of his ongoing “The Heard World” series on the London-based radio (and web-) station Resonance FM. Take episode 40 (MP3), which Kemble describes in his brief webposting as “20 minutes of your favourite worker drone, live from my living room, november 4th, 2006. all featured noises are from homemade instruments.” The lo-fi excursion, recorded on a sturdy old-fashioned cassette recorder, is a languorous swath of the sort of background noise that one learns to ignore, the light buzz of a distant vacuum, the whir of radio interference, the whorl of a faraway siren. It’s the sound of someone else’s activity invading, or overlapping with, one’s own inactivity. More info at petekemble.com and resonancefm.com.
Live Boduf Songs MP3
The name Boduf Songs is the moniker of a single guy, Mat Sweet (not to be confused with pure-pop maven Matthew Sweet), who makes space-folk like few others. At least, like few others alive. There is a taste of John Fahey’s Zen minimalism in his simply plucked lines, and of the recently deceased Syd Barrett in his intense insularity. (There’s also an echo of early Paul Simon, but that’s the maudlin, introspective 1960s icon, not the world-pop artist we know today.) Sweet milks light feedback for its electric magic and sings (mumbles, really) with the quotidian dread of high-grade slowcore: he talks as if to draw attention to his meaning, but his voice is so quiet it’s more texture than text. The Kranky label, which he calls home, has posted a 40-minute live set (MP3), recorded at the radio station VPRO in the Netherlands.