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.
One-Minute Vacation MP3s
Just about every week, Aaron Ximm uploads a new sound recording to his quietamerican.org-based series, One-Minute Vacations. They’re submitted by travellers who are as likely to carry MiniDisc recorders as they are cameras. Among the recent entries are a nightscape from Zion National Park (MP3), by Joshua Manchester; an Easter ceremony from Vietnam (MP3), by Eisuke Yanagisawa; and a typical morning in Lima, Peru (MP3), by Kathy Kennedy. There’s a podcast subscription for the series (XML), which includes, as a separate track, a narrative explanation for each week’s MP3.
Aquatic MP3
Another month, another fine free MP3 from the kracfive.com collective. This time around it’s a nearly six-minute exercise in aquatic orchestration that brings to mind Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic. “A Green Wall of Eyes” by Kettel opens with the bubbly real-world sounds of oceanic life before introducing held tones that gather in intensity as they rise up the scale, eventually to sink again into the watery depths (MP3).
Microtonal MP3
The Other Minds catalog of free listening at the Internet Archive, aka archive.org, now includes a fascinating interview with Russian-born microtonal composer Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979), in discussion with OM guru Charles Amirkhanian. It was recorded in Wyschnegradsky’s Paris home in early 1976. There isn’t much music, though toward the end he plays examples on his alternately tuned piano (MP3).