In about a week or so, the Disquiet Downstream will feature a pretty cool take on the ongoing remix festivities at bush-of-ghost.com/remix, the site set up in tribute to the rerelease of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. But in the meanwhile, here’s another recommended track, out of the nearly 140 that have been posted at bush-of-ghosts.com since it opened for public-domain business on March 9: Thomas‘ “Shadow Memory” (MP3) is one of the most rarified entries yet, all opening with no build. It’s comprised almost entirely of the material that most of the bush-of-ghosts participants have used to introduce what inevitably becomes a busy, traditional, rhythm-based pop song. Not so for Thomas, who gets points for remembering there are ghosts in the bush.
Japanese Noise-Art MP3s
Overdose Kunst is two Japanese musicians, Takeshi.f and Ryuta.k, who are well represented by a pair of recent five-track netlabel releases. War of Kelgenetu, on Umbrella Noize (umbrellanoize.com), moves easily from brash static to light field recordings to somnolent tunefulness, the highlight being the title cut, in which drowsy piano and a loping, skipped beat support a near inaudible vocal (MP3). And Non-Form Material Machine, on Postmoderncore (postmoderncore.com), ditches the noise in favor of something more folksy but at times no less discomforting, especially the tinges of backward masking that make “Requia for Ethnic Cleansing” (MP3) a study in motion sickness; there’s some consolation in the mashed found sounds of “I Should Want to Be Alan Lomax in New Domain” (MP3). But even console cowboys get the blues, as evidenced by the guitar’n’clicktrack “Medium’s Message” (MP3).
Free as in Netlabel
The proprietors of three established netlabels (Andras Hargitai of Complementary Distribution, Nathan Larson of Dark Winter, Pedro Leitao of Test Tube) discuss the cost of free downloads, the online community of uploaders and the transition from physical distribution to virtual
Come 2006, there are more than enough netlabels to fill even the most discerning of harddrives. A “netlabel” is a web-based distributor of music that charges nothing for the music it promotes. Though the concept seems to not only flout but upend conventional wisdom about how a record label functions, there are hundreds of these enterprising organizations around the globe, the significant majority of them focusing on electronic music.
Releases on netlabels are often the focus of the Downstream section of Disquiet.com, in which each weekday I recommend a free downloadable piece of music. From that Disquiet department’s beginning, in the fall of 2003, netlabels have been a major source of its material, including such destinations as 8bitrecs, Stasisfield, Kikapu and Monotonik.
To dig a little deeper into the subject, I ran a short-term discussion group earlier this year with the administrators of three exemplary netlabels. As with a previous Disquiet-based online discussion (“After ‘Thursday Afternoon,'” on the 20th anniversary of the Brian Eno album), the conversation transpired in private via an Internet-based forum, and what appears below is a transcription that was lightly edited after the dialog had reached its natural conclusion.
The participants were Andras Hargitai of Complementary Distribution (bitlabrecords.com/cod), based out of Budapest, Hungary; Nathan Larson of Dark Winter (darkwinter.com), based out of Minnetonka, Minnesota; and Pedro Leitao of Test Tube (monocromatica.com/netlabel), based out of Lisbon, Portugal.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, the discussion ranged from the theoretical to the practical, at times serving as a sounding board, at others as a technical support group, as Hargitai, Larson and Leitao discussed the cost of free downloads, the online community of uploaders and the transition from physical distribution to virtual. Continue reading “Free as in Netlabel”
Mechanized Instrument Exhibit MP3
The uploads to the Other Minds collection at the archive.org has a stellar new item. Well, new to the archive. Back in early 1973, Other Minds guru Charles Amirkhanian visited the Oakland Museum and recorded a walking tour of its exhibition, “When Music Was Mechanical,” curated by Gretchen Schneider. The hour-plus recording (MP3) features numerous examples of automated music, including the Lyon and Healy Empress Electric Orchestrion, the Wurlitzer Model 165 Band Organ and the Mira Music Box. Originally broadcast on January 25, 1973, on KPFA and KPFB, the exhibit ran from December 16, 1972 through February 4, 1973. Not only is there a lot of mechanical music recorded, but Amirkhanian describes in detail many of the instruments and Schneider talks about the show’s curation, which focuses on machines from the start of the 20th century, and she discusses the complexities of having multiple sound sources in a single exhibit (another name considered for the event was “Christmas Cacophonia”). She mentions two organizations to which most collectors, at the time, belonged: the Musical Box Society and the Automatical Musical Instruments Collector’s Association. Thirty-plus years later, of course, each has its own website: mbsi.org, amica.org. According to Schneider, the show was one of the museum’s most popular exhibits at that point in its history, with so many visitors that many had trouble seeing the instruments. More info, and alternate download formats, at archive.org.
Big-Eared DJ/Rupture MP3s
DJ/rupture is no reductionist, but he does sum up his one-hour, two-part “gold teeth thief” mix with some pithy accounting: “43 tracks, 68 minutes, mixed live on 3 turntables.” And for some additional numbers, he says of the files, “[T]he mix is encoded at 128 kbps. each part contains around 30 minutes of music.” Though it opens with Missy Elliot‘s “Get Ur Freak On,” part A of the set (MP3) is no ordinary mixtape, not when it veers into a bashed up reggae triptych, courtesy of the Greensleeves label. And part B (MP3) finds room for rap group Wu-Tang Clan and glitch progenitor Oval, not to mention Paul Simon off Graceland (who says Simon’s recent collaboration Brian Eno was a fluke?), which fits nicely between the digitized Middle Eastern inflections of Muslimgauze and a live track by by Miriam Makeba. Who else would segue from Kid 606 to Luciano Berio? Other highlights include a fully ruptured edit of “U Can’t Touch This.” Full track list at negrophonic.com.