Tangents (sculpture, Ghosts, Ubiq)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Just closed at the Migros Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, the exhibit “While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body: an Exhibition about Sound Performance and Sculpture,”curated by Heike Munder and Raphael Gygax, and featuring work by Banks Violette, Dave Allen, Mileece*, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Peter Coffin, Seb Patane and the pairings of Chris Cunningham with Bjork, Delia Gonzalez with Gavin Russom, and Rita Ackermann with Agathe Snow (migrosmuseum.ch). The Mileece* piece involved using plants for sound data, and Dave Allen’s involved attempting to teach two white-rumped shamas to sing the birdsong-derived piano Catalogue d’Oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen. … (2) Brian Eno produced Paul Simon‘s new album, Surprise, out this past week, and the New York Times interviewed Simon (nytimes.com). … (3) The London Guardian spoke with Eno about the birth of ambient (guardian.co.uk). … (4) The remix site set up to celebrate the rerelease of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Eno’s 1981 collaboration with David Byrne, finally went live: bush-of-ghosts.com/remix. Download the multitrack material that comprise two cuts off the album: “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody.” And then upload your own rendition. … (5) The only references to Bush on Byrne’s blog (davidbyrne.com) appear to be the U.S. president. … (6) The exhibit “Eigenheim, everything but the kitchen sink,” running through June 4 at the Kunstverein Goettingen in Goettingen, Germany, includes a sound installation by Mungo Thomson “of the artist making music on wine glasses call forth a narrative about time spent alone within one’s space” (kunstvereingoettingen.de). …

(7) Mathieu Briand‘s exhibit “Ubiq: A Mental Odyssey,” running through June 18 at REDCAT in Los Angeles, includes “an installation of four turntables and a mixing board connected to a vinyl cutting machine where viewers can create their own aural expression by manipulating samples and etching their own vinyl records” (redcat.org). … (8) Four entries with sound are listed among the material in the current Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night”: Trisha Donnelly; Dan Graham, with Tony Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger, Bruce Odland and Japanther; Dorothy Iannone; and Jim O’Rourke. … (9) Mark Bain, Yuji Oshima and Semiconductor are among the sound artists, curated by Daniele Balit, participating in the Prague Contemporary Art Festival, through June 27 (tina-b.com). … (10) The Sonambiente festival (sonambiente.net) will bring some 75 sound artists to Berlin between June 1 and July 16, including Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff, Terry Fox, Christina Kubisch, Helen Mirra and Carsten Nicolai. … (11) Speaking of Kubisch, there’s extended coverage at the website of MASS MoCA museum’s sound art exhibits by Ronald J. Kuivila, Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, and Kubisch (massmoca.org). … (12) Speaking of Cardiff, there’s a great conversation between film director Atom Egoyan and her at bombmagazine.com. … (13) A music critic (Chris DeLaurenti) and an art critic (Carrie E. A. Scott) debate the usefulness of the term “sound art,” focusing on the artist Trimpin at thestranger.com. … (14) Watch a choir immitate the sounds of a Honda Civic (honda.co.uk/civic). (Thanks, David and Bart.) … (15) Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts author Douglas Kahn is using his Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his book Radio Was Discovered Before It Was Invented (ucdavis.edu). … (16) Also among this year’s Guggenheim recipients: musicians Paul Dresher and Scott Johnson, and sound artist Jeff Talman.

… Keeping Score: (1) Amon Tobin is credited with scoring the forthcoming film Taxidermia, directed by Gyorgy Palfi. Two clips are up on youtube.com (“Exhibit,” “The Taxidermist“), per pe7er.com. … (2) That drums-heavy, stripped-down version of Lalo Shifrin‘s theme for Mission Impossible running at the end of the third and most recent Tom Cruise movie is by Kanye West and Jon Brion. It doesn’t appear to be on the initial soundtrack album, released on Varese Sarabande. … According to IMDB.com, (3) David Holmes is aboard for Ocean’s Thirteen, due out in 2007; (4) Gustavo Santaolalla is working again with his 21 Grams collaborator, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, on Babel; (5) Philip Glass is on The Illusionist and The Reaping; (6) Clint Mansell‘s on Joe (Narc) Carnahan‘s Smokin’ Aces and Gregory Jacobs‘ Wind Chill; and (7) Cliff Martinez is on Mark Fergus‘ First Snow.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Pianist Daan Vandewalle‘s four-disc readings of Alvin Curran‘s Inner Cities (Long Distance), especially the glacially paced “Inner Cities 9 (For Reinier Van Houdt).” … (2) The “self-remixed” greatest hits of DJ Krush, Stepping Stones, which comes as two discs, one of vocal cuts and the other of “soundscapes.” … (3) The Disquiet Downstream entry of the past few weeks is Stephane Leonard‘s constantly shifting sonic data on tri, his set on the Luv Sound netlabel (link).

… Quote of the Week: “I can’t see all that gorgeous radio anymore… The stars have stopped singing like they used to.” That’s Lois Lane, coming down after a day of enjoying all the powers of Superman, his birthday gift to her in the third and latest issue of All-Star Superman (DC Comics), written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Frank Quitely.

Monome Crew MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Monome, a fresh new music interface, is in production. A programmable grid of of 64 buttons, it’s a smallbrew device. That is, the piece of hardware is neither a mass-produced corporate item nor a homebrew bit of weekend-invention happenstance. It’s a proper commercial release, albeit on a small scale. Half a grand will get you the Monome itself, which made strong impressions at the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, as well as entry into the open-source community of musician-programmers who are devising software for the controller.

There’s enticing footage of the machine in action at the Monome website (monome.org), but while we wait for Monome-nurtured music to make its way online (and elsewhere), we can give a listen to music by the people who developed the Monome in the first place. Take Brian Crabtree, at whose nnnnnnnn.org is an expert, eight-track set, tomorrowperhaps, which features contributions by Monome staffers Peter Segerstrom and Kelli Cain, as well as by Corey Fogel. Crabtree records under the name tehn.

All the pieces are sample-laden and brief. With one exception, they’re all under two and a half minutes, and one is barely 45 seconds. The set opens with a mesh of haze and nonsense vocals (“Sixth and Market,” MP3), the soft vowels given shape with sharp cuts and stuttered edits. The entries are varied, from long, mellow tones to twinkling child’s play, but throughout there’s an emphasis on melding composition and field recordings, as on the mix of somnolent melodies and distant bird calls on “Article” (MP3) and the street noise leavened with bell tones on “Endof” (MP3). The full album is available for free download, and a “physical” edition is for sale (cheap: $5!) at flatflat.org.

Music and Comics Exhibit

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I co-curated an exhibit that opens today at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. Titled Cartoon Tunes: Capturing Music in Comics, it features over 40 pieces of comic art, including a bunch of material I commissioned and edited, between 1992 and 2002, at the magazines Pulse! and Classical Pulse!

The exhibit’s ties to ambient/electronica are relatively few, though there is a biographical piece by Justin Green about Philip Glass‘ days as a cab driver (which I wrote, so blame me for the glaring typo, which Justin says was cleaned up for the piece’s inclusion in some upcoming film about Glass) plus an extended epiphany about a John Adams performance of Arvo Part‘s Tabula Rasa, written and illustrated by Dylan Horrocks. (Unfortunately, time didn’t allow us to include a whimsical piece Tom Hart did for me once upon a time about Brian Eno, nor the lovely collaboration that Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang did in memory of John Cage, nor a particularly harrowing piece that Jon Lewis wrote and Jason Lutes drew about a nightmare scenario at a rave. The piece I wrote about the history of the 8-track tape, which was also drawn by Justin Green, isn’t included, but it is in his collection, Musical Legends, published by Last Gasp.)

I also wrote the exhibition text, which means I got to connect the dots (and asterisks, and curlicues) between Gene Deitch‘s consummate jazz-fiend gag strips and the synaesthetic art of Joan Miro and Josef Albers. (Well, I haven’t been by the museum yet, so I can’t say for sure that made the final edit.)

Cartoon Tunes, whose other co-curator is the hysterical cartoonist Keith Knight, runs from today, May 9, through October 15. There’s a reception on May 23 from 7pm to 9pm. If you’re in San Francisco that Tuesday evening, please do drop by and say hello. More info at cartoonart.org.

Dolby-Abrams M:I-3 MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Thomas Dolby has posted on his blog a funky nugget (“Groksploitation,” MP3), a collaboration with JJ Abrams, who’s contributed to the music of his own productions, including the TV shows Lost and Alias and the new Mission Impossible film, M:I-3. It’s in the middle of M:I-3 that this little Dolby-Abrams team-up appears. Explains Dolby, “While in post production on MI3, he and I started bouncing musical ideas around. He picked up one of my grooves and added a funky bass part and synth riff; and he told me there was a small slot in the movie for it, apparently in a scene where Tom Cruise’s character is working on his car, and there’s a party going on next door.” Of Abrams’ music fixation, he says, “JJ … started collecting synths and drum machines as well as getting pretty adept with his laptop, Logic, Reason and Ableton Live.” In Dolby’s telling, “On sets and in edit rooms there’s a lot of downtime. JJ wrote the themes to Alias and Lost on headphones while sitting around waiting for something to happen.” More at thomasdolby.com.

In related news, the New York Times recently visited the recording sessions for M:I-3‘s score (“Michael Giacchino’s Mission: Make the Old Music New“), and in the process interviewed the composer of the franchise’s theme, Lalo Shifrin.

Monolake MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Monolake‘s music, at its best, is so subtle as to be easily missed. That’s as true of his most quiet work, often released under his real name, Robert Henke, as it is of his more propulsive techno, which is labeled Monolake. If his soundscapes often maintain a certain constant emotional state, his rhythmic work likewise has a world-weariness that stops well short of quickening your heart rate. He’s uploaded an hour-long set of this even-tempered techno, originally broadcast on Melbourne radio back in February 2005 (MP3). The best moments, such as the one about 30 minutes in, occur when he sets two of his Zen-state patterns against each other; he eschews proper beatmatching in favor of something that roils like a sea change. He’s also posted a remix commissioned by one of the world’s oldest living synth bands, Depeche Mode, “The Darkest Star” (MP3). More info at monolake.de.