In years to come, April 1 will be the day with the lowest traffic on the Internet, as users do their best to avoid being suckered by deadpan pranks. Hence my initial hesitation when this past Saturday I received an email from a friend pointing me to a full five hours of performance in the MP3 format by Steve Roden, who is known for his threadbare minimalism and is equally at home in the recording studio and the art gallery. Turns out it’s true. In August last year, at the second annual Soundwalk sound-art event in Long Beach, California, Roden undertook a “durational performance,” the complete recording of which is available in five hour-long MP3s at ubu.com/sound/roden.html. He holed up in the corner of a room and played an improvised mix of bells tones, contact-mic investigations, murmurings, modest chants and less identifiable sounds, a kind of non-denominational ritual of the quotidian. Advises Roden in the accompanying note, which includes his initial proposal, “since the piece was playing through speakers located roughly 10 feet above the audience and reflecting off a dome ceiling back down to the listeners below, i would not recommend headphone listening, but giving the sound some distance.” More info at soundwalk.org and at Roden’s homepage, inbetweennoise.com. (And thanks to Jeff Levine for emailing me the tip.)
Early Carl Stone MP3
Composer Carl Stone‘s website, sukothai.com, features a dozen or so clips, dating back to 1982. For a musician today largely synonymous with multi-dimensional laptop play, it’s fascinating to set the wayback machine to a pre-Macintosh era. Listen to what constituted electronic music toward the start of the Reagan administration — and by that I don’t mean Billboard-charting singles like Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby,” Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” and Vangelis’ theme to Chariots of Fire.
The earliest entry on Stone’s hit parade is “Dong Il Jang” (MP3), a 20-minute exercise in crosstalk and slipped beats. It opens with tones that come slowly to be discerned as overlapping spoken bits, bringing to mind Steve Reich’s early phase-work and Alvin Lucier’s fascination with recursive loops. The rendition here is leavened with a bit of humor, as what’s heard is a sound check (“Testing one, two”). But it’s more than a schematic, soon blossoming into something more immediately recognizable as a musical performance. Percussion, both sampled and that which results from split-second soundbites set on repeat, join in, as do female voices that seem to be of ethnomusicological origin but are truncated and layered until they sound like the Roaches at their least folkie. Operatic voices flitter by like Philip Glass on fast forward, drums bouncing between speakers with a touch of pop? Who said the early ’80s were boring?
Kitchen Sink Pop MP3
Jeff Danger‘s “Some of My Best Friends Are,” a track off the Giovanni Chrome label’s Breach of the Preach compilation, is available for free download (MP3) from the label’s website, gcrecordings.co.uk. With its sour little bit of backward masking, and its clearly delineated structure, the piece is crying out for a vocal, but we’re fortunate enough to enjoy it before someone sets down a layer of some autobiographical ramblings. Danger has a taste for disparate little chunks of sound that when combined suggest an actual band is playing, even though virtually none of what’s played sounds remotely like standard instrumentation. Instead, it’s all rapidly failing keyboards, frying-pan percussion and lone plucked notes. It’s ramshackle pop: innovative tinkering disguised as modest music.
I-Hop Loop MP3
When does an extract best approximate the whole? When it’s a chunk of instrumental hip-hop. Hip-hop’s take on studio composition, for all its love of noise, still tends to rotate through chorus and verse. Ergo, the minute-or-less samples you can download free at fatbeats.com, a fine purveyor of hip-hop with and without the rap, can easily be looped forever.
Recent recommendations include the syrupy bass lines of Shawn J. Period‘s “The Come Back” (MP3). With the track’s casually skipped beats, it’s tailor-made for the jerky seam that cycles through every 45 seconds, when your MP3 player set on repeat turns the end into the beginning. And if you like what you hear, set up an account with fatbeats.com and order yourself a copy.
Laptop Dub MP3s
DJ Olive (aka Gregor Asch) has been there and back again, collaborating with the outward bound likes of Luc Ferrari, Kim Gordon and John Zorn, but always managing to bring it home for some seriously earthy solo dub. Witness his new full length, Heaps As: Live in Tasmania (The Agriculture), which was recorded live in Australia. It’s represented by two free downloads at the label’s website, both of them located somewhere between instrumental hip-hop and slinky dub, with i-hop’s attention to beat-for-beat’s-sakeness, and dub’s emphasis on dank grooves.
Now, “All’a’ya’alls” (MP3) may err a bit on the side of 1970s retro, but as it comes to its close the rhythm gets tortured, the horns a tad skronky, hinting at what must come next on the album proper.
And “Sub Bass Commandante” (MP3) is a must hear, the rhythm playfully flirting its way into the background, the chucka chucka beat edging ever forward, the whole thing simmering to nearly nothing by its close. And is that Nina Simone calling out from beyond the grave? More info at theagriculture.com.
Also, Olive/Asch was recently interviewed at the website of Ableton Live, the ubiquitous laptop performance software; the conversation is available in text and audio format (ableton.com, MP3).