Darren Bergstein, who edits and publishes the print magazine e/i, for which I do a fair amount of writing, and with whom I’ve debated the culture gap between — how best to put this — tactile and virtual publishing, just launched a blog of his own: stormstudio.blogspot.com. Initial subjects include a debt to William S. Burroughs (or is it Jack Dangers, of Meat Beat Manifesto?) and the “rediscovery” of King Crimson.
Willits-Laner MP3
Christopher Willits uses his laptop as a time-shifting effects pedal for his electric guitar. In the past, that guitar has distinguished his solo work (notably the full-length Folding, and the Tea and his tracks on the guitronic E*A*D*G*B*E compilation) as well as his many collaborations, which have teamed him with singers (Latrice Barnett), drummers (Gabriel Coan) and other electronicists (Taylor Deupree most often, despite Willits being based in California and Deupree in New York), just to name a few.
But one of his latest group efforts is a duo that amps up the guitar quotient considerably: the North Valley Subconscious Orchestra. Despite the expansive name, it’s a duo, pairing him with someone even more closely associated with the guitar: Brad Laner, best known for his work with Savage Republic, Medicine and Electric Company. (Laner’s involvement with Electric Company means both he and Willits have played in groups with Kid 606, Willits as part of Flossin.)
The North Valley Subconscious Orchestra has completed an album, apparently titled A Brief Pause, though no release date is set. Willits has said the album also includes “weird pop songs” and some acoustic material, and he’s posted online a single track, “Neutral Buoyancy” (MP3), which opens with a nod to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” before diving headlong into rich shoegazer territory, all hazy shades of infinite guitars and deeply subsumed vocals.
Free Tibet MP3s
No, not Milarepa Free Tibet, but free sounds of Tibetan singing bowls (and balloons and other odd sound sources), as well as resulting remixes. Bit of a scare today when a routine stop by freesound.iua.upf.edu came up with the sort of dead space that usually signals the end of a government grant or, worse, the midpoint of a natural disaster. But the Freesound site’s back up, with mention of the anticipated outage (“Due to a powercut freesound will be down”), and plenty of new communal remixes in the site’s Remix! Tree section (link), among them the before and after of a thrummed ballon (“Globo 01.wav,” MP3) with its channels subsequently set to rapidly crossfade (“Globo 02.wav,” MP3), and (among the best entries yet in this ongoing project) a Tibetan singing bowl struck once with a wooden mallet (“bowlHTc.aiff,” MP3) and then compressed to eerie effect (“bowlFlat.aiff,” MP3). The two balloon entries are by a contributor who goes by the handle pixt, and the Tibetan bowls are by a hanstimm. The initial entry in the Tibetan pair needs to be checked out if only to look at the accompanying waveform screen image, which is elegant and visually appealing where so many of the uploaded sounds are evidently chaotic and irregular.
I-Hop Post-Mortem MP3
Apologies in advance for choosing Valentine’s Day to drop a downer, but so be it. Rap producer J Dilla, aka Jay Dee, born James Yancey, had an intrinsically old-school touch, an early-hip-hop manner that prized switching up verses and laying down dusty vinyl for the sheer beauty of its surface tension, and he leant his scratchy powers to work by A Tribe Called Quest, Slum Village, Common, De La Soul and others. Dilla, who was born and raised in Detroit, passed away last Friday, February 10, just three days after his 32nd birthday, a day that also saw the release of his solo instrumental album, Donuts, by the Stones Throw label. One of the album’s best tracks, “Airworks,” is available as a free download from Stones Throw, and it sums up what’s great about Donuts, especially how it compresses 1970s soul into rusty kernels of riffs.
Donuts has many things to its credit, but what makes it a particularly great album of instrumental hip-hop (call it i-hop) is how it emphasizes vocal samples as part of the greater fabric. Even listeners with a fondness for studio-as-instrument composition often (mistakenly, I might add) find instrumental hip-hop lacking, and Donuts‘s bits of human voice make its music all the more palatable for a broader audience. Dilla also had a sly sense of humor, one grounded in music, bringing to mind a less showy Jazzy Jeff. In the age of the mash-up, anyone can sound like a street-reared P.D.Q. Bach, but Dilla really had the goods. Juxtaposition was just one of his many tricks.
As for “Airworks” (MP3), it’s a carefully edited succession of soul nuggets, reduced to their essence, a crooner’s voice cut to a mere syllable following a skipping opening that emphasizes the fragility of the source material. And when Dilla lays an echo on heavy, it’s just to emphasize how the period hits he’s borrowing from sound in our memories, a realm where he’s now a permanent resident. More info at stonesthrow.com/jdilla.
SFMOMA Sound-Artcast MP3
Sound artist Janet Cardiff currently has a piece at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a narrated tour of the museum that involves audio and video. To lend context to Cardiff’s work, SFMOMA has featured an archival audio interview with her as part of its occasional podcast (or “artcast”) series of free downloads. Cardiff describes the epiphany of hearing her own narration of an activity played back, as well as her experiments with binaural audio, which when combined have the inherent capability of producing what she calls a “weird disjunction.” (For my impression of another recent Cardiff exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, based on a motet by Thomas Tallis, click through to this January 31 entry.)
The same artcast file also includes a Pamela Z recording, constructed from the reactions of viewers to an exhibit at the museum, all overlapping voices and the whoosh of shared space. Among the weird disjunctions in Z’s piece is hearing her repeat comments, like some phantom of the museum.
One interesting technical side note: the SFMOMA podcast is available in two formats, one a standard MP3, the other an M4A file, which works well in iTunes. The benefit of the latter is that it includes embedded still images, which appear (at least in iTunes) in the window where an album cover would be displayed, and that seem to be timed to the audio. The M4A format is different from the M4V format, which iTunes uses for the episodic videos it hawks, but M4A seems to have a lot of potential as an application for animation and webcomics.
Unfortunately for SFMOMA, also among the materials on this same podcast is “new writing from JT Leroy,” the author who has recently been revealed as a contrivance perpetrated by at least three individuals, none named Leroy and none sharing the fictional author’s troubled adolescence. Knowing that Leroy is a fraud makes the author’s southern accent sound grating instead of humble. Further irony: whoever is reading as Leroy says close to the end of the entry, “Why let facts get in anyone’s way?” Talk about weird disjunctions. (More info at sfmoma.org.)