Tangents (bent, synaesthesia, Godzilla)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: Two via downloadsquad.com: (1) A mouse-based loop scratcher called Scratch (link) and (2) a Speak & Spell emulator (link), but can you circuit-bend a virtual machine? … Two via createdigitalmusic.com: (3) The website for Max/MSP software, cycling74.com, has re-launched. Recent additions include video of enhanced turntablist Daito Manabe (link) and an interview with Laetitia Sonami (link). … (4) Sounds from space, courtesy of NASA’s SuitSat (link), which turns an old spacesuit into a small satellite. The first SuitSat is transmitting its condition to earth via an FM signal. Tune your FM radio to 145.990 MHz, and check this site (link) for when the SuitSat will be in (well, above) your general area. … (5) Tips on composing music with the new Nintendo DS game Elektroplankton (link). … (6) An NPR story on composer and dub-violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (npr.org), whom regular readers of this site may remember from the October 25 Disquiet Downstream entry from last year (thanks for the tip, Rob). … Catching up with Kyle Gann‘s PostClassic site: (7) totalism (link), the latest in a series on the subject, and belatedly (8) the death of Luc Ferrari (link). … (9) The All Saints label, which released music by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, is re-launching (marketwire.com). … (10) Is the new Firefox-based music platform, Songbird (songbirdnest.com), an iTunes-killer?

… Sound Art Special: (1) A less than positive summary of the What Sound Does a Color Make? exhibit at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (washingtonpost.com), with work by Scott Arford, Scanner, Atau Tanaka, Stephen Vitiello and others. Up through March 18, 2006. Curated by Kathleen Forde. More info at umbc.edu/cavc. … (2) Vitiello is among the artists making sound art for the Olympics (timesdispatch.com), for a project called Echoes from the Mountains (echoesfromthemountains.info); the website’s a bit slow and confusingly organized, but the event appears to also feature Joe Diebes, Enrico Glerean, Phil Kline, Charlie Morrow and Zimmerfei. … (3) Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is currently exhibiting The Idea of North, a sound art exhibit curated by Rhonda Corvese, all of art from Canada, Iceland, Sweden and Norway, with work by Christoph Mignone and others (smu.ca). It closes in February 19. … (4) Just closed this weekend, a sound art exhibit in Toronto at Diaz Contemporary with work by Beagles & Ramsay, Stephanie Cormier, Brian Joseph Davis, Dave Dyment, Pete Gazendam, Adad Hannah, Doug Lewis, Daniel Olson and Laurel Woodcock, curated by Kelly Mark (diazcontemporary.ca). … (5) The San Francisco Chronicle has a brief mention today of a new “installation” due up at nearby Gallery Route One, featuring Rebecca Haseltine, Barbara Klutinis and (this suggests possible sound content) Joan Jeanrenaud, the former Kronos Quartet cellist. No info up currently at galleryrouteone.org. … (6) A report on the drug ketamine suggests it could trigger synaesthesia (bbc.co.uk). Hence its popularity in clubs, if not museums.

… R.I.P.: (1) Akira Ifukube (Godzilla composer, latimes.com), (2) J-Dilla (born James Yancey, old-school-style hip-hop producer, freep.com) and (3) Nam Jun Paik (video artist, nytimes.com: “In 1963, seeking a visual equivalent for electronic music and inspired by [John] Cage‘s performances on prepared pianos, Mr. Paik bought 13 used television sets in Cologne and reworked them until their screens jumped with strong optical patterns”).

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Clarinetist Sabine Meyer and the Trio di Clarone run through a host of music from or inspired by an age when mechanization was thrilling composers, like Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud: Paris Mecanique (Harmonia Mundi). … (2) The Disquiet Downstream entry of the week is Univac‘s circuit-bent live set of seven MP3s (link).

… Quote of the Week: Richie Hawtin, interviewed at (popmatters.com): “Techno sometimes does become more about process than substance, and I think this is when techno is going a little bit the wrong way.”

Stark Polish MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

EP: There are three tracks on Pawel Grabowski‘s Notes from the House of Dead: one that interpolates a little female chant and shifts it into a spectral presence, and two others stark enough that they’ll make you wish you had a little human accompaniment for comfort, corporeal or not. According to the brief online liner note that accompanies the EP, Grabowski sketched Notes as an attempt to keep things short while maintaining a sense of tension. On those measures, he more than succeeds. “The Dead,” the longest of the three at five and a half minutes, immediately immerses you into a cavernous underworld of disorienting echoes and foreboding murmurings. “The Box,” at about half the length of “The Dead,” is more arid and spacious, trading claustrophobia for agoraphobia; occasional snippets of a throaty scratch suggest the point of view of a marooned astronaut on some desert moon.

And then there’s “Break,” with its theremin-ish female voice, echoing and repeating like gothic dub amid horror-flick scrapings. The full set it available from a relatively new netlabel, Silence Is Not Empty, at silence-is-not-empty.com. Special thanks to Nathan Larson, who heads up the netlabel Dark Winter (darkwinter.com). Larson had mentioned to me not only the small but impressive catalog at Silence Is Not Empty, but the ingenious manner in which the label provides readymade album sleeves as full-color PDFs. Just bring your own ruler and sharp blade. More info on Grabowski, who was born in Poland in 1977, at pawelgrabowski.com.

Live Circuit-Bent MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a cognitive disorder known as “musical hallucinations.” It afflicts not the young but the aged, those whose decades of aural experience can come back unbidden, turning the brain into an out-of-control iPod on shuffle. For someone raised in a household where video games and other electronic devices, rather than a standard stereo system, filled rooms with sound, the music of a Macintosh tech consultant who makes his home at techdweeb.com might provide a scary, yet entertaining, premonition of mental issues yet to come.

Performing under names including Univac, or the Univac Index, he’s a serious bender, taking the noisemaking toys and gadgets of yesteryear and soldering them into his own aural image. The site offers visual and sonic documentation of things like a Kawasaki keyboard with pitch controls and optical resistors added on: “When it crashes noisily, you can still play noisy notes on the keyboard. Cool!”

Cool, indeed. The interface on the techdweeb site’s “noise” section requires the viewer to guess-click on a collage of dated computer clip art to access free MP3s of his performances. Doing so on the phrase “Single Pulse Device” (hint: lower right hand corner) leads to a seven-track set recorded live in Los Angeles a week or so prior to Halloween last year. He lists his equipment as Demon MonKeys, Nice Cube of White Noise, Blue Kaoss Pad, TubbyBox TinyFlaccid Po, Opera Daisy Rust, and the Super Ear Blaster. Listening to what appears to be a fleeing Pac Man at the tail end of “Electron Flow” (MP3) or the even more mashed-up gamer cues of “Free Battery” (MP3) and “Right Angles to the Wire” (MP3) could provide premonitions of what hardcore gamers will experience in their golden years. And there’s much more at techdweeb.com.

Live Koji Asano MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Many new year resolutions die not only hard but fast, yet Koji Asano is nine weeks into his free downloads, and has only begun to suggest he might repeat himself. The latest download, “Zoo Telepathy 2 (Version 2006),” is the second in the download series to riff on his 2003 album, Zoo Telepathy, an electro-acoustic mix of rustic violin and field recordings. If you find it a bit harsh on the ear, back up a week for a 12-minute live set recorded in Barcelona in 2000, which has a similarly abrasive feel, but one that’s softened having been recorded in a real-world setting with a broader assortment of orchestral instrumentation, including happy-to-be-here woodwinds. As has become Asano’s format, the track is available the week of its release as an enormous, “lossless” file, and then archived in a more compact format. You must volunteer an email address to gain access, at kojiasano.com.

Disquiet in Print

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sixth issue of e/i magazine is out. In it I interview dub figure Raz Mesinai (aka Badawi and one half of Sub Dub) about working with downtown Manhattan out-jazz elite, branching into film music and facing the self-fulfilling prophecy of paying musical tribute to Franz Kafka.

I also review the following albums: Alarm Will Sound‘s Acoustica (Cantaloupe), the broadly reported collection of Aphex Twin covers by an almost entirely acoustic new-music ensemble; Autechre & the Hafler Trio‘s aeo3 & 3hae (Die Stadt), a pairing that’s got more psychedelically abstract Hafler than it does beat-bashing Autechre; Christopher Bissonnette‘s Periphery (Kranky), one of my favorite records of last year (“Best of 2005”); Boduf Songs‘ Boduf Songs (Kranky), sad folk tunes played with funereal grace; Converter‘s Expansion Pack 2.0 (Ant-Zen), a union of industrial music and minimal techno; the Dead Texan‘s very introspective The Dead Texan (Kranky); Dub Gabriel‘s Bass Jihad (Azra), with its Middle Eastern affectations and urban inclinations; Zbigniew Karkowski‘s static and solitary One and Many (Sub Rosa); Daniel Lanois‘ rootsy Belladonna (Anti); Morgenstern‘s Teutonic Two Different Faces (Ant-Zen); M2‘s bracing The Frozen Spark (Ant-Zen); Silk Saw‘s Empty Rooms (Ant-Zen), a score for a play; the Village Orchestra‘s Et in Arcadia Ego (Highpoint Lowlife), all glistening epiphanies and flash-forward road music; and one compilation, the Danish Rump Comp Vol. 1 (Rump).

All that material will be ported to Disquiet.com around the time the seventh issue of e/i hits newsstands. More info at ei-mag.com.