Tangents (Buddha, Syrianna, Mieville)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links, News and Good Reads: (1) Apparently this (link) is a half-hour video of the duo FM3 (Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) playing chess with their Buddha Machines at the De Appel museum of contemporary art in Amsterdam, November 2005 (via chaile.org). The sound quality isn’t great, but eventually people shush and the music makes itself heard. … (2) Deep in the recent NAMM audio convention, one blogger noted a particularly cool trailer for DJ tools (video), for the Eclectic Breaks Pro X Fade (via skratchworx.com). … (3) Matmos talks to the camera for 40 minutes, including snippets of live performances, about teaching snails to play the theremin, swapping out a balloon for cow’s uterus and more (brainwashed.com), in advance of the April 2006 release of The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. … (4) The publisher Continuum has announced (at 33third.blogspot.com) the next 21 volumes in its 33 1/3 series of small books devoted to individual albums, among them Nine Inch Nails‘ Pretty Hate Machine (by Daphne Carr) and Brian Eno‘s Another Green World (by Geeta Dayal). Also listed, 20 Jazz Funk Greats (presumably the Throbbing Gristle album) by Matmos member Drew Daniel (via lacunae.com). … (5) The retailer eMusic.com announced in a January 23 press release that its sales would now be included in the Nielsen SoundScan ratings. EMusic has in its catalog a much wider array of electronic-oriented record labels than does Apple’s iTunes Music Store. … (6) “Weird Noises That Blossom Into Symphonies,” from the occasional Circuits section in the New York Times, on new fangled instruments, including the tenori-on, by Toshio Iwai. Also mentioned: Perry R. Cook, who apparently created a MIDI controller for, of all people, trad jazz man Wynton Marsalis; Don Buchla and Shawn Greenlee (nytimes.com). … From engadget.com: (7) musical uses for a castoff tool from a video game (link), and (8) a newfangled instrument puts on airs (link).

… Score Keeper: (1) Interview with Alexandre Desplat (soundtrack.net), Syriana score composer: “Also, almost all of the string patterns are doubled by synthesized electronic sounds that blur the strings. The concept was to blend all the sounds, so that no single sound would be too clear or defined.” … IMDB.com has (2) John Powell attached to Watchmen, the third X-Men and the next Bourne Identity movie (he’s done the first two in that series) and (3) Jeff Rona attached to Hellion and a TV series called Brotherhood.

… Select New Releases: These new release lists are less than useful, given the broad range of music released each week. Still, it’s a look at what’s imminent. Names of labels and artists link to webpages, where available and, of course, known. … (1) Coldcut‘s Sound Mirrors (Ninja Tune), with guests John Matthias, Roots Manuva, Annette Peacock, Robert Owens, Andrew (Fog) Broder and others. … (2) DJ Cam‘s Revisited By…, with remixes by DJ Premier, Thievery Corporation and others (Recall).

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) Pierre Bastien‘s Pop (Rephlex) will find a home in the collection of anyone who prizes the rickety sang-froid of Kid Koala’s turntablism or of Benoit Charest’s music for the film Les Triplettes de Belleville. Like both those gentlemen, Bastien uses humble materials to produce music that suggests Europe at its most elegantly dilapidated, but in place of Koala’s dusty vinyl and Charest’s musical kitchen appliances, Bastien has crafted his own small orchestra of makeshift instruments. His inventions take on a life of their own. Just listen to the muffled, slack-jaw howls that punctuate “Pep.” It’s the sort of sound that keeps you up nights. … (2) Producer DJ Muggs (Cypress Hill, House of Pain) and rapper GZA team up, or face off, on the recent Grandmasters, and a 12″ captures two GZA-free slices of Muggs’ background hip-hop, both laced with electric guitar. The A-side, “All in Together Now,” is a bare-boned layering of beats, with a touch of late-1980s rhythms that sound a bit out of place amid the track’s digital clarity. The keeper is the richer B-side, “General Principals,” on which a sad-toned guitar part suggests a hip-hop Ennio Morricone. … (3) Disquiet Downstream entry of the week: two sound-collage MP3s from Tyondai Braxton, of the rising math-punk supergroup Battles (link).

… Quote of the Week: From the short story “Details,” in China Mieville‘s collection Looking for Jake, published last year: “As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shuts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.”

Frogger MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

FonoZoo.com is exactly what it sounds like it promises to be: a menagerie comprised entirely of the sounds of animals. No feed bills, no pesky smells, fewer ethical quandaries. The organization’s latest publication is a commercial CD sure to be a big hit with the bioacoustic crowd, The Calls of the Frogs of Madagascar. Samples currently online include the mad whistling of the Boophis luteus (MP3) and the delicate, windchime-like call of Stumpffia gimmeli (MP3). The site, and the disc, aren’t limited to individual performances. Also available, the chatty “Chorus of Guibemantis liber, Blommersia blommersae, and a third unidentified frog” (MP3) and the gorgeous, eerie “Section of a soundscape of two troops of indris” (MP3). Judging by the sound of it, “troops” is a polite term for “orgy.” More samples, plus images of the unwitting amphibian recording artists, at fonozoo.com.

Franken MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As the Kikapu netlabel, at kikapu.com, creeps steadily toward its 100th release, out pops something dark and dreary, and altogether listenable. Roto Visage‘s Der Golem, Kikapu’s 87th entry, is 11 tracks not to be listened to before bedtime. That warning is intended not just for the ones with the most self-evident ties to the golem myth, two tracks titled “From Mud to Memory,” in both of which snatches of spoken dramatic text suggest something’s afoot: the dialogue provides raw materials that, like the golem itself, might become coherent with a little imagination, some science and magic. Much of Der Golem, though, is the better aspect of gothic, the pure mood, served up in haunting stretches of the audio equivalent of fog creeping through dead villages and infernal machines running slowly on automatic. It isn’t without beats. “Ketias” posits them as occasional hints of something centering, a few raspy punctuations in a row, before one is allowed to reverberate into the background. “Catalyst,” too, has a beat, but it’s merely the seam where the sample of static starts over. Such seams, inherent in loop-based music, take on a special meaning in the world of the golem, the myth that led to Frankenstein. Check it out at kikapu.com. More on Roto Visage at rotovisage.com.

Battles-Related MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Want to hear more from Tyondai Braxton, one quarter of Battles, the electronified math-rock outfit newly signed to Warp Records? There are two MP3s up at his website, tyondai.jmzrecords.com, both from the History That Has No Effect album, a “solo loop” set released on the JMZ label in 2002. (JMZ has also released work by Zeena Parkins, Nels Cline and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.) “Great Mass” (MP3) is a heaving symphonic guitar drone, and it would bring to mind Glenn Branca’s guitar symphonies even if Braxton’s brief bio/resume on the website didn’t reference Branca’s “Hallucination City: Symphony 13 for 100 Guitars.” The six-minute-plus “Mass” is one of three movements from a piece titled “A Sentence Worth a Thousand Words.” And lest that formlessness suggest that Braxton’s role in Battles is more a matter of texture than of rhythm, not only does “Mass” shift into a charge of circuitous baubles as it closes, the second free download, the nearly nine-minute “The Violent Light Through Falling Shards” (MP3), opens with a clatter of muffled beats beneath some chiming strings and builds from there, through stretches of plectrum thunder that suggest the Byrds at their most deranged, before reaching a climax of overt sirens. Yeah, something’s comin’, alright.

Kracfive MP3 Tease

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Kettel has uploaded a tease of an MP3, “Tussen” (MP3), as the monthly “MP3 rotor” entry at kracfive.com. Why a tease? Well, because the delicate melody and vibrant array of understated accompaniment (bouncy keys, a distant bit of plunky nylon strings, even a flute line) come to a sudden close with a little human laughter. Why is someone laughing? Because the whole thing clocks in at under a minute. Now that’s just not fair.