So, there’s one other twist. Koji Asano, the hyperproductive electronic musician whose output suggests that the Japanese word for “prolific” is a tad more forceful than the English one, started uploading free downloads to his website, at kojiasano.com/freetunes, last week. The initiative had some unique touches. For one thing, the first file, a remix of his Spring Estuary album (see the December 15 Disquiet Downstream entry), was large enough to be considered “lossless” (that is, large enough for its signal-to-data ratio to rival if not surpass the quality of a CD). For another, Asano announced he planned to do these weekly. The new twist is that when you log on this week to get entry number two, a live performance in 2001 at the radio station KFJC (89.7FM, Los Altos, California), you discover that last week’s entry is no longer downloadable. So that’s how it’ll be: free music, but just one track at a time. (Judging by his schedule thus far, the next piece should pop up on December 28.) The KFJC piece is a piercing, 15-minute drill’n’drone ride, sounding like the anguished cry of some android pachyderm, until, late in the game, a solemn melody rises from within. Is it real, or is it just your ear’s wishful thinking?
Holiday Break
After tomorrow’s Downstream entry and potentially a post or two this weekend, Disquiet.com will take a little holiday break until the first week of January (2006, by the way, marks this website’s 10th anniversary).
Bat Music MP3s
The German label at gruenrekorder.de has described itself as focusing on “audioart and field recordings.” Its sizeable website recordings include such categories as “sample poetry” and “bioacoustic compositions,” the latter featuring work that builds on tapes of, among other things, bat sounds. Lasse-Marc Riek‘s “Feeding Buzz 02” (MP3) shifts the bats’ ultrasonic emissions into human hearing range, and apparently uses a spatial analogy to transform the bats’ motion into music; the result is a mysterious flurry of movement, appropriately creepy given the source. Two other Riek tracks, “Reitende Hoehlentiere” (MP3) and “Modulierte Echtzeittiere” (MP3), mix these adjusted-spectrum sounds with recognizable real-world material, like industrial sounds and dog barks, and with bat noise that would be plainly evident to the human ear, such as the sound of chirping between parent and child bat.
Two Holiday MP3s
Tis the season, and Ghostly Records has the spirit. The label has posted some holiday treats in the form of freely downloadable MP3s: Cepia (aka Minneapolis-based Huntley Miller) turns Charlie Brown’s favorite holiday song into a mix of dissolving piano notes and dubby drum beats (MP3), while Outputmessage (Richmond, Virginia-based Bernard Farley) takes “Carol of the Bells” a little further afield, punctuating its melody and getting into some welcome production drift (MP3). Neither seems to appreciate how more fully these melodies can be disassembled, how far they can be stretched, given how familiar the songs are, but still, these are both cool tracks to toss into holiday rotation. More info at ghostly.com.
Noisejihad Live MP3
Tis the season for many things, but as the year winds down, the noisemongers at the Noisejihad Live netlabel certainly don’t have good cheer on their minds. The latest entry is a half hour of tentative dissonances by Eske Norholm of Denmark (MP3), caught on tape as the middle act on a bill that also featured Satanicponocultshop and Hiphopminuttet. As Noisejihad releases go, Norholm’s set is downright sedate, with none of the death-metal or industrial overtones of much of the label’s previous downloads. It opens with processed samples, futzed-with piano lines, before venturing into something formless and eerie, the gurgle of sublimated signals and the rudiments of raw found sound. Norholm has an instinct for narrative, as the piece moves ahead without resorting to overt drama or tense mood shifts. More info at noisejihad.dk/netlabel.