The user-submitted remixes at the Freesound community site (freesound.iua.upf.edu) often fly by in the blink of an ear. Thus, it’s best to recommend a handful, all housed at the “Remix! Tree” section (link). Recent highlights include a taut knock on a Coke bottle (link), transformed into a tensile smattering of pizzicato island rhythms (link) worthy of film composer John Powell. A two-second contact mic recording (link) of a camera flash charging (you know that tiny, asymptotic whine) is transformed into a rickety rhythm (link), just three seconds, but pregnant with promise. Both raw recordings are by one edwin_p_manchester, both remixes by one lancelottjones. Someone should log on and build on the potential of lancellot’s accomplishments. It’s only be chivalrous.
Dark Winter MP3s
According to the Dark Winter website, Aidan Baker‘s 24.2.24.4., the netlabel’s latest release, consists entirely of sounds made by electric bass and guitar. Well, make that electric bass and guitar manipulated and layered, cut’n’pasted, until the original sources are all but distant memories. Those reverberating strings are buried deep in a haze of suggestive static, clicks, rasps, hums and otherworldly moans (MP3). There are moments when oscillating waves suggest some old sci-fi flick, but otherwise the single, hour-long piece is an extended survey of gaseous abstraction. Atmospheric music of this length has a tendency to be samey, mistaking homogeneity for seamlessness, but 24.2.24.4. has more than enough distinct moments to make for foreground listening. Info on Baker at aidanbaker.org, and on Dark Winter at darkwinter.com.
After ‘Thursday Afternoon’
An electronic musician (Monolake), an English professor (Michael Jarrett), and a science fiction writer (Richard Kadrey), all Brian Eno fans, walk into a chat room …
This year, an electronic-music anniversary passed with little fanfare. Two decades after the release of Brian Eno’s album Thursday Afternoon, it was made newly available in a remastered edition. The occasion provided an opportunity for something I’d wanted to do for a while: host an online discussion on a specific topic, and then post a lightly edited transcript of the back’n’forth. I invited four people, one of whom ultimately wasn’t able to join in.
Over the course of two weeks, three of them conversed with me: Robert Henke, the German musician better known as Monolake; Michael Jarrett, a professor of English at Penn State York, and author of several books, including Drifting on a Read: Jazz as a Model for Writing; and Richard Kadrey, the San Francisco-based author of such science fiction novels as Metrophage and Kamikaze L’Amour.
I knew them all to be familiar with the subject, and to have creative imaginations. I’d interviewed Henke the year prior for e/i magazine (“The Organization Musician”), and I had assigned articles to both Jarrett and Kadrey while I was an editor at Pulse!, the music magazine once published by Tower Records.
The subject, Thursday Afternoon, is a unique recording in Eno’s discography. An hour-long swath of amorphous, largely organic-sounding quietude, it arrived during an ebb in the popularity of ambient music. The year 1985 was well past the tail end of the proggy 1970s, when Eno’s experiments with the studio as a musical instrument first flourished, and close to a decade would pass before a new generation of musicians, raised in the wake of the personal computer, would revive electronic music. Still, the album looked ahead more than it looked back. It took full advantage of the then new medium of the compact disc, making use of sounds that would arguably have been swallowed up in the hiss and crackle of vinyl. Likewise, it played for longer than vinyl could have accommodated without requiring a flip of the LP, certainly at any comfortable level of audio fidelity. On the other hand, it was less an album than it was a document; it was the soundtrack to a piece of video art that Eno had released on VHS the year prior. (That footage was also released this year, on DVD.)
As I warned Henke, Jarrett and Kadrey, I’d never really done anything like this before, and accordingly any lapses in communication or cogency are entirely my fault. The trio had insights into what is, in fact, one of my favorite albums, and in the course of our discussion they helped me listen to it in new ways. I plan to do more of these in the future, having gotten one under my belt. Continue reading “After ‘Thursday Afternoon’”
Un-Dead Archive.org MP3
The Grateful Dead has recast its demands of the Internet Archive (archive.org), or so the reporting at relix.com was stating as early as Wednesday evening. In the past week, news had gotten out that the Dead’s thousand-plus live concert soundboard recordings were removed from the Archive’s publicly accessible holdings, at the group’s request. It seemed at the time like an odd development, since the Dead has been synonymous with freely traded live recordings, dating from when it was a top touring attraction. The scenario also seemed odd since the Archive is not a frequent subject of news coverage, despite the depth of its holdings, likely a result of its non-profit status. Several members of the Dead had themselves only recently become aware of the Internet Archive, though bassist Phil Lesh reports that he’d used it when researching his recent autobiography.
Whether or not the Dead soundboard reels were to make their way back into the public realm (they did, but only as streams; audience recordings remain downloadable), the widespread new reports of the group’s public-relations mess has shed mainstream light into the Archive, which houses far more than the noodlings of the proto-jam band. Some reporting referred to archive.org as if it were simply a repository of live recordings, with no regard to its substantial holdings of studio recordings, video, software, text and more. Among other things, the audio archive at archive.org is home to dozens of netlabels. And these aren’t just small netlabels lacking the resources to host their own goods; they’re major ones (“major netlabel,” now there’s a thought), like 20kbps, Kikapu and No Type.
To keep up with what’s uploaded daily, there are RSS feeds for the live music archive (RSS) and the general audio archive (RSS). Earlier this week, amid the Dead hubbub, the live feed noted the arrival of a full set by Lusine in Seattle (MP3). What begins as beat-fortified ambience slowly develops into something more rhythmically playful, with an emphasis on loopy riffs and momentary silences that signify the break between distinct segments, like pauses in some imaginary jukebox. The set, recorded in 2004, is housed as part of the Percussion Live archive. More on Percussion Lab at percussionlab.com and on Lusine at lusineweb.com.
Hyper-Minimal MP3s
There’s music minus one, and then there’s music that’s little more than one. “Music Minus One” were those old LPs of arrangements lacking a single part, so you could practice your Dixieland clarinet playing or whatnot. “Little more than one” describes how spare, how thrillingly threadbare, are the mere crusts of tempo-suggesting static that comprise the four tracks on Nicron‘s Cod.coq, from the relatively new Complementary Distribution netlabel. (A modest Hungarian enterprise run by Andras Hargitai, aka Soutien Gorge, it was launched this past July, and Nicron’s is its fourth release yet, posted on the 23rd of this month.) These are less instrumentals looking for a soloist or a singer than they are single elements of an imaginary rhythm track, their testy little syncopations chattering away like some anemic bboy’s heartbeat. If you’ve ever stared at a blueprint for an as-yet-unbuilt skyscraper and marveled at its architectonic pleasures, then Cod.coq is your cup of hypotheticals, as pregnant with possibility as it is barren. More info at the Complementary website, bitlabrecords.com/cod.