My review of a performance of Philip Glass‘ opera La Belle et la Bete, by the Oakland Opera Theater, is just up at classicstoday.com. For La Belle et a la Bete, Glass, who’s done as much to bring synthesizers into the world of classical music as any other living composer, achieved a different kind of electro-acoustic symbiosis. He transposed the dialogue from Jean Cocteau‘s 1946 film La Belle et la Bete, with the intention of singers performing the music live along with the movie. The Oakland company has taken Glass’ transformation of the Cocteau one step further, dispensing with the projection entirely in favor of a stage production.
Freesound Remix MP3s
Another interesting remix thread at the Freesound project, at freesound.iua.upf.edu. The first file, “bewonderen.aiff,” is a brief sample of a spoken Dutch phrase, translated “to admire,” contributed by Hans Timmermans. Then an Anton Woldhek showed up, attempting in his words “to remove some of the low end and other rumble.” A few weeks ago, dropthedyle arrived and “elongated and mangled” the Woldhek file. Why not join in and fiddle about yourself? There is much to admire at Freesound, an open-source soundfile-sharing project hosted at the website of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Game Boy MP3s
There’s so much bippity boppity lo-fi, lo-tech electronic music out there, it’s almost too easy to take comfort in the abstraction of beatless atmospheres. At least with music like soundscapes and field recordings, you can take refuge in your own imagination. The Gainlad netlabel is pumping out exactly the sort of music that should fall short of even low expectations, yet so much of it is addictively listenable. Case in point, Jon Bro‘s three-track Cleanser EP, which appears to have been constructed on a Nintendo Game Boy, or an equivalently underpowered chipset; not only does it sound like the soundtrack to some chaotic Wario adventure, it has these irascible little melodic lines that skip around with an assuredness that much video-game-indebted netlabel pop sorely lacks. Check it out at gainlad.gameboymall.com. Oh, and the label currently has a call out for contributions to a Halloween-themed compilation. Entries are due October 25, so if you’re up for the challenge, then get thee to an arcade, pronto.
Edible Matthew Herbert MP3
Here’s a puzzle of a recipe. What do the following ingredients yield: Dry coconut, Eden organic grape juice in a glass bottle, organic peanuts in a plastic bag, Mount Hagen decaffeinated organic coffee in a glass jar with a plastic top, and two out-of-season apples? Well, if you’re Matthew Herbert, and those food goods were delivered to your small Brixton studio by representatives of the BBC, then they yield a tidy little upbeat track titled “Esme’s Waltz” (MP3), a chock-a-block wind-up toy of countless little percussive elements. As on Herbert’s new album, Plat du Jour, all of those individual sounds were derived from contorted samples of edible items. The BBC page where the file is housed also includes streaming video of Herbert constructing the track (bbc.co.uk). Esme’s is the name of the store where the goods were purchased.
24-Hours MP3
Think time’s flying by? Give a listen to a recent experiment by musician Marcus Obst, and then ask the question again. A few days ago, Obst placed a microphone by his window and taped the world going by for 24 straight hours. He then compressed the 24 hours to just under 24 minutes, and pitched down the sound so it doesn’t sound like a Chipmunks marathon or, for that matter, a tape set on fast forward. It’s nothing like the former, and far more than the latter. The resulting MP3 (“24h in 24 Minutes and Less”) has the vibrant flutter of low-key electronic music, and none of the sonic garbage one might expect from such a simple experiment in field-recording-based sound generation. In fact, it’s quite seamless and elegant. As with much conceptual art, the file benefits a bit from the listener knowing the system that produced it; once aware of Obst’s conceit, one would be hard put to not picture time-lapse images of insects and flowers. He describes how he accomplished the project on his website, fieldmuzick.net. The file is downloadable at freesound.iua.upf.edu. Oh, and don’t worry. It’s only 28MB.