Generally speaking, the Disquiet Downstream is focused on and restricted to legal downloads of full tracks from musicians and record labels, which, often as not in this aural realm, are one in the same. Case in point Steve Roach, the longtime ethno-enivro-ambient musician who’s been self-releasing the majority of his records in recent years. Now, Roach has two new albums out this week, New Life Dreaming and Possible Planet, the former a return to the freeform soundscapes of his Dreamtime Return album (itself just reissued on Projekt) and the latter an experiment in ditching much of the digital toolset he’s employed of late, in favor of real-world sounds and reverberations. Roach has posted excerpts from each of the two albums’ combined eight tracks, but since many of those tracks are in the half-hour range, the excerpts themselves are long enough to stand on their own, each between just over two minutes to about four and a half. It’s a diverse patch of recordings, from didgeridoo warbles to rattlesnake percussion to synth waves to ambitiously rich drones. One keeper, for sure, is “First Murmer” (MP3), off Possible Planet, a modal slo-mo glottal undulation from the deep subconscious. Check them all out at steveroach.com.
Remix Chain MP3s
How many electronic musicians does it take to switch on a lightbulb? At the online project known as Freesound, the answer is: as many as want to. Freesound is a web community, founded in May of this year, dedicated to the collection and sharing of sounds. It’s a sizable and steadily growing database of raw sonic audio files, mostly field recordings, instrument samples and effects. One highlight of the project is its “Remix! tree,” in which users post remixes of existing Freesound material, and, in some cases, remixes of the remixes.
One excellent example began its life as “light-switch.wav”: a three-second sample of a plastic lightswitch, posted to Freesound by TwistedLemon (link). Next up was someone by the name of dropthedyle, who “remixed and looped” the original lightswitch material, adding an echo and extending its length by about an extra second (link). It’s worth dwelling on how those small fixes substantially altered the original before moving on, because soon enough a bright knob twiddler named mdsp dropped by to turn in two minute-and-a-half entries that turn that click’n’clack of the lightswitch into witty, percussive tracks with touches of dub and minimal techno (link, link). More info at freesound.iua.upf.edu.
Moog Memorial MP3s
Robert Moog, as synonymous with electronic music as any individual, has passed away, according to an announcement on the website of his instrument company (moogmusic.com). He was 71, and was being treated for a brain tumor.
In lieu of a sample of a Moog playing taps, take a trip in the wayback machine and visit the archives at the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Iowa for a 19-track demonstration of the Moog Synthesizer recorded in 1979 by Peter Tod Lewis, the studio’s director from 1968 to 1980. Listen as Lewis introduces the studio (MP3) and the instrument (MP3), noting that it “consists of four carrying cases, each about 28 inches high, 20 inches wide, and each crammed with numerous modules, clearly labeled, and differing from each other in their configuration of knobs and sockets.” He then demonstrates its various outputs and attributes, including its sequencer (MP3), its ability to produce combination tones (MP3) and its white-noise generator (MP3). Visit the page directly here.
A public memorial celebration for Moog is planed near his home in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 26. His family has announced the Bob Moog Foundation, dedicated to the advancement of electronic music. Sitting on its board are David Borden, Wendy Carlos, Joel Chadabpe, John Eaton, David Mash and Rick Wakeman. More info at moogmusic.com.
Tangents (synaesthesia, ragas, Zvonar)
Quick Links and News: (1) The Hirshhorn Museum has posted a website to complement its current Visual Music exhibit (link), with soundclips from Olivier Messiaen and Alexander Scriabin, and images representing abstract painting, color organs, film, light shows and installation art. … (2) Work by Bainbridge Bishop is not included in the Visual Music exhibit, but he was an early theorist on the relation between color and sound. A short pamphlet he published on the subject in 1893, A Souvenir of the Color Organ, with Some Suggestions in Regard to the Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, is available as a free download in PDF form (link) from rhythmiclight.com. (The band Growing took the title of its recent Kranky Records album, The Soul of the Rainbow and the Harmony of Light, from Bishop’s essay.) … (3) Composer Stella Sung worked with sound designer David Wallace to produce a background-music environment for the M.C. Escher exhibit showing at the Orlando Museum of Art through October 30 (link). … (4) Other Minds Records announced in its email newsletter that it will release in 2007 The Complete Ragas of John Cage, thanks to a $12K grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. Working on the project are Italian vocalist Amelia Cuni, percussionist Federico Sanesi and electronic composer Werner Durand. A world premiere is scheduled for the MerzMusik Festival in Berlin. … (5, 6) Via gizmodo.com, drum machines for the PlayStation Portable (link) and an “optical theremin toilet” (link). … (7) Speaking of which, a list of the “leading ladies of music of the air” (createdigitalmusic.com). … (8) Famed music technologist Bob Moog is being treated for a brain tumor. His family is maintaining a journal online (link). … (9) Why does the copy protection on my store-bought Who Is Mike Jones CD keep it from playing on my car stereo? Wasn’t it recorded with the intention of being played in cars? Maybe my 10-year-old Honda isn’t “street” enough for it.
… Good Reads: (1) Sound designers explain what they do, in BackStage magazine (link). “Music or sounds may comment on the last scene and set the tone for the one that’s coming up,” says musician David Van Tieghem, one of several sound designers interviewed for the piece. … (2) Scroll down to the July 26 entry on the news page at Matmos‘s website (brainwashed.com/matmos) for an overview of what they did on their summer vacation, complete with photos.
… Select New Releases: (1) Anticon Records regular Alias recorded the lovingly introspective electronic hodgepodge of Lillian with his younger brother, Ehren, who’s still in his teens (Anticon); the album is named for their grandmother. … (2) Steve Roach‘s two-CD ethno-ambient Dreamtime Return has been remastered (Projekt), plus Roach has two new albums: New Life Dreaming, which he has said was inspired by the re-mastering process, and Possible Planet, a textural album for which he ditched his computers, MIDI and keyboards entirely (both Timeroom Editions). … (3) The Japanese pair of funk-glitchy producer Aoki Takamasa and ingenue vocalist Tujiko Noriko have teamed for 28 (FatCat). The title is their shared current age. … (4) Venetian Snares (aka Aaron Funk) has a new full-length, Meathole, perhaps his hardest post-drum’n’bass set yet (Planet Mu). … (5) Live hip-hop band Breakestra‘s Family Rap 12″ (Ubiquity) includes an instrumental track and a Cut Chemist edit. … (6) The Kallikak Family‘s May 23rd 2007 (Tell-All) includes noise and field recordings. … (7) Mossyrock‘s The Zero to One Sessions mix loungey, often Herb Alpert-ish folk-pop with electronic touches (nice+smooth) … (8) Nybbl (aka Tim Quackenbush) releases The Path from a Point Is in the Shape of a Heart (Noise Factory) … (9) Jackson‘s “Rock On” (Warp) is expertly jerky and sample-laden.
… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) “Kirilian Auras,” off The Psychic Nature of Being (Kranky) by Lichens, aka Robert Lowe (of 90 Day Men, TV on the Radio and the Castanets), builds from low-sung syllables to embrace slow, gritty feedback and archaic acoustic guitar phrases. … (2) That untitled reworking of Seamus Cater‘s chromatic harmonica by Roddy Schrock (MP3) is the top Disquiet Downstream entry from last week (full entry here). .. (3) Bill Frisell credits “loops” right alongside his guitar on the back cover of his new live album, East/West (Nonesuch). While nothing here gets as abstract as on Smash and Scatteration, his ancient (well, 1984) collaboration with Vernon Reid, he really lets the digitally enabled music take over on a sweet cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” The album’s due out this coming Tuesday, August 23.
… Quote of the Week: “What is this clicky stuff?” Text displayed as part of a background visual for a performance by the Hub, six composers improvising over a computer network on August 20, the third night of the sixth annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival. The Hub that evening consisted of John Bischoff, Chris Brown, Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Tim Perkis, Phil Stone and Mark Trayle.
… R.I.P.: Yesterday, while attending the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, I learned that Richard Zvonar had passed away. Zvonar was an accomplished musician and artist based out of Los Angeles. I never met him in person, but I helped edit a profile he wrote about composer Bebe Baron, best known for her work with her husband, Louis, on the soundtrack for the science-fiction classic Forbidden Planet. The piece appeared in the third issue of e/i magazine, which was published last year. Zvonar and I spent numerous phone calls talking about the analog roots of Information Age culture, and with each successive conversation I learned more and more about his extensive career. What he didn’t dwell on was the cancer he’d been fighting for years. When the Baron piece was complete, he said his next proposed article, on composer Carl Stone, would have to be put on hold until he regained his strength. Richard Zvonar passed away on August 3. … Doug Wyatt, of Mother Mallard and Red Letter, reminisces on his website (sonosphere.com). Keith Snyder, who along with Zvonar was a member of the band Cosmic Debris, tributes Zvonar on his web journal (link), which includes a 10-minute MP3 of them improvising. … More info at zvonar.com.
Germanic Soundscape MP3 Album
In Traum (“traum” meaning “dream”), by the German act Seetyca, could very well take as its title the name of the netlabel that released it: Dark Winter. It’s nine tracks of near-lifeless, emotionally and physically remote soundscapes. Or is it? The closing piece, “Vielleicht Erlischt das Licht” (roughly, in English, “Perhaps the Light Expires”), shares with the hour-long album as a whole the same hovering clouds of white noise, and the nearly subaural rumblings of deep bass-line activity that root everything here. But it also could be heard as a kind of heavenly choir, albeit not one that brings to the mind’s eye images of sun-split heavens and rotund angels. The sense of awe is too intense, too existential, to allow easy resolution into joy. That confliction, along with an ever-present flicker of digital noises throughout “Vielleicht Erlischt das Licht,” makes it more than just an exercise in sonic despair. Most of the tracks do sound like field recordings from icy and underpopulated regions, but some have metallic touches that suggest interior spaces, like “Im Travergange,” and occasionally voices can be heard, though only as transmuted sonic elements. Get the full set at darkwinter.com.