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.
Kettel Keys’n’Beats MP3
When is a light bit of studio-concocted radio funk-jazz more than that? Well, when it opens with a lo-fi heavenly choir, only to cut off the beatific vocalists unceremoniously. And when it shuffles by with a digital beat that, despite a steady stream of Herbie Hancock-style keyboard parts, can’t take three steps in a row without shifting about peculiarly, as if it’s continuously rethinking its metrical allegiances. And when it takes those Hancock-isms and layers them one or two, maybe three, deeper than he’s likely to venture. What is this confection? The latest entry from the kracfive.com collective’s monthly MP3 rotor: “One Foggy Ear” (MP3), credited to Kettel. The kracfive site, by the way, was recently re-designed and streamlined.
Staunch Austrian MP3s
When Rifa, on Elevator Monkey (Prison Soup, a French netlabel), isn’t channeling Tom Waits (“Penetrate”), or ramming a disco chestnut through a carton of cigarettes disguised as a granular synthesizer (“Don’t Rush”), it makes for some bracing electronic music. “Timewarp” presents a uniquely staunch take on dub, with a beat that’s little more than a struck match and a compulsory echo that could be approximated with an old coffee can. Rifa humanizes the environs on “Timewarp” with a breathy trip-hop diva, and does the same on “M1,” but that track has a more elegantly rattled rhythm, slipping up on occasion in a manner too low key to be truly called glitch. “Tapemeserios” is of a piece with those tracks, but it also sounds like it was recorded on the Orient Express, with a contact microphone glued to the undercarriage; it’s both fuller and noisier. And then there’s “Bing1,” the album’s finest track, which blends in some hip-hop, but also messes with the rhythms as if the whole composition had been laid on a shifting bed of ball bearings. Rifa is described by Prison Soup as an Austrian musician and a member of a collective called Loop Logo. Download the full Elevator Monkey set for free at prisonsoup.com. More info on Rifa, albeit in German, at looplogo.com.
Postscript: This brief write-up originally had incorrectly listed the title of “Bing1” as “Bling1” and drawn conclusions about its hip-hop flavor from said misreading. Apologies for the error.
Sounds of Thunder MP3
What is it about high technology that makes everyone want to go back to nature? The Freesound Project (freesound.iua.upf.edu) is a massive public open-source file-trading database of sounds, from screams to machine noise to instrument samples, from trains to birds to the kitchen sink (and fork, and knife, and plate). It’s like a field-recording wonderland, and largely a high-fidelity one, to boot. And as of this typing, the top 10 most downloaded files (in the last week) are all either rain or thunder (that’s out of some 300,000-plus downloads since the site launched, back in mid-May of this year).
Well, why fight what’s popular? Check out what is, for the moment, the most downloaded of those thunder sounds, contributed by a Washington, D.C.-based audio engineer whose file uploads are tagged “RHumphries.” The file (link) is a clear tape of distant thunder, all sharp crackle and resulting drone and echo, heard through a scrim of light precipitation. Each Freesound file’s page includes a waveform image and a compressed preview version of the file. The compressed thunder track is just 1,545KB, but the uncompressed file is almost 40MB. Judging by the increasing distance between the thunder strikes clearly visible in the waveform, the storm is headed away.
Of course, Mother Nature is just one of Freesound’s many contributors. Head over to the site’s “Tags” page, in which the size of the 150 most popular tags’ typeface approximates their relative popularity, and you’ll see everything from “atari,” “chime” and “city” (tiny), “guitar,” “sax” and “water” (medium), “noise,” “drumloop” and, yes, “ambient” (large).
Electro-Acoustic MP3s
For all the evening’s sonic ingenuity, the harmonica took top honors. Two Fridays back, on August 5, Seamus Cater played as half a laptop duo with Roddy Schrock. It was part of an extensive bill held by the Drum Machine Museum some four or five stories up in a brick building in San Francisco’s always colorful Tenderloin District. In addition to Cater-Schrock, there were performances by Lx Rudis and Beau Casey (for which I arrived too late), and by another duo, Christopher Fleeger and Marielle Jakobsons. In between, DJ Guanaco spun. Jakobsons is a violinist, and her set with Fleeger had her not so much trading fours with his laptop, but feeding bits of riffs into it, which he’d process and shoot back at her. Though they’d only apparently played together once previously, they had a good collaborative feel, especially when Jackobsons emphasized the strings’ textural quality, and when Fleeger met the violin halfway, by trying out gestural melodic elements.
Anyhow, the harmonica is what Cater used to open his set with Schrock. He played a short warm hum, which was immediately processed into a rumble of minimal techno. What distinguished his and Schrock’s work together was, once you got past the harmonica, how difficult it was to sort out who was playing what. Whereas most duos perform as individuals, they were producing a singular sound. Not surprisingly, they’ve collaborated for some time, both in concert and online.
Two of their group efforts are available on Schrock’s website, fundamentallysound.org, both artifacts of their file trading. “Reset Artclock” (MP3) reportedly originated as a computer improv, and was subsequently treated with field recordings by Remi Gerard-Marchant; it’s considerably more sparse and enigmatic than anything they emitted at the Tenderloin gig, a mysterious assemblage of tiny sounds, all light clutter, water drops, distant whir. An untitled piece (MP3) will satisfy anyone still wondering about that harmonica mentioned up top. It presents Cater’s harmonica processed by Schrock, who creates a kind of monastic zone-out realm, with overlapping patterns of round tones that echo Terry Riley’s minimalist mysticism.
Cater has another project that combines acoustic and electronic elements, his trio Hills not Skyscrapers, which teams him with Missy Mazzoli and Tom Parkinson. They’ve put three segments from their just finished album, Highwires, up on their site (seacater.com/hns), and though they’ve drawn on a wide range of instruments (“We play pianos, harmonicas, guitars, basses, melodicas, sinewaves, tiny toy instruments and computers”), each of the tracks is sedate and spare. “Rushed Girl” (MP3) is introduced with what sounds like a muted piano transcription of “When I Wish Upon a Star” played above knee-smacked spoons. “Trilingual” (MP3) opens the piano up for something more free and improvisatory, amid spacey strings; those spoons, or perhaps castanets, reappear, but more as sound effects than rhythmic engines. “Orrizonte” (MP3) may be the real keeper. It locates Mazzoli’s wide piano chords within steady cicada sine waves. The three tracks are apparently excerpts of longer pieces, but the Hills not Skyscrapers folks have done listeners the favor of closing each MP3 file with a slow fade, so as not to disturb an otherwise elegant listening experience.