Tangents (space, BPMs, consumption)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links: (1) On NPR’s July 30 Weekend Edition (RealAudio), astrophysicist Donald Gurnett explained that space really isn’t entirely silent, and shared sounds recorded by the Cassini space probe when it reached Saturn last year. (Thanks for the tip, Barney.) … (2) Composer Walter Cianciusi has produced a digital implementation, in Max/MSP, of La Monte Young‘s sine-tone installations (link, via of Kyle Gann‘s Post-Classical blog). … (3) One-minute? Brother! In case you were wondering, someone has sorted out (link) how many old-school computer punch cards it would take to store a 60-second MP3 file encoded at 128kbps: depending on how you organize the data, either 36,864 or 40,960. The latter is a stack over five and a half feet high (via boingboing.net). Now that’s one thick hipster PDA. … (4) Build a mechanical paper pipe organ (link, via musicthing.co.uk). … (5) Close Encounters of the 16^2 Kind: Also via musicthing, Yamaha’s futuristic Tenori-On instrument, a grid of 256 buttons that light up. It’s quite lovely, and was developed by media artist Toshio Iwai. More at yamaha.com and at Iwai’s page (link). … (6) Createdigitalmusic.com asks of Apple’s new, multi-button Mighty Mouse, “Good for music?” (link), noting that the handy peripheral includes a tiny internal speaker. … (7) Peek inside said mouse over at arstechnica.com. … (8) Boot Camp: How to make a mash-up (link), in one easy software package (via makezine.com). … (9) Yahoo has launched the beta of its audio search (audio.search.yahoo.com). … (10) There’s a messier, but still quite useful, third-party approximation of this functionality for google.com, at xtragoogle.com. … (11) More info on finding MP3s, etc., via google.com at tech-recipes.com. … (12) A growing list (at createdigitalmusic.com) of music-related widgets, or small programs (for both Mac and, thanks to Konfabulator, PC), including a Beat Meter and Brian Eno‘s Oblique Strategies. … (13) Need a quick BPM counter for your Palm OS device? Try the one programmed by DJ Timothy Wisdom (timothywisdom.com). It has a simple interface that averages the beats in real time.

… Good Reads: (1) The Washington Post profiles sound artist Janet Cardiff (link), and in a side note mentions that (and this is a bit out of the ordinary) only museum members who have contributed more than $100 can attend her lecture at the Hirshhorn on September 28, part of its current Visual Music exhibit. … (2) The London Independent on July 29 profiled Soul Jazz Records, which has become a sort of British answer to Rhino: a reissue label that originated as a record store (link). The label will take a break later this year from releasing dub reissues to do up some Tibetan and Georgian (yes, Georgian, as in Russian) chant. … (3) Brian Eno talks with the BBC about the use of technology to manipulate his vocals on his recent album, Another Day on Earth (link). … (4) In the New York Times, July 26 coverage of Alarm Will Sound‘s Aphex Twin covers (link) and (5) the next day a marimba’n’vibraphone adaptation of Steve Reich‘s “Electric Counterpoint,” by Svet Stoyanov (link); more info at svetoslav.com.

… Select New Releases: (1) Bjork has recorded the soundtrack to artist Matthew Barney‘s new film, Drawing Restraint No. 9 (One Little Indian), working with Will Oldham (Palace, Bonnie Prince Billy), Mark Bell (LFO), Valgeir Sigursson, Akira Rabelais and Leila. She discusses the album in the London Telegraph (link). Some news sources list this as coming out on August 23, while others list it as already released. … (2) Foscil‘s Foscil (Fourth City) draws on hip-hop and dub, having been recorded “with an Atari ST computer system, open-reel analogue tape and a hybrid of live instrumentation, analog synths, and sequencers.” The Seattle-based group consists of Tyler Swan, Ryan Trudell, Anthony Moore and Adam Swan. … (3) Matthew Herbert‘s Plat du Jour (Accidental) takes global food consumption as its theme. While it was still a work in progress he wrote, “The album will include tracks made from a grain of sugar, 30,000 chickens, a salmon farm, the sewers below London and water.” More info at platdujour.co.uk.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) The Dead Texan‘s self-titled album (Kranky) is a mix of entirely acoustic sounds, like the Satie-esque piano on “Taco Me Manque” and “Aegina Airlines,” and tech touches, like digital drones, wafting synths and what seem to be field recordings of delicate sonic ephemera. In all, it suggests the studio-informed composition of Gavin Bryars, much as it does the kitchen-sink toolbox of so many soundtrack composers. … (2) The rap compilation You Don’t Know Half (Halftooth) came out in 2004, followed closely by the solid downtempo 12″ for Kenn Starr‘s resulting single, “If,” featuring guests Asheru and Talib Kweli. I didn’t catch wind of Starr until recently, when fatbeats.com, the web record retailer (and Halftooth distributor), opened one of its podcasts with the instrumental version of the single’s flipside, “Walk the Walk.” It’s a great piece, a shaggy beat below the sort of openhanded chordal piano that suggests a church service; a loose electric bass line is added early on, and later there’s a craggy call, like someone’s blowing a conch shell through a distortion pedal. Halftooth’s latest full-length is the 24-track Oddisee Instrumental — Mixtape Volume 1, which contains “If” but, sadly, not “Walk the Walk.” Perhaps it’ll make volume 2. … (3) The standout track on Permanent Flow (Accretions), a live date by the out-jazz trio of Joscha Oetz (contrabass), Andreas Wagner (tenor saxophone) and Greg Stuart (percussion), is titled “Straight Curves.” It opens with Oetz playing a bluesy figure, which neither of the other musicians seems interested in disturbing; instead they contribute what sound like sonic accessories, bits of noise and brief riffs that keep Oetz aloft.

… Quote of the Week: “All the stuff I scrapped was shot at night outdoors in the winter in London. I had to go outside four nights with no clothes on and I nearly died. Then I scrapped all the footage anyway. It was pointless torture.” That’s director Chris Cunningham and longtime Aphex Twin colleague talking to the Pitchfork zine (well, last week) about filming Rubber Johnny (link).

No Merzbow in iTunes Japan?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Has access to Japanese electronic music gotten easier, thanks to Apple? Apple launched an iTunes Music Store in Japan on August 3, bringing to 20 the number of countries with iTunes stores, including not only the U.K. and Germany, but Finland and Luxembourg. Region-specific iTunes stores include region-specific downloads. Thus, sampling Japanese electronic music should prove easier than ever.

Or maybe not. There are only two full DJ Krush albums in the U.S. iTunes store: his most recent (Jaku) and his collaboration with trumpeter Toshinori Kondo (Ki-Oku). Oddly, there’s only one DJ Krush release in the Japanese store: Bad Brothers, his team-up with jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan (odder still, the current Japanese download has one fewer tracks than did the out-of-print U.S. version of the release). There’s no Merzbow at all in the Japanese iTunes store, but at least three U.S. iTunes catalog items feature that legendary Japanese noise act. Of course, these are just cursory searches, and it’s quite possible that some of the Japanese acts are filed using hiragana characters. (Another factoid that surfaced during this surfing: Bjork’s Drawing Restraint is already available via iTunes in Japan and Britain, though it’s not out in the U.S. or in Canada.)

On an initial glance, iTunes Japan prices songs at 150 yen each, which as of this writing is about $1.34 (coincidentally, a penny less than the cost of files from bleep.com); the U.S. version prices songs at 99 cents. Unfortunately, you must have a Japanese credit card in order to download music from iTunes Japan, even the free weekly download. There is some good news, regardless of region: you don’t need a credit card to listen to samples of tracks in iTunes, or to download free podcasts via iTunes. More info at apple.com/itunes.

One-Minute Vacation MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another month, another set of weekly One-Minute Vacations, courtesy of Aaron Ximm‘s quietamerican.org site. Each Monday, more or less, Ximm posts 60-second audio snapshots recorded around the world and contributed by a growing assortment of volunteers. Highlights in July included a thunderstorm caught on tape in northern Italy (MP3) by Joseph Young (“using Soundman OKM binaural microphones and a Sony MZ-N707 minidisc recorder,” he reports) and an extended scene at a temple in Nara, Japan (MP3), courtesy of Ari Noguchi, who writes … well, he describes the scenario at length on Ximm’s site, but it’s probably preferable to listen to it through at least once before having what actually occurred spelled out for you. While the thunderstorm is self-evident, the Nara sequence is not. Both are elegant real-time sound events with the shape, in retrospect, of compositions. (The Nara is also unique in that it’s one and a half minutes in length.) These One-Minute Vacation entries are worth checking out regularly, and Ximm has added a podcast feature for those looking to access them automatically. One thing of interest about the entries is that while they seem to pass so quickly as to evade attention, they last much longer if you watch the seconds tick by on your MP3 player. Of course, better yet to close your eyes and drift away for a minute. More info at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.

System-Hum MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Musician Jose Maria Rodrigo pilots his drone-based electronic music onto your headphones like someone bringing a massive starship in slow and steady. “Industria Proxima,” off his July 10 Montgo netlabel release, Por Debajo de las Cosas Ordinarias, opens with an underlying murmur, the sound of a sizable object some distance away. While it blossoms, a distant rumble gaining proximity, the foreground comes alive with small activities, little curlicues of electronic chores, sounding like routine protocol checks monitored by semi-sentient, whimsically efficient autobots. The result is the sound design for a quotidian Pixar short about life on a space station. The album opens with “Presencia Humana,” all garbled communication amid more of that starship systems hum. All of the tracks provide the ambience of deep industrial activity. Or, as Rodrigo told Montogo: “In my work as sound technician I have often been paying my total mental-sensorial attention to landscapes or sound objects that a priori seemed empty or insignificant and discovering in them a rare beauty.” The sole exception to Por Debajo‘s extreme remoteness is the electric piano that appears, briefly, on “Presencia Superior”; jarring amid the otherwise mechanistic terrain, it’s like some memory shard of past human interaction. More info at montgorecords.com.

Extended Larkian MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One is tempted to call Larkian‘s “Droxma_1” a drone, but it’s so much more than that, more specific, more earthly, more tangible. There’s too much detail in “Droxma_1” to relegate it to mere, to even superior, drone-ness. It begins in these shifting waves of tone, with particulate percussion flitting in and out. Drone purists might consider the noises to be flies in the ointment, but in this case the extra material makes the whole thing all the more interesting, more eventful, more palatable. At nearly half an hour, “Droxma_1” begins in one place (this nascent realm of sounds competing, lazily, for prominence) and drives eventually to elsewhere, to a peak of rollicking maximalism, like a Glenn Branca symphony, like one of Michael Gordon’s post-rock chamber works, like the famous “tuning up” moment in the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life,” but distended, like some tumultuous communal experience replayed on the evening newscast in slow motion. “Droxma_1” is the third and most recent release from the adozen.org netlabel. It’s available in two file sizes: 256 kbps (MP3) and 128 kbps (MP3). In general, the latter should be sufficient for casual listening, but this piece deserves the density of the higher bit rate.