Tangents (training, Acoustica, afterblast)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Good Reads: (1) The European Union Commission is focusing legislation on member states over noise pollution in cities (cnn.com). … (2) Finally, someone (Tony Green) takes on the “most bogus claim in the music business,” i.e., that one is “classically trained” (slate.com). … (3) I sent a note to engadget.com, asking for suggestions about iPod alternatives (specifically, flash-based items with screens that support multiple operating systems and drag’n’drop). They posted it, and about 50 people responded (engadget.com). … (4) How to copy a vinyl album using your computer scanner (link), via makezine.com.

… Select New Releases: Sara Ayers debuts her enviro-ambient A Million Stories CD (Dark Wood Recordings). … More new release info at brainwashed.com/releases.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) The top Disquiet Downstream entry this past week, easily, was “For Amanda” (July 11, MP3) from allthatfall‘s hopecrash EP, on the luv sound netlabel. It opens with a tasty horn’n’guitar salvo that you won’t get out of your head any time soon. … (2) Missy Elliott‘s new album, The Cookbook, is her least Timbaland-heavy, certainly, but she’s not short on fine production, as the 12″ for the Neptunes-produced “On and On” shows: rubberized beats, lots of space, syrupy scratching. It’s a good recipe (and the 12″ includes an instrumental). … (3) Alarm Will Sound‘s album of unplugged Aphex Twin covers, Acoustica, is now out, and the winner may be a solo piano take on the Drukqs album’s “Avril 14th,” which, of course, was solo piano in the first place. Close runner up: “Gwely Mernans,” which revels in light counterpoint.

… Quote of the Week: Robb Witts (link) on thinking of John Cage during the public moment of silence after the July 7 bombings in London: “Cage discovered that there is no true silence, that even in the deepest quiet our human ears are filled with the background hum of our own fleshy machinery. By taking our act of remembrance into the streets, we performed a memorial of quiet, in which the presence of our fellow Londoners was audible by the absence of their sound.” (Via Robert Gable‘s site, aworks.)

Colin Andrew Sheffield MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Apologies for the two-day lull. I was away for a brief work-related trip. Speaking of lulls, a full track from Colin Andrew Sheffield‘s debut solo album, the enviro-ambient First Thus, is up at the Elevator Bath label’s website, elevatorbath.com. The shortest of the set’s four tracks, “Come Closer” (MP3), at about four and a half minutes, rises like a ground fog, the mere suggestion of mist gaining density at an imperceptible and, yet, suddenly claustrophobia-inducing rate. Reportedly, the sounds on “Come Closer,” like all of those on First Thus, originated on pre-existing commercial recordings, but those recordings are so entirely misshapen and distended, so wrenched into formlessness, that an act of Congress under the most severe stricture of the Patriot Act likely couldn’t suss out their original source.

Two Eno Streams

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Yes, the Downstream is about downloadable, not streaming-only, sound. But another question that gets answered “yes” is: “Are there two streaming interview programs featuring Brian Eno up on the BBC’s website?” Some questions are more important than others. And indeed, there are two such BBC programs (programmes?): the Mixing It show (link) and Any Questions? (link). Better yet, the Any Question? show presents a complete transcript on its website. Understand, though, that while Mixing It features a discussion about Eno’s new album, Another Day on Earth, the Any Questions? show is a discussion about terrorism, in light of the recent attacks in London. … Still want a download? Well, here’s a tangential one: frequent Eno collaborator Daniel Lanois has a new record out, Belladonna, and its record label, Anti, has posted a free song, the redolent rural ambience of “Agave” (MP3). It doesn’t deserve a full post, though, because it’s not a complete file; it cuts off a little more than halfway through, which is all the more absurd since the original is short to begin with, falling shy of two minutes in length.

Post-Loop MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The act allthatfall‘s six-song EP on the luv sound netlabel (title: hopecrash) is so endlessly listenable that you end up playing it in the background while writing about other (other, more easily summarized) records. There’s just so much to praise on hopecrash, like the catchy birdsong on “We Live Outside,” chirping above a funky organ cascade, with the occasional flute line, some snappy drum breaks, and the odd vocal refrain; individual elements suggest acid jazz, given the genre’s emphasis on loungified period instrumentation and chanteuse charm, but those elements here are stacked one on top of the next, combining to be so much more. “Fall Break” veers close to electro, with video-game burts of overclocked riffs, but a background track of children playing, along with a quaint little melody, keeps it from ever sounding particularly retro. And then there’s the tasty horn’n’guitar salvo on “For Amanda,” which sounds like an outtake from the recent Abdullah Ibrahim remix record: elements of earthy jazz salvaged for digital pursuits.

What distinguishes allthatfall’s pieces is that even though they’re essentially sequences of individual sonic packets, they have a structure that moves from one musical space to another, with well-timed transition points along the way; this is loop-based music that at each juncture makes a concerted effort to break free from looping. Take the opening of the fantastic “For Amanda” (MP3), just as one example. It starts with this guitar line that bounces back and forth between speakers, and then introduces the horn, eventually laying two distinct horn parts atop each other (one a trill, the other a held note), as a drum-machine beat kicks in; after a brief diversion, the song returns, but the horn is replaced by a synthesizer. The effect is ripe with promise, and the piece hasn’t even reached the half-way point. More than anything, you’re left thinking that this Amanda person must really be something. (Check it out at luvsound.org.)

Tangents (Gibson, Scratch, HBO)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links: (1) Instructions (link) on how to download “any multimedia file from the web to your hard drive” (via downloadsquad.com). … (2) A guitar-playing robot (link) and (3) a drum machine for the PlayStation Portable (link), both via engadget.com. … (4) Make your own microphones (link), via makezine.com.

… Good Reads: (1) The July issue of Wired focuses on remixing, and includes an essay by novelist William Gibson (“God’s Little Toys”) about the literary roots and metaphors of cut’n’paste culture. … (2) Also in the Wired remix issue, a piece on how the Avalanches pursue a remix (“Making of a Remix”). … (3) A review (link) in this past Friday’s New York Times of a synaesthesia-minded group-show exhibit in Manhattan’s Eyebeam gallery. More details at the gallery’s site (link). … (4) A review of an exhibit by MacArthur grant-winning sound artist Trimpin in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (link). … (5) Robert Gable‘s fine “aworks” blog (rgable.typepad.com), focused on “‘new’ American classical music,” celebrates its third anniversary (link). … (6) Not much of it is online, but Scratch may be my favorite new(ish) print music magazine. It posits itself as “the only hip-hop magazine that reps the beats.” And, indeed, reading Scratch, you’d think the producers, not the rappers who drop by the studio to lay a lyric on top, are the real stars, which is how it would be in a better world. Issue six features a Timbaland cover story, a piece by mix engineer Ken Lewis on how he assisted Kanye West to construct a bit of faux-’70s soul for West’s The College Dropout, and a short piece covering a New York University forum on the making of Public Enemy‘s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (mentioning that Hank Shocklee, member of Public Enemy’s production team, the Bomb Squad, is writing a book on the album’s recording process). More info at scratchmagazine.com. (By the way, Lewis is a prolific in-studio blogger, over at hiphopmixing.com/blog.html.)

… Select New Releases: Due out this week are (1) Daniel Lanois‘s Belladonna (Anti), (2) psychedelic rockers Kinski‘s Alpine Static (Sub Pop), (3) Juan Maclean‘s robot-dance Less Than Human (DFA/Astralwerks) and (4) Adrian Belew‘s Side Two (Sanctuary), with Erick Cole on theremin, plus (5) Secede‘s Silent Flower Observers (Neo Ouija). And on DVD, (6) Bodysong with score by (and interview with) Radiohead‘s Johnny Greenwood.

… Disquiet Heavy Rotation: (1) It’s not due out until Tuesday, but Belladonna, by longtime Brian Eno collaborator Daniel Lanois, is already floating around. It’s a beautiful album of rural ambient music, not folktronica per se, but lilting instrumentals performed by a proper band. It’s a bit like Boxhead Ensemble, especially on the pedal-steel-dominated opening cut, “Two Worlds.” The song is barely two minutes long, but you may find yourself listening to it dozens of times before moving deeper into the album. Belladonna closes with a remote soundscape, “Todos Santos,” with loops that seem to go slowly out of sync. … (2) The next single off rapper Common‘s album Be is just like the first, simply piano’n’drums, courtesy of expert producer Kanye West. But where “The Food” featured an old acoustic piano (actually a sample of a Sam Cooke album), on “Go (Instrumental)” it’s an electric piano. And West, as always, isn’t happy to play the sample straight; instead every second of the electric piano is warped, as if on a wobbly turntable, accentuating the instrument’s inherently lush vibe. Judging by the credits on Be, those keyboards originated on Linda Lewis‘ pop-soul nugget “Old Smokey,” off her 1972 album Lark. … (3) The cuts are pretty short and terse on Japanese avant-turntablist Turntabrush‘s View of Rainbow CD. The medium distinction is important, because the CD, LP and cassette (yes, tape cassette, remember them?) of View of Rainbow are all different. Anyhow, the cuts run generally in the one- and two-minute range, but there are a few pushing the five-minute mark, and they can be listened to as songs unto themselves, instead of as abstract tiles in Turntabrush’s set-on-random mosaic. … (4) Of the Downstream entries for the past two weeks, the one in heaviest rotation has been “Atomsk” (MP3), the scratchy little sonic world perpetrated by Octopus Inc. and Le Gun, of the kracfive.com collective. More details in the Downstream entry (link).

… Score-Keeper: (1) The artist known as BT has scored Stealth, the fighter-pilot thrill ride due out at the end of the month. The Hollywood Reporter has an interview with him (link), in which he talks about writing “algorithmic music to code” for Stealth, which happens to feature an artificial-intelligence antagonist. … (2) The same Hollywood Reporter piece also interviews Tyler Bates on his score to Rob Zombie‘s forthcoming The Devil’s Rejects: “Many sound sources were mutated into ambient textures and percussive loops through various forms of synthesis, and, in turn, generated disjointed rhythms and conflicting harmonics. … In other words, it sounds like tennis shoes in the dryer.” … (3) Philip Glass is attached to Vic Sarin‘s Partition and Emmanuel Carrere‘s La Moustache, via IMDB.com.

… Quote of the Week: “Claire, hey, it’s, uh, it’s me. Are … are you still at Amoeba, because if you are, I really need to hear some Brian Eno today or I’m going to tear my eyes out.” That’s a voicemail on Claire’s phone, left by Billy during the June 27 episode of Six Feet Under, “Time Flies.” (Her response, in part: “Please, get a life for a minute.”) While she’s checking her messages, the band Alva Star’s mope-rocky “Cold Calculated” plays in the background.