Live Greg Davis MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A half-hour live performance by musician Greg Davis is up on the website of Kranky Records, which released his Somnia album late last year. It’s the most recent in Kranky’s ongoing series of free MP3s. Recorded at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shortly after Somnia hit record stores, the set opens with rough, natural sounds, like pebbles being tossed across a table, small sticks being snapped, and water being slopped about. Layers of this mess eventually overlap, gaining a rhythmic currency, passing through a transition of relative chaos, and then melting into a haze that resembles the dronework that defined much of Somnia.

There are none of the literalist folkloric elements that defined Davis’ best known albums, the guitar-based Arbor (2002) and the more folk-revival-ish (folk-revival-revival-ish?) Curling Pond Woods (2004), both of which came out on the Carpark label. In essence, the Kranky concert (MP3) tracks the development of terse sounds into mellifluous ones, of harsh, tight little bursts of individual noise into long, held notes. It also displays the differences between the commingling of short sounds and of long ones, the difference between a jumble of action and the silken grace of horizontal motion.

Judging by the archive of performance dates housed at the website of the small label that Davis operates, autumnrecords.net, this concert occurred on November 18, 2004. Listeners intrigued by the set should check out Yearlong, a new live album he and Keith Fullerton Whitman have out on Carpark; it documents their 2001-2002 tour. More info at kranky.net and carparkrecords.com.

Two New Eno Downloads

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

So, Brian Eno, studio-as-instrument innovator, has a new album out, Another Day on Earth (Hannibal/Rykodisc). It’s his first full-length song-form album since his cantankerous collaboration with John Cale on Wrong Way Up, back in 1990. What little difference the time makes. It’s still Eno, still ambivalently axiomatic in his lyrics, half sung and half spoken, his voice a kind of neutral tone seemingly effortlessly in tune with his imagination, itself a kind of mantra engine. Ryko is promoting the album with two “podcasts,” which as always means little more than extended free downloads, in this case a 10-minute montage of portions of the album (MP3) and a 20-minute conversation about the recording with Danny Hillis (MP3), both the men being board members of the Long Now Foundation (more info at longnow.org). More info on the new record at rykodisc.com and anotherdayonearth.com.

Live Noise Netlabel Release

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Waldchengarten is the first act to get a release entirely to itself on the Noisejihad netlabel, based at noisejihad.dk/netlabel. Noisejihad releases free downloads of live concerts, and previous entries in its series have paired the likes of Zbigniew Karkowski and Fl/ex’0, and Ryfylke and Danny Kreutzfeldt. The twofers have helped because noise is often so abstract and amusical (not that all Noisejihad albums have dispensed with rhythm) that having two sounds sit side by side puts each of them in some sort of context. Fitting, thus, that Waldchengarten’s 40-minute industrial ambient sprawl gets aural space to itself, because any such pairing or context might have risked diminishing its breadth, its magnitude, its sonic omniscience. Waldchengarten’s set, recorded live on May 26 at in Aarhus C, Denmark, moves from stage to stage like stark, emotionally neutral sound-design set pieces in some wasteland of a narrative, from suffering welps of static, to alien atmospheres washed on occasion by whisps of wind, to locked-down tunnels pummeled by unseen forces. More on Waldchengarten at waldchengarten.dk.

Space Improv MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based record label Colour Sounds specializes, as it bills itself, in “avant, out, psych, improv and other interesting recorded musics.” The “Listen” page on its website, vorg.net/csr, features numerous excerpts, live tracks and otherwise unreleased MP3s, and a good point of origin into the label’s sound jungle is with the Beets. That’s the duo of John Dalessi and Adam Kriney, whose combined tools include “synthesizer, electronics, 4-track w/ cassettes” and “voice electronics” (a comma may or may not be intended to appear between “voice” and “electronics”). A live Beets recording, titled “Don’t Be Afraid of the Ghost That Haunts You,” is a thrift-store hodgepodge of drone-like elements that eventually find a kind of unison, which then takes its time coming apart; if there’s a tension in the music, it’s how it approaches but never really embraces the kind of epiphany that’s so common in drone-rock (MP3). A couple more examples of the Beets are housed on its “Artists” page on the Colour Sounds website, and particularly recommended is an edit of “Bird of Prey … Further Envelops You” off their Say Yes CD-R. It adds earthly elements like chimes and cymbals to an otherworldly, undulating sound, but manages to never touch the ground (MP3). That chimes and cymbals, which are usually elements of color in a drummer’s kit, are the most worldly sounds here says something about how far out the Beets like to wander.

Orchestral DJ Spooky MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

DJ Spooky, media-manipulating turntablist that he is, likes to mix things up. So, if you want to hear the three MP3s he’s posted of parts of his Rebirth of a Nation project, you head over to the “art” page on his website, not the “sounds” one (at djspooky.com). Why? Likely because Rebirth is an ambitious large-scale art piece, not an intimate nightclub mix; it involves him performing a live video mix of D.W. Griffith’s unapologetically rascist film Birth of a Nation (1915), about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, complete with orchestral accompaniment. Spooky has Rebirth performances scheduled in the near future in Italy, Croatia, London and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The three tracks on his site include one of straight orchestral playing (MP3), with a fairly rudimentary melodic structure but a pleasing bluesy edge (reminiscent of John Lurie’s score for Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise), plus two (MP3, MP3) that lay that playing atop and amid Spooky’s characteristically murky beats. There’s also a video excerpt and an essay, in which Spooky praises Griffith’s “hyper dense technically prescient intercuts” as a precursor to DJing, explaining “it?s all about how you play with the variables that creates the artpiece.”

Zeitgeist alert: Griffith references are especially frequent right now among pop-minded African-American public commentators. Rebirth of a Nation is reportedly the title of a forthcoming album by classic hip-hop act Public Enemy, due out in August. And Birth of a Nation was the adopted title of a recent graphic novel drawn by Kyle Baker (Why I Hate Saturn, Plastic Man) and written by Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) and Reginald Hudlin (House Party).