The third and latest release from the “minus n” netlabel is as notable for how it’s presented as for how it sounds. A vaguely poppy riff on minimal techno, Lod‘s Taskenti EP is four tracks of metrically succinct music composed of sodden beats, albeit with intriguingly hesitant melodic aspirations. The song “Clokio,” for example, introduces a synthesized mallet melody. While that melody, frilly at a whopping three notes, stands out like a candy raver at a Steve Reich recital, what’s interesting is less the riff itself than the extended fade on the final note, as it bleeds back into the whole. The netlabel deserves particular praise for including along with the four tracks an interview with Lod, aka Luis Ortiz, who is based out of Barcelona. It’s not a lengthy back and forth, but there’s enough space to touch on the album’s title (a kind of vegetation, appropriately), his basic tools (“i mainly work with a computer although i add some synths, and i also use some analog guitar filters and a compressor”), and his other projects, including two online labels he runs: klitekture.com and sinergy-networks.com. Check it out at minusn.com.
Surveillance Art MP3s
Scanner, the British electronic musician also known as Robin Rimbaud, regularly posts MP3s of his live concerts on his website, scannerdot.com. It certainly seems fair-minded for him to give out music for free, since so much of his early work was built on random voices and sounds that he snatched with his namesake device. The most recent such concert listing, as of this writing (it’s toward the bottom of the scannerdot.com MP3 page), is from an April 29, 2005, event held in the capital of Latvia. He gave a half-hour concert in Riga as part of “Waves: Scanning,” a lecture and performance session at the RIXC Media Space. His set and that of the Latvian duo Clausthome (credited as Lauris Vorslavs and Girts Radzins) are available as free downloads from RIXC’s website (link).
Though Scanner has gone on to mix visuals (Michelangelo Antonioni in 52 Spaces) and archival audio (Andy Warhol on the album Warhol’s Surfaces), he is true to his early form here, mixing “found” conversation yanked from the ether into extended, mournful electronic ambience that serves as a contextualizing soundtrack. In this case, the initial conversation features what sounds like a brassy New York woman, a substitute aerobics instructor or something along those lines, planning her schedule with another equally obstinate woman, either a manager or a booking agent. After the two tough cookies find something to agree upon, their words are subsumed by an undulating, bottom-heavy score, which transforms repeatedly as it continues on; voices will be heard again, but none with such clarity as those first two.
On to Clausthome’s music: is it more haphazard, more confused or, simply put, more challenging? Or are Scanner’s techniques just more familiar, making his work easier to decode? Clausthome’s has the additional disadvantage — well, this is a geolinguistically chauvinistic thing to utter, but there you have it — of not using English-language content. As a result, their spoken material, buried beneath phone hookups, dial tones and generic sonic interference, will provide a comprehensible narrative to few Scanner fans. All of which said, the telling in the Clausthome work is in its remoteness, and that’s something you can sense, whether or not you understand what’s spoken; the emphasis on phone sounds highlights the role of technology as a tool that both connects people and keeps them apart. To Western ears, Clausthome’s recording, with its echoes of wiretaps and of Eastern European intrigue, brings to mind a cornerstone of surveillance culture: the Cold War.
Usefully, Scanner’s own recording comments on the association of language and accent, of verbal affect, with emotional meaning, when that same snotty New Yorker duo discuss someone they both know: “He’s adorable,” says one. “He’s South American or something? Aww, I love him.” Says the other, “He has a little bit of a Ricky Ricardo accent?” If Scanner’s surveillance art always brings along with it the illicit thrill of intruding on someone else’s privacy, he knows how to turn that back on the listener. By the time these women are judging their colleague based on how he speaks, we’ve already judged them.
Sci-Fi MP3 EP
Kurrel the Raven‘s Aechyrs to Aechyrs, on the Nishi netlabel, is utter space music. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about a four-track EP that includes one titled “Captain K-Bird Encounters the Far-Out Space Owls,” especially not when the song is almost 11 minutes from start to finish and moves from gentle Martian new wave to extravagantly flanged mind warps before fading out for what feels longer than many entire songs by like-minded galaxy pilots. Sensitive to the trips of its listeners, Kurrel closes on the quiet “Way Out,” a brief signoff that shifts from the music of the spheres to a heartbeat in less than three minutes. Lacking the audacity of the EP’s “Blissblaster,” an overclocked white-noise rock anthem, the title cut is the one real keeper here: a sedate montage of sonic texture maps waiting to serve as sound design for a science-fiction TV show that’s not yet a twinkle in its future producer’s eye. Check out the EP at notype.com/nishi.
Mexican Abstract Hip-Hop MP3 EP
The website for the bilingual, Mexico-based netlabel Filtro, filtro.com.mx, says it’s still in beta, but the music is fully functional. The eighth and latest entry in Filtro’s steady release of free downloads is an EP of what it calls “abstract laptop-hip hop” (or, in Spanish, “abstract laptop-hip hop”): Kampion‘s four-track Invisible. A pseudonym for Guillermo Guevara, of the Duopandamix team on Static Discos, Kampion knows how to keep things simple. His music is almost entirely rhythmic, chops of sound that dance and shuffle like a debonair robot. For those seeking a specifically “.mx” spin on instrumental hip-hop, “Routes” is the key track on Invisible, in that it’s the most evidently Latin, with percussion samples that suggest an old Command Classics stereo-demonstration album, cut’n’spliced for the early 21st century. With Kampion’s terse samples bounding between your speakers, you can just about picture the Josef Albers cover art.
The Sound of Visual Art at SFMOMA
When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art decided to show Winchester, three short films by artist Jeremy Blake, it knew where to display them: in the same long, velvety dark room that housed Christian Marclay’s “Video Quartet” in the past. The question was how? In one long sequence (they’re each between 10 and 20 minutes in playing time) — or, as was ultimately decided, side by side?
By turning the trilogy into a triptych, SFMOMA emphasized how we absorb visuals and sound differently. Blake’s three films are derived from the Winchester Mystery House, a tourist trap in nearby San Jose that was once, in the late 1800s, the home of the heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune. Story has it that she feared the ghosts of people killed by her family’s flagship product, and thus kept up construction on the building throughout her lifetime, creating architectural oddities — hallways to nowhere, circuitous loops, trap doors — to confuse her spiritual stalkers. Blake, perhaps most widely known for his digital acid sequences in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Punch-Drunk Love and his album art for Beck’s Sea Change, created video odes to the sights, sounds and figments of Winchester. The most recent of the three films has the same overripe colors as Punch-Drunk Love, but the other two emphasize the house’s sepia-tone decay. Each film has its own soundtrack, of period music and/or illustrative noises, like creaks and the flutter of film stock. Whether you sit on a bench in front of any one of the films, or on the floor with your back against the wall to take them all in, they remain individual works, but the sounds combine into a collective score, which varies continuously, due to their differing lengths.
Now, one doesn’t ever take in a single exhibit without it playing off the other exhibits in the same museum. Much as the sound from each Blake screen mixed with that of its two counterparts, other sound-related art at SFMOMA seeped in metaphorically from around the building. Down in the permanent collection were two Robert Rauschenberg pieces: the mixed-media “Trophy IV (For John Cage)” sculpture from 1961, and one of the stark white canvases (“White Painting [Three Panels],” 1951) from the series that informed composer Cage’s famous “silent” work, 4’33”.
An enormous temporary exhibit of video installations by Gary Hill included pieces like “Cut Pipe” (1992), two long cylinders, one of them showing the image of hands gently molesting a speaker cone; “Crossbow “(1999), a three-screen video of Hill working at his desk and occasionally taking a break to blow a sho, a Japanese mouth organ with bamboo pipes; and “Circular Breathing” (1994), which projected large-scale side-by-side moving images, with resulting overlays of on-screen sound. The informative text descriptions of the individual pieces were mostly written by the artist himself (something museums should do more often). Of the sho, Hill explained, “It makes one steady, long sound, a clearing to begin again.” And of “Circular Breathing,” he wrote, “Erik Satie’s ‘Vexations’ comes and goes throughout, adding to the sense of endless subterranean emotion.”
Part of the museum’s permanent collection, “Cyclorama,” by Marco Brambilla, sets in an eye-level semicircle nine video monitors showing moving images shot from rotating rooftop dining rooms in Montreal, New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, Toronto, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Seattle. Carefully synchronized, the visuals suggest a heady, warped zone in which traffic flows from the Mississippi River Bridge through St. Louis’ Gateway Arch, and the sun rises and sets throughout North America in one simultaneous instance. Like Jeremy Blake, Brambilla has credits in Hollywood, having directed such B-movies as Excess Baggage and Demolition Man (for both of which, it’s worth mentioning, he employed first-rate composers: John Lurie and Elliot Goldenthal, respectively). The quietly enveloping sound design in “Cyclorama” (by, I believe, tomandandy, who contributed to the scores of Oliver Stone’s JFK and Natural Born Killers, and who have collaborated with artists Jenny Holzer and the Starn Brothers) may have benefited from the power of visual suggestion, but it made my ears pop.
Blake’s Winchester shows through October 10, 2005. Image, Body, Text: Selected Works by Gary Hill closes today (May 30, 2005). More info on some of the various organizations and artists: SFMOMA (sfmoma.com), Jeremy Blake (link), Gary Hill (link), the Winchester Mystery House (winchestermysteryhouse.com).