While lawyers sort out the legality of radio stations making copyright-protected music available for free download, the podcast-ization of FM proceeds apace. Today’s example: a May 18 program from the Australian radio show Ultima Thule, featuring material from what it describes as the “Fripp-Eno-Hassell creative nexus.” This means solo work by Brian Eno (much of it unhelpfully cited on the show’s playlist, available as a PDF file, as originating on the Eno instrumental box set, which was culled from various Eno albums), and tracks by Eno with Robert Fripp (from their recent reunion CD, Equatorial Stars, on which Fripp’s guitar is far more recognizable as guitar than it was in their earlier collaborations, like Evening Star and No Pussyfooting) and by Eno with trumpeter Jon Hassell (including the opening track, from their Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics recording). So, more to the point: Eno is the nexus. You can download the MP3 directly here, and subscribe to the Ultima Thule podcast here. Compressed at AM-quality 56kbps, the 36-megabyte file is an hour and a half long.
Dub-cast MP3
Some call it a “podcast,” while others simply call it a very large MP3 file. In either case, brainwashed.com’s latest podcast (file and, by extension, date: podcast050511.mp3), weighing in at almost 100 megabytes, contains a sequence of tracks by musicians and record labels whose websites are hosted at brainwashed.com. They’ve dubbed this entry the “dubcast” edition, because it focuses on music influenced by dub, including songs by the Tear Garden, Twilight Circus, Dome, Tortoise, Strategy, Greater Than One, Bomb the Bass, Meat Beat Manifesto, Sandoz, Annie Anxiety and Out Hud. The one long file is set up radio-broadcast style, with spoken intros and outros for the songs, and it includes the occasional slice of dead air generally associated with college FM broadcasts, but it’s all good stuff. These aren’t new songs, necessarily; the Tortoise entry, for example, “Goriri,” dates back to the milestone Macro Dub Infection compilation, now a decade old. The superb Greater Than One’s thunder’n’rain-laced “Dub Killer,” likewise, dates from 1990. The whole thing clocks in at a little over an hour. More info at brainwashed.com/podcast. Because they often contain previously unreleased music, these brainwashed podcasts are worth keeping an ear on.
Retro-Industrial MP3
What with the continued popularity of those 1980s theme bands, from Interpol to the Killers to the Rapture, it’s inevitable that someone would arrive to channel for us the mechanized ruckus of such industrial acts as Skinny Puppy, Nitzer Ebb and Consolidated. Kill Memory Crash does just that, filtering those groups’ cyber-adenoidal sounds through the subsequent improvements in recording technology, which lend the band’s new album, American Automatic, its first full-length, a sense of detail that its militaristic predecessors only could have dreamed of. The album is out this week on the Ghostly International label, which has made the title track available as a free MP3 download from the release’s promotional page (link). More info at ghostly.com.
Tangents (Tijuana, guitar, Dormouse)
Sound Award: The 11th annual Alpert Awards fellowships have been announced (that’s Alpert as in Herb Alpert, of Tijuana Brass fame), and among the five winners is Santa Fe, New Mexico-based sound artist David Dunn. More info at alpertawards.org and artscilab.org/~david. .
.. Guitar Talk: Backbeat Books will publish Sonic Pioneers this fall. The book will feature the guitar setups and techniques of various musicians, explained one of its subjects, Christopher Willits, in a note to his email list this past week. Also included: Adrian Belew, Glenn Branca, Robert Fripp, Robin Guthrie (Cocteau Twins) and David Torn, not to mention Link Wray and Jimi Hendrix.
… New Releases: Out this week is industrial act Kill Memory Crash‘s American Automatic on the Ghostly International label. … Keith Fullerton Whitman‘s Multiples (Kranky), about which he wrote to his email list today, “[O]f the records i’ve released over the past ten odd years this album comes the closest to encapsulating the sounds i hear in my head.” … Also on Kranky, Nudge‘s Cahced. … Jamie Lidell‘s three-track 12″ When I Come Back Around (Warp), in advance of a June full-length. … More new-release info at brainwashed.com/releases.
… Quick Links: Useful entries via the del.icio.us web service, a “social bookmarks manager”: ambient, idm, eno, field recording. … The e.discogs.com open-source discography of electronic music is rapidly approaching its 30,000th record label. Of course, this being a group effort, included are variants along the lines of Wax Trax, Wax Trax! Europe, Wax Trax! Records and Wax Trax! UK. … On May 21, the BBC Radio 3 show Hear and Now will present the first of three programs of music from this year’s Cut and Splice Festival (link).
… Quote of the Week: “the notion that one person should control all of the functions of a computer and that the machine would in turn respond as an idea amplifier.” That’s the definition of “personal computing” set down in John Markoff‘s introduction to his new book, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
Karkowski & Co. MP3s
Listening to a live recording of noise-meister Zbigniew Karkowski on an MP3 has about as much fidelity (in the general experiential sense of the word, as well in the more common audio one) as watching the big weekend game on a countertop TV the size of a small loaf of bread. Such an MP3 is almost an absurdist document, like a cellphone snapshot of a ballet. A Karkowski performance is a visceral thing, something you prepare for with earplugs and a solid meal, something you feel, not just the thick waves of sound punching your gut, but the air currents that emanate from the speakers to brush your cheek and make your pants flap. Promoters of Karkowski’s brand of avant-garde noise are aware of his exacting standards. Take, for example, a gig he played last March in San Francisco at Naut Humon’s Compound with the groups Fe-mail and Rajar. Shortly after his set started, he began moving around (and under) the venue’s central control table, fiddling with cables and devices. It seemed like he was adjusting the considerable noise that filled the small room, especially as his face took on an aggravated look that matched the aggression of his sound. As it turned out, though, he was simply frustrated with the sound: it wasn’t loud enough for him. All along he’d been attempting to pump up the volume, and when he’d determined that the Compound’s system wasn’t up to the task, he simply stopped.
Based on that experience, it’s unlikely that Karkowski would be enthusiastic regarding the 25-minute live track that’s half of the new release from the Noisejihad Live! netlabel (noisejihad.dk/netlabel). It presents such a thin layer of audio that it seems less like a Karkowski performance, and more like a single sound element from a Karkowski performance. It may be helpful to keep in mind, when listening to it, that this isn’t an ear’s memory of the event; it’s a microphone’s. Still, like an anecdote from a traumatic incident, the track does provide a useful vantage on the live show, tracing the shape of the set, from its opening static through periods of brash chaos and absolute silence. As such, it’s a bit like listening to a blueprint. (Also, you can’t help but wonder if those moments of silence were, in fact, moments of intense noise that simply overwhelmed the mic.)
This is the fourth release from Noisejihad Live!, and as with the previous entries it bears the date of the concert as its title (15/04/2005: April 15 of this year) and pairs two acts. Following Karkowski’s entry comes one from Fl/ex’0. With its insistent beat, the latter’s set is much more, in a word, knowable. Its pace slows after 10 minutes, from industrial pummel to something with a bit of swing, broken up by what sounds like the marriage vows of a sex cult. The show was recorded live at the club Splab in Aarhus C, Denmark; more info at splab.dk.