With its offbeat tempos and prevalent mallet-wielding, Jaga Jazzist may be the second coming of Tortoise, or of Shadowfax, depending on your temperament. Neither of those acts, though, ever rocked as hard as Jaga does on “Oslo Skyline,” a soaring track off the group’s recent What We Must, now available as a free download from its label’s website, ninjatune.com. This may be the most hard-core prog-rock thing Ninja has ever unleashed on its devoted, and generally downtempo-fixated, audience. (How proggy? Picture Godspeed You Black Emperor’s tour bus hijacked by Keith Emerson.) Jaga is a 10-piece Norwegian ensemble that mixes standard equipment (bass, drums, guitars) with old-school (trumpet, vibes, flute) and new-school (drum machines, wind controller, various keyboards) touches. More info at jagajazzist.com.
Tangents (bent, GRM, Adkins)
Manhattan Bender: Circuit benders descended on the Tank in Manhattan this past week for four days of Bent 2005 (wired.com has the story). The Tank site features a brief video documentary of Bent 2004, including footage of proto-bender Reed Ghazala. … Speaking of which, if anyone has tips on any sound-art events this coming week and weekend in Manhattan, please drop me an email (marc [at] disquiet.com).
… Upcoming Streams: The BBC’s Late Junction show on Radio 3 will feature classic musique-concrete from the GRM archive (that’s France’s Groupe Recherches Musicales) throughout the coming week (link). … Domino Records now hosts, at dominorecordco.com, the video for Four Tet‘s “Smile Around the Face” single, a thunky drummer of a track. It was directed by Dan Wilde (Alpha Male, Bookcruncher) and features actor Mark Heap.
… Quick Links: Discogs.com, the open-source discography project, has divided into four distinct sites. What was once purely electronic now makes room for hip-hop, jazz and rock sections. Go straight to e.discogs.com for the electronic section, by far the largest of the discographies, at (as of this moment) 338,356 releases by 182,913 artists on 28,944 labels. … The website of the Kranky label, kranky.net, has added a video section, featuring bits by and on Greg Davis, Ben Vida/Bird Show, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Pan*American and others.
… New Releases: Out this week are Fog‘s 10th Avenue Freakout (Lex), a future single from which will reportedly feature a Yo La Tengo remix; Nine Inch Nails‘ With Teeth (Interscope); and Bjork‘s Medulla DVD and Army of Me CD of remixes/covers (click here for soundclips and bios of the 20 tracks’ contributors: Interzone, Grisbi, 50 Hertz, Haxor & Porr, Slagsmalsklubben, Messengers of God, Dr Syntax’N’CB Turbo v Rivethead, Dr. Gunni, Martin White, HEMP, Lunamoth, Beats Beyond, Peter Baker, Random, Atoi, R. Luvbeats, Alfredo Lietor, Patrick Wolf, Neetoo, Liliom, Mikhail Karikis, Tor Bruce). More new release info at brainwashed.com/releases.
… Keeping Score: A search for “Brian Eno” on IMDB.com newly brings up a short, Blanco y Negro, credited to Martin Mainoli. … Angelo Badalementi scored the forthcoming horror flick Dead Water. … Kent Sparling is credited with music for Seven Fallen Objects, also due out this year.
… Quote of the Week: “I didn’t try to be primitive. … I just had bad microphones.” That’s outsider-country maverick Hasil Adkins, quoted in his New York Times obituary on Saturday (link). R.I.P.
Frippertronic MP3s
The loopdiary.com website collects a fairly steady schedule of guitar-based soundscapes, 20 so far this year by a single musician who goes by the name Disproduction. These are loops, but not loops as in brief presets that you can download and use as patterns in your home audio-production setup. No, these are long-form loop-based performances, in which sounds recur repeatedly, over an extended duration, overlapping with themselves and their derivations, and develop a sleepy realm of aural ghost images. How long is long-form? Two thus far clock in at over 10 minutes. Disproduction describes them as follows: “Semi-ambient guitar improvisations using a single guitar, various effects and long recurring delays. … Sometimes referred to as ‘frippertronics’, these pieces are minimally edited, nominally processed, and likely uninteresting.” That’s an accurate description, aside from the “uninteresting” line. Particularly recommended are “03.12.05a,” which has a nearly vocal effect in its silk-thin harmonies, and the more evidently guitar-produced accents of “03.21.05a.” Among the more dissonant entries are “02.02.05a.mp3,” which highlights a more varied number of contrasting elements than do most of the pieces here, and “03.08.05b.mp3,” which milks what appears to be a particularly tangy alternate tuning. The site’s homepage appropriately features a mythological beast eating its own tail.
Slonimsky Lecture MP3
Here’s another nugget from the Other Minds catalog at archive.org (aka the Internet Archive). This time it’s a 1987 discussion with Nicholas Slonimsky, the legendary musical biographer, and a humorous and insightful speaker, who passed away in 1995 at age 101. When the OM founder Charles Amirkhanian inquires how, for example, Slonimsky clarified that composer Villa-Lobos was born in 1887, not 1890, he replies: “I asked his mother. His mother at that time was 102. … I wasn’t even sure if she was alive. She looked fossilized.” He talks and jokes about musicians he has known, from Ravel to Varese to Frank Zappa. He plays a few of his own pieces, including “Objets Trouves in the Dodecaphonic Environment,” explaining that the “objets trouves” (aka the found object) is “a device invented by modern composers who were incapable of composing.” He tells the story of how he came to befriend Frank Zappa, whom he teases about the great expense of his $100,000 Synclavier. It’s a great, hour-long talk. Highly recommended. (This link should go to versions of the talk in different formats, depending on which browser you’re using.) There’s a lot more by and about Slonimsky in the Internet Archive, if you look around.
Beck Remix MP3
So, where is the free MP3 hidden on the website of Beck, urban folklorist turned sample meister turned r&b ironist turned (as of his new album, Guero) back on himself? Well first you go to beck.com, and then you click on the prominent link to Guero, which was produced by the Dust Brothers, who previously midwifed his Odelay, and one half of whom, John King, produced the great Medeski Martin & Wood album of 2004, End of the World Party: Just in Case (Dig). On the Guero webpage, you’re greeted by the album’s cover art, by Marcel Dzama, and so you click on the little puppet figure raising his hands in the air like he just don’t care. What does the puppet spit out when you tickle his belly? A remix, by the band Subtle, of Guero‘s “Fairwell Ride.” The original was built from hand claps, tasty slide guitar, kalimba, thick backing vocals, piano and a dirge of a main lyric somewhere between burned-out Neil Young and apocalypse-weary Glenn Danzig. The remix, almost a minute longer, exaggerates the percussion, emphasizes the piano and uses various effects to shade specific words. Oh, and it adds a rap, and takes its sweet time fading out. How did you find out about this hidden file in the first place? You subscribed to the email list of lexrecords (lexrecords.com), home to Subtle, one of whose members, Dax Pierson, was severely injured when the band’s tour van was in an accident in Iowa in late February. More details on Pierson’s recovery at daxpierson.com and on Subtle at subtle6.com.