Generative Kirschner Piece

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Kenneth Kirschner is a New York-based composer whose format of choice is not 12-tone, nor drum’n’bass, nor electroacoustic, but Flash. That’s Flash, as in Macromedia Flash, the pervasive multimedia software platform that powers countless websites. Kirschner composes in layers. He sets up batches of MP3 segments, groups of sounds that complement each other. He crafts those sounds himself, and then lets them float in a Flash system, a program that allows the MP3s to run atop one another, starting at random intervals, each item preset to fade in and out. Because of the randomness, each time you play (perhaps “run” is the correct word) one of his constructions, it’s different. Kirschner has hosted a few of these generative compositions, amid more traditional, static MP3s, on his website, kennethkirschner.com, and there’s a new one up. Like all his previous work, the new piece takes a date as its title, in this case “January 15, 2005.”

The music is soft and steady, extended periods of light buzz and the occasional glittering field; sometimes like tones match up, but there are also moments of silence, and others when sounds are coming up and going away simultaneously. Unlike with some of his earlier pieces, none of the sounds are familiar; they’re all drones, not representational, not sampled from a recognizable source. A lot of quiet music seems limitless, but in form and function that description is a matter of fact in Kirschner’s work. You also can dig beneath the hood if you’d like, and check out the 14 individual component MP3s of “January 15, 2005” (link), which are elegant in their own right. The Flash programming is by Craig Swann, Kirschner’s collaborator.

Lateset Osymyso MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The musician known as Osymyso made a promise at the start of the year to upload 50 individual MP3s to form 05ymy50, an ongoing album-in-progress, which he’d mix, at the end of the project, into a seamless piece. He’s just about to break out of the single digits with his old-school mashes of hip-hop riffs and found sound, all of which brings to mind the short attention spans of such sampling activists as DJ Food, Coldcut and Negativland. His “Fragment 8” is a pothole public service announcement directed by Max Headroom, and the subject of “Fragment 9” (aka “The Return of an Old Friend”) is the classic “Funky Drummer” beat, which Osymyso excavates from various settings and tries, valiantly, to revive. Get all nine current 05ymy50 fragments released thus far at osymyso.com.

Percussive Other Minds MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recordings from the recent Other Minds festival in San Francisco continue to be uploaded to the Internet Archive, aka archive.org. Some are a little off topic to the Disquiet Downstream, but two recent percussion pieces will certainly appeal to fans of the trance-like (trance-itory?) effects of Balinese gamelan and the pixelated moire patterns of Steve Reich’s urban minimalism. The ensemble So Percussion performed “Melody Competition” by composer Evan Ziporyn on February 26, the piece ranging widely from rural quietude to Cageian near-chaos. That same night the ensemble performed John Luther Adams‘ “Strange and Sacred Noise,” a more resolute and singular experience by Alaska’s best known composer. (Easiest to locate these at archive.org by searching for “melody competition” and “sacred noise.”) More on Ziporyn at ziporyn.com. More on Adams at johnlutheradams.com. And more on the performers, whose latest album is Reich’s Drumming (Cantaloupe), at sopercussion.com.

Live Dub MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If ever a music was destined to live on well past its peak of popularity, that music was dub. Its lingering presence, which swells every few years, resembles nothing so much as the sweltering echoes that are the music’s aural stock in trade. Dub has, in fact, become an echo of itself, not so much a meta-genre as a genre that has attained quasi-immortality by seeping into the background. Amorphous by nature, dub is unlikely to ever become a major commercial enterprise, certainly not a major commercial-recording enterprise, though perhaps a live one (or perhaps some heady subscription channel in a future market of domestic background streams). The music, formless by nature, a haze of sounds and beats, resists packaging.

Despite which challenges, dub has more than its share of virtuosos, not just the Caribbean originators, but the eager landlocked adopters, folks like Bill Laswell, Calvin Johnson’s Dub Narcotic Sound System, Raz Mesinai and, of late, David Last, who must be one of the foremost practitioners of dub going. There’s a live set on his website, davidlast.net, an hour-long tumble of styles that dates from early this year, and it is absolutely stellar. It moves from groovy slo-mo rituals with Middle Eastern accents, through periods of retro reggae, through European street music, its bass lines slinking like sleepy, bloated eels through thick waters, its rhythms offset with casual counterpoint. Last is as comfortable with moments of meticulous glitch as he is with rapturous orchestral extravagance. (He also has a peculiar sense of trippy, trippy being an important part of dub’s appeal; in this case, it involves a computerized voice admonishing you for missing a big meeting with your boss.) And this particular set peaks at just the right time, the melodica piercing the ceiling amid raucous laughter for a brief spell, just before the recording fades. (Direct link to MP3 here.)

Tangents (Hrvatski, glitch, navelbrowsing)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Good Reading: The “projects” section over at the home page of musician Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski), keithfullertonwhitman.com, is highly recommended. Currently up are detailed explanations of three of his performance/recording systems. Each entry features screen shots and lengthy audio samples. There’s a 2,500-word section on various patches he has devised for the Max/MSP software package, such as “Bleep Factory, a six-voice synth that produces a very wide range of traditional ‘analog’ synthesizer sounds,” and “Taaltronixxx,” which he created, he explains, “to add a ‘rhythmic’ element to one of my guitar-drone patches.” Each of these entries dives deep into his tech and technique. Another 2,500-word piece focuses on what drove his excellent album Playthroughs (Kranky, 2002), which was built from guitar source material. There’s also a section on his work with moving pictures, including an ongoing project involving “47 very short films (less than 1 minute in length each) shot on (literally) and about/of turntables, with musical accompaniment.” … Glitch stars Autechre were interviewed by Matmos member Drew Daniel for pitchforkmedia.com about remixing Skinny Puppy, where Charles Manson went wrong, and the “how?” question. Autechre’s new album, Untitled, will be released in the U.K. on April 18 and in the U.S. on April 19. … Another IDM: For most readers who happen upon this website, the three letters IDM mean one thing: the perhaps unfortunately named genre “intelligent dance music.” But there are other IDMs, most of them institutes, like the Institute of Direct Marketing, the Institute of Design Montreal, and a transatlantic biotech firm with an interest in immunotherapy. Fans of the IDM genre should, if they already don’t, take interest in yet another IDM, the Internet Download Manager (internetdownloadmanager.com), a Windows tool that speeds downloads. What it also happens to do is extract MP3 files from the Flash scripts that provide streams and jukeboxes to numerous websites. (Side note: That biotech firm IDM’s logo, which is “made by mapping prime numbers along a square spiral, and marking the locations of the prime numbers with a different color from the non-primes,” is downright psychedelic [link].) … Search Returns: Top 10 most popular search returns on this site: bjork, moby, bedroom, mp3, dj, eno, ambient, ryoji, chemical, autechre. Recent search returns on this site: craig david, granddaddy, Nancarrow, bedroom, piano magic, speakspell, white, michael torke, yellow pages, boards, coldcut, 2pac, dj, 20th century, dj food, john duncan, jaga, kid koala, rhona, satie, iron chef, Royksopp, Morton Feldman. … Let’s Vibrate: Perhaps the most ubiquitous form of electronic music is cell-phone ring tones. The vibrate option isn’t really much of an option, since a phone vibrating on a desk is louder than most ring tones. And, come to think of it, isn’t putting your phone on vibrate redundant? That is, isn’t all sound a matter of vibration?