No, your wifi isn’t picking up stray radio signals. Musician Micah Silver did that himself, fusing barely audible bits of the spoken world into “Scale,” the first of two lengthy experiments in sonar chamber music that comprise his album for the Stasisfield netlabel, Utopian Artifacts, released in late February. Both “Scale” and its counterpart, “Houston / Touch,” are beat-less enterprises in dislocation, positing expanses of sound with rising tones that peak out like waterlogged ears, with ghostly voices that turn into vapor, and low-level shuddering that suggests dread but also provides an unlikely warmth and comfort. The latter track was recorded in response to the paintings by Mark Rothko at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas, which makes Utopian Artifacts a good complement to an earlier Stasisfield release, Four Painters, by the label’s founder, John Kannenberg; that album paid tribute to the visual artists Paul Klee, Agnes Martin, Kazimir Malevich and Cy Twombly. Visit Stasisfield at stasisfield.com, and read Disquiet’s interview with Kannenberg (“United Stasis”).
Jet Black Crayon MP3
The database at music.download.com can be confusing, especially if you want to know what’s “current.” By all initial appearances, the entry, for example, on the group Jet Black Crayon aligns with no temporal axis. We know the title of the song is “The Mentalist.” We know the artists, as JBC teams downtempo (and skateboarding) figure Tommy Guerrero with Gadget and Monte Vallier. We know the genre, which is helpfully defined here as the following spelunking expedition through sub-subcategories: Music >> Alternative/Punk >> Indie Rock >> Post-Rock. That about nails it, as the four-minute piece is a melodica-tinged, bass-riding lull-a-thon, like Tortoise slow-jamming an Astor Piazzolla cover just before dawn. To figure out when, exactly, this track was uploaded, it turns out you have to click on “Expand” for that entry (or “Expand All” for the available songs, though this is the only one for JBC to date). It was back in April of last year. There you go, some user-interface tips, along with a recommended download. Check it out at download.com/jetblackcrayon. More info at the band’s label’s website, at function8.com/jbc.
Ansiform MP3s
If the proliferating mass of names that make electronic music so difficult to keep up with has got you down, then here’s a netabel worth visiting: Ansiform, at ansiform.a.la. Why? Well, besides the fact that it posts fine ambient-leaning music (its mission statement reads: “unobtrusive, beatless, finely textured, and stable”), such as the elegantly rote “I Know Nothing” and the soft synth tones of “Fluids” and the horrorshow spookiness of “Slowly Fill My Eyes,” not to mention the light emphasis on naturalist elements, such as the apparent flock of birds on “Three to Six Months, Tops,” and the background noise that opens “Artroom”… yeah, well, besides all that, the label posts all these files anonymously. If you don’t know who the artists are, it’s one less thing to lose in your memory bank. This brief notice is just an initial pass on these fine tracks. More details to follow.
Oceanographic WAVs
Sounds are all around us, and so too is writing about sound, often as not well beyond the bounds of what’s considered music criticism. For example, a story in today’s New York Times (“For Young Fish, It Seems, the Call of the Reef Is Music,” link) puts many netlabels to shame in its exploration of the outer reaches of sonic life. Destination? The coral reef, where scientists have discovered that young fish use ocean noise as a means to gauge a new neighborhood’s hospitality. Says a researcher from Edinburgh: “They can listen to what animals are on it before deciding whether to settle.” Included with the online version of the article are two downloadable “wav” files, one of the “popping sound of nocturnal shrimp,” the other of the “sizzle” of snapping shrimp. It’s unclear if the decision to use wav files is some sort of aquatic pun.
La Monte Young MP3
Another fine Other Minds entry from the Internet Archive, at archive.org. It’s a recording, from 1965, of a La Monte Young piece comprised of sequential bangs on a gong, performed by Peter Winkler at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco. To be clear, this is no clang fest. The gong decays in a manner that’s entirely elegant, not regal or militaristic. You barely sense the plosive, just the denouement. Furthermore, on this old recording, the tape hiss is almost as loud as the taped material, but to modern ears the patina sounds almost purposeful, like a treated field recording. Search for “henry flynt” (the essayist and artist after whom it was composed) at the archive.org.