Matmos Stream: A 20-minute live set featuring Matmos, along with frequent guest J Lesser, recorded March 17 for the BBC Radio 3’s Mixing It show dated April 1 (link). … Keeping Score: Here’s some soundtrack news, courtesy of the imdb.com database. Cliff Martinez (Solaris, Traffic) is attached as the composer for Havoc, a new L.A. story directed by Barbara Kopple, which features actress Laura San Giacomo, a star of Martinez’s score debut, 1989’s sex, lies and videotape. … The Jacket, which featured a score by Brian Eno, died in U.S. theaters, and is tentatively scheduled for a July DVD release. … Gustavo Santaolalla (whose music was featured in Michael Mann‘s The Insider, even before he scored Amores Perros, 21 Grams and last year’s The Motorcycle Diaries) is attached to Ang Lee’s upcoming Brokeback Mountain. … Cross-Cultural Review: The New York Times reviewer of the Onkyo Marathon last week at the Japan Society was Anthony Tommasini, one of the paper’s classical/opera critics. This may have been a signal of appreciation of the compositional roots of today’s avant-garde electronic music, or an act of curiosity on the writer’s part, or one of against-type assigning on his editor’s part. The Japan Society defines “onkyo” as “an umbrella term for a new genre of computer music that is primarily atonal, noise-based and improvised.” Performers included Sachiko M, AOKI takamasa, Carl Stone, Nobukazu Takemura, o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) and Otomo Yoshihide. The reviewer’s conclusion: “Whether loud or soft, noisy or soothing, an onkyo improvisation is more like a sound environment than a musical composition.” Not, as they say, that there’s anything wrong with that. “You can’t complain when a sound environment runs on or seems aimless. Such concerns are not the point.” (nytimes.com) … Psychoacoustics Today: In today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, a piece (“Our Ratings, Ourselves,” nytimes.com) on the science of TV ratings mentions “psychoacoustic masking, which places a signal just beneath the frequency of whatever is being transmitted.” The signal helps Arbitron track consumers’ media usage. However, it’s not a simple task. The signal’s developers “discovered that the masked code’s frequency could not be too low (where it would run into technical problems) or too high (where it would bother dogs and cats).” … Quote of the Week: “The bus plows down the highway at a set speed, the tires humming along, never getting any louder or softer. Same with the engine, its monotonous sound like a mortar smoothly grinding down time and the consciousness of the people on board.” From Haruki Murakami‘s recent novel, Kafka at the Shore.
Intro
A place on Disquiet.com for brief notes and quick links has been coming for a while now. Pretty much any downtime in updates to this site can be traced to after-hours stints spent fiddling in HTML and dry-running various scripts, potential blog tools and content-management systems. In the meanwhile, too many live concert attendances go unreferenced, too many interesting webpages and posts go unlinked to, too much offline reading gets un-cited, and too many general, even if inevitably tangential, observations don’t receive a mention. The site’s Downstream section (disquiet.com/downstream) already recommends free, musician-condoned downloadable music, but there are plenty of streaming broadcasts that deserve to be noted, even in passing, and a quick-links section would satisfy that requirement. Oh, as of this writing, the site’s search routine has been upgraded. A place to mention such backend maintenance would be beneficial as well. Disquiet’s been running since late 1996, and it has long lacked a spot for such material. So, now it has one, “field notes.” OK, enough with the backstory. On with the short stuff. …
Dark Ambient MP3s
The Hazard Records netlabel, at hazardrecords.org, welcomes you with a Q&A that sums up the attitude of many skeptics toward free downloads: “Want to lose all your rights on your music? Sign to Hazard Records!” Fortunately for the listener, the label has found numerous willing participants, including Ze (no relation, one assumes, to Tom Ze), whose Electronics Anonymous is among Hazard’s most recent albums. If you like your dank ambience stirred by the occasional clang, and your vocals filtered through an old FM radio that’s taught itself to dance, this is your kinda music. Electronics Anonymous, eight tracks in all, was recorded live in London last year.
Jam Band Techno
Seek in the Internet Archive’s audio catalog (archive.org/audio), and you might just find. Several years ago, the String Cheese Incident, a noodle-rock jam band, turned some of its recordings over to a pop-minded technologist, DJ Harry, the result of which was a recommended album (The String Cheese Remix Project) of techno music fabricated from sun-dried straw and wildflowers. A search at archive.org yielded two live concert results of this union, one from July 15, 2000, and another from November 26, 2004. The latter, recorded at the Tweeter Center in Camden, N.J., features Harry joining SCI onstage for an encore. Titled “On the Road,” it starts off in space-rock zone but soon solidifies into the Deadheady music one expects from SCI, but then it breaks open wide for an extended bit of looping (focused largely on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech) against SCI’s backwoodsy ensemble. Some caveats: the music is encoded as an “SHN” file, a so-called “lossless” (or hi-fidelity) format that is (1) really large (65.5 megabytes for about 10.5 minutes of music) and (2) kinda hard to play, because not a lot of MP3 players support it (there is a plugin for Winamp software). Oh, as for that July 15 track, it’s only downloadable as part of a zipped 3.2 gigabyte file. Save that for another rainy day. Search for “harry string incident” at archive.org.
Prefuse Hip-Hop MP3
Back in early March, Prefuse 73 made the Disquiet Downstream with a track, “Pagina Dos Featuring the Books,” that the Warp Records label posted for users of its bleep.com digital-music retail service, as an apology for some sort of technical error. Later that month, Warp gave another track, “Hideyaface,” to Salon.com for the site’s daily free-download feature, “Audiophile.” The track features Ghostface (and it appears, El-P, though the Salon entry doesn’t mention him) rapping over beats that Prefuse (aka Scott Herren) emphasizes with a tangy percussive hook and hazy synths. The chorus includes this particularly interesting line: “Cuz radio don’t play you / doesn’t mean that you great.”