The San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall, up a steep, tree-lined and particularly Hitchcockian street in North Beach, has become a sound-art nexus in a city with more than its fair share of sound-art nexuses (nexi? nexes? nexum?). In the past year or so there, academic Douglas Khan (author of the superb Noise, Water, Meat) has talked about how radio was “discovered” before it was “invented”; artist Steve Roden has limned the commonality between his fragile music and his visual art; filmmaker Walter Murch (The Conversation) has talked about the craft of sound editing. M.C. Schmidt, of the duo Matmos, who is manager of the New Genres Department at SFAI, recently started hosting Thursday-night music events at the institute (among the guests: William Fowler Collins, Bevin Blectum and Thomas Dimuzio), and Saturday he took his series into the lecture hall for a sedate, hour-long set by fragile-sound experts Coelacanth, a collaboration between Loren Chasse and Jim Haynes, their slow-burn and anti-audiophilic noise given a fitting visual complement courtesy of filmmaker Keith Evans. Evans’ images of wiggling paramecium, of bent light and of nature in raw decline gave substance to the remote, intensely delicate sounds produced by Chasse and Haynes, who crouched in the near dark on stage as they performed. Their self-described mission: “operating the tools of an imagined science to explore the various possibilities for sound to originate from traditionally non-musical materials.” If you didn’t make the concert, there are MP3s from all three of Coelacanth’s records up at helenscarsdale.com, the web home of their record label (two each from The Chronograph, 2001; The Glass Sponge, 2003; and Mud Wall, 2004). Evans’ visuals don’t come along with the files. But if you close your eyes, the essence of decay will arrive in its own good time.
Moby MP3
The marketing of Moby‘s forthcoming album, Hotel, due out next Tuesday, continues apace. First up was an innovative if unnecessarily amusical medley of samples, featured for free on the iTunes Music Store (Disquiet’s Downstream entry on February 22). With a spoken introduction by Moby himself, that track sounded a bit like the digital-music trend of the moment, the podcast. Now there’s a promotional MP3 up on amazon.com‘s “free downloads” page that takes its cue from a more old-school recording trend: it’s listed as an “Exclusive B-side.” The track is titled “Quiet Pianos,” its release dated February 17, and it’s quickly established itself at the top of the Amazon downloads chart. For all its popularity, or perhaps because of its popularity, the actual act of downloading hasn’t been entirely smooth; some computers end up not with the 6MB file, but with a 5KB placeholder. To get to it, find the “free downloads” tab on the site’s “music” page, or search for “Quiet Pianos.” In related news, moby.com has been redesigned, as Moby noted in his journal yesterday (dateline: Milan).
Brent Gutzeit MP3
Just up on the news page at kranky.net, the website of Kranky Records, is an extended live performance by Brent Gutzeit, part of the label’s ongoing “free music” series (previous entries have featured Loscil and PanAmerican). It’s a 19-minute MP3, an extended blend of rust-belt drone, the pace as sedentary as the hum from a distant power station.
Daniel Menche MP3
Let’s close off the week with a second consecutive Important Records entry, following up yesterday’s reference to the group Larsen’s Autechre-inspired Play. Like that album, Sirocco by Daniel Menche is of particular interest due to the music that fueled it. But whereas Play‘s ambitious post-rock benefited from Autechre’s glitch in ambiguous if imagination-provoking ways (Larsen reportedly jammed to Autechre melodies prior to moving into the recording studio), on Menche’s Sirocco the debt is literal. The album is constructed from one-minute slices of source material submitted by a range of musicians, including Andrew Lagowski, Asmus Tietchens, John Duncan, Scanner, Akira Rabelais, Illusion of Safety and Merzbow. As with Play, though, it’s unlikely you’ll recognize the raw ingredients in the final product. The result of Menche’s refined digital blender, as represented by a five-minute extract on the Important website, importantrecords.com (visit the “releases” page), is a cyclically chiming wonder, an epiphany on hold, something that simultaneously has the efflorescence of intense forward motion and the resolute stillness of a frozen moment glinting in the sun. More on Menche, who has albums on Trente Oiseaux, Soleilmoon, Ground Fault and other labels, and who has contributed to compilations on Ant-Zen, 23Five, Touch and other labels, at esophagus.com/htdb/menche.
Autechre-Inspired Post-Rock MP3s
The group Larsen consists of four Italian musicians on standard rock tools with some additional homey instrumentation: harmonium, xylophone, accordion. Their recent Play album, on Important Records, adds some guests, in the form of a cellist, a keyboardist, a violinist and a synthesizer player. Wondering, at this point, what Larsen has to do with the Disquiet Downstream section, beyond the fact that Play shares a record-label home with Jack Dangers (of the industrial band Meat Beat Manifesto), not to mention art-noisemakers Fe-Mail and Merzbow, and late ambient figure Muslimgauze? Well, according to Important, Larsen preceded the Play recording sessions with a particular exercise: “improvising around some of their favorite melodies from Autechre albums,” Autechre’s groundbreaking glitch having about as much to do, on the surface, with accordion rock as, well, fill in your favorite cultural-divide simile here. As it turns out, the Autechre factor infused Larsen’s recordings with a deep post-rock vibe. The Pitchfork online magazine’s MP3 page, pitchforkmedia.com/mp3, features a nearly eight-minute Larsen piece, “C,” which slowly makes its way from stasis to just short of ecstasy, building and building like some folksy ritual. And over at the Important site, at importantrecords.com, are two more tracks (on the Play album’s page). One, clocking in at two minutes, appears to be an edit of the Pitchfork track. The other, at three minutes, is an edit of an even more drone-like recording, the accordion bringing to mind, immediately, the protean work of Pauline Oliveros. Aside from this latter track’s clipped close, it’s heavenly.