Straight outta Portugal (the country that birthed the poet who gave this website its name, it’s probably worth mentioning) comes Test Tube, a netlabel with 10 sets under its belt, one of the most recent of which is Rui Gato‘s Chaosmos EP, three long-form tracks of slow-build drone (“M1,” 17 minutes), glitched-out field recordings and modified acoustic instrumentation (“M2 Extended,” 7 minutes), and a bit of granulated fire that slowly evolves into brittle minimal techno, then into a florid industrial wallop, before fading out with enough grace to erase the any memory of the recent unease (“M3 Final,” 11 minutes). “M1,” which starts in silence and masters a rich verticality necessary for repeat-listen ambience, is the keeper. Check them all out at monocromatica.com/netlabel (Monocromatica is the parent label of Test Tube). More on Lisbon-born musician Gato at elasticvoid.monocromatica.com.
Free Moby Download
Two terms get tossed around a lot, and though they sound similar they mean entirely different things. “Electronic music” is music in which the tools of artistic production are inherently mechanized (laptops, turntablism, field recordings). “Digital music” is music whose delivery to an audience is directly enabled by computers (MP3s, audiostreams, satellite radio). The iPod, and along with it the iTunes Music Store, has made much of the latter but little of the former. Ultimately, for all its digital gloss, Apple’s flagship product, the elegant MP3 player, is a fairly neutral device, as far as genre is concerned. In fact, were you to take one measure of the iTunes catalog, electronic music isn’t even particularly high on the premiere digital music emporium’s to-do list. That measure is iTunes’ weekly free download, its “Single of the Week,” which more often than not presents a sub-par singer-songwriter or positive hip-hop kinda thing, that odd yet numerous category: the Top 40 song that lacks a Top 40 audience. This week is no different, to the extent that the week’s single, Michael Lord’s “Smile,” is almost a parody of well-meaning blandness.
However, this week there’s an unusual entry: a second free download, a seven-minute preview of Moby‘s forthcoming album, Hotel. Now it’s easily arguable that Moby’s music isn’t inherently electronic. Moby would likely be among the first to make that argument. But the fact of the matter is that to the world at large, Moby is a figure who stands for electronic music, which is to say that this record will be seen as a touchstone, if not a milestone, regardless of what it actually sounds like. What makes this little preview neat is that it is, in essence, a “podcast,” one of those newfangled homemade broadcasts that allow anyone to sew together some sounds (a little talk, a little music, a little background noise) and put it out there for a willing, if far-flung, audience. In the case of this preview, we get Moby introducing the cuts with all the presence of a college-radio DJ (which is to say, none at all), and then cycling through some clips of the album, with no concern for rhythm or segues. You’d certainly never know he has spun for a living. There’s some nice stuff, and some generic stuff. You can be catty, and guess which products will soon feature each song in an advertisement. You can be a trainspotter, and wonder whether he’ll ever sound more like the late Joy Division singer Ian Curtis than he does here. Or you can just enjoy the tunes for what they are, and this promotion for what it is: a Top 40 fulfillment of the promise of home recording. The track is available as of today, February 22, as part of the iTunes catalog. If you have iTunes installed on your computer, clicking this link will take you to the file. You have to wonder if he put the whole thing together in GarageBand.
Nancarrow Biography MP3
Reportedly the first step in breaking an addiction has something to do with owning up to it, so suffice to say my name is Marc W. and I’m hung up on the Internet Archive, specifically its Other Minds catalog, at archive.org. Today’s Disquiet Downstream entry is yet another fine downloadable Other Minds file, a half hour audio documentary on composer Conlon Nancarrow, by writer/producer/narrator Helen Borten and featuring interviews with, among others, Yoko Ono, Kyle Gann, Ursula Oppens and Mako Nancarrow. Nancarrow composed for the player piano, which music historian Artis Wodehouse (misidentified on the site as Ardis) describes as “the first computer.” The documentary is packed with insightful and often humorous anecdotes, including Nancarrow’s dismissal of John Cage’s chance compositions. Borten gives a solid overview of the history of the piano, and of Nancarrow’s aggressive exploration of its potential. The file is only downloadable via FTP, but the site provides clear instructions; just search for “nancarrow place.” … By the way, this year’s Other Minds festival, the 11th, occurs this week, February 24-26, in San Francisco. Included: Michael Nyman, John Luther Adams, Fred Frith, Joan Jeanrenaud, Phill Niblock and more. More info at otherminds.org.
Toy Piano MP3s
Closing out the week with more archive.org treats from the Other Minds collection: avant-garde piano virtuoso Margaret Leng Tan doing the Beatles‘ “Eleanor Rigby” on a toy piano. Perhaps it’s the lo-fi quality of the recording, but the piece, with its increasingly unstable counterpoint, comes out sounding like a music box or a distant carillon. The file is only downloadable via FTP, but the site provides clear instructions. Search for “tan rigby” in the “Other Minds Archive” section under “Audio” at archive.org. For a more intense player-piano-inspired piece, a search for “tan nancarrow” yields her performing Conlon Nancarrow‘s Three 2-Part Studies on two toy pianos.
Francis Dhomont MP3
FRANCIS DHOMONT MP3: Another downloadable prize from the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive, archive.org: a March 6, 2004, recording of composer Francis Dhomont performing “Les moirures du temp” and “Phonurgie” (a neologism, meaning “fabrication, shaping, creation of sound”) live at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It was, apparently, done on a 12-speaker surround system, but even in stereo it’s a half hour of tightly shape-shifting sound samples, mixing and diverging in a manner both chaotic and elegant. As Dhomont says of the first piece, “Certain sound types and features — particularly meaningful — are privileged, such as the harmonic timbre, percussion/resonance, accumulation, movement (trajectories, swirling) and contrasts of dynamics: the very things that give sound a texture and that make it shimmer.” The file is only downloadable via FTP, but the site provides clear instructions. Search for “dhomont” in the “Other Minds Archive” section under “Audio” at archive.org.