Erik Levander MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Genres come and go. And if one ever seemed ripe to go from the get go, it was glitch. Sure, certainly from early on, glitch was something to behold, especially how Markus Popp managed to make the desecration of CDs seem like a fine way to spend a Saturday, how he literalized the extent to which super-fragile ambient music was dependent upon a digital medium and its tabula rasa of silence. Popp also managed to turn those broken fragments into things that, while never melodic in the traditional sense, had the comfort of song.

But how long could it last? How long could the mistakes inherent in digital music continue to sound fresh, how long before they were superseded by new mistakes — maybe a dual-sided 20-gigabyte DVD simply sounds different when it dies?

Well, Erik Levander‘s music suggests glitch has a ways to go before it dies, that’s for sure, at least judging by his late-2004 album, Tonad, on the Neon label. Four Tonad segments on erik.levander.dk twist and twirl in a way that push glitch’s envelope just far enough to suggest the comfy confines of a proper genre. More than anything, Levander has a deep sense of tone, never betraying his work with a preset sound or an undercooked sample. Yet all the familiar flavors are here, from the arachnoid whirs to the aquarium gurgles to the particulate hazes to the way instrumental moments, like bells and plucked strings, are warped back on themselves in a manner that confirms suspicions we had about the nature of those elements, suspicions that only advance audio processing could confirm.

CCMixter.org MP3 Contest Update

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you’ve been paying attention to the ccmixter.org site’s current remix competition, you’ve no doubt gained respect for the musicians who made tracks available for open-source sampling. Name-brand acts, including Matmos and David Byrne, Chuck D and Dan the Automator, Zap Mama and Danger Mouse, among others, provided original songs to Wired magazine for a CD that helped promote the Creative Commons license. The CC is an alternative to the standard grade copyright, in that it provides what it terms a “spectrum” of rights, ranging from full copyright (all rights reserved) to the public domain. More info, including a helpful desktop comic strip, at creativecommons.org.

The ccmixter.org site upped Wired’s initial ante by providing an Internet community in which fair citizens of the open-source public could transform those tracks into their own personal musical statements. As an exercise in creative rights, it’s been a success; some 126 songs and 187 remixes have been uploaded to ccmixter.org since the contest launched. As an exercise in interface design, it’s also been a success; just check out the page (ccmixter.org/tags) that allows you to browse entries by the “tags” associated with the individual MP3 files, and you’ll have a pleasing visual experience.

However, as a listening experience, the results have been less than stellar. A lot of routine drum’n’bass, a lot of GarageBand rudiments, a lot of third-rate hip-hop and generic lounge-jazz-house background music, a lot of first drafts. Yes, indeed, if you’ve been paying attention to ccmixter.org, you’ve gained a lot of respect for the artists who initially contributed tracks, because the results of the contest, by and large, suggest that making good music is more demanding than many people suspect. Searching for a diamond, let alone a potential gold record, among the entrants is a somewhat thankless task, but here are two good ones:

Henrik‘s “AAA final” is little more than a horn line and a dropkick of a beat, like Steely Dan’s catalog reduced over a low flame, but as a smoky exercise in the placement of downbeat, it’s well worth a listen.

The prolific Gerador Zero uploaded a small stack of efforts, one standout being “rm $x”; it makes Henrik’s jazz minimalism sound fully orchestrated by comparison, and has the lo-fi rasp of early Money Mike. More on GZ at geradorzero.com.

Instrumental Sylvian MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It was widely reported that David Sylvian, one of the more enigmatic figures associated with so-called progressive rock, collaborated on his most recent full-length album, Blemish (2003), with Christian Fennesz, the generation-younger electronic musician who has artfully employed glitches and laptop-tweaked guitars in his own music. Fennesz brought those same textures, and along with them a certain freshness, to “A Fire in the Forest,” the closing track on Blemish, Sylvian’s first album on his own Samadhi Sound label. Fennesz’s presence also brought to mind Sylvian’s past recordings with other guitarists known for using technological means to push their instrument of choice into new territory, including Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson.

The extent to which Sylvian has embraced an aesthetic more closely associated with Fennesz is nowhere as apparent as on a fine MP3 he subsequently posted on his website, davidsylvian.com. (Modern electronic music owes a great debt to Sylvian, but there’s no room here to trace that lineage with any detail. Just pick up an album by his early band, Japan; listen to his singing amid Fripp’s loops; and ponder the subsequent musicians, such as Trent Reznor, who commissioned one of his, and Brian Eno’s, favorite album-jacket illustrators, Russell Mills.) Click over to the Downloads section and listen to “Mothlight”  (MP3), nearly nine minutes of lovely stillness, interrupted by flashes of field recording and foregrounded digital synthesis. The track’s title phenomenon is represented both by the stereoscopic suggestion of erratic motion and by these whizzy cues that at first seem very much like a close-flying insect, but frequently flip over to things that merely resemble that familiar flutter: quick switches, looped static, shrill-pitched tones and other compositional fragments.

Best known as a vocalist, Sylvian doesn’t sing a word on “Mothlight,” yet the piece is clearly marked as his own; like his best work, notably the album Gone to Earth, it appears at once florid and concertedly restrained. Sylvian explains on the site that the track was composed after an editor requested his participation in a book of work by the Starn Twins, the photographers. Though that project never materialized, some of the sounds later made their way onto the Blemish album. Those same sounds have gone on to have a third life on a recent compilation, The Good Son vs the Only Daughter, featuring remixes of Blemish tracks by, among others, Akira Rabelais, Burnt Friedman, Yoshihiro Hanno and Ryoji Ikeda; Nils Petter Molvaer guests on trumpet. “Mothlight” is apparently where it all started.

Cage-Feldman Discussion MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“I’ve never heard anyone boo a transistor radio,” says John Cage. He’s talking with fellow composer Morton Feldman, who was just complaining about how the presence of radios playing rock’n’roll had spoiled a recent day on the beach. Cage is having none of it: “All that radio is, Marty, is making available to your ears what was already in the air and available to your ears but you couldn’t hear it. In other words, all it’s doing is making audible something you’re already in. You are bathed in radio waves, TV broadcasts.” And, Cage goes on to joke, telepathic messages from other deep thinkers, such as Feldman himself.

This is just one early highlight from a recording that’s among the many treasures in the Other Minds audio library at archive.org. Taped between 1966 and 1967, the discussion documents the minds of two of the major figures in 20th-century music. Feldman passed away in 1987 and Cage five years later, but even by the mid-’60s they sounded like ancient gurus trading koans. Feldman has rabbinical gravitas, and Cage’s pixie-ish voice is marked by a verbal tick, a frequent “Hmm?” that is at once inquisitive, probing, accusatory and rhetorical. The discussion was taped at WBAI in New York City and the transcript was collected as a book, Radio Happenings I-V (Edition MusikTexte), but it’s a unique treat to hear them live. While much of the Other Minds library at archive.org is for streaming only, these five interview segments, ranging in length from about half an hour to an hour, are downloadable via FTP. Best way to locate them is to go to archive.org, click on the “Audio” option in the menu at the top of the page, then select the Other Minds Archive and search for “cage feldman wbai.” For some reason six search results come up, but one currently leads to a dead link. The five entries you want are clearly labeled “Cage and Morton Feldman In Conversation, Radio Happening I of V recorded at WBAI in New York City, 1966 – 1967,” and so on. (This link should do the trick.)

Aural Vacation MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

They take digital equipment on their world travels, so we can enjoy the field recordings from our cubicles. Among the latest weekly One-Minute Vacation tracks uploaded from various contributors to Aaron Ximm‘s quietamerican.org website are an evening in Barcelona, complete with street music (February 7), and of numerous boats all blowing their horns on the North Sea (January 24). Not everyone’s that hi-tech, as evidenced by a third entry (January 31): which documents a race-car rally, recorded on an answering machine via cell phone. If you’d like to extend your stay, there’s an additional five-minute version of the Scottish boating chorus, an annual tradition called “hogmanay.” Check ’em all out at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.