In its own way, Pilot Balloon‘s “Vampire Tonic” (MP3) elegantly compresses the already brief history of pop psychedelics, from the Beatles through the Chemical Brothers and Tortoise, into one seamless montage. But don’t call it a mashup. The track, off the duo’s Ghastly Good Cheer album, released last year on the German label 2nd Rec, opens with something reminiscent of so-called Britpop. There’s an electrified piano and a solo male voice, barely intelligible and heavily echoed. Don’t bother grasping for what it’s saying because soon enough that same echo has dispersed the voice into background haze, and the drums have worked their way into primacy. If that alone isn’t the history of heady rock, what is? Anyhow, the next time you hear the voice, late in the track, around the four-minute mark, it’s been sampled and repurposed as pure tone, an instrument to be played. The message is clear: the real “voice” on a track like this is the voice of the arranger, or in the case of Pilot Balloon, the arrangers. The Massachusetts-based duo of Judson MacRae and KaeoFLUX are able to segue from the opening song through elegant post-rock to tunneling drum’n’bass and on, never losing sight of where they’ve been and where they’re headed. The post-rock sections are particularly fine, threaded through with a woodwind dirge and a halo of mallet work that could just as easily be from a piece by a post-minimalist, like a Michael Torke, or a composed-jazz macher, say Marty Ehrlich, and yet feel right at home here, among the fragments of pop songs, the trip-hop grooves, the machine drums. Yeah, it’s that good. More info at 2ndrec.com and pilotballoon.net.
Osymyso’s Resolution MP3s
OSYMYSO’S RESOLUTION MP3S: Whether or not they go the full 365, new year’s resolutions make for good web projects. Case in point, osymyso.com, which was recommended in the latest email newsletter from the Warp Records label as a fine counterpart to DJ Food’s recent Raiding the 20th Century, an extended mash-up of mash-ups. Osymyso makes the standard January 1 promise: new content, once a week, every week. In this case, it’s 50 tracks over the course of 50 weeks, with a bonus: “it will then be re-arranged and mixed into one chunk for release on the first day of 2006.” So far, Osymyso (may we call you Osy?) has been producing the sort of retro-futuristic sampling that used to be the sole province of the Ninja Tune label, the sorta jokey yet funky stuff that Funki Porcini, Food, Coldcut and others cemented as perhaps Britain’s first major contribution to hip-hop. Osymyso’s tracks, collectively titled 05YMY50, bear the marks of Funkadelic and Salt ‘n Pepa, the Beastie Boys, even Morris Day, filtered through a penchant for rigorous instrumental cut’n’paste play. (There’s an informative interview at pixelsurgeon.com.) So, make a less demanding new year’s resolution of your own: put osymyso.com on the weekly to-do list, and we’ll take stock on the first of next year.
8-Bit MP3s
A post early this morning on gizmodo.com, the consumerist gadget blog with an interest in homebrew hacking, directed readers to an online gallery of psychedelic visual “boot patterns” from arcade video games. Housed at axbx.assembler.org, the screens are brightly colored mishmashes of ASCII characters, beautiful in their lo-fi chaos, and nostalgia-inducing for readers of a certain age. As audio accompaniment, the gizmodo writeup referenced a small cache of MP3s, also housed on the assembler.org server, at 2a03.assembler.org. Apparently 2a03 is the name of an old Nintendo sound chip, from an early-1980s 8-bit platform called the Famicom. The five MP3s on the site are abstract mutations of theme music from a Famicom video game; you can hear the chipper tunes bleed through stuttered breakbeats and thick washes of interference. “This is done through random string manipulation, rearrangement, addition and subtraction,” the site explains. (Original gizmodo post here.)
Sample Battle MP3s
Following up on yesterday’s Kracfive.com entry, the collective’s latest “Iron Chef of Music” contest has been posted on the site. It’s a “global” battle, meaning it took place remotely (“from afar, over the internet from multiple kitchens”). “Local” battles, in contrast, take place “in person, face to face; all contestants used the same kitchen.” Each Iron Chef of Music calls upon a bunch of musicians to make a song based on a common sample; according to the contest’s F.A.Q., they have two hours to accomplish the task. Past mystery ingredients have included a Bruce Haack soundtrack snippet, the Lord of the Rings trailer, and the sound of ice rattling around in a glass.
The latest battle (#23, “Casio Scone,” recorded December 10, 2004) provided perhaps the contest’s shortest sample yet, a three-second Casio riff. A Casio SK-1, to be more specific: a low-budget, mid-’80s sampling keyboard; an 8-bit monophonic artifact. Run in a loop, the spare sample has a nice jittery beat, like a funky guy nursing a knee injury. That sample, all 74 KB of it, and the three completed entries are available for download (here). Khonnor‘s “Iron Chef” slows the sample until it sounds like a Phantom of the Opera organ on the fritz (that’s Claude Rains’ Phantom, not Joel Schumacher and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s). The subject of Lipid‘s “Winning Game” appears to be pachinko, gauging by its musty-arcade vibe. Proswell‘s “Whyy” is the most radio-friendly, with a groovy beat and some understated changes. The winner? Well, it may be something of a tie — by default, my iPod sequenced them in alphabetical order by artist, and Lipid’s track happens to close with a little call out (some dude saying “Heh” or “Hit it” or something like that), which leads just perfectly into Proswell’s opening rhythm. Between the two of them is a recipe worth revisiting.
Pastoral Kettel MP3
There’s yet to be a Matador of netlabels, a Sub Pop, a Factory, a Def Jam — a place that, for some period of time, dependably, with a mix of pop magic and monocular focus, produces must-hear recordings one after another after another. There are, however, several key online collectives, loosely associated and often geographically dispersed groups of musicians who between them produce material that, while varied, has some sense of a core, shared ideal, and that keeps you coming back to see what’s new. Kracfive.com, home to the occasional “Iron Chef of Music” contests, is such a collective, thanks to contributions by folks like Colongib, Ipagos and Kettel, people who manage to sound playful and folksy, irreverent and craft-oriented, all at once, musicians unafraid of a melody, but uncommitted to songs. Kettle produced the latest entry in the site’s “MP3 Rotor” download section. The pastoral “Poire Test” (MP3) is little more than a bird chip above a low and slow mix of glitchy percussion and beading synthesis, but combined those elements are as peaceful as a Saturday afternoon when your bills are paid, your email inbox is empty and you’ve managed to forget all your cares, at least for the track’s three and a half minutes. Spring arrived a little early this year, thanks to “Poire Test.” More on Kettel (aka Reimer Eising) at kracfive.com/kettel.