DJ Food Mashup

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Disquiet Downstream focuses on recordings posted by musicians online for intended download. Occasionally a demonstratively law-flouting set, like DJ Danger Mouse’s matchmaking between Jay-Z and the Beatles, last year’s Grey Album, vaults itself into the near-public domain through sheer force of ubiquity. By Danger Mouse’s concise litigious standards, Ninja Tune Records stalwart DJ Food‘s new Raiding the 20th Century is a veritable Bleak House of mashups, an hour of copyright-teasing snippets sewn together with a blend of Christian Marclay’s sense of pop-culture curation, an FM radio promo’s interest in keeping your attention, and an NPR afternoon forum on intellectual property. Listen in as Dizzee Rascal fades into the Beastie Boys, not long after the 20th Century Fox drum roll starts things going and Roy Orbison returns from the dead for evenly paced moans. According to Food’s website, djfood.org, the mix’s unwitting lineup includes concrete-music figures (Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Steve Reich), pop-music ones (Kylie Minogue, S Club 7, Destiny’s Child, Missy Elliott) and those who bridge the gap (Negativland, Beatles, Jon Oswald, Grandmaster Flash, Invisbl Skratch Piklz).

DJ Food is a name up for grabs at the Ninja Tune offices, and it’s been used by Ninja’s founders (Coldcut’s Jonathan More and Matt Black) and by Patrick Carpenter, among others. On Raiding, it’s Strictly Kev calling the shots, with chunks of spoken word by William S. Burroughs, and by Art of Noise veteran Paul Morley, talking about the subject at hand in excerpts from his recent book, Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City. The DJ Food site removed the track after download requests overloaded its server. Now the file is floating about the Internet, all 72,552 kilobytes of it. Two places to start looking are entroporium.com (entry, file) and seibuone.com (entry, file). An earlier, and somewhat less sizable, version of the track remains up on djfood.org’s info page (here), along with a PDF of the track listing, though that’s somewhat less than helpful, since it consists largely of remixes, and not of the remixes’ contents.

D12 Logic MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The vast depths of archive.org‘s holdings are difficult to come to grips with. Even putting the public-domain text and video material aside, there seems to be enough music by the Grateful Dead alone to play for a good year straight, and there’s more like the Dead in that corridor of the archive than anything else — more jam bands, more riff rock, more psychedelic noodling. Not, as they say, there’s anything wrong with that. When you’re pleased by recordings that resemble a century-old radiator on overdrive, it’s tough to go complaining about what someone else calls music.

All of which said, it’s initially hard to find much electronic music in the archive’s live holdings, in part because of the abundance of Dead acolytes, and in part because of the site’s search engine, which prioritizes “mediatype” and other categories over genre. (On the other hand, its netlabel directory serves as a backup for many notable electronica free-music concerns, including 8bitrecs, Monotonik, Nishi and Thinner.) Still, search and you shall find. For example, a search for “DJ” in archive’s live holdings yields over 250 results, among them a July 7, 2002, concert featuring the New Orleans ensemble Dirty Dozen Brass Band with New York turntablist DJ Logic sitting in for two songs (“Africa,” “We Got Robbed”). It may be electronic by association, but it’s a great document of an unusual collaboration (one Logic spoke about at length earlier that year in a Disquiet.com interview, “Sonic Anomaly”).

Oh, and as if finding the concert wasn’t tough enough, you’ll discover that it’s only downloadable as a “flac” file — which is a mix of good and bad news. The good news is, “flac” is a high-quality, so-called “lossless” format; the bad is, it’s enormous (94Mb for 15 minutes of audio, the length of the “Africa” track alone). Check out the full set here.

Anticon Hip-Hop MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Start off the work week with two fine background-music instrumental hip-hop tracks from Telephone Jim Jesus, off his late-2004 album, A Point Too Far to Astronaut (Anticon). TJJ’s “Little Boy One Eye,” which runs a romantic piano loop and genre-complementary choral effect above a disjunctive and jittery drum beat, has been featured recently on the music.download.com site, here. Over at anticon.com (click through to the “media” page), you’ll find that track, plus “Struck by Falling Object,” which is more varied, more a montage than a collage, moving from one segment (a slap of jazz horn, a heady beat, etc.) to the next, and using each snippet’s climax as the springboard to the subsequent one. And, a third treat, there’s “Blue in the Face,” which manages to bring an enthusiastic pop sensibility to CD-skipping.

German Techno MP3 EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A quick one to end the week. The Uran97 netlabel’s latest release (number 24) is M.M.B.‘s Robot Work Area, an exercise in vaguely Kraftwerkian mechanoid funk, updated with raspy touches of glitch and an abiding affection for moire patterns of elemental counterpoint. M.M.B. is a German duo, Marc B and Marksman, who’ve been working together since 2002. Check the four-track EP at uran97.com (download page here), and visit the group’s homepage at mmb-techno.de.

Latest Tonatom MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When musician Maciek Szymczuk titled his EP Romantic Piano for Lovers, he meant lovers of surface-noise-laden, static-laced, beats-all-a-flutter minimal techno, with saw blade string sections and chest-pounding thuds of subterranean dread. Or he was just being ironic. Either way, RPfL is a six-track set on which the piano is contorted until it skips like a broken self-playing model (“Supper at Piano Bar”), or it’s muted until it sounds like an alien harpsichord (“Romantic Walk”), or it provides occasional accent marks (“Flame of Love”), or it’s entirely abandoned after an opening chord in favor of speaker-shaking sludge and heavenly vocals (“Tender Kisses”). Szymczuk calls his music “click’n’everything” — and he clearly takes pleasure in contorting whatever sounds come his way, running them over mechanistic pulses and through echo chambers with sodden walls. The rich and varied set was the final release of 2004 on the tonAtom netlabel. Download it here, and visit tonAtom at tonatom.net and Szymczuk at mszymczuk.prv.pl.