Global Eavesdrop MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Signals abound that it’s vacation time. Email and voicemail have diminished. TV’s on perpetual repeats, with the exception of the news, which the past few days has been catastrophic, and will continue to be so in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunamis. (The New York Times has a list of charities here.) Need a break yourself? Visit the quietamerican.org site’s One-Minute Vacation page (here). Just about every Monday, site creator Aaron Ximm posts a new 60-second clip from a different contributor, an unedited eavesdrop somewhere in the world. Often as not the locales are exotic, but it’s amazing how the clarity of a Minidisc recording can make the most familiar sound seem exotic, or at least mysterious.

The past two months have been particularly rich ones for One-Minute Vacations, and those nine tracks (five in November, four in December) seem, thanks to shared sound elements, to suggest specific sequences, were you to listen to them as a suite. It’s the audio equivalent of one those package tours your grandparents take (“Seven European cities in six nights!”), but with more leg room… and more head room:

In an Italian church (the Nov. 22 entry, credited to Etienne Noiseau), murmured voices and the creaking of pews make for a shadowy texture above an electric guitar line, only to be lost in the ringing of call-to-mass bells. … On an atoll called Makundu (Dec. 20, Adriano Zanni), the bounce of a volleyball is pure percussion, no more or less than the wind against the microphone. … More wind in the San Francisco Mission District (Nov. 15, Jay Thomas), and the familiar sound of a structure bending like old bones (well, familiar especially to those haunted by Stephen Vitiello’s recording of the World Trade Center swaying), with a car serving the same coda-like role of the bells in Italy. … Those cars come to the foreground in Achen, Germany, until the recorder moves into a stairwell (Nov. 8, Michiel d Boer). … Having taken shelter, it’s just rain and thunder (Nov. 1, Steb M. Fitzroy), which is more than enough, though a distant plane lends a long, centering tone. … The plane comes into the foreground in London (Nov. 29, James aka Catskin Royale) — two planes, in fact; the flying machines date from WWII, but the sound was recorded earlier in the month. … Trade one flying machine for another with a rapturous bit of birdsong (Dec. 6, John Hartog); Messaien would be jealous. … More birds, but far less idyllic, as cars run overhead like restless ghosts (Dec. 13, Grant Finlay). … And then comes, according to the brief description on the quietamerican site, some 15,000 superballs bouncing in a Denver warehouse, as loud as the other entries are quiet — a curatorial equivalent of fireworks, since it’s One-Minute Vacation’s closing entry for 2004 (Dec. 27, Todd Novosad).

Field Music MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Field Muzick record label has produced two CDs thus far, the first of which, Music Out of Open Windows, collected 10 acts working along a single theme: “field recordings mixed with music / vice versa.” Among the album’s artists were Andrea Marutti, Fragmatist (aka Ryuta Noguchi) and Dronaement, the latter of whom also created the label’s second release, My Open Window. In any case, to supplement the first release, one of its artists, Sebastien Roux, posted two files on the Field Muzick site, one a delectably fragile mix that lives up to the album’s billing, a light mesh of real-world sounds and haze-level synthesized audio. The other is a deep, nearly subaudible drone with an occasional beat like the pulse of a sloth deep in hibernation. Label website at fieldmuzick.net, Music Out of Open Windows page here. (There’s also a streambox on the Field Muzick site, here, that plays a couple of minutes of each Open Windows track.)

Extended Murk-tronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like a lot of abstract, ambient-leaning electronic music, Maikko‘s new release on the netlabel Statisfield, titled Kneedeep, defies the ear’s sense of scale. It could be a close-up audio recording of bionic buglife, or the seeping hum of some giant, slow-moving machine. Either way, though, it’s rich in detail — perhaps the microscopic workings of something smaller than your earlobe, or maybe the semi-organic sinew of something significantly larger than your apartment building. Confusingly, Kneedeep consists of a single track with a split title, “Wasteland / Flowers on Their Graves,” but at almost 20 minutes in length, it also has enough distinct stages, or movements, to deserve at least twice as many names. Note that all three given titles suggest organic murk. It’s a through-composed journey the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. There are moments of what sound like heavily vocoded speech, computer babble filtered through layers of feedback and transformative algorithms. What suggests spoken words is, specifically, how arrhythmic yet fluid that material is, like it has its own internal, if amelodic, logic; listen around the five-minute mark, and above the pulsing wave there’s a fuzz box that sounds like a Cylon Raider on a bender. By the 15-minute mark, the piece has an understated groove; it’s amazing how the odd offbeat can make the most mechanical of sounds seem to swing. Check the album out here, the MP3 file here. Maikko is a cofounder of the Italian collective Otolab (more info at otolab.net, and check out the Otolab music archive here). More on Stasisfield at stasisfield.com.

Penultimate Musork MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In a post titled “The End Is Near,” Kit Clayton and Sue Costabile, founders of the Musork record label, announced on its website that they’ll be closing the organization down in early 2005. Since 2000, the duo’s label has released fine original recordings and remixes by the likes of Blectum from Blechdom, Stephan Mathieu, Ekkehard Ehlers, Kid606 and many others. Musork’s 18th and most recent set, Westernization Completed by AGF, earned an Award of Distinction this year, along with Janek Schaefer’s Skate, in Ars Electronica’s Digital Music category (Thomas K?ner, of minimal-techno greats Porter Ricks, took the top prize, the Golden Nicas). Today’s Downstream entry is a track from that award-winning AGF album, “Private Birds” (album page here, MP3 here), which features the voice of Antye Greie (aka AGF) intoning fragments of poetry, the fragments gaining an almost funky quality the way they’re interspersed with, and joined by — and set up against — snippets of delicate electronica, and how her words are sometimes tweaked and echoed with light digital processing. More on Greie/AGF at poemproducer.com. More on Musork at musork.com. (Clayton and Costabile mention on the Musork site that there will be one more release, due out in spring 2005: “something new made out of things old … mostly out of past Musork releases.”)

Guitronic Trio MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Still more guitronica this week, broad and fairly meaningless as the term may be. The trio named Mire is an improvising group with atmospheric intent, based in the San Francisco Bay area. Its members, Elise Baldwin, William Fowler Collins and Joel Pickard, have between them background in such varied realms as academic composition, sound design, field recording, commercial work-for-hire, classical guitar and theater, and all three are graduates of or students at the music program at Mills College in Oakland, whose current faculty includes such luminaries as Chris Brown, Alvin Curran, Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros. Given Frith’s prominence as a bleeding-edge guitarist, it’s probably too easy to infer his influence on Mire, especially since two thirds of the group doubles on guitar (Collins on electric, Pickard on pedal steel — all three are credited with electronics and/or laptop), but the association certainly wouldn’t set unfair expectations on the listener’s part. Collins has posted on his website, wfowlercollins.ath.cx, a nearly 12-minute-long piece from a Mire performance recorded back in early August at the Black Box Theatre in Oakland. And the guitar is the core of the work, even if its ranges widely, from rural finger picking with the feel of the Boxhead Ensemble or Bill Frisell at his most blissfully absentminded, to industrial noise amid the squeal of machinery, to the sort of untraditionally plucked (or, perhaps, bowed) segments that bring to mind prepared piano as well as, of course, Frith’s own six-string experiments in that area. This live track, highly recommended, is less a song than it is an excursion across territories. True to the group’s name, Mire has little interest in getting anywhere in particular; the threesome is happily caught up in the view. (Pickard, by the way, composed the catchy genre snippets that accompany advertisements for the Showtime TV series Dead Like Me and those clips, along with a batch audiostreams, are on his site, hatfarm.com.)

PS: Update: Only Pickard is playing guitar on that Mire recording. Collins is manipulating some of his own recordings on his laptop, using SuperCollider2. And the link to Collins’ site was broken, but now it works.