The website of minimalist composer Steve Reich (stevereich.com) posted a videostream of his “Clapping Music” (1972) about two months back. The fuzzy black and white video shows Reich and noted percussionist Russell Hartenberger performing the piece in 1974, each clapping independent rhythmic lines that occasionally intersect, and otherwise produce a funky counterpoint. The endearingly low-quality video footage reminds you of life before such computer programs as Apple’s iLife made high-quality audio and video available for the masses. (It feels like it’s from an early episode of Sesame Street: “This avant-garde segment brought to you by the number two.”) For contrast, there’s also posted on the site a gamelan-flavored segment from the Hindenburg-themed section of Reich’s 2002 high-tech “video opera,” Three Tales. (More on Hartenberger — a University of Toronto music professor, and a member of Reich’s ensemble since 1971 — at nexuspercussion.com.)
Free Bill Laswell MP3
The ever prolific Bill Laswell, one of the great ambient-dub producer/musicians, has posted for free download an MP3 of a track from his upcoming album, Version 2 Version (ROIR). The song, “Babylon Site,” is a extended chunk of dub, almost nine minutes of bass that slows the pulse, flanged percussion that sounds like some sorta super-slo-mo Doppler Effect, and just generally deep, deep echo that brings to minds vats of rich chocolate. The cherry on top is a mix of chiming guitar and synthesized strings, just about the track’s only nods to the treble range. For the Version 2 Version album, Laswell characteristically brought together a supergroup, including bassist Jah Wobble, keyboardist (and George Clinton sideman) Bernie Worrell (whose great work with Talking Heads is being rediscovered of late, thanks to the rerelease of the Name of This Band album), and two percussionists: Karsh Kale and Abdou Mboup. Now, a lot of echo-heavy music sounds as if it had been recorded in a sterile hall, a modernist zone of aesthetic purity — a wrongheaded Platonic ideal of a space-music space, especially where dub is concerned — but Laswell’s “Babylon Site” has the intimacy of seasoned musicians working in close commune. The full album comes out Sept. 21, 2004. The “Babylon Site” MP3 is downloadable, for the time being, here. More info on Version 2 Version, as the release date nears, at roir-usa.com.
Guit-tronic Pop MP3
The Ipagos track “Lets Go Rodeo v3” (sic), the most recent free download on the kracfive collective’s website, begins with what sounds simply like a fun, computer-generated, rapid-fire jumble of pixelized percussion. But as it progresses, a similar theme — a burst of melody that won’t be easily excised from your memory bank — is played on guitar, and maybe a ukulele, and you realize that what sounded computer-generated was, far more likely, the strummed part filtered and tweaked into a digital simulacrum. Once that cause and effect is apparent, Ipagos layers the opposing elements, setting some slide work against a hopped up drum’n’bass figure, as cartoony as anything Carl Stalling ever penned. At just over two and a half minutes, the whole thing is utterly delectable. Oh, and if the break sounds familiar, you might try singing George Michael’s “Faith.” Check it out in the “MP3 Rotor” section of kracfive.com.
Barbershop Field-Recording MP3
Like its earlier Downstream entry (see the highly recommended “Le Saint Jean,” January 7, 2004, here), Soundvial‘s “Steven Head” MP3 has all the makings of a short indie film — well, a very short indie film (at just over six minutes), and one without any visuals. The track manages to tell a story of sorts, with little more than some occasionally unintelligible spoken audio and a soundtrack of slow-going electric guitar, a bit of percussion (a spare jazz kit), and these subtle textures that make themselves apparent only on the second or third listen. Prominent among these latter elements, of course, is the buzz of the haircut that is the putative subject of the recorded narrative, but others include extended runs of reverb that loop around like water in the ears, and filters applied to the spoken segments that may or may not simply be unintended consequences of recording slyly (to MiniDisc?) on the go in a cramped space. The dialog is a conversation at a barbershop, plus the phone call that precedes it: a study in intimate but cautiously unrevealing old-world exchanges. Fans of Scanner will dig it, but so will fans of Jim Jarmusch. (More on the Soundvial duo, Ken Reisman and Matt Simon, at soundvial.org. The “Steven Head” MP3 is downloadable directly here.)
Laundromat Techno MP3
Kwook, with his nonsense syllable of a nom-du-MP3, knows that much as a word repeated ad nauseam becomes almost alarmingly meaningless, a sound repeated on end becomes a potent rhythm track. The self-descriptive “Washerloop,” off his four-song Immiscible EP on the One netlabel (downloadable free here), starts with a washing machine but becomes pure techno even before the light comes on to signal a call for detergent.
In part this is because your standard everyday laundromat is a natural minimal-techno engine, an armory of things that rattle as they rotate, things that being mechanical have inherent, often eccentric, rhythms, even if they do not adhere to what we think of as a proper downbeat. “Washerloop” is fine field-recording techno also because the recognizable sound elements are matched and eventually subsumed by a more artificial brand of throbbing, roiling sound.
What “Washerloop” achieves with the noise of a Sunday morning laundry session, “Apolloguiltly” does with deeply distorted vocals, virtually unintelligible, as if they’re being tapped in an aquarium. Where “Washerloop” goes for dance-floor agitation, this track beatifies its source material, ascending from the mundane concerns of the muffled conversation toward something heavenly, the come-hither voices of the Information Age sirens. “Psychopomp” achieves similarly haloed ends with more traditional instrumentation; the elegant stretch of ambience could easily be transferred to church organ.
The only disappointment on Immiscible is the opening track, a pulsing shunt of pop-minimalism with the generic spirit of a lesser Tangerine Dream score. It’s built on bland synthesized sounds, washes of silicon waves, pointillist riffs played with all-to-familiar preset tones, unearthly choral harmonies sung by eunuch androids. The rest of the EP, though, especially “Washerloop” and “Apolloguiltly,” more than make up for this misstep. (More on Kwook, aka Simon Bennet of Perth, Australia, at kwookyworld.com.)