Promise to not make a habit of it, but this week’s Friday Downstream link is the same as last Friday’s: the BBC’s Mixing It radio show, at bbc.co.uk/radio3/mixingit. Same link, but new show, as each Friday brings a brand new broadcast. This one features — in addition to fine commercial recordings by Sion Orgon (real-world sounds warped until they sound like avant-garde chamber music), “underground hip-hop” mainstay El-P jamming with jazz musicians (among them Daniel Carter, William Parker and Matthew Shipp) and Mira Calix (mixing live insects and orchestra) — live studio performances by, and conversation with, Californian tuba player Tom Heasley, whose deeply reverberant solo works are often reminiscent of whale song. Heasley talks with the Mixing It hosts about his early improvisation experiences on tuba with one of jazz bassist Charlie Haden’s large-scale ensembles circa 1984, the influence of Robert Fripp (whose 1970s “Frippertronics” work make him think, “I could sorta see doing something like this with a tuba”), his prized loop sampler (“[It] records 14 seconds of music, and then you can overdub over that, and it just constantly mixes together and it becomes other things”) and the differences between a tuba and a didjeridu, which he also plays. More on Heasley at, naturally, tomheasley.com.
Live Ben Recht MP3
An hour-long live set by Ben Recht (aka Local Fields), recorded earlier this month at the Enormous Room in Cambridge, as part of the weekly Beat Research club night, has been put up online. Recht pithily summarizes the recording as “rock anthems and 3step,” and the most memorable stuff is downright melodic. It’s a (vocal-free) mix of something along the lines of the Cure’s pop sensibility (samples of hooky, loosely strung electric bass and guitar, used to groovy effect, with touches of goofy synths) and the Feelies’ rhythmic richness (myriad segments of lockstep and crosswalking beats). But there’s more going on, the best of it these spare asides, or bridges or tangents, of stark clubfoot techno (perhaps what he meant by “3step”), quirky gizmo action and subtle metrical gamesmanship. It’s unfortunate so many bands get so much attention by aping ’80s new wave acts; all the while, a guy like Recht is quietly channeling that mess of early electronic songcraft into something unique. If his name is familiar, that’s likely due to the coverage his work on the Audiopad musical interface received around this time a year ago. Recht is a PhD candidate at MIT, crunching numbers on the cutting edge by day, but by night (or at least this Monday night) he’s an electronicist with a taste for pop. More on Local Fields, including the downloadable live MP3 set, at localfields.com. More on Beat Research at mashit.com/beatresearch. And more on Recht’s academic research at his MIT homepage, here.
German Techno MP3 Lode
Another day, another international netlabel with deep archives. The Germany-based Stadtgruenlabel has been doing free monthly releases of minimal techno all this year. And though much of it is more techno than minimal, more chunka chunka than sublime churn, an initial tour of its catalog reveals various items to recommend. There’s “Desko,” off Dataman‘s six-track Abstrahism, the label’s fourth release, which shifts its various paces against each other in ways that confuse the mind’s ear about foreground and background. Yatsuo Motoki‘s “Offshore,” from the five-track Circular Motion set, eventually achieves loungey sameness, but how it gets there is worth experiencing, a slow build from silence to metronomic sheen. And of course, if chunka chunka is your flavor, then download the label’s eighth and most recent album, Frank Biedermann‘s eager-to-please Wookie Woods. Check them all out at stadtgruenlabel.net.
Sun-Kissed MP3
One of the beautiful things about electronic music that’s derived from conceptual art is that it provides its own readymade metaphors. In other words, in the absence of traditional musical form, we have the musician’s m.o. to lend sense to something that is otherwise abstract. Case in point, Retina Burn, the new, half-hour long piece by Andrea Polli, available as of last month as a free download from the Stasisfield netlabel. Polli’s work — 27-plus minutes of low-level interference and broken whirs — takes as its source “soundwaves generated by the sun.” Polli then manipulates this sonic information, transforming it with what she’s termed “intuitive ocusonics,” or computer-aided musical interfaces that track eye movement. Why does she choose to shape the sound with her eyes, and not with fingers on a keyboard, or on a six-string? Conceptually, Polli’s point is self-apparent: by manipulating sound from the sun with her eyes, she’s doing what we otherwise must not, which is to look directly at the sun. What’s interesting, though, is that the resulting sound art, as heard on the overtly slow Retina Burn, doesn’t suggest the scorching, brilliant center of our solar system (although the crackles do bring it to mind) so much as it sounds like data being processed meticulously in the name of science: pristine data sets published for peer evaluation. The Stasisfield label’s sixth release this year, Retina Burn is available here. More on New York-based musician Polli at her webpage, here.
Techno Exotica MP3 Set
While there is much on r_garcia‘s four-song Travel by Light Rail MP3 EP (available for free from the Kikapu netlabel) that leans heavily on the sort of techno-exotica that seemed brave and new when Aphex Twin first recorded such things — the tick tock beats, rubberized and distended; the disarming, Casio-style melodies; the light echoes of dub; the ironically canned nature of some of the rhythms — there are more than enough moments of pop splendidness to warrant its download. Here are two: on “Runk,” which is a kind of willfully rudimentary Balkan slice of techno, it’s how the piece funnels down into a simple, repetitive sequence, and how your brain isn’t quite sure which beat is the down beat; on the title cut, it’s the opening sequence, in which the plaintive beacon tone is set against a pneumatic thump. The Kikapu label’s 70th release, Travel by Light Rail is available here. More on Florida-based musician garcia at his webpage, here.