The new album by Scanner, Double Fold, on the Slovenian record label rx:tx, is apparently inspired by Nicholson Baker’s excellent book by that name, which was an alarming study of how libraries have forsaken their duty as custodians of our literary heritage, focusing in particular on the failures of microfilm to do justice to print newspapers. Two-minute RealAudio streams are currently available (on the posteverything.com site, here) for two segments of the album, “Microfilm” and “Ultrafiche,” both sprightly yet irritable stretches of glitchy minimalist momentum. Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) writes of the project, on his own site (scannerdot.com), “Fold is one extended elastic track focusing on a pulse, 128 beats per minute. The book is an exploration of the dismantling of the greatest archives of our recorded heritage, paper as a resource now too fragile to store our history on.” He explains that he built the album as a collage of hundreds of fragments from his domestic tape archive.
Skalpel Musical Erector Set
It has long been standard operating procedure for 12″ versions of singles to include both the instrumental (which is to say, vocal-free) and vocal (which is to say, instrumental-free) edits of the title track. The rapper Jay-Z made the vocals off his entire Black Album available sans backing tracks, and deserves credit as a result for midwifing the cut’n’paste magic of DJ Danger Mouse’s infamous Grey Album. Not to diminish Mouse’s achievement, but Jay-Z’s open-source beneficence did free Mouse up to focus on constructing a bed of sound from the Beatles’ White Album.
Just about every hip-hop 12″ offers both “a cappella” and “instrumental” versions, from Eminem’s “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” (which is fairly lackluster without his Gollum-like emotional switcheroos) to Public Enemy’s underappreciated “Gotta Give the Peeps What They Need” (which, in its vocal-free form, works toward a rewardingly chaotic close). Acts including De La Soul and Deltron 3030 have released some of their entire albums in vocal-free versions, making for fine instrumental hip-hop. At a time when the beats of producers Timbaland and the Neptunes are routinely as recognizable as the voices of the singers who float atop them, it’s surprising that collections of their raw tracks aren’t readily made available in commercial form. A CD full of Neptunes productions, minus the singers? Now that’s what I’d call Behind the Music.
In any case, more than one-upping those readily available 12″ B-side treats are the occasional opportunities to download all the individual constituent parts of a given song — not just the vocal and the backing tracks, but each separate looped snippet: say, the drum track, the bass line, the piano, etc. This is exactly what Skalpel, the Wroclaw, Poland-based production duo, has done for “Break In,” off its recent self-titled Ninja Tune Records album. Skalpel, true to its name, has segmented “Break In,” a jazz-fusion electronica song, into 27 individual pieces, a veritable home-studio erector set. It’s part of a contest they’re running (details here), asking fans to produce remixes of the track. The due date is April 23, 2004, so get your laptop fired up. (The prize is a trip to Warsaw, though the details appear to limit the offer to intra-European travel. A winner living in Duluth or Kyoto may incur overseas travel as an out-of-pocket expense.)
The 27 “Break In” parts range from a half dozen drum tracks, to bits of string, piano and bass playing. (They’re all in “wav” format, which most MP3 players can handle.) Tellingly, the longest track by far is a 47-second segment named “ambient,” a bed of jazz-ensemble haze (and which makes good listening all on its lonesome). The track next closest in length is less than half that, a funhouse assemblage of reverb-enhanced vocals, like a sound check at Disney’s Haunted Mansion. Seven of the “Break In” tracks are so short that they’ll register as 0:00 on most MP3 players, but they’ll still play properly.
Oddly, one bit is missing from the “Break In” sample hoard: the intro vocal that intones, on the Skalpel record, “Hello everyone, I’d like to take you on an imaginary trip. … Pretend you can see everything happening in your mind.” Anyhow, fans of Skalpel who listen to the remix-ready sample wav files will gain a deeper appreciation for the duo’s skills. To hear the original version, check out the stream on the album’s webpage on the Ninja Tune Records site, here.
BBC Interview Streams
The BBC’s website(s) is/are so enormous, so maze-like in their multimedia sprawl, that finding anything requires the navigational equivalent of a Freedom of Information subpoena. In any case, the Mixing It radio show, filed under “World & New,” located somewhere beneath the Radio3 subsubsubpage, hosts several 2003 interviews of note, including Warp Records electronic act Plaid (click here) and ambient progenitor Brian Eno (click here). Click through those links, or enter the maze at its main gate, bbc.co.uk, and see what you stumble upon. If you find anything more of interest, be sure to report back.
Motion MP3s
Speaking of musician Chris Coode (see yesterday’s Downstream entry on the fall of the house of 8bitrecs.com), his latest album under the Motion moniker, Every Action, is out on 12k Records, the label headed by Taylor Deupree. The 12k.com website has uploaded two minute-long-ish segments from Every Action, which are less electro-acoustic than they are electro-organic, sounding like the first burbling emissions of some newborn digital lifeform, just these warm, blippy sounds struggling lightly for coherence, surrounded by a warm, if synthetic, blanket. (The 12k “sounds” page is here, and for the moment the Motion files, “Untitled” and “Moken Edit,” are the top two in what has become a long list.) Any MP3 player with repeat and crossfade can sew these stereo files into more extended listening than the cumulative length of the individual tracks.
Digital Variations on Harp, Guitar, Flute
If the 17-minute A-side of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie‘s Variations (Elevator Bath, 2003) seems to shimmer, credit that scintillation at least in part to the source material: this lengthy ambient piece is apparently built from the sounds of a harp, once the mood-setting instrument of courts and kings. Likewise, the vinyl LP’s cut B1 is built upon a guitar, and B2 upon a flute. The album is a half-hour-plus trio of aural-for-aurality’s-sake ruminations on singular instruments. Sheffield and Rippie dig deep into their raw goods, so even when the instruments are less than recognizable post-production, their core sound — their aural aura — remains present in some form. The tone, if not the technique, sings through: the guitar splayed into slowly ringing sine waves, the harp a crystalline surface extending into the distance.
All of the work on Variations was reportedly recorded live with Sheffield on sampler and Rippie on turntables and guitar. Of the three tracks, the least static of the variations is the one that closes the album, the one based on a flute. There’s much more than a flute in that cut — a wash resembles nearby surf, and there’s a downright eerie granularity at times — but it’s the occasional bit of tentative embouchure that grounds the atmospheric goings-on. The flute track, although eight minutes in length, is listed on the sleeve as an “excerpt,” and one can only imagine where it might have gone had it extended into double digits. The guitar piece, at close to ten minutes, ends quite suddenly, just a whisp and then dead air; perhaps the finality is on purpose, but more than likely it’s single bum moment in an otherwise epiphanic live improvisation. It’s also worth mentioning that the Elevator Bath label, which never skimps in its productions, released the album on heavyweight, 180-gram vinyl.
This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.