Grey Market MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Perhaps there is no such thing as a free MP3. Thorsten Sideboard, who founded the 8bitrecs.com netlabel, got back to London after a recent trip to the U.S., only to find he’d lost his job. Why? Because 8bitrecs.com had participated in Grey Tuesday, the web activist event late last month, in which almost 200 websites around the world made DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album available for free download. The Grey Album had become a flashpoint for various copyright issues, including sampling clearances and peer-to-peer filesharing. It melded Jay-Z’s 2003 Black Album and the Beatles’ self-titled 1968 record, ubiquitously known as the White Album, and was made available for free download. EMI, the Beatles’ publisher, sent threatening cease and desist letters to everyone involved, including the numerous Grey Tuesday activists.

Now, 8bitrecs was no generic blog. It was a leader in the netlabel community, offering legal free downloads of MP3 files of electronic music submitted by a wide range of established and up’n’coming musicians, notably Greg Davis, Janek Schaefer and Rothko. It was also, however, hosted on the server of Sideboard’s employer. Make that ex-employer.

“My ex-employer didn’t kill 8bitrecs straight away,” he says. “I can still upload HTML pages, but basically they took down the software running the streams, and I no longer had access to the database, so I couldn’t upload new artists and tracks. I’m also pretty sure they were going to start charging me bandwidth.” (Thanks to the exigencies of Google’s cache function, some of that 8bitrecs material is still available, however temporarily.)

Sideboard’s loss is ours as well, though he’s looking on the bright side: “It feels more like an opportunity to focus more on Highpoint Lowlife, which I’ve always felt I have lacked the time to fully devote to, so hopefully something good will come of it.”

Highpoint Lowlife is Sideboard’s proper record label (website at highpointlowlife.com), which just released its seventh album, titled, with unintentional irony, White Label (by Recon, aka Chris Coode, better known for his work as Motion). He’s also on track for the next three Highpoint releases: Rashamon’s Tomorrow, People; Marshall Watson’s The Time Was Later Than He Expected and, for its 10th album, Some Paths Lead Back Again, a compilation of Scottish electronica, featuring tracks by Daigoro, Izu, Rose and Sandy, Accrual, Bovine Life, the Village Orchestra and others, organized by the Marcia Blaine School for Girls.

Although 8bitrecs.com has hung the “closed” sign, Highpoint is hosting a select number of free MP3 song files (no streams). Among the most recent is a highly recommended pair by Fisk Industries (you were probably wondering how, exactly, this little news report worked as an entry in Disquiet’s Downstream series — now you know). “Earth Algorithm” samples a line from the sci-fi sequel 2010 (“I’m completely operational and all my circuits are functioning perfectly”) and then, for almost six and a half minutes, artfully takes the phrase apart, layering its syllables and sibilants through a steady haze of downtempo techno. You’ll be amazed how solid a rhythm can be constructed from Hal 9000’s stutter. (Speaking of 2001/2010 samples, there’s a page full of ’em here.) Fisk’s “The Way We Found Each Other” is decidedly more upbeat, the sort of bouncy yet bittersweet, keyboard-driven piece that the Cure used to traffic in, before it became a guitar band.

Sideboard meanwhile has announced a legit new MP3 venture, making Highpoint’s albums available for sale as downloads at the invisible-sound.com webstore.

Bryars Stream

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The BBC’s Hear & Now radio program has been posting segments of an interview with composer Gavin Bryars. The first three parts (of a total four) are up now (here). The primary focus of the conversation is Bryars’ new work, From Egil’s Saga, which involves using technology to reproduce architectural acoustics — “a hallway, a vestibule, and so on” — and which he calls “ambisonics” and credits in part to composer Alvin Lucier. “I’m not terribly interested in extraordinary digital trickery,” says Bryars, who layered murky sounds in his Sinking of the Titanic and looped a hobo’s prayer for Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet. In the interview, he talks about his devotion to a particular type of pencil, his use of the Sibelius score-production software, and his penchant for putting jokes into his written music. (In a related link, critic and composer Kyle Gann, on his PostClassic blog [here], has been discussing Sibelius, which he uses in his composition. “No one seems to be monitoring the impact of notation software on composing,” he writes, “and it is sure to be vast — and homogenizing.”) The BBC webpage suggests that the fourth and final segment of the Bryars interview will be uploaded on April 8. It also includes links to two interviews with Bryars from 2003.

Family Occasion MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The most recent “one-minute vacation” from Aaron Ximm’s quietamerican.org site is an MP3 of a family occasion recorded by Joseph Young — less a field recording than a home recording. It’s a raw sample from a master’s-degree project Young is working on, titled The Family Album. Young writes, “My final piece will combine this type of source recordings with manipulated loops and melodic fragments, to create a new narrative borne out of heard phrases and associated emotional moods.” This unedited segment is a good example of the loop-like rhythms inherent in human speech, the way certain syllables, consonants and even entire phrases can provide a kind of sequence of ticks to the roiling waves of sound that constitute conversation. (File here, “one-minute vacation” page here. More information on Young at josephyoung.co.uk.)

Squarepusher Stream

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The BBC’s Breezeblock radio show has up, currently, a stream of an interview with Squarepusher (plus music from his new Warp Records album, Ultravisitor), in which he talks about, among other things, his difficulty describing his own music. Stream here, show homepage here.

More Sci-Fi MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Radio Free Albemuth was Philip K. Dick’s last book. It makes a fitting subject for the Sine Fiction series of scores for classic science fiction novels, if for no other reason than its protagonist works in the music industry. Technically, Radio Free Albemuth isn’t a classic, as it’s one of Dick’s least known full-length books. It hasn’t the mainstream popularity of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was reworked as the film Blade Runner, or the cult cachet of Valis, to which Albemuth is closely related.

In any case, this 13th entry in the Sine Fiction series was recorded by Galactic Zeit, aka Trace Reddell, a professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver. The album starts with three distinct tracks, a chunk of new-wave-sounding instrumental rhythms (“Aramcheck”), a similarly upbeat bit that may very well have at its core a sample of the Knight Rider theme song (“Valisystem-A”), and a more abstract piece (“FAP”) with industrial overtones. The album’s centerpiece — heck, its foundation — is a nearly 20-minute, through-composed work, “Albemuth,” that is far less loop-driven than the other tracks, darker and ambiguous, with bits of scrambled voices that hint at Dick’s entrenched paranoia. “Orange County” brings down the back beat, for a touch of minimal techno, just a spare drum and light noise, and the closing (and title) entry has, thanks to its beat-lessness, an air of regret and (another Dick motif) psychedelic reflection — less a coda than an ellipsis. (More info on Reddell/Zeit here, and get the full album here for free.)