The Kracfive label’s MP3 of the month is Colongib‘s dubby remix of Cex‘s “At Least One Unwilling Passenger” (MP3 file here, MP3 of the month page here, Kracfive website at kracfive.com). Though the laptop computer is an arguably neutral music-making tool, this track exemplifies what some might call a “laptop aesthetic”: starting and stopping at will, it is slacker-careless in its cut’n’paste randomness, and poppy despite its incoherence. It’s also a lot of fun.
Another Game Boy MP3
Overthruster‘s Meth Date Dance Party is the sound of geriatric robots taking their last dance, all creaky and sad, occasionally tripping up, and not moving entirely under their own power. Reportedly recorded last November as a live DJ set, the nearly 20-minute track has the steady underlying beats and limited palette of German minimal techno, but with two tasty switches.
First of all, it was rendered entirely on a Nintendo Game Boy, using the Little Sound DJ software. Even most minimal techno, for all its sonic doldrums, still is glossy and aurally rich, those dubby subterranean bass tones oh so murky. No such production concerns for Overthruster (or “Overthrustr,” occasionally, in the documentation), which is satisfied with the four channels of four-bit sound inherent in the Game Boy’s circuitry.
Second, the Meth Date set is offered as an unambiguously lo-res, lo-fi 16kbps file. What this means, in practical terms, is that the data is saved at less than one tenth the fidelity of the average MP3 file. What this means, in audio terms, is that every beat, every note, flutters with interference. For a piano recital, this would be unacceptable. For Overthruster, it’s ambience. Overthruster’s Meth Date Dance Party is techno heard through a CB radio, darkly. It’s available as a free download from the appropriately named 20kbps netlabel, at 20kbps.sofapause.ch (zip file here, complete with cover art and a text-file liner note); it was added to the 20kbps site on January 28, 2004. More info on Little Sound DJ at littlesounddj.com.
Transmetropolitan MP3
Warren Ellis, author (Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Authority), pop-culture pundit and increasingly ubiquitous web presence, has been threatening for some time to release a spoken-word CD, in collaboration with Scott Lamb, programmer and leader of the goth-rock quartet Deathboy. A taste of what such a beast might resemble, “Revolution” (MP3 file here), was uploaded onto Ellis’ diepunyhumans.com website yesterday at 6:48PM London time, according to the blog’s index. He describes it as “a futurephoned rant by me folded into an apocalyptic piece of EBM” — “electronic body music” that is, four-the-floor dance-stuff. It’s housey track of retro techno, with Ellis’ voice laying down misanthropy by the yard: “You know who the scariest animal in the world is? Us. Because there are six billion of us, we are capable of anything, and we do as we are told.” And: “Human beings are scary because we are too stupid to live.”
All in all, more interesting is the scenario that led up to “Revolution,” in Ellis’ words: “The silly bastard literally just MMSed me at 1.30 in the morning asking me to record a ranty bit on the phone and beam it over to his so he could chuck it into his cauldron of tortured computer bits. And people ask if I really need a futurephone. How else could we make mad shit on the run?” Still, it’s a promising start, suggesting he’s headed in a different direction than the audio experiments of his fellow British comic-book writers, like Alan Moore, who goes mystic on a series of CDs, including Angel Passage and Highbury Working, and Neil Gaiman, who has fiddled with the radio-drama format (Two Plays for Voices).
More on Ellis at warrenellis.com. More on Deathboy at deathboy.co.uk. You have to admire a band that lists its members as if they were Dungeons and Dragons characters, in terms of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, etc. How about Bitrate and Memory Cache?
Quote of the Week: Sonic Fiction
This is an early passage from science fiction author Greg Egan‘s new novel, Schild’s Ladder (Eos/HarperCollins):
As she entered the chamber, she seemed to emerge from the mouth of a burrow to float above a lush, wide meadow beneath a cloud-dappled sky. The illusion was purely audiovisual — the sounds encoded in radio waves — but with no weight to hold her against the ceramic hidden beneath the meadow, the force of detail was eerily compelling. It took only a few blades of grass and some chirping insects to make her half-believe that she could smell the late-summer air.
The setup is too complex to do justice, but suffice to say that the character described here finds herself adjusting to an artificial environment hundreds of light years from her home on Earth.
Veem MP3 Album
A few days after his interview on Disquiet.com (“Shawnee for ‘Laptop'”), Brad Mitchell (aka Pocka) has posted a new set of MP3 files on the netlabel he runs, Kikapu.com. Number 58 in the label’s catalog, Veem‘s Station album is an hour of instrumentals, its seven tracks clinically labeled “000” through “600.” It opens with ten minutes straight of far out space drones, deep clouds of sound crossing each other like porous Venn diagrams. As if for the sake of orientation, toward the end a pulse appears, a beep really, every 10 seconds or so, too infrequently to serve any traditional rhythmic purpose. It’s like a pod slowly arriving from the other side of the galaxy — no doubt trafficking a load of classic white-label singles lifted from a multi-tentacled DJ in the Beta Pictoris solar system.
The pod beeps its last beep in time to usher in track two, “001,” which is one of the better songs in recent memory to play with sort of “ping pong” sound that both Monolake and Plastikman experimented with on their recent albums. The simple beats are set in motion, slowly building up rhythmic complexity. Not too soon, elements that last more than a split second begin to appear, and as the track nears the four-minute mark these longer phrases become the dominant motif. To that extent, “001” is the opposite of “000” — its beats disappear into, rather than out of, the haze. The remaining tracks run the gamut, from a loose jazzy electric piano melody (“002”) to jangly detuned guitar lines (“005”) to, in the end (“006”), a fairly bouncy bit of wordless pop. (Kikapu at kikapu.com; Veem album here.)