Disquiet

Robert Willim, who records as Selko, gathered a host of musicians to record music based on sounds recorded at a sugar refinery in Sweden. The results are being released later this month as IC1 – The Birth of Industrial Cool, which features tracks by Scanner, Tonne, Mikael Stavöstrand, Rechenzentrum, Pheek and many others. According to Willim, he initially posted a track of his own, titled “Pneumatik,” online as a model for his contributors, to give them a sense of what he was after. When the project was nearing completion, he decided to include a different Selko track on the album, and then posted “Pneumatik” for free for the general public.

As for what Willim means by “industrial cool,” he describes it in part as follows: “an attempt at accentuating the potential beauty of industrial settings, partly by sonic recycling of sounds from factory milieus. In this way electronic music has the potential to alter our perception of the traditional industry.”

The song “Pneumatik” provides a solid blueprint, with its titular percussion, that compact sibilant whoosh, and its danceable automaton rhythm, very taut and suggestive. It’s a great track (file here). And for those who construct musique concrete at home, Willim has posted 38 unedited sound files straight from the refinery itself, ranging in length from 2 seconds to 43 seconds, their utilitarian content hinted at with titles like “Transporter,” “Stitcher” and “Mechanical Breath.” There’s more information available on the Industrial Cool album at its promotional website, pleazure.org/ic1.

The duo known as Soundvial played a handful of pieces at the December 5, 2003, Field Effects concert event in San Francisco. Two of those compositions are available for free download from the group’s website, at soundvial.org. One of them, “Le Saint Jean,” is a highly recommended work of augmented field recording. It consists of sound drawn from the real world and then subsequently fashioned into something that requires no particular taste for the experimental to be recognized as musical, even tuneful. The Soundvial site describes the track, concisely if incompletely, as “a rainy afternoon at a cafe in the 18th arrondissement of paris.” That’s a major understatement.

Like much of the work curated in the Field Effects series, Soundvial uses as its source material field recordings, sound captured in the wild — in this instance, the urban wild. But the sounds of the cafe (the clack of dishes, street noise, a woman’s voice) are just the start of the track, which reproduces them whole before introducing a guitar line and then looping segments of the found elements as melodic and rhythmic motifs. A sequence of ring tones divides the composition roughly in half, between the raw and the cooked. Hearing the raw materials reworked as song elements suggests that the listener think back on the first half of the piece as a kind of overture. At the very end, the unedited sounds are reprised briefly, which in turn suggests that the listener think back on the “musical” half of the piece as a kind of dream.

Soundvial consists of Ken Reisman and Matt Simon. For more information on the Field Effects series, visit fieldeffects.org.