An act named Echtzeit had one of the standout tracks on a compilation titled Music to Listen to Music By, released a year and a half ago on Private Elektro Records, which is based in Leipzig, Germany (website here). Echtzeit has resurfaced with a new name, C:/, and two new tracks, both hosted for the past month by Private Elektro (here). The downloads couldn’t be more different from each another. One is close to eight minutes of overlapping sine waves and beats, all of whose internal clocks are slightly out of step, which leads to wonderful rhythmic surprises, the audio equivalent of optical illusions. At times a light keyboard melody, reminiscent of the 1980s synthesizer renaissance, arrives to lend a song-like coherence. The other track, a lengthy drone piece, dispenses with rhythm almost entirely, unless you count the waves of rumbling that constitute the work’s lower register and the occasional chimes that define its upper reaches.
Halloween MP3
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And where there’s a campfire, there are ghost stories to be heard. So in the spirit of Halloween, the final MP3 for this week’s Downstream is a five-minute tape of a late night fire. It’s ambient by the most traditional definition of that word: a document of environmental sound. And it’s fairly spooky, even if unintentionally so. The location of the file (here) is the Phonography Archive (here), a haven for audio files uploaded by members of a phonography online discussion group.
Phonography is the art of field recordings, and the Phonography Archive is a repository of the taped work of the discussion group’s members. (The group is open to the public and can be found on its Yahoo page, here.) On the main page of the Phonography Archive site as of today are recordings of a Malaysian rain forest and of Chinese New Year celebrations in Amsterdam, of a metro entrance in Lisbon and of downtown Oklahoma City on a cold winter day. Most entries are annotated briefly, and the pieces are not to be mistaken as mere audio snapshots. There’s a compositional philosophy at work in much of phonography. The Viennese artist Bernhard Gal writes of one of his audio postings, a recording of a Taiwanese market: “by moving through the surrounding soundscape, i performed ‘my personal acoustical interpretation’ of the location, creating what might be looked at as a subjective sonic fingerprint of a typical taipei night market.” The description sounds very much like that of a fine photographer who composes within the confines of the camera lens. Phonographers are not categorically opposed to editing. Writes Gal, “the only modification i made is a short loop in the end of the piece which i found necessary in order to create a fade out/an adequate ending.”
As for this sublime five-minute MP3 of quiet fire, it was recorded by S. Arden Hill, who goes by the moniker Duul_Drv (homepage here). Hill’s track annotation records both the fire’s pastoral setting (“This recording was made at West Hawk Lake, Manitoba, Canada on a camping expedition. We got a fire going about 1 am and recorded this sample in between marshmellows”) and the phonographer’s ham-radio-like attention to technical detail (“Recorded with Sony MZ-N707 and ECM-DS70P stereo Mic”). For all the annotation, of course, a field recording is as much a touchstone for the imagination as is a traditionally composed piece of music. So download today’s Downstream track (again, here), and others in the Archive, and listen for the ghosts in the phonographer’s recording machine.
Silent (Running) MP3s
An album of science-fiction-themed electronic music from Canada, Pheek‘s new collection, Tabisuru Kokoro, is the latest release from Thinnerism Records. Thinnerism is a German label that distributes its music online as free sets of MP3s. Pheek is Jean-Patrice Remillard, a Montreal-based musician who favors the key ingredients in minimal house: the willfully tepid beats, the tiniest of riff-like elements (mechanical echo effects, bells so distant they could be from the next track), almost all of it composed from a select palette of staccato samples, with the occasional enlivening wash of sound across the stereo spectrum. The album is reportedly a tribute to the sci-fi film Silent Running, for which Peter Schickele (the classical-music parodist better known as PDQ Bach) wrote the score, and which also featured songs sung by folkie Joan Baez. The only apparent vocal on Pheek’s album is a spoken snippet, on the opening track (“There You Are”), of Silent Running star Bruce Dern. Tabisuru Kokoro contains nine tracks: six originals and three remixes, one each by Taho, Mateo Murphy and Jeff Bennett. It was uploaded to the Thinnerism website (thinnerism.com) on Tuesday, October 27, and is located here.
Franco-Japanese Video
Wondering what Daft Punk, the French electronic group, has been up to? They’ve collaborated with longtime anime figure Leji Matsumoto on feature-length release, Interstella 5555, due out on DVD on November 18. The film is subtitled “The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.” It premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival, and has been exhibited at ResFest, the touring film festival, which has an emphasis on desktop production and electronic music. Three rocket-fueled, funkified clips (partial synopsis: kids in band fight off mysterious costumed evil-doers) from the film are viewable on its promotional site (here).
Quote of the Week: Battle Sounds
From a review of Saira Shah‘s Afghanistan memoir, The Storyteller’s Daughter:
[S]he is disturbed by the Taliban commander, met on leave in Pakistan, who tapes the sound of battles he has fought “so that I can play them later for relaxation and so that my name will live forever”
New York Times Book Review, Sunday, October 26 (nytimes.com).