Through a Microphone, Darkly

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

C. Reider is a one-man game of telephone. The voices that enter his recording devices exit entirely transformed. Almost invariably, what was said in the first place is altered beyond any sort of verbal comprehension. There are instances on the opening track of his recent Aughtet album (Vuzh Music) where, amid the sub-bass rumblings, a distant human utterance might be identifiable, but it’s a voice on the far end of an extremely bad extension. You can sense the anxiety, but you cannot discern the cause. Of course, Reider has such control over his source material that he could probably make the most erudite politician sound like a patient at an Asperger Syndrome clinic. For all we know, the voice on this track is reading saccharine poetry from a Hallmark card.

Since the advent of the mobile phone, it’s become abundantly apparent that proximity and clarity are no longer directly proportional. For that reason, even the most alien sounds on Aughtet may ring more true than the false promises of Sprint and Verizon spokespeople. Reider’s sound art revels in the everyday dissonance of the overheard and the misheard. Aughtet’s second track begins with a tantalizingly false promise. The word “siblings” sounds loud and clear, but what is subsequently spoken is chopped, cut, garbled and mix-matched into a mosaic of broken syllables, even the vowels fractured into harsh, otherworldly consonants. Reider plays many games with his chosen sounds. On “Lumchumble,” a giggle and a “huh” flit in and out, repeated like a stuttered mumble. He embraces the almost purely rhythmic on “Narh Narh.” Several tracks bring to mind the gender-bending games of early Laurie Anderson multimedia performance art, others the nonsense mouth-play of Charles Schulz cartoon adults and Jerry Lewis comic antics, but they’re just as likely untouched surveillance tapes of Wookie psychoanalysis sessions. “Organic Machinery C 3,” looped like a deep, beat-less techno track, pushes voices beyond any identifiable human tone, but the best work here may be where a voice, however remotely, makes itself heard, as on “Vian II-V,” which reproduces something close to the cumulative rush of crowd-speak. These are the half-remembered narratives from nightmares, warped like the faces in Francis Bacon paintings.

London-Based MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, regularly transforms field recordings into subtly rhythmic, often ethereal music. He’s uses everything from voices caught on surveillance equipment (hence his moniker) to tapes of Andy Warhol interviews (see his recent album, Warhol’s Surfaces). Five MP3 files that comprise a Scanner work titled Surface Noise are available for free download on his website (here); to access them, visit the site and click on the “MP3” tab on the site’s top bar. Scanner’s most common source material is the human voice, but for Surface Noise the sounds are field recordings from around London. Here’s how Rimbaud described the project: “Making a route determined by overlaying the sheet music from ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ onto a map of London, I recorded the sounds and images at points where the notes fell on the cityscape. These co-ordinates provided the score for the piece and by using software that translated images into sound and original source recordings, I was able to mix the work live on each journey through a speaker system we installed throughout the bus, as it followed the original walk shuttling between Big Ben and St Paul’s Cathedral.” At the moment, the MP3 page on Scanner’s site also links to ubu.com, where four complete works he produced for BBC radio are archived (here).

Dead Streams

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Deadbeat is the pseudonym of one Scott Monteith, the Montreal, Canada-based electronic musician. Several Real Audio streams of his work are available on the audio page (here) of his website (here). Be sure to check out the hour-long Deadbeat performance of dubby ambience from May 2003 at the Mutek Festival, as well as his half-hour live collaboration, with Monolake (aka Robert Henke), as Atlantic Waves, from the May 2002 Mutek fest.

Laptop Concert in Tokyo Nest

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At a club called Shibuya Nest in Tokyo, Japan, on February 9 of 2003, Christian Fennesz, who records under his last name, took the stage with his laptop and let loose three quarters of an hour of sublimation and noise. The event is now available as full-length CD, Live in Japan, from the Tokyo-based label Headz. Aside from one fadeout half an hour in, it’s a single continuous piece of music — continuous, but not homogenous by any means. What is beautiful in a familiar way about the recording (the occasional spurts of guitar, the squawking of birdsong, various lyrical samples) is often muffled by layers of static and fuzz. And that static and fuzz, in turn, is often shaped into its own musical material — repeated, for example, until what sounds like interference becomes a riff; the experience is a bit like seeing enormous and threatening clouds overhead come to resemble faces and forms. (Throughout the record, various segments might be recognized by anyone who has heard Fennesz’s previous Endless Summer and Field Recordings albums.) His music thrives on its proximity to chaos, which is what makes it sublime. In contrast with cathartic work that openly embraces chaos, his has the detailed beauty of a carefully produced song, though that song may take several listens to hear, and the production several listens more to appreciate.

Almost seven minutes into Live in Japan (the disc contains one single track, 43 minutes in length), after a flurry of fuzz has settled down, an acoustic guitar surfaces tentatively to provide a distinct signal. The digital hubbub subsides, soothed like a pack of digital beasts, rabid robot scouts lured to the campfire by the promise of a lullaby. The hisses and crunches that had previously defined the recording seem to coalesce around the guitar, echoing or otherwise complementing the melody that’s being plucked and strummed. There’s an extent to which these fluctuations and irritants are welcome, since some of the guitar playing sounds like second-rate singer-songwriter mush. Twenty minutes or so in, as an electric guitar emerges, again it’s downright enticing how peculiar particulate sounds — bleeps like terse foghorns, scintillate like amplified fireflies — mesh with the guitar. On first listening, the noise can be little more than a distraction. But Fennesz has the unique ability to suggest an interplay between what is foreground and what is background, and how those two merge into one thick moment is what makes Live in Japan worth sitting through repeatedly. So heat up some sake, dim the lights, and sink in.

Downjungledubtempo MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cambridge, Mass.-based musician Keith Fullerton Whitman, aka Hrvatski, occasionally posts MP3 files of outakes and works-in-progress on his reckankomplex.com website. The current item is what he calls “a completely alternate demo version” of “You Didn’t Look High Enough,” the original of which appeared on his 1999 collection, Oiseaux 96-98, due for re-release in an expanded edition on February 3, 2004 (he promises to pack it with extra material in MP3 format). Whitman describes this archival find as “replete with a zany dub breakdown & some dope ‘sound of ’96’ minimal amen-grunkerie, albeit scarred from nasty digital distortions (which we feel add to the experience). in one word: dope,” all packed into little more than four minutes. In other words, it’s a heavily constructed track, with familiar elements — the dub and the mid-’90s jungle percussion, for example — that are spliced together in a manner that draws attention to how distinct they are from one another. The dub is deep and earthy, the percussion erratic and mechanistic, and while either sound might be a tad dated, Whitman’s ear for keen edits, tribal momentum and spacious pauses is completely fresh. In the best meaning of the phrase, it’s a true kitchen-sink marvel, with what sounds like typewriter percussion preceding the more common, but still inventively cadenced, drum machine. Check out his home page, or access the file directly. (And read a past Disquiet.com interview with him here: “Army of One.”)