[ July 15, 2007 / bookmark ] MID-SUMMER SILENCE: A website about quiet music is probably the last place where one might feel the need to explain the virtues of silence. However, two months have passed since I posted at Disquiet.com, and it's time for a little explanation. I'm excited to report that in a few weeks, tops, Disquiet will be fully ported over to a content-management system that will improve the site in many ways. Searches will be vastly upgraded. All posts will now have their own, individual pages (as opposed to [...]
[ May 7, 2007 / bookmark ] SINGING ICEBERG: The musician and sound artist Joe Colley has a piece in which he puts clay in a small cup, attaches a contact microphone and pours in water. It's less a composition than it is a recipe, but what results sonically is complex beyond anything that brief description might suggest. As the clay slowly wakes up, the creaking and cracking, the bubbling and breaking apart, sounds like a field recording of some rich, expansive rain forest. The effect could be called "magnaphonic" music, works in [...]
[ May 5, 2007 / bookmark ] LIQUE-FICTION: Shortly after I moved back to San Francisco from New Orleans in 2003, I sat down with three science-fiction writers to talk about two parallel topics, how both San Francisco and science fiction had hit a glass window called reality. For the city at the time, it was life post-boom, after the Internet bubble had collapsed. Richard Kadrey ( Kamikaze L'Amour , Metrophage ), Pat Murphy ( The City, Not Long After ; The [...]
[ May 3, 2007 / bookmark ] CUT CHEMIST LECTURE: Another good Red Bull Academy Lecture, this one from ace turntablist and producer Cut Chemist , aka Lucas Macfadden , Jurassic 5 cohort and DJ Shadow collaborator. He talks about the difficulty (well, more the expense) in sampling rock stars, the downside of having a sample-laden track become a hit, potentially mythical court-ordered sound-file analysis, the influence of Ethiopian soul jazz, and Los Angeles during the early days of its hip-hop scene. It's not every DJ who can, in one interview, [...]
[ May 2, 2007 / bookmark ] JAPANESE DREAD MP3S: The six track EP The Castration by Ryu does include a track, the title cut, so to speak, in which the title word is repeated against what seems like lightly mediated field recordings of some ancient, indigenous ritual ( MP3 ). But that recitation, even with its vaguely William S. Burroughs-style blank intonation, is far from the most haunting thing here. "Schizo Voltaile Traqlzr" has the sort of sound design that usually accompanies a tracking shot through a deserted [...]
[ May 1, 2007 / bookmark ] LOU HARRISON MP3: The wayback machine that is the Other Minds catalog at the Internet Archive (aka archive.org ) has set its dial to May 14, 1977, when a concert at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California, celebrated the 60th birthday of composer Lou Harrison , who would have turned 90 this year ( MP3 ). The recording was originally broadcast on Los Angeles radio KPFK, and was the inaugural show of the Imaginary Landscape radio series, cohosted by composer Carl Stone, then [...]
[ April 30, 2007 / bookmark ] THESE MP3S WERE MADE FOR WALKIN': If you follow, or are simply intrigued by, sound art, then one date is well worth pencilling into your calendar: September 22 is the fourth annual Sound Walk in Long Beach, California. And if you make sound art, there's a second, more pressing date to note: July 1 is the deadline for entry proposals. The Sound Walk is an installation-oriented affair, during which speakers are attached to walls, hung as art, hidden in shrubbery and otherwise worked into the Long [...]
[ April 25, 2007 / bookmark ] DUBSTEP LECTURE: The term dubstep may just be a new branding experiment for illbient, but one of the genre's most proficient enactors, Kode 9 , lagging from a recent flight, shed some light on its dark contours when he spoke at length as part of the Red Bull Music Academy late last year. Kode described the music as a sideways outgrowth of the more reggae side of UK garage, which is to say music of choppy velocity that makes room for some dubby swing. The [...]
[ April 24, 2007 / bookmark ] INSECTOID MP3S: Machines may not yet have gained sentience, but in Paul Feyertag 's work they certainly achieve an insectoid fervor. The opening track on Suburban Decollage , "Contrary Motion," suggests a nightmarish scenario of constant death in the classic arcade game Centipede, whose familiar 8-bit synthetic tones were as chunky and mechanoid as the avatars to whose battles they lent a soundtrack ( MP3 ). The later "Ostinato" has a thick overlay of burbling noise, but just below is a quickly shifting hive [...]
[ April 23, 2007 / bookmark ] SOUND PERFORMANCE MP3: The event xxxxx23 held at Limehouse Town Hall, London, on March 23, 2006, brought together various speakers on esoteric subjects broadly associated with "the rich consequences of expanded software." Among them was Swedish sound artist Leif Elggren , who opened his 20-minute performance with a simple but strange pronouncement: "This basic sound material was recorded in my biological mother's uterus," he says, "with my not yet developed teeth used as a fundamental and simple recording device a few days before my birth. [...]
[ April 16, 2007 / bookmark ] KRACFIVE REMIX MP3: You'll come for the brittle beats, but you'll stay for the supple curves. That's Colongib and Octopus Inc 's "Remix of Freeform Audio Tourism" in a nutshell. The track, the latest free monthly entry from the kracfive.com collective, starts with a crack of fire that could, alternately, be a radio signal coming into focus ( MP3 ). What follows includes wood percussion, taut guitar strings plucked like bicycle spokes, and all manner of ticking, beating, thrumming goodness. But [...]
[ April 13, 2007 / bookmark ] PROCEDURAL MP3S: Bruno Ribeiro creates short, narrative-like tracks from found sounds, B-movie atmospheres and vaguely mechanistic rhythms. The four songs that comprise his Edit, Transform, Renew, Create album on the MiMi netlabel ( clubotaku.org/mimi ) include shimmering noise set against glistening shards ("Na Passagem Das Horas," MP3 ) and what seem like broadcast snippets forged into something sinister ("The Post-Orgasmic Sleep or the Dream of the Magenta and Blue Organic World," MP3 ). The album's title lays bare Ribeiro's technique: [...]
[ April 12, 2007 / bookmark ] LIVE BUDDHA MP3: The Buddha Machine has taken on a life of its own. It was created as a portable sound-art automaton, but far more music has resulted from the battery-operated Buddha than was anticipated by its creators, the duo FM3 ( Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian ). The pocket-size device, which retails for around 25 dollars, contains a chip with nine short sonic loops. Those loops gain a certain lo-fi grit thanks to cheap plastic and a rudimentary, cyclopean speaker. Like [...]
[ April 11, 2007 / bookmark ] CYMBAL-TO-NOISE MP3S: According to cut.fm , the label that released Gunter Muller 's recent album, Reframed , the musician is a former drummer who's gone drone. He hasn't entirely given up his original instrumentation, though. He's just simplifed, way down. Each of the album's five cuts is composed from "processed recordings of bowed cymbals." Up on the label's website are two-minute excerpts from each of those five pieces, from undulating expanses of structureless tone ( MP3 ) to what seem like distant bells [...]
[ April 10, 2007 / bookmark ] TRUE OPEN-SOURCE MP3S: We discover music that's new to us in various ways: a snippet heard in a movie, a fragment caught mid-broadcast on radio, an entry in a random podcast and, certainly the most dependable system, tracking down original work attributed to someone with a small supporting credit on an album one already admires. Well, here's a new route entirely: if you have a favorite piece of shareware, check out the website of the software's programmer. Aaron "Jomdom" [...]
[ April 9, 2007 / bookmark ] FILMIC HERBERT MP3: Score is a new album collecting background music by someone who has recently been pursuing a spot in the foreground. It's a retrospective compilation by Herbert (born Matthew Herbert and aka Doctor Rockit) of pieces he's written over the years for film, cues of churning, introspective textures by someone whose modus operandi of late has been decidedly extroverted: using his Plat du Jour album as a bully pulpit against consumerism, moonlighting from electronica to front a big [...]
[ March 29, 2007 / bookmark ] EMAIL OUTAGE: Email sent to this website between 11pm Pacific Time today and Saturday, March 31, may be iffy. I'm in the process of changing email service providers. Apologies for any inconvenience.
[ March 26, 2007 / bookmark ] TWEAKED REALITY MP3S: Been a while since the Downstream has included an entry from the ever expanding "Remix! Tree" at the Freesound website, freesound.iua.upf.edu . The site is a trading place for recorders and admirers of raw field recordings. The Tree is where folks go to tweak sonic reality more to their liking. Take, for example, a trio of tracks that begin with eerily dripping water drops ( MP3 ), then loop a segment to distantly musical effect ( MP3 ), finally warping the material [...]
[ April 2, 2007 / bookmark ] SHOEGAZER TECHNO MP3S: Dublin-based act Decal has posted a small heap of unreleased material at his website, decal-artifacts.com , much in the vein of just slightly tweaked techno, like the drolly titled "Forumla for Change" ( MP3 ), which maintains its 4/4 metrics while cycling through all mannger of moody dance floor modes. The keeper is "Dropping Quays" ( MP3 ), which slaps a literally offbeat bit of rhythm into the mix, grounding an otherwise familiar pulse by making it more complex than [...]
[ March 20, 2007 / bookmark ] MORR DOCUMENTARY MP3S: The Morr label's podcast ( link ) offers an opportunity to peek inside the laptops, and brains, of its musicians. Most recently, Bernhard Fleischmann spoke in detail about the recording of the two long live sets that comprise his most recent album, Melancholy/Sendestrasse . ("I like very long, very repetitive tracks a lot.") Regarding "Melancholy," he shows how a few basic electronic chords grew, through accrual and collaboration, to a piece rich with heavily mediated cello. The making of "Sendestrasse" [...]
Disquiet.com
Bison - Quill
Neutral Milk Hotel- Aeroplane Over the Sea
Shinichi Osawa – Big Beach Mix 2012
Mr Fogg - Eleven
