another thought
Arthur Russell - Another Thought (Keeping Up)
tropisms (part II)
The second release in our series of Tropisms is now available as a high quality download. This one contains the next three Tropisms. Download it here.
fugue
- Josef Albers, Fugue (about 1925)
- Henri Nouveau, plastic representation of the Fugue in E Flat Minor by JS Bach, 1928
I'm consistently drawn to expressions of music in other media. Here's two expressions of the structural properties of the Fugue from the Bauhaus period.
heartbreak
Heartbreak live @ Bethnal Green Working Men's Club (Last.fm presents), photo by Russ.
Just perfect.
tropisms
'Tropisms' is the latest Cacao release. It contains the first two tropisms in a series which will be released in parts. The tropisms are sonic versions of Nathalie Sarraute's interpretation of the term, exemplified in her literary work of the same name (more). You can download the artwork & release in full.
No synthesizers were used.
zimmer
Zimmer is one of our custom-made max/msp instruments which we use in Cacao. Click the image for a full-size version.
chromophobia
Gui Boratto / Chromophobia
Another remix from The Field on this one. Axel Willner keeps a distinctive, simple style through all of his production work. I admire the consistency.
utopia
Wild Combination: A portrait of Arthur Russell is screening in Berlin in Feb 2008 and then hopefully the rest of the world. Here's a video teaser. Don't miss.
woebot
It has long been my plan to call it a day at the blog after five years, but more recently I've decided to draw a line under all my online contributions... Why am I going "offline"? I think I've explored every aspect of the experience and that now it's time to do something different, not necessarily something public either, the shape of which I'm still figuring out...
- Woebot, Jan 2008
Woebot has long been one of my favourite music writers (since 2004 or so). He will be sorely missed. To get a flavour of his writing try posts like Post Punk obscurities judged unfairly by the cover, A Pre-History of British Electronic Music, Prog(ish) or his sprawling Jazz retrospective. His archive is a goldmine of commentary on overlooked music. He also set up the popular forum Dissensus. Best of luck with new projects Matthew.
experiment
When I finally present a work it is not an experiment - it is a finished product.
- Edgard Varése, upon being dubbed 'experimental' by critics.
select
Whereby I finally take some days off work and deem it appropriate to write about some of the music I'm listening to. Note: You can click the thumbnails for big pretty pictures.
Chris Corsano / Michael Flower - Earth/Wind/Fire
An almighty overdriven banjo jams with Corsano on percussion. Proper freak-out stuff. The banjo seems a lot more nimble an instrument than the guitar. Which makes for some good spazz. Elemental.
Frank Bretschneider - Rhythm
As clinical, forensic and deft as you'd expect. One of my favourite Bretschneider releases this one. As the title suggests, it's full of beats. Pretty lively and about as accessible as Raster-Noton gets.
Ankersmit/O'Rourke Split
O'Rourke seems to be using one of those shitty overdrive guitar pedals fifteen year old kids go to Denmark Street to pick up. They come in lots of different colours and have names like 'hyperdrive'. Despite that it's a fairly good guitar piece from him. Ankersmit takes his sax on a power-drill drone that I am definitely feeling. I think he edges it. I'd like to see him live now.
Oren Ambarchi - Stacte Motors
Ambarchi attaches motors to a guitar and cymbals to create pretty novel rhythmic noise pieces. The guitar piece is insanely physical and immersive and probably the most interesting thing i've heard this year. If anyone tells you this is 'dad noise' they are full of shit.
Sylvain Chauveau - Nuage
Film score from Chauveau. Hit and miss. Orchestral strings and his brand of minimal piano. Distinctive in places, pedestrian in others.
sodeoka
Yoshi Sodeoka, 'Bloodless, Empty Socket' (from 'Noise Driven Ambient Audio And Visuals')
More @c505
sonata
Cacao's second release — Sonatas For VHS — is now available. You can listen to any track in full or download the entire release (including artwork) on the Cacao page. Sonatas For VHS is a re-working of Franz Schubert's last three piano sonatas, which were written just months before his death at the age of 31. Our field recordings come from Melissi & Rotterdam this time around.
UPIC
Haswell/Hecker, UPIC Diffusion Session #13 @ Conway Hall
→ More on UPIC
→ More on the Conway Hall
xerrox
Carsten Nicolai processes muzak culled from hotels, airports & in-flight airline programs in xerrox.
supersonic.
Listen to 14 Live Sets from Supersonic 2007 in their entirety. Supersonic was held in Birmingham in July and included folks such as Sunn O))), Jazkamer, Mogwai, Modified Toy Orchestra and Wolf Eyes.
domes.
'Domes of the World' is now available as a packaged download (.zip, 69MB) - you get the whole record in high quality mp3 and high resolution artwork (click above) to boot. You can reach it from the Cacao page where you can also preview any track on the EP.
Miranda & I have another mini-album in the works that should be complete in the next month or so, as well as a couple of video pieces on the way. I'll shout on here when they're up.
italopsicle in london fields
Afterwards you might want to check this compilation of italodisco artwork, design and paraphernalia (Youtube link).
semiconductor - worlds in flux
Fatcat have recently released a compilation of Brighton-based Semiconductor's audiovisual work on DVD, and I must say it's great. I particularly like the 'Microclimates' piece, in which real landscapes are subtly altered. You may have seen a number of these pieces before, but it's well worth the compilation. More here.
phonogram
In my article of 12 years ago I enumerated among the uses to which the phonograph would be applied: 1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation, without the aid of a stenographer. 2. Phonographic books, which would speak to the blind people without effort on their part. 3. The teaching of elocution. 4. Reproduction of music. 5. The "Family Record", a registry of sayings, reminiscences etc, by members of a family, in their own voices: and of the last words of dying persons. 6. Music boxes and toys. 7. Clocks that should announce, in articulate speech, the time for going home, going to meals, etc. 8. The preservation of languages... 9. Educational purposes: such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher... 10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that invention an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records...- Tomas Alva Edison, The Phonogram, 1890
"what is noise to the old order is harmony to the new"
Nestled deep in Jacques Attali's brilliant multi-disciplinary analysis of sound in human society, 'Noise - the political economy of music', i found this,
Inevitably, the statistical evaluation of the quantity of the representation will be adopted. The usage of music will be evaluated exclusively by polls determining the quantity of the music broadcast. Musicians will be renumerated according to statistical keys and treated as producers of a stockpile of undifferentiated raw material. This shift relates to a statistical reality: the disappearance of use-value in mass production and the final triumph of exchange-value.- Jacques Attali, 'Noise', 1977
Attali's fourth stage (after sacrifice, representation and repetition) is composition, in which he puts his money on technology liberating the music makers from the aforementioned scenario.
If you haven't been exposed to Attali's oft-quoted work, try this for a provocative hypothesis,
Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.
Skim an overview of 'Noise', read an interview with Attali by a lecturer at LCC ( where he shows his broadly optimistic view on technology in the culture industry) and finally peruse his snazzy website.
the wow starts now
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.
- Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Music
In related news, we've just signed a deal with warner.
cacao: a sound project
For the past 3 months, Miranda & I have been pooling field recordings and massaging them with max/msp. So far we've recorded musical toys, xylophone stairs, carousels, people trying to whistle, bees, ducks, the Parisian metro and all manner of street sounds. Our field recording setup is described here, and you can see my first (messy) max patch here. Little by little, we're putting together a batch of recordings entitled 'Domes of the World'. 'Domes' is still on-going, but you can check out some Cacao previews.
audioscrobbler stickers are in
My iBook now carries what is probably the first audioscrobbler sticker ever. Yum.
claude debussy's shoutbox is empty
Just got back from a long weekend of field recordings and slow gestures in Paris. A strip of the south bank of the seine (by the 'jardin des plantes') was the visual highlight - photos here. We stumbled upon it really, following an episode with a carousel (obvious soundmark, but rewarding nonetheless). A polyphony of celebratory car horns - a wedding chorus - producing unusual timbres was the aural highlight.
I snapped a photo of miranda amongst trees, holding the fuzzy neck of our Rode NTG2 condenser microphone. She will hate me for this, no doubt.
More on the sound project sometime soon. I leave you with this gross generalisation: the continent is slow, insular and comfortable. I may live there some day.
last.fm chart arcs
One of our talented data miners, Martin, put these chart arcs up on our data playground last week. They show chart positions and movements of artists in our profile, along with popularity information. Turns out i probably have the least 'mainstream' taste of any of the last.fm staff. For further explanation and all the staff chart arcs, visit the last.fm chart arcs page on our playground.
why do we stop?
Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one.
- Joshua Kit Clayton, website announcement upon the closure of record label Orthlorng Musork.
free as in free-time.
Organized freedom is compulsory. Woe betide you if you have no hobby, no pastime.
- Theodor Adorno, "Free Time"
As you may have noticed by the activity around here, i've taken a few days off work to catch up with myself. Most of my time off has been taken up with a crash course on DSP using my shiny new copy of MAX/MSP.
Last night i even ventured to North West London (gasp) to catch Junior Boys for their first (overdue) London show. The photos are here. Really ace to see everyone again. I should stumble out of East London more often...
last.fm
I'm joining social music service last.fm as a full-time developer in a couple of weeks over at their new office in old st (it still looks like a mess - story + pics). As those who know me will confirm, i have views on social software and how culture can suck less under new classification, distribution and publishing models, so i'm really looking forward to getting stuck into moderation strategies, web services, folksonomy and data mining. Particularly psyched to find individuals i respect (e.g. Joi Ito) among the investors.
It should be a tremendous year for last.fm. Hopefully i can play my part in that.
handycam.
Hard to think one company could come up with design excellence like my old handycam as well as design crimes such as the jewel case (what an environmentally damaging design, aside from its aesthetic and functional problems), all in one decade.
I have a phobia of jewel cases. I had to encode all my CD's to digital format just so i could throw them away.
This handycam features a single battery pack that plugs into the 8mm tape player, the camera and the battery charger as well. That's modular design. The whole kit comes in a metal handycam briefcase. Testament to what was arguably a golden age in technology product design.
Still works to this day (more than 20 years of use). Try saying that of your Sony Cybershot in 2026.
immemory.
In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work i had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful pastoral pieces I had forgotten about[...] with excitement i began recording the first one to cd[...] To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating[...] the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape[...] i was recording the death of this sweeping melody[...] it was very emotional for me, and mystical as well[...] on September 11th I was on my roof in Brooklyn, less than 1 mile from the World Trade Center[...] We saw those towering structures fall before our very eyes[...] We were apalled[...] We sat on the roof terrace on lawn chairs and watched the fires burning all day into night with the Disintegration Loops playing in the background...
- William Basinski, Liner Notes, Disintegration Loops I-IV
William Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' recordings are a tribute to analog media's temporality; to its ability to invoke human nostalgia. You will not find a better example in the audioture of the 20th century of how memory embeds itself in media and vice versa. Listening in is a shattering experience.
William can post his recordings out to you direct, check his releases page. Here's a pitchfork review if you like that sort of thing.
viscous.
More complicated, viscous and vicious than just about anything out on the free market
- On computer musician Florian Hecker, Cut & Splice festival press ahead of next weekend's performance.
Curiously, Mego seem to have archived my old review of Hecker's PV Trecks and Farmer's Manual have done the same with my old review of Cut'n'Splice 2003. Nice to be duplicated, i guess.
