Not all is grey static in the sound world of the excellent broadcast/podcast series Radius, out of Chicago. As always, it takes the phenomenon, the practice, of radio as its subject, but not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations. The entry by Desh & Ekis, “Xprmtal Short Wave Radio B-Side (Radius [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,voice
When we speak of dropped lines, we mean breaches in communication that are severe enough to cause the connection to end: a severing beyond mere degradation of transmitted information. In the capable hands of Schrödinger’s Dog, the dropped line takes on a double meaning. This is because the fragile sound of a fax handshake, the [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,gadget
Catherine McChrystal and Kara Q. Smith have co-hosted a podcast that complements the sound-focused current issue of artpractical.com, in which I have a story about the San Francisco area’s role in the sonic infrastructure of global arts. The audio track (available as a single MP3, and streaming at the “contemporary art talk” site badatsports.com) mixes [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,sound-art,voice
SoundCloud.com turns a particular idea of the bootleg on its head. The term “bootleg” is often associated with black market recordings, but much of the realm is actually more grey market: not fake versions of commercial goods, but commercial versions of uncommercial goods, such as live recordings or studio outtakes. SoundCloud is where many musicians, [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
I wonder if my whole interest in drones has to do with the 13-year-old me wishing the opening notes of Yes’ Fragile would go on forever. # Incredible sonic moire outside Old Navy in downtown San Francisco between store-entrance stereo speakers and drumming busker. # PR email received for band whose picture, artfully, doesn’t show [...]
Categories: field notes,site-maintenance
At 1:39, suspicions are verified. In the expansive world of experimental music, it’s pleasant to listen to each new individual track as a standalone entity, to take it as a self-contained whole, let its internal coherence be the ear’s sole guide — but there’s always some bit of metadata to help shape the imagination in [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
As heard later in an MP3, the performance is cut short. Not by the arrival of the fire marshall, or an electrical outage, or an assault from a member of the audience. The performance went on, but it’s cut short for those of us who didn’t make the April 21, 2012, event at the YU [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,Live Performance
From The Diaries Of The Too Numerous Cursed Poets by Mark Browne Mark Browne‘s Malapert and Erratic is an expansive and ambitious project: seven tracks, one over twenty minutes in length, none shorter than six minutes, all with lengthy titles somewhere between a Dickensian subtitle and a Fluxus manifesto, such as “Adjusting the Windows in [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
Burble, burble. This is “Finally Sunny,” a nearly four-minute piece by Rawore uploaded to his soundcloud.com/r-37 account. It’s a bubbly, synthesized rhythm, atop which, methodically, a melody of sorts comes into focus. The melody takes the form of occasional tones that move up and down and up again in a manner that suggests a loose, [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
I’ve been thinking in rhymes since MCA died. # Anyone strongly recommend a password manager? This “store your passwords in the cloud” thing seems, er, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. # 5th piece in this week’s Junto is by @ETALABEL (Poland). Like how each piece’s waveform is clearly divided in three: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 # Tatsuya Yoshida from [...]
Categories: field notes,site-maintenance
The songlessness of experimental music is often overstated. Autechre’s distressed digital inventions, for example, gain from their cover art an association with impossible architectures, things that CAD software can imagine but no general contractor could actually build. XYZR_KX of Chicago, aka Jon Monteverde, took the challenge upon himself to transform the turntable-laden, scratch-infused, murky wonderment [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
Alan Morse Davies has been posting some of his earliest work recently. He’s associated with the process of slowing down, though his work is often more complicated than simply the mechanical action of reducing the pace of his source material. A single dating from 1984, released under the moniker AED, shows him on the gentle [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,voice
Nils Quak is playing a show in Hamburg, Germany, on June 1. In advance of the event, he is prepping his live rig. We know this because he has posted an extended test run of his rig. It’s an attenuated sliver of ethereal momentum, aptly titled “Live Test.” The music is quite lovely. It’s also [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,Live Performance
Among the top 10 most popular posts of the past month, April 2012, were (1) an interview with Morton Subotnick (“The Patch Cord Godfather”) and (2) the announcement of a live Disquiet Junto concert in Chicago on April 19. Five of the 10 most popular posts were drawn from the daily recommended free downloads: (3) [...]
Categories: field notes,site-maintenance
The first half of the hour is Achim Mohné on a trio of turntables (Omnitronics), and the second is Philip Jeck on a pair (Dansettes, we’re informed) and in place of a third, Jeck employs a sampler. Both musicians take a device intended to project, to reproduce, sound and then they explore the device’s unintended [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,gadget,Live Performance
Musics from disparate cultures that occur during a similar era might have shared dispositions, shared characteristics, that become clear only as time progresses. Case in point: Ethan Hein‘s recent experiment in employing a Buchla modular synthesizer to rework source material from hip-hop, specifically the human beatboxing of Doug E Fresh. Fresh isn’t himself self-evident in [...]
Categories: downstream,Free,gadget,voice
RIP, Swiss artist David Weiss (b.1946) of Fischli/Weiss: Rube Goldberg-ish video The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) http://t.co/05DZynwH # RIP, Joe Muranyi (b. 1928), latter-day Dixieland clarinetist in Louis Armstrong’s band: http://t.co/5xUFnQiN, http://t.co/KrGmazuP # 17th Disquiet Junto project already has 2 new 1st-time participants: Biel, Switzerland’s @tobiasreber & NYC’s @clownfacee. # Somehow got [...]
Categories: field notes,site-maintenance
4’33 Neoteny: Jonathan Lethem gave the tenth State of Cinema address at the 55th San Francisco Film Festival on April 21, and wired.it posted a bootleg of the audio. The sprawling lecture, which is highly recommended, is very much a novelist welcoming film to post-relevancy. Of course, Lethem turns matters of relevancy on their head, [...]
Categories: field notes,ios,iPad,Video Games
Leonardo Rosado‘s “Sharp Knives Eyes” opens with what could easily be, or be mistaken for, the warning signals of fog-deep lighthouses, muffled and solemn sirens that pulse slowly and forbiddingly. As the track proceeds, the sounds soon move from apparent naturalism to a more representative approach, as what appears to be a slowly implemented guitar [...]
Categories: downstream,Free
As of this typing, the 18 seconds of static that I recorded off my hotel radio in Evanston, Illinois, last weekend has been played over 350 times on soundcloud.com. That’s 105 minutes of a bit of noise that served more as a trigger for an extrapolative thought process than as actual listening. The noise occurred [...]
Categories: downstream,Free