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Some things, pretty, digital.A download, watch, and listen blog by he can jog.
Blessed Feathers18.03.11
Video by Wooden Lens. Music by Milwaukee troubadours Blessed Feathers.
2010 Favorites: Tanner Menard – You Had Not Changed But Your Cameras Were No Longer Identical28.12.10
Tanner Menard (behind the laptops)
This is the first in a series of 2010 favorites. This year, I actually kept a list all year long so I wouldn’t forget the great things that happened early on. Tanner Menard‘s You Had Not Changed But Your Cameras Were No Longer Identical was never in danger of being forgotten. I’ve returned to it over and over as the year passed by and it never managed to stay far from my mind.
He describes the 24 minute piece as an “attempt to forge a virtuoso exploration of raw symphonic emotion and uncompromisingly poetic romanticism.” There’s nothing overly saccharine about this piece, it’s deeply patient, but there’s a background radiation of longing somewhere deep below the patient surface that keeps drawing me back to it in fits and cravings.
Download the the whole thing for free from High Liner Music. (Direct link)
Ted James Butler – ENSONIQ FIZMO P4927.12.10
Ted James Butler uploaded this piece of frosty drone to youtube as a demonstration of a patch he’d come up with on the ensoniq fizmo. It’s impressive as a piece of gear minimalism: one oscillator, and some apparently simple settings to the synth — but forget about all that. Stir the marshmallows into your hot chocolate and sip on this tasty drone.
Ric Larsen – Campanas del Alba (Eduardo Sainz de la Maza)22.12.10
Just a quickie today, but a good one: Ric Larsen performing Eduardo Sainz de la Maza’s gorgeous Campanas del Alba. Lovely Media will be back on the 27th – happy winter solstice!
Monty Adkins and Jay Payne – Remnant21.12.10
I like to listen to certain music with the assistance of a spectrograph sometimes. Like studying a score, it’s often a revealing experience, especially with music and sound art that likes to pack content all over the frequency spectrum and in densities that are difficult to navigate.
Monty Adkins‘ music isn’t quite in the same camp as the Florian Heckers of the world that inspired me to take up this practice in the first place, but there is a high amount of detail in this slow moving piece – transformations to the sound happen at a rapid pace, in a narrative fashion. There are small stories inside every sequence of filter stutterings and rapid but subtle timbre shifts.
Jay Payne reinforces those stories by mapping them to light in a beautifully imprecise way – rays of color bounce and fuzz off of a nondescript globe that sometimes feels like its submerged deep in the ocean. This could be an entirely analog video, though my guess is its a bit of good work with Processing or a similar procedural video environment.
The same qualities are present in the music – this could be a meticulous analog piece; over-driven sound shifts accomplished in the painstaking fashions that folks like Stockhausen pioneered. I can imagine Kontakte-style banks of speakers on a mechanically controlled platter, spinning in complex patterns, Doppler shifts picked up by a matrix of microphones placed creatively. It’s probably at least in part a software creation as well, but I love that it’s not really obvious what is happening here – a lot goes down in both the time and frequency domain, but in the end the technique is a fun mystery to think through, but it’s not really important of course. Watch the synchronicity of this psychedelic Christmas ornament dancing along to bubbling synth gyrations and just enjoy the collisions.
Tajinder Singh Dhami – Electrotuning20.12.10
I saw this short film by UK animator Tajinder Singh Dhami at the 2010 SPARK Festival in Minnesota. First on loop in one of the installation spaces, then again projected at the impromptu Love Power theater. I’d just spent the last few months experimenting with building simple induction microphones out of hard drive coils and butchered guitar pickups so this immediately caught my attention. The film is a wonderful bit of otherworldly field recording. The structure is simple – a bit like laying items down on a table, just a linear movement through a database of gorgeous EM field recordings.
Even having done a fair amount of this sort of recording myself, there was still a really nice process of revelation while watching. As each filmed space passes, suddenly it becomes obvious that the crackling symphony we’re hearing is actually being produced by the objects and devices being filmed. It’s a simple but really nice effect – and the source subjects are sometimes jaw-dropping. The elevator Dhami filmed sounds like it studied for years under Kim Cascone. It’s a nice peek into the secret lives of electronics.
Bryan Teoh – Bumblebees and Amber17.12.10
Performing as 8bit bEtty. Photo by Marjorie Becker.
Bumblebees and Amber by Bryan Teoh
I met Bryan Teoh in the hallway outside of the Lawrence University jazz room. It was 2001 and we were both auditioning as first year students for the school jazz ensemble. That jazz room ended up being a pretty special place. We chewed through probably hundreds of collaborative projects, feverishly assembled one-off bands, and all-day jam sessions in our five years together in Appleton. After college, he moved out east to NYC with a group of mutual friends and has been relentlessly exploring a pretty breathtaking number of projects and disciplines in his creative work since. There’s the blasted laptop-infused post-folk as Always Tokyo, nintendo rock as 8bit bEtty, and in the last few years he’s become an active live visualist to boot.
Bumblebees and Amber doesn’t fit exactly into any of these projects but the connections are everywhere: the deft counterpoint of 8bit bEtty, the aching melody of Always Tokyo, the textural detail of his solo laptop microsound projects all come to play here. It’s telling that the mp3 is simply tagged ‘Bryan Teoh’ I think. This is personal, moving music for winter nights on that long train ride home.
Like A Diamond – Glass Ghost16.12.10
This news is a year old now from the date on the vimeo upload, but I’m glad to see that Brooklyn band Glass Ghost has signed to Western Vinyl and made this VHS-smeared music video for their song Like A Diamond. I remember feeling moved watching Eliot Krimsky croon this song in the cramped living room at a house show in 2009 – and a watch on vimeo years later is no less moving.
Coppice – Vinculum15.12.10
Pins dropping
I saw Coppice perform a graphic score by Bryce Beverlin II at this year’s SPARK Festival in Minnesota. (Pictured above.) UPDATE: this was a performance of their own piece entitled Copse, I was probably confusing the note about the score with the performance that followed immediately afterward: Bryce Bevelin & a percussionist. This was probably the most delicate performance I’ve ever attended – a packed audience of all ages milling feet away in and around the performers soft-shoed silently under the music, which was sometimes only as loud as the imperceptible gasp of air releasing from the bellows of a hand-pump organ. Coppice is a duo who play acoustic/mechanical and homebrew electronic instruments in such a precise way that the meticulously organized crackles of Xenakis’ Concrete PH might blush. It’s not precise music in the sense of a virtuosic cellist realizing a Ferneyhough score exactly motion-for-inkblot, but in the sense of deftly listening through the absolutely tiny variations in sound that these fragile instruments produce and coaxing them gently to behave, aggregate, and bend. Virtuosic and exact listening.
Listen to sound samples of a piece for multiple cd players on their website, and be sure to catch these Chicago-based electroacoustic microsounders in performance if you have the chance.
Orestis Karamanlis – Στέρφος14.12.10
orestis karamanlis
The internet is a great place for casual aesthetic encounters. Flip past as many shards of embedded flash media as you like and there’s always another heaping fistful of pages to slice into an already bloody attention span.
To be fair, I discovered Orestis Karamanlis‘ music deep in just such a google dive. I was digging for the music of another Greek composer (who released an electroacoustic orchestral piece on some now-forgotten netlabel years ago) but the search terms I was using to target that composer brought me to Karamanlis instead.
Στέρφος rings bells, stutters into deliciously dirty flakes of noise, resonates on a few overtones for a while before deftly mixing what sounds like distant folk singing through the turbine of a jet engine… there are some clucking chickens somewhere in there too. The piece is the weakest at its most cinematic and showy points. Thankfully there is only a minute or so of those Swoop Synthesis Porn For Soundtracks and Look Ma Granular Processing! moments shuffled into an otherwise really compelling sound walk – and no worries, there are more than enough ¡fuck yes! moments to go around.
Take 21 minutes today and try not to let jazz dog get the best of your attention span.