“Another world is possible”
Peter Ablinger’s “speaking piano” declares the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court. A stunning piece of work—conceptually, technically, and emotionally.
March 03, 2010, 10:19am
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Georges Aperghis: Avis de tempête (2004)
From the album Avis de tempête
Avis de tempête (Storm Warning) is an early 21st-century opera by Greek-French composer Georges Aperghis. The first of the opera’s 13 tableaux, presented here, seems to begin in medias res, with a kaleidoscopic array of electronic whooshes, distorted guitar noodling, jagged woodwind fragments, and schizoid vocal interjections. The middle portion is dominated by a throbbing electronic soundfield, a kind of radio static through which shimmer enigmatic and fragmentary transmissions from another plane. As the fiercely spinning centrifugal force set in motion by the opening section begins to dissipate, the piece winds down with a duet between a dolefully descending Shepard tone and a disturbed female voice reciting a bizarre macaronic text.
The libretto, written by Aperghis and Peter Szendy, is a patchwork text that includes fragments from Melville, Kafka, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and Hugo. Another collaborator, Sebastien Roux, is credited with “computer sound design,” including an implementation of granular synthesis conceptually inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique. Burroughs’ influence is also at work in Roux’s effort to musically realize the concept of virus through the use of digital clicks and glitches (with a tip of the hat to Yasunao Tone).
Fluids, sounds, images, information: they all pass through us and it becomes very difficult to focus on any one thing. Electronics enable me to realize this state of perpetual transition, to jump from one world to another. An abstract sound becomes the voice of an actor, a phoneme becomes running water, a character may be divided up and then reconstructed elsewhere. (Georges Aperghis)
Played 28 time(s).
February 20, 2010, 4:43pm
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Masanka Sankayi and Kasai Allstars feat. Mutumilaya: “Wu Muluendu”
From the album Congotronics 2: Buzz’N’Rumble from the Urb’N’Jungle (2005)
Noisy, funky, lovely sounds from the ”electro-traditional” music scene of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was hooked as soon as I heard the amazingly synth-like timbre of the overdriven electric likembe, “with its pickups made of copper telephone wire wound around crushed car alternator magnets.” The Congotronics series (comprising three releases at the time of this writing) and its enthusiastic reception by American listeners have been intelligently discussed by Mike Powell at Stylus.
Played 43 time(s).
December 18, 2009, 1:03pm
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Laibach: “Contrapunctus 1”
From the album Laibachkunstderfuge (2008)
What do you get when you mix the Slovenian industrial band Laibach with the German Baroque composer J. S. Bach? A bizarre yet undeniably appropriate musical hybrid that only the young 21st century could create.
Bach is almost certainly the most frequently “covered” composer of the European classical canon, among both 20th-century art music composers (see my earlier post on Anton Webern’s arrangement of a piece from Bach’s other late magnum opus, The Musical Offering) and popular musicians. Because Bach left The Art of Fugue without directions as to what instruments should play the various parts, the work has presented later musicians with the ideal tabula rasa for “remixes” of various sorts. Laibach envisions Bach’s contrapuntal permutations in The Art of Fugue as a premonition of the music of the electronic age:
Since the work is very much based on mathematic algorithms, Laibach decided to use computer and computer program as the key »instrument«, providing a very special electronic interpretation and showing that J.S. Bach with his work could as well be understood as the pioneer of electronic, techno, and computer music.
Played 67 time(s).
December 06, 2009, 11:09pm
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Crlos: “City of Fluxes” (2003)
From City of the Future, a project of microsound.org
Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1972 sci-fi psychodrama Solaris features a remarkable sequence about 30 minutes into the film, in which the character Burton speeds in an automobile through a vast, labyrinthine metropolis. (The scene was filmed— where else?— in Tokyo.) In an already strange film, this passage— entitled “City of the Future” in the DVD chapter headings— is a staggering and experimental gesture: nearly five minutes of montage evoking the dense, alien beauty of the modern urban experience. The sound mix for this scene is what really makes it work: Tarkovsky’s longtime musical collaborator, Eduard Artemyev, creates a slowly building collage of industrial whirs and rumbles that makes you feel you are traveling not through the city, but into its throbbing concrete heart.
In the spring of 2003, sound artist and curator of microsound.org Kim Cascone invited members of the group’s email list to create remixes of the sound file extracted from the “City of the Future” scene in Solaris. One of these tracks, “City of Fluxes,” was featured in Past Forward, the audio companion to issue #13 of the fabulous Cabinet magazine, entitled “Futures.”
Played 78 time(s).
October 18, 2009, 12:57pm
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Crystal Castles: “Air War”
From the album Crystal Castles (2008)
Here’s a fun little exercise in the infinite cultural recursion of the information age: In 1922, Irish modernist author James Joyce writes the novel Ulysses, a radically experimental work that plays with the musical potential of “nonsense” speech. In 1958, Italian composer Luciano Berio, one of the foremost members of the international musical avant-garde and co-founder of the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, creates a piece for magnetic tape entitled Thema (Ommagio a Joyce), based on a recording of renowned vocalist Cathy Berberian (to whom Berio was married at the time) reading from the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses. In 2008, the Toronto-based electro-rock band Crystal Castles releases their eponymous debut studio album, including the track “Air War,” which samples Thema at length, turning Berio’s music (and Joyce’s prose) into an estranged psychedelic sound-layer atop the band’s catchy lo-fi electronic dance grooves.
Played 69 time(s).
October 14, 2009, 4:43pm
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Reverend Jesse Alexander Harding: “Perfunctory Punk Factory Funk Factorial!”
From the album I am an infinite scrutiny.
Today, some more “home-grown” music from Philadelphia.
Apparently Rev. Harding (of the Church of Rube Goldberg) and I have been eavesdropping on the same cosmic radio station. How else could he have discovered that the secret to sonic enlightenment lies in the alchemical synthesis of brutalist noise-bombs and shamelessly grooveable synth-pop saccharinity?
Much more music can be heard (and downloaded) at Harding’s website.
Played 35 time(s).
August 09, 2009, 12:37pm
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Benge: “EMS VCS 3”
From the album Twenty Systems (2007)
The synthesizer, along with the microphone and the electric guitar, is one of the most important technologies of sound to emerge in the 20th century; and yet the history of this fabulously powerful device, the pipe organ of the electronic age, has yet to be written. Even an excellent book such as Trevor Pinch’s Analog Days— though admittedly focusing on “first wave” analog machines— contributes inadvertantly to the unhappy tendency of one brand of synthesizer, the Moog, to stand in for the entire technology.
Thus an effort such as Twenty Systems by Benge (the stage name of Matt Edwards) is especially welcome. This album presents brief sonic portraits of twenty different synthesizers, analog and digital, spanning the years 1968 to 1987. The disc is packaged with a gorgeous booklet featuring photographs and descriptions of the various machines.
The style of the music is can be described as minimalist, not in the Philip Glass sense of endlessly repeated tonal fragments, but rather in exploring the sound of each machine by means of a highly concentrated set of musical gestures. Though some of the tracks are a bit too soporific for my taste, some are quite gorgeous, and all of the tracks are composed in such a way as to let the unique timbral character of the instruments shine through.
This track showcases the fabled VCS 3, produced by Electronic Music Studios of London in 1969.
Played 34 time(s).
July 07, 2009, 11:50am
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The Wiggly Tendrils: “What Birdies Dream”
From a pirated master tape (2009)
The Wiggly Tendrils are an enigmatic Philadelphia music collective rumored to consist of 20-30 members operating out of a basement workshop in a condemned building somewhere near Baltimore Avenue. Their style veers virtuosically between introspective voice-and-guitar soliloquies, rollicking earworm-infested sing-alongs, and hyperactive synth-pop microsymphonies.
Listen at your own risk— you may not be able to stop.
Played 52 time(s).
May 24, 2009, 3:01pm
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Belbury Poly: “Remember Tomorrow”
From the album From an Ancient Star (2009)
Since 2004, the British label Ghost Box has carved out a distinctive niche in contemporary electronic music. Combining space-age nostalgia with modern techno-musical polish, acts such as Belbury Poly evoke the distinctly UK brand of futurism embodied by the music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and TV shows such as Dr. Who.
In an age of rampant cultural necrophilia, where dead styles are brushed off and repackaged in ever quicker succession by a desperately decadent marketing apparatus, any such willful appropriation of the past can be suspected of revivalist bandwagon-jumping. But I believe this music should be spared that verdict, for two reasons: first, its style, combining childlike tunefulness with elements of electronica from disco to pyschedelia, is syncretic enough that it can hardly be accused of straightforward recycling; second, its primary influences are themselves, like so much of the best 20th-century music, all but unknown in their original forms.
Played 49 time(s).
May 12, 2009, 9:46am
