Disquiet

downstream / UK Quiet Noise Trio Baraclough MP3

If less is more, then the UK trio Baraclough is the most. A live in-studio recording from early last year captures them collaborating on little more than a squiggly rumbles, choked static, rhythmic shorthand, gray drones, and other modest noises (MP3).

Looped applause at the set’s opening manages to be both sonically enticing and contextually telling. Only for a moment is the applause believable as having originated with a live studio audience. After a few splices, the looping becomes self-evident, as is also the case with the militarist drum-corps percussion that follows. A performance that opens with canned applause, and that then ventures immediately into the deepest, dustiest recesses of performers’s drum machines and samplers? It’s just perfect. What follows is an hour of controlled noise, alternating between expanses of industrial soundscapes — the section about 12 minutes before the track comes to a close is especially noteworthy — and churning digital aggression.

Baraclough are Paul de Casparis, Dale Cornish, and Eddie Nuttall (that’s the same Dale Cornish who supplied the rain field recordings for yesterday’s Disquiet Downstream by Philip Marshall entry). More on Baraclough at baraclough.co.uk (and the inevitable myspace.com/baraclough). More on the members at myspace.com/pauldec, dalecornish.com, and eddienuttall.co.uk. More on Ill FM, which first broadcast the performance, at illfm.net.

field notes / An Afternoon Between John Zorn’s Ears (San Francisco)

There’s a large, geometrically accomplished, bright white room on the top floor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. To inaugurate the Daniel Libeskind-designed museum’s opening last year, John Zorn was invited to curate a series of recordings to be played in that room, on a rotating schedule: The Aleph-Bet Sound Project. Other than a few benches, some explanatory documentation, and the bodies of fellow museum-goers, nothing else is in the room, the Stephen & Marielle Leavitt ‘Yud’ Gallery (reads the CJM website, thecjm.org: “65-foot ceiling … 36 diamond-shaped skylights”). If there is a distinction to be drawn between sound art and sound as art, this is arguably the latter.

I’ve entered that spacious, THX 1138-style room twice, the second time this past Sunday, January 4 (that had been the scheduled closing day of the event, but it’s now been extended through February 1). I was returning largely because the Alvin Curran piece wasn’t on the rotation when I’d first visited, shortly after the museum opened to the public last year.

I arrived on Sunday in time for the work by New York sound couple Marina Rosenfeld and Raz Mesinai, early enough to be greeted by the closing vociferous clanging of z’ev’s “For Lillith,” which played like endless encompassing circles of infinite, rusty old cymbals, colliding into each other way up in cymbal heaven. The Rosenfeld-Mesinai piece, “Tzadik ‘00″ (Tzadik is the name of Zorn’s record label), opens with a prayer bowl sound, and then veers into digitized clamor, with spoken syllables ever so lightly digitized, just barely beyond verbal recognition.

A measure of the collective work’s variety, the Rosenfeld-Mesinai ended in time for “Tell Me That Before” by David Greenberger, whose ongoing Duplex Planet project — in zines, on CDs, in performance, and in other formats — collects the musings of elderly Americans. “Tell Me That Before,” with its hazy recollections of childhood in Baltimore, among other subjects, didn’t disappoint. The monologues were all backed by a mix of piano, bass, drums, and a mallet instrument. That the anecdotes were often accented with precisely placed notes cemented the work as a proper composition. Another segment featured birdsong and maudlin violin as an aural backdrop.

Out-jazz cellist Erik Friedlander’s “50 Gates of Understanding” contribution to the Aleph-Bet Sound Project was reminiscent of much of the Tzadik label work he has recorded: modal jazz settings for heady, whirling improvisations on indelible themes. Friedlander’s is a sound that is at once deeply old world and of the moment. (The corner of 3rd Street and Mission in San Francisco has provided a second home of late to Friedlander; his father, the great gestural photographer Lee Friedlander, last year had a major career retrospective at the nearby SFMOMA, at which the younger Friedlander performed a concert.)

Each work in Zorn’s Sound Project takes as its cue a letter in the Hebrew alphabet, the mystical root of the Kabbalah. Yud, the name of the gallery, is one of the letters in the alphabet, and an instructive note on the wall provided a primer on the inner meanings of the characters. At the entry to the museum, in the lobby, there’s a kof, pictured below, on the floor:

That’s the letter selected by Laurie Anderson for her piece, “Kof: I thought I closed the door,” which employs “holosonic audio technology” so that you can only really hear the piece if you’re standing directly on the paperback-size kof on the floor. The piece was louder than it had been during my previous visit, which is to say it was entirely audible, Anderson’s familiar dry delivery amid field recordings and digital effects.

Upstairs, the Curran finally came around to its place in the program, and like each piece in the show, it had its evident roots in Jewish aural culture. Titled “Shin ‘far’ Shofar,” it opened with the blowing of the title instrument, the shofar, an animal horn that emits a deep, resonant bellow that suggests a distant cry. Soon it was followed and joined by halos of by high-pitched overtones, which gathered in intensity. Those tones played push and pull with the shofar, before a heavenly chorus of ahs joined in, along with tapes of singing, first a man’s, then a woman’s, and then a fugue-like setting that found a balance between them, before the shofar sputtered into silence.

The shofar gave Curran’s the most self-evident liturgical vibe of the set, though each, in its own way, employed cultural cues, from the prayer bowl in the Rosenfeld-Mesinai, to the Eastern European holiday-party music of the Friedlander. The room’s expansive whiteness provides an almost self-consciously ethereal quality, and despite its odd shape, there was no awkward echoing or other sonic imaging. That said, the music could have been louder — it never achieved a truly immersive environment, and even the Friedlander and Greenberger at their most exuberant couldn’t drown out the clunk of the parade of fancy Sunday-go-to-museum shoes. The Yud gallery has several lengthy benches, but most visitors chose to lean against the walls, which pitch back about 40 degrees, allowing for a restful, if not entirely reverent, posture.

John Zorn’s The Aleph-Bet Sound Project closes on February 1, just in time for another music-themed enterprise. On February 6, the museum opens Jews on Vinyl: And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Our Vinyl, which covers Jewish records from the 1940s through the 1980s, ending, as the exhibit’s promotional text jokes, “with the holy trinity of Neil, Barbra, and Barry.”

downstream / Berlin Sound-Art Document MP3 from Philip Marshall

One of the many side benefits of sound art are the audio documents left behind after the exhibit closes — or, for that matter, that are circulated while the exhibit is still happening. Over at the Touch podcast spinoff, touchradio.org.uk, Philip Marshall has made available an edit of his piece “Ghost.” It’s a mysterious mix of digital music and spoken fragments, amid swaths of field recordings, the latter replete with wind-blown microphones, a smattering of rain, and all manner of passing fragile incidents (MP3). The work is intended to be heard as part of “The Space Between Seeing and Knowing Is Haunted,” an exhibition curated by D–L Alvarez at two Berlin galleries (Exile thisisexile.com; Arratia, Beer: arratiabeer.com). The spoken material originated on The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP, a collection of “electronic voice phenomenon” examples. The rain was provided by Dale Cornish (baraclough.co.uk) — at least, the recordings of the rain were.

field notes / Heavy Rotation: Rob Swift’s Dusty Vinyl, Alex Wurman’s ‘Kill You’ Score

What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:

(1) The X-Ecutioner Looks Back: Now, DJ Rob Swift’s album Dust to Dust doesn’t have the swagger or intensity of his recent trio effort — the group Ill Insanity, which teamed him with DJs Total Eclipse and Precision, and debuted early last year with Ground Xero — but the set’s 17 tracks of old-school breaks is tasty, rich with surf rock, r&b, and more stripped-down percussion than you can shake your maracas at. And, for fun, the titles of the songs read in sequence as a sentence, which serves as the project’s manifesto: “Dust,” “To,” “Dust,” “Is,” “A,” “Collection,” “Of,” “Breaks,” “Inspired,” “By,” “The,” “B,” “Boy,” “Movement,” “Of,” “The,” “1970s.”

(2) South Boston’s Slow Burn: In what would make a good double feature with Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, director Brian Goodman’s What Doesn’t Kill You is small film about small-time hoods (both movies share a lead actor in Ethan Hawke), a group of South Boston thugs whose criminal pursuits unfold against an excellent score by Alex Wurman (Criminal, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Wurman brings an understated sensibility to the narrative, but manages to infuse it with enough melody to be true to the drama without edging it into melodrama. Especially strong are a “What Doesn’t Kill You” suite, built from minimal piano, sour strings, and tiny little sonic details that bring a tension-building undercurrent of gears that would benefit from a little oil. (The set is reportedly due for release directly to iTunes on the same label, Yari, that brought out Cliff Martinez’s music for First Snow.)

field notes / Image of the Week: Staalplaat’s Connaught Project

A sketch for Staalplaat Soundsystem’s recent residency at Khoj Worsksop in New Delhi:

The project involves triggered sounds in nearly a dozen small taxis in Connaught Place, one of the city’s densest — and loudest — commercial zones. More details in two posts at staalplaat.org and staalplaat.org Visit Khoj at khojworkshop.org.

field notes / Quote of the Week: Muhly’s Tape Sausage

The Wall Street Journal queried various folk from various fields about their 2009 plans. Among the respondents, composer Nico Muhly:

In 2009, I am going to finally finish a long series of short works for solo viola and tape [recorded elements]. I’m into this because it’s weird and specialized, like taking a year of your life and learning how to make blood sausage.

Full article at wsj.com (via rgable.typepad.com).

field notes / Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet: Over 25,000 Served

The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 25,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 28-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album. The contributing musicians are AllThatFall, Roddy Schrock, Pocka, Stephane Leonard, (dj) morsanek, MrBiggs, John Kannenberg, My Fun, Mark Rushton, Prehab, Ego Response Technician, and Doogie.

The songs are all available for free download in various formats (192Kbps MP3, 64 Kbps MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3) at:

archive.org/details/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet

More info at disquiet.com/bushofghosts. Thanks to all the contributors, including Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), who produced the beautiful “cover” (shown above) and “back cover” for the collection. The project would not have been possible without the instigation of Eno and Byrne, who posted the raw materials of the original songs at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.

downstream / Austrian Drum’n'Bass MP3

Drum’n'bass could have become chamber music, but instead it became a plug-in. Once upon a time, those ricocheting beats, along with sudden moments at which the bottom simply drops out, felt like they’d landed from some alien nightlife. But within a few years, they were serving as backing tracks to car commercials, especially once the production became routinized, and the drums and the bass started to play tertiary fiddle to synthesized chimes and florid, insta-atmospheric aural haze.

Flipping through new drum’n'bass releases these days can be a heartbreaking endeavor, but you do come across solid nuggets. Case in point, the third track off the three-song release Id by [sub], on the Plain Audio netlabel. Perhaps the title to “The Monk Tune” means that the string bass resounding midway through the seven-and-a-half-minute track was lifted from a Thelonious Monk song, but whatever the impetus for the name, [sub]’s effort shows estimable restraint, the pinging drums and sonar blips left more or less to themselves, and the percussion following its own advanced calculus (MP3). It’s a bracing track, enlivened by taut horn and string elements.

Innsbruck, Austria, is [sub]’s home base, where he runs syncopathicrecordings.com. More details on Id and “The Monk Tune” at plainaudio.com.

downstream / Historic Frippertronics MP3 from 1978

Guitarist Robert Fripp by 1978 had disbanded King Crimson, embarked on a series of collaborations with Brian Eno, and relocated to New York City. Eno was also in the city, and that year saw the release of his No New York compilation, on which Arto Lindsay and Ikue Mori, among others, performed. Mori herself had only recently relocated to the city, from Japan, and was then still a drummer — drum machines and laptops awaited her down the road. Kurt Munkacsi, long a key member of Philip Glass’s organization, was one of the engineers on No New York.

On February 5, 1978, Fripp made his debut as a solo performing artist at the Kitchen, long home to some of the city’s most vibrant avant-garde performing artists, including Glass, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, and others. That evening marked the debut of Frippertronics, his trailblazing experiment in live looping. And a few days ago, Fripp’s website, dgmlive.com, posted a rare rehearsal recording from that very evening. At nearly three and a half minutes, the lovely solo guitar loop is marked by the slow fades, loping cadences, attenuated accrual of layers, and brief passages of rapid patterns that have long characterized his playing (MP3). The dgmlive.com site doesn’t leave up these occasional free MP3s for very long, so I recommend that you download this one at your earliest convenience.

John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, was at the Kitchen show, and his story in the paper two days later (”Pop: Robert Fripp After 3 Years”) closed with these three paragraphs describing the performance:

The explanatory note at dhmlive.com reads, in full:

As the title cunningly implies this piece is taken from a test loop prior to Robert’s appearance at The Kitchen Video Arts Center in New York, February 5th 1978. The date is important, marking as it does Robert’s debut as a solo performer and the first public unveiling of Frippertronics. The opening night (of two) was subject to intense interest from the public with lines spreading around the block in freezing cold weather, requiring an impromptu second performance to try and accommodate the heavy numbers of eager punters queuing up. These loops would have been prepared by Robert as test pieces and ultimately used by him to solo over.

Perhaps the full recordings of the Kitchen shows will see release some day. The venue has recently released four archival CDs, including one from around the same time as the Fripp show, featuring live performances by Martin Kalve, David Tudor, and Bill Viola. More on the Kitchen at thekitchen.org.

downstream / Emmanuel Witzthum’s Piano-tronic MP3s

There are two pieces of music on Emmanuel Witzthum’s new release from the Stasisfield netlabel, Chamber_music_(1.a). One is a quartet, the other either a quintet or a solo work, depending on the listener’s perspective. The quartet, “For Pianos” (MP3), involves four pianos playing with a heightened sense of ensemble. Suspended structures are built from shared chordal material, in which overtones do much of the heavy lifting. (The performers are Witzthum, Ju Ping Song, Reiko Fueting, and Yuval Cohen.)

Those resulting rich, overarching sonics provide the raw goods for the second piece, “With Pianos” (MP3), in which Witzthum reduces, via electronic processing, the piano sounds into something delicate and fine. Additional information at stasisfield.com.