Last week, en route across town, a friend and I got stuck in rush hour traffic near Central Park. We hopped out of the cab, and walked across the park. Despite the warm weather, it was nearly deserted. The only people about were New York caricatures in garish jogging suits or walking hilarious dogs, all of us extras in a Woody Allen movie. Near the Sheep Meadow, the midtown skyline placid in the blue dusk, I felt transported to the timeless city that runs unchanging beneath the ever-shifting storefronts, advertisements, and neon. I might as well have been 12, visiting from Long Island. Today, the Museum of Natural History felt the same way.
(As Owen and I once discovered, while the other stuffed animals in the dioramas are posed vaguely naturally, the gemsbok simply stare disarmingly back. They almost break the fourth wall.)
“April Showers” – Marcos Fernandes (download here)
from phonography.org, vol. 1 (2001)
released by phonography.org
(file expires on April 14th.)
Good field recordings are deceptively hard to make, especially of things that are simple, like rainstorms or waves crashing. At least when I’ve tried, unexpected noises have always sullied the result: people talking in the next room, sudden gusts of wind at odd angles to the microphone, etc..
Marcos Fernandes’ “April Showers” is the Platonic rainstorm. Water pounds in sheets on the porch roof, its tempo and intensity changing subtly, and — midway through — dramatically. A sparser sub-network of percussive drips plays in oblique counter-rhythm to the main drone. Airplanes (I think) cut through the atmosphere far above, issuing parallel rumbles like enormous pieces of construction paper ripping in extreme slow motion.
Sometimes, even if it is April and supposed to rain, it’s good to listen in advance to the music you are about to hear.
Tonight at dorkbot, I saw NYU’s Jeff Han present on the multi-touch systems he has helped invent. These are touchscreens that expand their input from one finger to, in theory, an infinite amount. In his presentation, Han argued that the one-cursor/one-mouse model that computers have run on for decades is limiting. If he hadn’t insisted that the screens depicted in his videos were real, I would’ve sworn the clips were mock-ups.
Hands roamed a celestial desktop filled with photographs, effortlessly resizing them and sorting them at will; they soared over a GoogleEarth-like mapscape zooming in and tilting with mild finger twitches; they sculpted a virtual face as if it were clay; they danced across a MaxMSP-type environment, attaching sound widgets to oscillators, keyboards, drum machines; they played strange futuristic games; they navigated pure abstractions. I guess it’s kinda that whole virtual reality thing, huh? Whether or not it will ever catch on, it’s straight-up next level.
Here is a short overview video demonstrating the multi-touch project.
“Some Clouds Don’t” – Fred Frith (download here)
from Cheap at Half the Price (1983)
released by East Side Digital
reissued by ReR Megacorp/Fred Records (2004) (buy)
(file will expire on April 12th.)
Matt turned me onto avant-guitarist Fred Frith’s frickin’ fantastic Cheap at Half the Price several years back. I finally got my own unscratched copy in today’s post. It’d be cheap (at less than half the price) to compare the disc-opening “Some Clouds Don’t” to Brian Eno’s ’70s pop excursions (to which Frith himself contributed)… but I think I just did anyway. Like those albums, Cheap is a rare trip into vocal-based music. Frith’s ragged voice, lo-fi complexity, and tweeting keyboards are all cheekily charming. The harmonies are nice, and there’s something willfully naïve about the lead guitar playing that I like (especially coming from somebody as nimble as Frith). The whole album — recorded on a four-track with Frith playing most of the instruments and assembling all of the sound collages — is extraordinarily personable.
Once Upon A Time – Kahimi Karie with the Olivia Tremor Control
released by Polydor Japan (2000)
download here
(file expires on April 9th.)
I’m a pretty big Olivia Tremor Control fan, but somehow — until this past weekend — I totally missed the existence of Once Upon a Time. Yet, there it is, nestled in the discography over at elephant6.com. Recorded in 2000 backing Japanese singer Kahimi Karie and released on Polydor in her native country, the Olivias serve up five tracks of spaced-out psychedelia replete with concrété chaos, horns, violins, cosmic blurps, and everything else one might expect (save for the giant Beatles choruses).
In an odd convergence, a few months ago, I asked my now ex-neighbor to give me the strangest music on her iPod. She gave me some tracks by Kahimi Karie that she’d lifted from a Japanese teen’s mp3 collection. And, lo, they were strange. Funny to find out now that she’s both a protégé of Cornelius (another fave), and has worked with the Olivia Tremor Control. Bizarro headphone candy, for sure. Once again, a peculiar noise called the Olivia Tremor Control…
(I’m pretty sure this EP/mini-album was never released in the States. It sure doesn’t turn up on Amazon. If anybody’s got any beef with me circulating it, let me know.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” – Elf Power (download here)
from Walking With the Beggar Boys (2004)
released by Orange Twin (buy)
(file expires on April 6th.)
“Walking With the Beggar Boys” uses the simple tools of rock — a circular guitar lick, a chorus that compares love to a dream, call and response — to create something ecstatic. There is nothing remotely progressive going on, but Andrew Rieger and the Elves go for it anyway. The refrain is perfect pop logic — “love was just a dream, you know I never got no sleep” — that comes at an oblique angle to the verses, which are about pretty much about what the title suggests. A brief Eno-circa-Warm Jets guitar solo gives way to the song’s moment of being: a breathless call and response between Rieger and Vic Chesnutt that recalls “I am the Walrus”: “I was you ” (“You were me.”) “He was she.” (“She was he.”) “They were us.” (“We were they.”) Crank it.
The Elves will be putting out a fine new album in April, Back to the Web, on RykoDisc. (If Warner buys Ryko, as promised, does that make this their major label debut?) They’ll also be touring a lot with The Instruments.
I’m taking the night off. Go play with some of Dad’s trippy software.
o Optical Atlas is the blogosphere’s first full-service Elephant 6 Recording Company resource. The last week has been full of news (an E6 documentary!) and goodies (a stunningly crisp, segue-loaded uncirculated Neutral Milk Hotel soundboard from ’97).
o Robert Hillburn interviews Jack White on the occasion of the debut of The Raconteurs, his extracurricular modern pop quartet with Brendan Benson.
o Alexandre Matias’s “The Dark Side of Tropicália, part 1,” published by Perfect Sound Forever in 2003, argues (essentially) that the tropicalistas have assumed an omnipresent cultural dominance in Brazil not unlike their baby boomer equivalents in the United States. Matias’s argument is as uncommon as it is well reasoned. Definitely an interesting read. (But where’s part 2?)
o Back in December, Nature published an article that claimed Wikipedia was only marginally more error-ridden than the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica. Britannica has fired back. Like many, I’m rather enamored with Wikipedia, and this is heartily disheartening on all counts. Nature refuses to retract the piece. (Thanks, Russ.)
Shiek Andy just posted the newest installment of the Frow Show. Word to your mother, Andy!
Listen here.
1. “In and Out of Grace” – Mudhoney (from Superfuzz Bigmuff plus Early Singles)
2. “Frow Show Theme” – MVB
3. “5:30” – DNA (from New York Noise: Dance Music From The New York Underground, 1978-1982)
4. “Corrinna” – Ralph White (from Trash Fish)
5. “When the Stars Shine” – The Instruments (from Billions of Phonographs)
6. “You Can’t See The Stars In This Town” – Sam Champion (from Slow Rewind)
7. “Rocket #9” – Sun Ra (from The Singles)
8. “Second Movement” – Glenn Branca (from Symphony No. 6 (Devil Choirs at the Gates of Heaven))
9. “Sunken Treasure” – Wilco (from June 28, 2005, Metropolis, Montreal, Quebec)
10. “I Shall Not Be Moved” – Mississippi John Hurt (from Live)
11. “Accidentally Like A Martyr” – Jerry Garcia (from All Good Things box set)
12. “I’m Not Here 1956” – Bob Dylan (from Complete Basement Tapes bootleg)
“Just Another Day” – Brian Eno (download here)
from Another Day on Earth (2005)
released by RykoDisc/Hannibal (buy)
(file expires on April 3rd)
Last year’s Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno’s first solo collection of songs since 1977, is far from perfect. There’s almost no way to get around the fact that it’s synth-heavy New Age pop. Still, that core melodic gift that made his ’70s music special is present somewhere in nearly all of the tracks. After getting the album, I listened to it a bunch and tucked it away. Whenever one has come on lately, I’ve realized that I remember it and most of the words. He had to have been doing something right.
What “Just Another Day” has going for it is the fact that — on headphones, with one’s eyes closed — its first minute sounds and feels remarkably literally like the first rush of a psychedelic experience. The texture Eno chooses to express this breathtaking stereo-trickery recalls, for better or worse, a sonic approximation of a planetarium laser light show. After that, the song settles down into semi-trite (but, as I said, perfectly memorable) Eno-pop. Still, take a minute, put on your headphones, close your eyes, and zone. When was the last time you were at a laser light show, anyway? Do it ironically, if you need to, but do it.
(Nothing posted yet, but EnoWeb news reports that Robert Fripp’s Discipline Global Mobile site will be selling unreleased Fripp/Eno recordings soon.)
