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The Man from Planet Risk debuted last night at the The Lucky Cat in Williamsburg. Their CD Escape from Chixalub is what might be called "downtempo horrorcore" (or The Music Formerly Known As Triphop--more on this below) but the live set, substituting drums for old skool hip hop beat machines, changed the feel of the sound quite a bit. Live, drummer Cave Precise seems to be imitating a beatbox or drum instruction cassette, except he's trying as hard as he can to destroy the drums. His manic rigidity and intensity tipped the sound over from the hiphop column to rock-and-roll, a kind of minimalist psychedelic metal. "Minimalist" because each "song" is basically just a really cool metalloid riff--a big ungainly slab of doomstruck sound--played long enough for the audience to get the point and then ended.
For all its echo-y horror soundtrack atmospherics and Black Sab-like bass riffs, the CD is much lighter: the beats are spryer, with turntable twists & jazzy piano riffs livening up the doom and gloom. I mentioned triphop because the sound is truly trippy: keyboardist/laptopper Jenghizkhan approaches music like a painter (and is in fact a visual artist, exhibiting under his real name John Parker), taking advantage of all the filtering and timestretching capabilities of modern keyboard tech to make layers of artfully mangled sound. Imagine Ennio Morricone eclectism shot through with the kind of dreamy, smeared psychedelia of San Francisco post-punkers Chrome, or the European hardcore tech of The Mover set to a hiphop beat. But also none of the above. You can check out samples of the CD here.
The art-jazz-electronic duo Plasmodium has a CD out titled Clairaudience, blending fusion, sampladelia, grunge, and twisted Southern humor. At the music's core are jazzy grooves performed by Jim Thomson (drums, vocals) and Bob Miller (trumpet and keyboards), augmented with loops, samples, and electronic treatments a la the "labfunk" of Recloose or Atjazz. Miller's nimble trumpet is a versatile lead instrument, moving from traditional muted phrasing to wah wah-ed electric guitar shrieks.
Veterans of the Virginia music scene centered around Richmond and Charlottesville, the pair has an interesting provenance: Miller gigs with the salsa group Bio Ritmo, while Thomson drummed in the 80s for the Mad Max-ian, nuclear mutant hardcore outfit GWAR. Although mainly jazzy, Clairaudience spins a dazzling range of musical fictions, from "Tristay"'s reverbed rockabilly lament to the paranoid psychedelic dirge rock of "Space Eye" (think Alice in Chains meets Air, if that's possible). The daily indignities of hapless convenience store clerk "Clive Buckledown," recited in a deadpan, detective-story monotone over sensuous electric piano loops, recall the white psycho jazz rap of Kentuckyan-by-way-of-Dallas MC 900 Ft. Jesus.
In a more Cagean mode, the sound collage "Rethinking the Raven" presents echo-treated field recordings of a suburban smart guy spouting increasingly ridiculous, palsied nonsense syllables into fast-food driveup intercoms. ("Sir, can you drive to the window so we can take your order, we can't understand you.") The track is funny on a mean spirited Jerky Boys level, but also seductive, with the sound manipulations turning the baffled or bored utterances of the franchise employees into quasi-world music. One clerk's digitally twinned "I don't know/I don't know (I don't understand what you're saying)" becomes poignantly melodic through repetition, resembling an eerie call-and-response chant. In "Dr. Octobongopus" a bored lounge MC introduces the stage act of a polyrhythmic, multi-armed, but basically lame bongo player in a routine that is pure deadpan surrealism.
You can stream a few .mp3s at the Dry County Records site ("Space Eye" is especially good), or purchase the CD via paypal at The Drama Online Store. Highly recommended.
"Windows Noises" is a short Flash movie by Clown Staples (click here--it loads pretty quickly). It's made using the little .wav (sound file) editor called sndrec32.exe, found in the Windows/system32 folder right next to the viruses and spyware. Windows XP still includes this fun device, although it's usually overridden by RealPlayer or the like. The source material for "Windows Noises" consists solely of four sounds: chimes, ding, chord, and the "Microsoft Sound" (a pre-XP string sample). These have been chopped up, accelerated, reversed, looped, and mixed into a single synchronized file. In the video, an unseen mouse-clicker plays up to six editors like a mini-orchestra. The piece is at once hellishly clever, dumb, resourceful, "deconstructive," and musically very catchy. As explained in the Winnoise FAQ, the Flash film isn't a record of an actual performance but rather a re-enactment of the processes by which the tune was made. All the sound was done with sndrec32.exe but the visuals are animated from cut-and-pasted screen shots of the cursor flitting about the "orchestra," triggering drop down menus and starting and stopping loops. It was actually a relief to learn the piece wasn't done in real time--nobody could be that good. Could they? I still don't believe synch-ing up the parts was as easy as Clown Staples says it was. [via cuechamp, where I also got the screenshot]
Artist Sally McKay is participating in a show in Toronto, opening April 30, called "Robot Landscapes." In her piece, a small mirror-lined box serves as home to a solar powered robot slowly caroming around inside. Reflected on the inner walls of the box is a continuously looped video of a half-factual, half demented Martian landscape; a kind of Zen foil-ball garden with a dozing, skullfaced inhabitant, who may or may not be inflicting intermittent, flaring image breakdown on the Rover's prying digital eyes. The mirror-diorama is viewed through a window, with nearby headphones chiming musical accompaniment--a kind of lo fi, ambio-melodic soundscape created by yours truly. Sally explains more of the particulars here, and she's also offering a scaled-down version of the 9 inch wide video as a streaming or downloadable online video. A borrowed copy of the interface is below.
click for streaming video
(or option click / right click here for download)
graphics by Sally McKay, music by Tom Moody
Saturday night, April 24, a group of laptop performers convened at vertexList, a newish space in the old Four Walls location in Brooklyn. Video artists picked audio artists as collaborators (and vice versa) and the work seemed as random as the pairings: synergy was only intermittently achieved. The video part of the Jeremy Bernstein/Glomag collaboration (coruscating patterns of finely minced abstraction) showed more subtlety than the clunky audio, and the audio part of the jenghizkhan*/Daniel Vatsky union (mysterious, sexily-filtered ambient industrial keyboards) eclipsed the video's rather generic typography-cum-50s-science-textbook imagery. One moment where everything clicked came during the token "analog segment," when Mike Ballou's super-8 film of a crowd pulling a giant helium-inflated pig through the sky found suitable porcine accompaniment in Brian Dewan's morose vacuum tubular oinks.
A cranky comment: some artbloggers outside NY have said "there's nothing going on here" or words to that effect. That's clearly wrong. The scene is so rich, so multi-layered, so overflowing with good work that gallerygoers have become blase--talking, schmoozing, laughing, flirting, and exchanging business cards during performances. The music and video serve only as a cool clublike backdrop for their networking. This is Williamsburg, after all, where those art school "how to survive as an artist" courses are field-tested en masse. To put it bluntly, the pigs weren't just up there on the screen Saturday.
*aka John Parker
CLASSIC RAVE HITS! (except I don't know what any of them are)
All of the following house and breakbeat rave techno tracks were taped off the radio in '93 and '94, specifically during DJ Jeff K's live mix show, "Edge Club," on KDGE-FM in Dallas (besides killing Kennedy, that city has been a haven for club music since the late '80s, as Simon Reynolds noted in his book Generation E). I made them as "studio tapes" (i.e. to play while making stuff), but found them indispensable when I moved to NY shortly thereafter and had all my other music in storage. Some tracks were played by Jeff K himself, others by the guest DJs he had on each week (DJ Icy, the Hardkiss collective, Utah Saints (!)). What they all have in common is (1) I still play them on my battered cassettes and (2) I don't know any of the artists or titles, except as noted below. Now that they've been extracted from the longer mixes where they originally appeared--digitally clipped, sutured, & faded in or out as .mp3s--a little attribution help would be greatly appreciated: any information you might have about this weird, E'd-up, often gemlike music.
Techno-Rave
Track 1 [4.5 MB]. "Like this," "come down," and an uncanny "blablablablablablablablablah" are the samples punctuating this frenetic Two Bad Mice-like track.
Track 2 [3.4 MB]. The insipid "different strokes for different folks" vocal commencing this number is soon belied by Mentasm stabs and other craziness. The ending sample of a lad saying "only originate and never pirate" (as in "pyrate") cropped up a lot around this time.
Track 3 [3.7 MB]. Very minimal breakbeat rave recorded on Jeff K's birthday. A sequence of 12 notes is repeated (with the filtering constantly changing) until the middle, when it is replaced by another sequence of 12 notes.
Track 4 [4 MB]. From a live mix at the Bomb Factory in Deep Ellum, this peppy number (possibly by a Texas producer) merges flawlessly into Joey Beltram's famous "Energy Flash," right before the fade.
House
Track 5 [4.1 MB]. A bouncy little march opens and closes this Dixieland-inflected track.
Track 6 [5 MB]. Disco-era drum pads, a Chinese prepared piano hook, and a vaguely Middle Eastern diva wail: it's catchier than that sounds.
Track 7 [5.5 MB]. Digs and Woosh of the UK's legendary DIY Crew guest-mixed this deep house track. James at Satellite (who met the DIY-ers in Dallas) thought it was from Chicago, maybe Balance Recordings. The string riff magically smeared dozens of ways sounds like turntablism but I assume it's the sampler.
Track 8 [5 MB]. Spare (as in lean) organ riffs from guest DJ Germ-E's mix.
BONUS: Downtempo Rave (?)
Track 9 (5.5 MB). Not sure what else to call this; it's too giddy to be considered triphop. It's from a mix by guest DJ Kid E.