Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 447

More Free Music from Oval

More music has been posted for free download by Oval (Markus Popp): the 2000 album ovalprocess and his side of a 2011 split EP released with Liturgy, Oval-Liturgy. These follow five previous recent free downloads: Aero Deko, Dok, Pre/Commers, Ovalcommers, and Szenario. Get them all at oval.bandcamp.com. Ovalprocess is late-era glitch from one of the key acts to push that approach, all broken media and frayed sounds, while the Liturgy split is along the lines of his more recent efforts in producing, solo, music that sounds more like a post-rock band working through themes in a live setting.

ovalprocess by Oval

Oval-Liturgy Split EP (Oval Side) by Oval

Get them all at oval.bandcamp.com.

Cues: Rdio, Spotify; Writing Sound; Producer Reducer

◼ This Is Rdio Disquiet: I’ve started a pair of ambient stations/playlists at rdio.com and spotify.com, for any folks who subscribe to those services. These are in addition to the three setlists-by-accrual “Disquiet Carousels” over at SoundCloud.com.

◼ If a Setlist Plays in the Forest: Olivia Solon at wired.co.uk reports on a project involving a radio transmitter deep in a Scottish forest by name of Galloway. The music will play for 24 hours. “Those who want to hear it,” writes Solon, ” will have to head to the forest. There will be no repeats and the files will be deleted after they are played.” The music will include work by Severed Heads, The Herbaliser, Scanner and Stephen Vitiello, Dave Clark, Imogen Heap, and Richard X. The koan-probing DJs are Stuart McLean (aka Frenchbloke) and Robbie Coleman and Jo Hodges, the latter two of whom are artists in resident at Galloway Forest.

◼ Daniela Cascella and Salomé Voegelin have created a new broadcast series, titled Ora, about “Writing Sound” for Resonance104.5FM in England. After the program(me)s are heard on radio, they’ll pop up on the resonancefm.com website. The first one aired Thursday, June 27, 2013, with a rebroadcast scheduled today, June 29, after which it’ll pop up on the Resonance site. Here’s a description:

Writing Sound voices the relationship between listening, hearing, talking and writing – it puts forward a language that is part of the listening practice and challenges the nominal relationship between sound and words, naming and reference. It is language as the production of words, the material of language, in response to the material of sound, that invites listening as a material process also to uncover in language the process of listening, rather the source of what is being heard.

◼ Excellent interview with producer Rick Rubin (LL Cool J, Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash) at thedailybeast.com, especially in terms of his focus on simplicity. His emphasis on less being more is virtually required reading for anyone participating in this week’s Disquiet Junto project, which is based on subtraction-as-composition. Here is Rubin replying to an informedly leading question from interviewer Andrew Romano:

Q: So you don’t believe that, say, a great melody is necessarily part of a great song?

A: No, no. I think one of the things that really drew me to hip-hop was how you could get to this very minimal essence of a song—to a point where many people wouldn’t call it a song. My first credit was “Reduced by Rick Rubin.” That was on LL Cool J’s debut album, Radio. The goal was to be just vocals, a drum machine, and a little scratching. There’s very little going on.

◼ Decade of SoundWalk: July 1 is the final day for proposals to participate in the 10th annual soundwalk.org sound art festival in Long Beach, California. Last year I ran a panel discussion at SoundWalk, and the whole event was a blast.

Ambient Classical (MP3)

“I’m beginning to feel like this blog should be called 52 months at the rate I’m going,” writes composer Madeleine Cocolas. She is commenting on the status of a projected series of 52 weekly projects throughout 2013. She is also being a little unkind to herself, a little disingenuous, since as of the final week of June her effort has yielded 20 of the 26 pieces she might have completed by now. That is a fairly solid accomplishment.

Cocolas was born in Australia and lives in Seattle (where the above photo was shot by her). Her “Week 20 Project” is tagged “ambient classical,” a fitting association. It’s an elegant work, a spare piano line lingering amid a deep echoing space, shimmering shards heard deep in the background. In time the space between shard and piano is filled with an additional line, a deep swell of sound that gently nudges past the elegiac stasis of repetition toward something more melodic, if waveringly so.

She writes, in part, of the piece:

For my Week Twenty Project, I again trawled through the old hardrive I told you about a few weeks ago and found a little piano loop I wrote back in 2005 that I’ve incorporated into this weeks’ project. It’s the repetitive piano background that starts the piece off and plays throughout. I’ve also got it playing in reverse through the piece as well.

Around the 45 second mark I’ve added some more piano and some bass clarinet (a stunning instrument that I really haven’t delved into properly yet). I think the result is a pretty calming and tranquil peace that is also hopefully filled with gentle optimism.

Track originally posted for free download atsoundcloud.com/madeleine-cocolas. More from Cocolas at madeleinecocolas.blogspot.com, where she is documenting her 52-week project.

Disquiet Junto Project 0078: Less Sound, More Music

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The composition at the heart of this week’s project is mentioned prominently in the Anton Chekhov short story “The Black Monk”:

One day he was sitting on the balcony after evening tea, reading. At the same time, in the drawing-room, Tanya taking soprano, one of the young ladies a contralto, and the young man with his violin, were practising a well-known serenade of Braga’s. Kovrin listened to the words — they were Russian — and could not understand their meaning. At last, leaving his book and listening attentively, he understood: a maiden, full of sick fancies, heard one night in her garden mysterious sounds, so strange and lovely that she was obliged to recognise them as a holy harmony which is unintelligible to us mortals, and so flies back to heaven. Kovrin’s eyes began to close. He got up, and in exhaustion walked up and down the drawing-room, and then the dining-room. When the singing was over he took Tanya’s arm, and with her went out on the balcony.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, June 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 1, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0078: Less Sound, More Music

The 78th weekly Disquiet Junto project revisits the most popular project in the year and a half thus far of the ongoing Disquiet Junto series. It’s a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from the same source audio, which is provided below. You will take the provided sound sample and from it make an original work. You will do this only by subtracting sound from the sample. You won’t add anything to it. You won’t slow it down. You won’t speed it up. You won’t cut it up, and you won’t otherwise reorganize its contents. You won’t play it backwards. You will only “remove.” The word “remove” is up for interpretation — but generally speaking, I’d say that it means various acts of lowering the volume of a narrow or wide band of the audio spectrum for either a short or long period of time. And, of course, “lowering the volume” can be interpreted to mean muting outright. The act here of “removing” is the sonic equivalent of sculpting something from a solid block.

The track that will be the focus of our collective effort is a 1902 recording by the Edison Symphony Orchestra of “Angel’s Serenade,” or “La Serenata,” by composer Gaetano Braga. This link goes to the source MP3:

http://goo.gl/9sWNe

Deadline: Monday, July 1, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your piece will, due to the nature of the assignment, be the exact same length as the original recording on which it is based: two minutes and seven seconds (2:07).

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0078-minusmusic” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 78th Disquiet Junto project, in which sound is removed from a century-old Edison Symphony Orchestra recording, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/06/27/disqui...

This track a reworking of a 1902 recording by the Edison Symphony Orchestra of “Angel’s Serenade,” or “La Serenata,” by composer Gaetano Braga. The source audio is from this URL:

http://archive.org/details/EdisonSymp...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Industrial Collage (MP3s)

The album Au​-​Delà by Usher and Zreen Toyz brings to mind the early industrial music of Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Psychic TV: underground beats undergirded with hushed portent. The set’s four tracks make steady beats seem unsteady by layering in found sounds and muffled vocalizing. As the album proceeds, beats give way, in “Ectoplasmes,” to an anxious haze of broken chimes, backward masked wisps, and shuddering near-subaural drones. The record was released by the Inner Cinema label, more from which at inner-cinema.com.

Au-Delà by Usher & Zreen Toyz

Get the full set as a free download at innercinema.bandcamp.com. More from Toyz at arcanewaves.blogspot.com.

Yesterday and Tomorrow from Kyoto (MP3)

The latest from Nobuto Suda still bears today’s datestamp, but he is based in Japan, where it is already well into tomorrow. Titled “Note of repose（sketch_13/06/25),” the track is a little over eight minutes of glistening stasis. There are a few notes consistently, if tentatively, eking out a semblance of a tune, but they are echoed and refracted with such attention to detail that they come to form more of a scrim than a melody, a kind of slow-motion shimmer.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/nobutosuda1101. Nobuto Suda is based in Kyoto, Japan. More from him at
nobutosuda.bandcamp.com.

Composing Material Culture

The metronome provides an invisible blueprint for music. That time-tested pendulum timekeeper is employed in analog and digital form by musicians of all stripes. Yet by the time those musicians perform live or in a recording setting, the metronome itself has been relegated back to the closet.

But now, as part of an expansive, highly engaging evening-length program, titled neither Anvil nor Pulley, the composer Dan Trueman has brought the metronome into an unfamiliar role as a performance instrument. Not that there aren’t precedents, notably including György Ligeti’s “Poeme symphonique” (1962) for 100 metronomes, and an even earlier work, “Music for Electric Metronomes” by Toshi Ichiyanagi. But as a testament to Trueman’s ingenuity, the metronome is employed both as object and inspiration: both as a sound source, and as a touchstone for a variety of metric and percusssive explorations.

And, furthermore, the metronome is simply one among numerous objects that are used untraditionally in the work. There’s the turntable that plays archaic fiddle music — or at least what appears to be archaic fiddle music, except that it’s actually original work by Trueman, to which he added the patina of vinyl surface noise. There are controllers (“tethers” as he calls them) that date back to a decade-old golf video game. There are speaker drivers attached to large acoustic drums (see image up top). There are the laptop computers, a tool that Trueman has actively pursued in PLOrK, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, which he and Perry Cook cofounded in 2005.

These matters of material culture are key to Trueman’s compositional efforts. As he has written in regard to the title of the work: “Unlike the anvil or pulley, the computer hides its purpose—to strike or yank will only break. What is this ‘tool’ we call a computer?”

In an extended interview-via-correspondence, Trueman discussed at length the role that these varied objects play a role in his compositioanl practice; about the collaborative give and take involved in working with So Percussion members Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting; about his teaching at Princeton; and about why the word “classical” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

This is a preview of the music from the album, which was released by the Cantaloupe label on May 28, 2013:

This is a video of the work performed live in full:

Marc Weidenbaum: This is an overly long opening question, but please take that as an expression of enthusiasm. I want to start the interview by focusing on the opening parts of four of the work’s five parts. All but “Feedback,” the Bach exploration, begin with very quiet sounds: the surface hiss of vinyl, the tiny tick of the metronome. I’m fascinated by the employment of these elements, because I have come to wonder — not just in your music, but in that of Arvo Pärt and Max Richter, not to mention people like Steve Roden and Carsten Nicolai — how much they represent a compositional approach that comes after not only the introduction of recorded music, but after the introduction of the CD and, later, digital audio files. Do you see that as “new,” somehow, the composer’s comfort with sounds that might, before 1980, or perhaps 1880, not have been inherently presumed to be audible to an audience?

Dan Trueman: Absolutely. My way into electronic music back in the day was through the electric violin, and the main attraction to me was not being able to play loud, but being able to play soft, and have the details magnified and audible. So, for instance, the noise of barely speaking ponticello or tasto on the violin strings with all the whispery harmonics, the gentle grit of the rosined horse-hair on steel; these were elements that were practically unavailable before amplification.

Which means that I’m not really answering your question! But, what I think it means is that my attraction to the qualities that the very soft sounds have, and the fact that they were now available through amplification, led to an interest in a whole world of sounds that wouldn’t have been practically available, or considered “musical.” So, record hiss, the drop of the needle, the minute click of a single digital sample (which sounds like a digital artifact, and is traditionally avoided in “computer music”), all of these are now part of a larger world of small sounds that are inherently technological. For me, these are part of the palette, the way traditional instrumental sounds are.

Weidenbaum: That’s great that the whole “microsound” aspect was something you had been so attentive to. Of course, I am not surprised, and the way you laid it out is very helpful. To follow up, I have another question. Allowing that much of this work is technologically facilitated, are there pre-electronic premonitions for you, works from the canon that set up what you are now exploring. I think Morton Feldman’s music, and some of Olivier Messiaen’s, play this role. The opening half minute or so of Mahler’s first symphony has long been a “classical ambient” touchstone for me. But I think I’m asking even further back.

Trueman: Feldman has long been a huge influence. Pieces like Piano and String Quartet and “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” in particular, with their incredible sonorities and intense quiet. But earlier, [Igor] Stravinsky’s Symphony of Winds has also been very important for me, with its “moments” that just seem to sit, or float. [John] Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts is another, the [György] Ligeti piano music (the Études, “Musica Ricercata”), much of [Louis] Andriessen’s music (“Hadewijch” comes to mind).

Now this is going to sound terribly old fashioned, but I just can’t get enough of Bach, even after all these years. So many things about his music, but in this conversation, I’ll mention one moment: well into the epic D-minor Chaconne, from the solo violin partita, he moves ever so delicately to D-major, and in some of the best performances I’ve heard, this move happens so quietly and delicately it can barely be heard.

Even earlier, renaissance vocal music like [Orlando de] Lassus; I actually grew up singing stuff like this, informally with my family.

But I really need to mention pre-electronic fiddlers that have been hugely influential, like Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, who is an absolute master at what I suppose we might call “microsound fiddle playing.” I’ve never heard a fiddler play more quietly and with more color and space than Caoimhín; it is astonishing and mesmerizing. His colleague the singer Iarla Ó Lionaird has a different but somehow similarly austere sort of expressivity in his voice; I can’t get enough of it. And then there is the glow and sparkle that Norwegian fiddlers like Hauk Buen have; it’s a sound that remains stuck in my ears and something I aspire to, often indirectly, but also directly.

Weidenbaum: Speaking of which, what does the term “classical music” mean to you? Do you engage with the term directly? I’ve been fascinated by its seeming decrease in prominence among a certain generation of young composers.

Trueman: I’ve mostly forgotten that term, and really don’t like it. I suppose I use it occasionally when under duress, in a conversation with someone who isn’t really into music much, but it really doesn’t feel useful, and has lots of baggage.

Weidenbaum: There is considerable thought evident in your broader writings about your work — so much interesting context that has informed my listening — on your website, in your tech overview, in the score itself. How do you decide how much information to put in the album’s liner note?

Trueman: Well, there is the program note and the liner note. I think of program notes as an extension of the piece, helping set the stage for the listener, offering them ways into the piece that reflect my own thoughts about what I was after. With some pieces this is more important than in others, and I think with neither Anvil nor Pulley, they are quite important, because of the scale of the work, the unusual things i’m asking the performers to do, the mysterious fiddle tunes, and so on. I find it hard work to write these notes (I prefer just to write music!), and am always frustrated with them, but i think not having them would be unfair, given that I’m asking people to give 45 minutes of their complete attention to something I’ve made, something that is, I think it is fair to say, unlike anything else they have likely encountered.

One specific aspect of this has to do with new technologies. I really don’t want my notes to turn into a geek-fest, drawing the focus of the listener into how I’ve done things, or trying to impress them with technological prowess. Of course, questions about how everything works are inevitable, and I welcome them, but I really hope they become fused into a larger, musical experience that is as compelling as possible. On the other hand, for other geeks like me who are interested, I like to make it known what’s going on; this is all part of the dialog that these pieces should inspire, I hope.

In this case, So Percussion made the decision about what to include in the actual liner notes, and these days with digital releases and PDFs, it’s really nice to be able to include a lot. I like what they’ve done, with the mixture of artwork, photos, excerpts of computer code, text, and so on. In fact, I’m amazed at how comprehensively they have looked at how to release something like this; the LPs, the speaker-driver, and the tether releases, are all really amazing, beautiful and thought provoking (and specially appropriate to neither Anvil nor Pulley), I think, and that really was all So Percussion’s work.

Weidenbaum: How did all those untraditional release formats come to be?

That’s all So Percussion’s doing. They did a really neat no-CD release last year — the Cage Bootlegs — where they really tried to mark the release in a special way without actually pressing a CD, something that seems increasingly pointless. I love how thoughtful they’ve been, and how their ideas really came directly from the piece. The LP-sized artwork is stunning, and then simply holding an actual old LP in your hands when first engaging with this piece, hearing the needle drop, will be quite something, I hope.

These three videos display the alternate physical versions of the So Percussion release of Dan Trueman’s neither Anvil nor Pulley. There’s a record album containing another album entirely. There’s a “speaker driver package” that requires the user to add another element — like, say, a piece of carboard. And there’s the tether (or “sound marionette”):

Weidenbaum: Did you explore using existing recordings of fiddle music before employing your own?

Trueman: No, I wanted to use those tunes in particular, two of which I wrote specifically for neither Anvil nor Pulley, because of their sense of time. The first one, which really locks into a foot-stomping 120bpm, gives way to the 120bpm digital clicks in a way I really love, and the last one has such a warped, physical sense of time that feels so different than what machines normally give us. And the lyricism of the second fiddle tune seemed almost needed — like a bit of ginger — between the intensity and abstractness of “120bpm” and “Feedback.” I also wanted to give them some old fashioned notes to play; I remember seeing Adam [Sliwinski] work on “Hang Dog” in an early rehearsal, before I had even decided to include the other two fiddle tunes, and was struck by how much he loves to shape phrases, and how good at it he is — I felt the piece needed more of that!

Weidenbaum: Were either of these pieces of music on your mind as you worked on “120bpm”: György Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” or Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Music for Electric Metronomes”?

Trueman: I wasn’t familiar with the Iciyanagi piece, but of course the Ligeti is almost just part of the atmosphere, no pun intended. I have another piece called “Four Squared for Ligeti” that is based on the same metronome instrument as “120bpm,” and directly references the “Poème” and also the “Ricercata.” I continue to be awed by Ligeti’s range and depth, that the person who wrote the Études would be the same to write “Poème.”

A page from “120bpm [or, What is your Metronome Thinking?]” one of the five parts of neither Anvil nor Pulley:

Weidenbaum: Clearly in a piece like “Another Wallflower,” significant effort goes into this lovely fade, this film-like transition from the recorded version of the melody to the one that is performed in the more traditional sense. How much are you also bringing the surface noise to life? It seems like the tonal material retains the gauzy quality, but that could just be wishful listening on my part.

Trueman: That’s interesting! Do you mean, was I specifically composing the tune from the record noise itself? The way that worked is I gave the recording to So Percussion and a very basic notation of the tune (two voices, since it’s double-stops, and the foot-stomping patterns), and then they worked out how they wanted to play it, and when they wanted to remove the actual recording (they could have played the whole first track with the fiddle if they wanted). Since they did this with the old, hissy version of the tune, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of what they did reflects the specific qualities of the recording itself, especially in Jason’s case; he has such a colorful touch with the drums, the snare in particular, and I’m sure, even without thinking, that some of what he does comes from the complete sense of that noisy recording.

Weidenbaum: How did this project originate, your composing this specific work for this specific ensemble?

Trueman: I had worked with So Percussion on another evening length piece, (Five (and-a-half) Gardens, a collaboration between So Percussion and my duo, Trollstilt) and I also play with Jason [Treuting] in a band (QQQ), so we have a long history of working together. So Percussion were putting together a program of new commissions for their first full show at Zankel and asked me if I would write them something new, just for them and possibly with laptops, for that concert. Since I had worked with them so much, and since I trust their abilities so much, I wanted to collaborate with them on the process, and this piece wouldn’t have turned out this way without that. “120bpm” is fully notated and composed in a traditional sense, but “Feedback” was a much more collaborative (and scary) creation, one where I had built the instruments for them to play and a rough outline of the work, but one that didn’t come to life until we workshopped together, extensively (once, in front of an audience at the So Percussion Summer Institute, which was particularly frightening!). And of course, the fiddle tunes as I described, where I really wanted them to find ways into those tunes themselves, the way “folk” musicians do.

Weidenbaum: Can you describe your academic mode? Are you tenured at Princeton? What courses do you teach?

Trueman: I’m extraordinarily fortunate to be tenured at Princeton, where I have some wonderful and inspiring colleagues and students. This is far more than you’ll want to see, but i recently took part in a symposium on what we do here and presented this paper, which does, I think, present a fair picture of our idiosyncratic, very open program. I’ve taught 16th- and 18th-century counterpoint here for many years, and then I teach a variety of other courses, like the PLOrk courses, graduate seminars in electronic music, instrument building, comparative coding, or non-electronic subjects like rhythm/meter/groove, theft by ear, or, this coming fall, intercultural music with Donnacha Dennehy, a good friend and visiting composer here at Princeton.

Weidenbaum: I find myself paying special attention to your emphasis on the computer-as-instrument. Because of its wide breadth of possibilities, its ability to multi-task, to network, the computer differs significantly from what was considered an instrument before it. How hard do you work to limit the computer’s role in a specific work, so as to find a balance with instruments that predate it? I feel like there is a parallel between the chance elements in “120bpm” and the way that PLOrk has helped pushed the laptop beyond synchronization.

Trueman: Right, such an important question. With PLOrk, I’ve found that the most important challenge is calibrating the “player’s” level of engagement and effort with the computer. Obviously, they can just press a button and then sit back and let it do its thing (and there are times for this!, not unlike striking a gong and listening to the glow for minutes), or they can be asked to try to master something that takes hours and hours (or years and years) to master (this is actually quite hard to reach, frankly, and possibly pointless). For me, I want the player to be deeply engaged in the musical experience, sometimes to break a sweat, sometimes to be seriously challenged, sometimes to simply enjoy the process of engaging with sound in a straightforward but new way (the “tethers” in “120bpm,” for instance). And while I do often think of these things that I make for people to play as “instruments” I also often think of them as “machines” that we are trying to harness, not unlike, say, a race car. You think of a race car driver: they aren’t physically making the car go, but rather they are trying to control it in virtuosic ways, making it go as fast and as nimbly as possible, and in turn the driver is taken on a ride that would simply be impossible with the “machine.” We should have more musical “instruments” that are like race cars! And, in this case, I had the Andrettis of the percussion world to drive.

The “sync” issue that you bring up is interesting, and I can’t say that I was thinking of it explicitly when working on the aleatoric sections in “120bpm,” though it does make perfect sense. One of their main roles as players is to sync and de-sync the digital metronomes on their individual laptops, and these aleatoric sections willfully ask them to de-sync and to partially repress the metronomes.

The interface for the software that interacts with the video game “tethers” employed in neither Anvil nor Pulley:

Weidenbaum: The next step beyond syncing is the network, computers reacting to each other — computers working in symphony, as it were. Do you do any network-based composition and performance?

Trueman: Absolutely, quite a lot. I use it some in the “Four Squared for Ligeti” I mentioned, and others like “Clapping Machine Music Variations,” but that usage is really embedded in the fabric of the piece and is not foregrounded. Several years ago, when PLOrk first started, I explored this a lot, in particular with this piece [see: turbulence.org. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of LANs and music making (as opposed to distance networking), whether dealing with actual time sync or simply sharing of information of various sorts while performing. That said, I’m still figuring out how to calibrate when to use it; in neither Anvil nor Pulley I don’t use it at all, and I really do prefer to have the players do the syncing, and have the syncing be fluid and part of the musical performance process. This is of course especially true with a group like So Percussion, who have such an incredible relationship with sync and time.

More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com. More on the album at bangonacan.org. More on Dan Trueman at manyarrowsmusic.com and princeton.edu.

Anime Sound Design Remix (MP3)

The artist who goes by johnny_ripper on SoundCloud refers to one of his latest tracks, “Cat Soup,” as a “love letter” to the Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa. Ripper goes on to explain, “95% of this song is music and sounds from the movie *Cat Soup*,” a decade-old Japanese anime that Yuasa created. The anime itself, an abstract and psychedlic journey into sublime weirdness (still image above), had little in the way of score (at least in its first third, which is shown streaming below), depending instead on much in the way of sound desgin elements like wind chimes (see screen shot below), insects, and other everyday noises — as well as on the unintelligible voices of massive spiritual forces and strange beasts.

Ripper has taken these sounds and managed to both keep them recognizable from the source material, and yet construct from them a jittery, glitchy instrumental pop song that captures the original film’s more cheerful aspects.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/johnny_ripper. The musician is based in Montréal, Canada. More from him at twitter.com/johnny_ripper
and johnnyripper.bandcamp.com.

Here, for reference, is the opening part of the Cat Soup, which appears to be much more oriented toward sound design than score, though Yutoro Teshikai has a credit for music:

A Sardinian in Berlin (MP3)

A Sardinian musician living in Berlin the past two years, Stefano Ferrari records and performs as Menion. His new album, the self-titled Menion, was released earlier this month by the excellent La Bél netlabel, and what follows is the fourth of its ten tracks. The piece runs the gamut from gentle vibrating ambience to glitched-out guitar effluvia. It sounds more like a teaser collection of sample segments or a mini-suite of short-attention-span bits and pieces than a standalone track, but that is what it is. Among the several things that make it hold together splendidly is an interesting contrast, in that the vibrant passages are austere while the mellow ones are warm and enveloping — which is to say, it cools down when it heats up.

Get the full set for free download at labelnetlabel. More from Menion/Ferrari at menion.org and soundcloud.com/menion.

O’Rourke + Haino + 7 Others (MP3)

The great record label Important Records — which has released recordings by such musicians as Pauline Oliveros, Acid Mothers Temple, Eleh, Ellen Fullman, Eliane Radigue, Matmos, Kid 606, and Merzbow — now has a Tumblr account, at imprec.tumblr.com. The account is so new, having begun this month, that as of this writing there are precisely two posts on it. One is a link to an hour-long streaming drone video on YouTube by Amelia Cuni, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Werner Durand.

And the other, ready for download and repeat listening, is an extravagantly restrained nonet featuring Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, among a heap of equally stellar performers. The lineup is as follows, and the Tumblr post is actually a link to cellist Claus’ johakyu.com site. The work is deeply dramatic, reminiscent of a Heiner Goebbel or Robert Wilson production. The full cast is as follows: Gaspar Claus (cello), Eiko Ishibashi (Voice, Piano), Kazutoki Umezu (bass clarinet), Kakushkin Nishihara (Voice, Satsuma Biwa), SachikoM (Sine waves), Jim O’Rourke (electric guitar), Tomokawa Kazuki ( Voice, Guitar), Keiji Haino (Voice, Rudraveena, Percussion), and Leonard Eto (taiko).

Track downloadable for free at johakyu.com. More on the label at ImportantRecords.com.