Entries associated with the tag "Electronic Music":

In the new issue of Signal to Noise a number of writers and musicians list their "most-cherished musical possessions," and aside from records and instruments most of them turn out to be useless ephemera imbued with meaning by the owner--a leg from a piano stool wrecked by Misha Mengelberg, for instance, or a sleeve from a shirt worn by Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers.

Music writer (and former Reader contributor) Kevin Whitehead chose an instrument imbued with meaning: his "crackle box," a handheld, battery-driven electronic instrument designed by Dutch engineer Michel Waisvisz (pictured), which produced "the goosey sound of an airport security wand." (Click the header of this post to access a photo of the device.) He writes that hundreds were sold during the 70s, but by the 90s they were near impossible to find. Whitehead, who spent several years in Amsterdam researching his indispensable book New Dutch Swing, got his from Waisvisz himself.

Since 2004 they've been manufactured again, but sadly, Waisvisz died yesterday, following a bout with cancer, at age 58. For the past 27 years he was the director of the important Dutch electronic music center STEIM, where he became a strong advocate of experimental electronic musicians building and modifying their own instruments. Back in 1977 Waisvisz released an album called Crackle for FMP/Claxon, which ended up being the main item in his discography; after 1978 he almost never recorded, preferring ephemeral live performances. A few years ago Sonig Records released In Tune, an anthology assembled by Frank Dommert that mixed pieces from that long out-of-print album with a handful of live and live-in-the-studio pieces. Despite the primitivism of the crackle box, these recordings suggest its malleability and power--in the right hands, it doesn't sound dated at all.

Today's playlist:

Joe Bataan, Gypsy Woman (Fania)
Trinity, Shanty Town Determination (Blood and Fire)
Scott Colley, Architect of the Silent Moment (Cam Jazz)
David Behrman, Leapday Night (Lovely Music)
Wibutee, Eight Domestic Challenges (Jazzland)

Late last year New World Records issued a fascinating document of the work of the League of Automatic Music Composers, a Bay Area group that in the late 70s and early 80s became one of the first to use computers as real-time musical instruments. Few people have ever heard the brazenly experimental material produced by the LAMC--a group of largely self-taught tech geeks that included John Bischoff (pictured), Jim Horton, and Tim Perkis--but their canny exploitation of early microcomputers like the KIM-1 (which went for around $250 when it was introduced in 1976 and operated with a mere 1 K of user RAM) presaged whole worlds of music making that would open up in the decades to come. They formed an interactive band of networked microcomputers, wiring three or four separate machines to one another to produce spastic, unpredictable, and deliberately raw blasts of synthetic blubbering, squealing, squelching, and humming.

The new CD collects ten pieces recorded between 1978 and 1983, culled from 30 cassettes kept in an old shoebox. The music is unmistakably (and understandably) primitive, created by jerry-rigging crude gear, a la LAMC contemporaries Voice Crack (whose approach, while similar, was even more improvisational and low-tech) or countless subsequent bargain-bin hackers (like the Chicagoans in the defunct 8-Bit Construction Set). Joined for brief periods by important electronic-music figures like David Behrman and Paul DeMarinis, the LAMC developed strategies and programs that allowed their highly challenged machines a limited kind of artificial intelligence--one computer might react to specific pitches it "heard" by triggering rhythmic functions in a second device--but they left enough room for chance and randomness that the music was often essentially improvised. In their extensive liner notes, Perkis and Bischoff write:        

"A typical League session would consist of setting up our computer systems in a living room and laboriously connecting them together. With wires running everywhere and our computer programs finally debugged, after several hours we would eventually get the system up and musically running. Then we would play, tuning our systems and listening intently as our machines interacted. When surprising new areas of musicality appeared, we took notes on the parameter settings of our individual programs with the hope that recalling those settings in concert would yield similar exciting results."

The group ceased activity in 1983 due to the Horton's crippling rheumatoid arthritis (he died in 1998). Bischoff and Perkis eventually started another network band called the Hub, which has been active sporadically for more than two decades.

Bischoff, currently teaching music at Mills College in Oakland, has produced a small but strong body of solo work since the dissolution of the LAMC. His most recent album, Aperture (23five, 2003), uses current software (namely the fairly ubiquitous Max/MSP), but spontaneity and chance remain vital components of his music--the album was recorded in real time, and there are no overdubs. A beautiful piece like "Piano 7hz" uses piano notes as source material, but the sustained notes from the keyboard are not only processed but seem to be triggering other elusive sounds--pings, ringing bells, water drips. I won't pretend to know how all this stuff works, but I can say that the results can easily be appreciated without such knowledge. On Saturday night Bischoff gives a rare local concert at Lampo, where he'll perform four recent pieces. 

Today's playlist:

Anthony Braxton & Joe Fonda, Duets 1995 (Clean Feed)
Andy Moor, Marker (Unsounds)
Soft Machine, Volume Two (Water)
Mattin & Radu Malfatti, Going Fragile (Formed)
Antonio Sanchez, Migration (Cam Jazz)

"If you read the credits, [Diplo] sent me a loop for 'Bucky Done Gun,' and I made a song in London, and it became 'Bucky Done Gun.' But that was the only song he was actually involved in on Arular. So the whole time I've had immigration problems and not been able to get in the country, what I am or what I do has got a life of its own, and is becoming less and less to do with me. And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed. After the first time it's cool, the second time it's cool, but after like the third, fourth, fifth time, maybe it's an issue that we need to talk about, maybe that's something important, you know."

Around this time of the year a slight sense of panic invades my mind. While I’m perfectly aware of how silly and arbitrary top-ten lists are, there’s always a part of me that's dedicated to doing it right: thinking hard, comparing, and remembering, as if picking my ten favorite (or, even funnier, "best") albums of the year will actually mean something.

One thing that occupies much of time each December, then, is catching up on albums I missed, or barely listened to. Since I’m the midst of that process it seems obvious to share some thoughts, especially because the Reader's forthcoming best-of feature will have only top-five lists, leaving out a lot of good albums.    

The other day Jim “Marlon” Magas commented on my brief Clipse post, noting that the austere sound of the album made him feel “almost like it was produced by Ryoji Ikeda.” Ikeda is a dynamic, highly minimalist Japanese electronic-music composer who reduces his sonic building blocks down to a simple synthetic tone. When people talk about music as ones and zeroes, this should be what they’re referencing. He’s been turning out thrilling music for over a decade now, translating binary code into rhythmically audacious, wonderfully tactile music that doesn’t suffer at all from academic mumbo jumbo.    

Last December he released his first album in three years, but since it was issued on a German label and took a few months to make it over to these shores I’m logging it as a 2006 release. Dataplex features Ikeda’s tell-tale sounds: high-frequency sine waves (your dog might be whining), tinny electronic pings, floor-rumbling bass tones, white-noise blasts, industrial hums, etc. According to Ikeda’s Web site, this album is “the first musical composition in the datamatics series—a new body of work across various media that uses data as both its material and its theme." While Ikeda is hardly the first composer to translate digital data in sound—and with this kind of music it doesn’t strike me as a very interesting concept—the structural arrangement of the 20 pieces transcends that gambit. The disc opens with a bunch of short pieces that expose the raw data sounds, then graduates to lengthier pieces that reveal the composer’s more deliberate rhythmic ideas—where original constructions are endlessly and methodically permutated—and sonic layering. It’s still icy, ultra-precise stuff, and melody has no place in it, but Dataplex is as good as anything Ikeda has done.