Category: Listen

Here’s a gem of a download from Donna Summer, uh, I mean Jason Forrest. Despite the fact that “Sperry and Foil” has been kicking around the Cock Rock Disco site for a while now, as well as appearing on Forrest’s latest EP titled Lady Fantasy, the track is still available as an MP3 in its full 7½-minute glory. For an artist classified by Pitchfork as breakcore techno, it’s surprising to find Forrest in chill-pill mode, restraining himself from his usual glitzy blitzkrieg. Inspired by, and likely sampled from, krautrock legend Neu!, Forrest gives the geeks the odd-meter rhythm orgasm they crave by throwing in some lovely 16-beat chunks that have a catchy 7+9 groove. The track is so atypically conciliatory in comparison to Forrest’s usual fare, you might even get away with playing it at your next cocktail party without freaking anybody out—depending on who your friends are of course.

—RN

Though he’s no stranger to the studio, this is the first disc of Damon Holzborn’s to come my way. On this outing, the founding member of the experimental/improv Trummerflora collective abandons his guitar for the world of solo electronic manipulation. From a video game in hyper drive to what could easily be mistaken for closely mic’d kitchen appliances, he crafts sounds into what even the electronics-skeptical might identify as music despite themselves. Though his compositional pedigree includes Frederic Rzewski, Brian Ferneyhough, Will Ogden, and Rand Steiger, I couldn’t help but imagine a closer alliance with the work of Nicolas Collins while listening to tracks like “O/Radio.” The piece is a ten-minute struggle to tune in not this week’s Top 40 hits, but more likely the communications of extraterrestrials or maybe even God. Regardless, John Cage must be smiling down and maybe even phoning home.

—MS

Known simply as Quiet American to most, sound artist Aaron Ximm has been instrumental in shining a spotlight on field recordings, minimal sounds, and digital music that melds these strategies together though his successful Field Effects series in San Francisco. His website is a treasure trove of information about the artist, the concert series, and even tips on field recording techniques. “three trains” (yes, apparently Ximm ascribes to the lowercase aesthetic), the first track from the 1999 album vox americana, is available as a downloadable MP3 along with the rest of the album along with lots of bonus material. Created from recordings captured in Ba Cah, Vietnam, “three trains” is a hypnotic journey of phasing rhythms, clanging bells, and voices. As you might expect, Ximm sites Steve Reich’s Different Trains as an inspiration for the piece, but Ximm’s abstracted approach is infinitely more subtle.

—RN

Eschewing more traditional, Italianate nomenclature for movement titles like “Chaser,” “Plucker,” and “Grinder” is but the first indication that Nathaniel Stookey’s String Quartet No. 2 is a decidedly 21st century sort of composition. Add to these stylistic references to video arcades and some of his favorite pop songs and you have Musée Mécanique. His working title, Five Gadgets, reveals a bit more of the thought process behind this work. As each movement unfolds the machine grows into a big “Mixer.” Keep an ear out for the nod to the artist once again known as Prince…

—MS

I’ve always been a sucker for cello ensemble pieces. There’s something really appealing about having a big group of people all playing the same instrument, and it works more effectively with cellos than most instruments—tons of flutes are cool but there’s only so low you can go and a bunch of pianos are cool to look at but usually guarantee a muddy texture, and I haven’t even taken practicality into account. David Liptak’s Broken Cries, composed in the summer of 2001 (month not specified), sounds like much of the music created by Americans either immediately after 9/11 or eerily right before it. Slow mournful music gradually grows turbulent and uncertain.

—FJO

I became an instant Blevin Blectum fan back when she and Kevin Blechdom performed a concert in a Mills College bathroom. Since then, she’s continued to tweak sampler knobs and laptop trackpads, coaxing extraordinary sounds and frenetic beats into a whimsical, self-referential landscape that never sits still. I ran across an excerpt of Blectum’s “Chicken Jiggler Peady” on the webpage of fellow Bay Area electronic maestro Wobbly. A quick listen will give you a little peak into Blectum’s sideways, stuttering, arcade-inspired sonic living room.

—RN

Craig Hella Johnson & Company of Voices

I’ve never understood people who could throw a CD in the stereo and go to sleep. Even at my most exhausted, my ears will not disengage from the sound long enough to let my mind wander off to dreamland. Still, as a veteran insomniac, I’m always on the lookout for music that might become my adult lullaby. To that end, Eric Whitacre’s Sleep couldn’t have sounded more attractive. The four-plus minute setting of a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri is delivered here as a powerful hymn by the Texas-based Company of Voices. It would be a very worthy accompaniment to a well-deserved rest, but I don’t think I’ve found my aural sleeping pill here. Silverstri offers a poetic explanation: “A thousand pictures fill my head/I cannot sleep, my mind’s aflight/and yet my limbs seem made of lead.”

—MS

Bridge’s new CD of music by Tom Flaherty was my introduction to this L.A.-based cellist/composer. While the disc offers a variety of chamber music combinations including two duets for two pianos, the piece I find myself coming back to most is his 1991 Trio for Cello and Digital Processor (which should be a duet right?). The Trio, according to the booklet notes, makes references to repertoire as disparate as J.S. Bach’s Es ist Genug and Edgard Varèse’s Poème electronique, but (in a rare non-analytical moment) I was too busy being saturated by the textures to notice or care.

—FJO

A visit to o.blaat’s webpage will point you to a myriad of interesting sites such as WKCR’s Live Construction archive featuring music, sound work, and radio art from every corner of the globe. Visitors are also given the chance to download a handful of MP3s created by the Brooklyn-based sound artist. An MP3 titled tipsooi begins with a benevolent thunder storm or the synchronized humming of a clandestine air conditioner orchestra, then piercing high-pitched stillness punctured by micro-pops which gets harmonized by something resembling the Emergency Broadcast System’s signature sine tones. This crystalline sonic landscape is visited by tiny insect legs that become giant foghorn-gongs as things finally settle into gentle patterns of periodicity. All the different looping textures move independently, sometimes dancing into the foreground as the music simmers away, its seams occasionally exposed by deliberately spliced-in glitches.

—RN

Violists tend to feel like left out like second cousins at the party, but really it seems like the perfect instrument—the soul of the cello with all the portability of a violin. Easley Blackwood is a composer who appears to have relished in what the viola has to offer. Two viola sonatas are presented on this disc, their composition separated by almost 50 years. The first, from 1953, Blackwood wrote to resemble the styles of Berg and Messiaen, and harmonically the piece takes a number of fascinating turns. Hindemith, with whom the composer was studying at the time, was not amused. “He thoroughly disliked the piece, declaring that its style was ‘unnatural’,” writes Blackwood in the disc’s liner notes. “I argued back that all musical styles are basically unnatural, save perhaps for pentatonic monody. Hindemith was not a skilled debater.”

—MS