“On lead synthesizer, a philodendron …” (And the crowd goes wild…)

Vegetation may not be the first association you have when thinking of electronic music. But two new albums, each released via Bandcamp, celebrate biological life of the green, leafy variety. One is a benefit compilation, with proceeds going to help trees and music inspired by that green goodness. The other uses plants as “performers,” generating its form from plant life in an installation and extended “live” release.

It seems a fitting time to think about trees and plants, as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere see the coming of summer. As I write this, outside my home office’s window, everything has become a calming canopy of maple leaves. And so, just as those trees have a chilling, soothing emotional impact, I confess that this is all really enjoyable music, gimmicks aside. The tree-themed compilation is not a bunch of aimless Earthy music; the plants are not, as you might assume, screechy noise. Instead, you get two full-length albums of terrific-quality ambient music.

Each also works to plant something living – literally. “Take to the Trees,” a compilation for Arbor Day, directs proceeds from sales to the Arbor Day Foundation for conservation and education. That means money from the release could protect and plant trees. The Data Garden Quartet is more literal: embracing the idea of “plantable music,” the ephemeral digital download code is printed on paper that can grow. For instance, on the recent “Cheap Dinosaurs” release, you get “hand-made seed paper with screen-printed album art and download code on reverse side.”

Download Cheap Dinosaurs, plant this art under a thin layer of soil in full sun to partial shade and add water. With proper care, blue lobelias will begin sprouting in the first two weeks and finally begin blooming about 4 weeks later.

Released on Sound for Good, a benefit label, “Take to the Trees” gives you four hours of music for a minimum of just US$1. The collection is eclectic, spanning fairly traditional ambient music to beats, breaks, and experiments. Some tracks sound influenced by the cadence of traditional Japanese music or Tibetan meditation. They evoke impressions of trees and forests, but often via electronic (even traditional analog) timbres, recalling the sensation of trees and experience as much as painting those scenes directly. There are epic, sprawling tracks and more compact, rhythmic compositions. Sometimes nature itself sneaks in, in jungles and mountain sojourns. More often, warm, fuzzy electronic pads glow like sunlight. Many, many artists participate, going far beyond the San Francisco scene, including our friend, technologist, blogger, and musician Mark Mosher. Jack Hertz, also a prolific blogger and performer, heads up the comp.

Artists:

John Koch-Northrup, Ian Boddy, Burning Artist, Chromasonic, Crystal Dreams, Todd Fletcher, Groupthink, HG Fortune and Inner Dreamer, inside/ outside, Oskar Menzel, Joe McMahon, Mesawzee Eagle, Mirada, Shane Morris, Mark Mosher, Mystified, redgreenblue, John Sherwood, Symatic Star and Tange.

http://sound4good.bandcamp.com/

If “Take to the Trees” is hours of human playing and human experience recalling the feeling of plant life, “Data Garden Quartet” turns to the plants to “generate” the score, in nearly two hours of extended listening. Blending minimalism and ambience, the product is a wash of sound, with waves of timbres crested by gentle buzzes, glitches, and hums, all in extended rhythms and cycles (sometimes recalling nothing so much as the occasional stroke of a Javanese gong).

The project looks to make natural phenomena audible, “information which we cannot perceive through our biological senses”:

The musical compositions you are about to listen to were generated by the electronic impulses produced by four tropical plants. This data, interpreted by humans with the help of computers, has been employed to organize sound into beauty perceivable by the human ear. While the means of producing this beauty can be described in technical terms, the natural creative force generating this experience is less apparent.

These 116 minutes were recorded during an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April, in a “quartet” of a philodendron, two schefflera plants, and a snake plant. (Images here are from that exhibition.) The team:

Sam Cusumano: electronics
Joe Patitucci: sound design
Alex Tyson: production, graphic design

More images, though I think my favorite of all is the wonder of the gawking young girl. It’s too easy for us to become jaded, and forget, sometimes, the magic of the things we make.

Quartet: Live at The Philadelphia Museum of Art [datagarden.org]
http://datagarden.org/about/

Data Garden also do an interview with Abigail Bruley for Creators Project:
Interacting With Plants To Create Polyphonic Music

Musical history seems to happen when things collide, when things get mixed up – certainly in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century. And so it is that one of the most important “Detroit techno” records ever released came out of Amsterdam.

If this were a new artist, the long string of endorsements from a who’s who of electronic music in the video here might seem like publicity fluff. But because Dutch artist Steve Jerome Rachmad, aka Sterac, has had such a deep influence on electronic music since his 1995 debut release, instead you can listen to a network of people in the dance music community, and how those influences form nodes in a neural net of musical creativity. Those networks cross national borders and backgrounds, speaking this musical genre as a common language. As the centerpiece of this docu-short, Rachmad himself is humble and quiet, a Zen-like presence on a sofa in the midst of bubbling techno celebrities, as he talks about how he clawed his way to getting anything released at all, on his first Atari 1040ST computer.

The best part of the video, though, is hearing Sterac’s musical process, often just playing directly from his head through a series of overdubs. I’m sure Rachmad was thrilled to power up his Atari ST for the first time; nowadays, a lot of us find a way to return to the immediacy of directly-recorded one-take overdubs. (It’s not so hard, of course. Just step away from your fancy editor.)

I’ve just listened to the re-release “Secret Life of Machines,” due out in June. It’s a fantastic, fresh-sounding release – unassuming and direct in the way Rachmad himself is in the interview. The dirty reality is, some 90s electronic music – even some that is considered a landmark today – really does sound dated today. These cuts simply don’t. There is this sense, as Richie Hawtin puts it in the video, of music that’s “melodic, funky, like Holland … but [is] rhythmic and beautiful like Detroit.”

I am, not very secretly, an optimist. I wonder what musical collisions may happen next – whether it’s club music or dance music or not, in electronic music as a medium. To me, the most fertile moments in music bloom when these kinds of connections and influences can form.

“Secret Life Of Machines” will arrive in phases, remastered and remixed, starting in June 2012, on CD and digital.

Speaking of the iPad and music making, Japan’s Human Boot Project draw a music video release for their latest track directly from screen as they play, working in the app Tabletop. I really love the personality of the resulting sounds. There’s a rawness to their music, the dense downtempo jazz-inspired electronics, which you can enjoy on their new EP “Picture Over Picture.” It’s a Beatport exclusive from Greece’s V.I.M. Records:

http://www.beatport.com/release/picture-over-picture-ep/887326

The artists say it’s “Downtempo beauty to Jazz Electronica futurism !!” (Exclamation points theirs, but … I agree.)

Human Boot Project are a Japanese underground music unit. This is a genre breaker fusing Jazz with Rock and Drum and Bass and one to get the synapses twinging.

http://www.humanboot.com
http://www.facebook.com/humanboot
http://soundcloud.com/hbp

Tabletop is on sale now for 99 cents currently free, though note that a lot of what you’re seeing here requires in-app purchases of add-ons:
http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/tabletop

Artist Paul Salva consulted on the app, and in a video with the LA Times walks through the features in detail, if you want a closer look at the app. (Interestingly, he notes many in the LA scene are going iPad live.)

Out of the noise of the Internet, don’t be surprised if some of the music being made is – unexpectedly – wonderful. So it is with a compilation curated by Chris Randall from the Analog Industries community. Unsuspected Sounds is unexpected. It’s proof that those people writing all those comments really do have time to make music.

It’s nice seeing this come from Chris and the community he’s assembled. For his part, Chris doesn’t fit the stereotype of a blogger; he’s got industry experience as an engineer as an artist, is known to many as a veteran of Sister Machine Gun, and now leads dual lives as music maker and plug-in and mobile developer. (See: Audio Damage.) The guy has craft, across technology and art, such that one can see a dividing line between the two. So, fittingly, Chris pulls from his readers people whose music is evidence of the same.

All of this goes to a good cause, as well. It’s the sort of thing so many of us hope online communities will be. It’s nice when, at times, they actually are.

The sounds themselves fit into the amorphous but, for me, delightful category of “ambient/IDM,” into some catch-all of smart, doesn’t-quite-fit-in music made with electronics, inflected with beats without being slave to genre. (Please, someone, if you can rename that zone of music, you’d do all of us a favor. I know it’s my job as a journalist or whatever. But I’ll be your friend for life.) Thoughtfully constructed sounds, venturing into sometimes-moody, quirky, but personal and passionate realms, this is music that makes you feel intimate with its creators and what moves them when they’re being themselves. That’s perfect for a music compilation that itself represents a community that has gathered around common interests online.

I’ll let Chris explain the rest to CDM:

The story is pretty simple: what I did is have Analog Industries readers submit an exclusive track; I got 92 submissions, and curated the 10 on the album (well, 9 plus mine) out of those. 100% of the net proceeds (that is to say everything after production costs are covered) go to charity, specifically the Breast Assured Foundation.

The cover art was done with a Processing sketch created by Stefan Goodchild. [The sketch code is on GitHub.] The sketch does an FFT on an audio waveform and spits out a circular motif; top is left channel, bottom is right channel. I made a single audio file that was the entire album, and created the image from that. (As an aside: Stefan does audio-reactive visuals in Processing for several big acts, notably Peter Gabriel and Blur, and he did the Varese, Schaeffer, and Derbyshire T-Shirts that I sold on AI a while back.)

Chris also has some nice reflections in what he wrote for the release:

“I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.”

-Edgard Varèse (Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music)

“unsuspected sounds” is a collection of electronic music curated from the Analog Industries community, with 100% of the net proceeds of the sales donated to the Breast Assured Foundation, an organization that provides early breast cancer detection services for underprivileged women via a sophisticated mobile screening lab. Featuring ten tracks of all-new music, “unsuspected sounds” is a genre-spanning collection that provides a perfect soundtrack to modern living.

Available now at Bandcamp as both a DRM-free digital download and as a download + 12″ vinyl combo.

Side A:
1. Goldbaby – Ten OP
2. Bitmud – All The Beauty Is Gone
3. Chris Randall – Abstract Sixteen
4. Sabama – Doublethink
5. Pauk – Here She Comes

Side B:
1. Ancient Young – Silica Resonance
2. Russian Corvette – Pattern Recognition
3. Anodize – Bismuth
4. Milkfish – Just Once My Day Blows Yours Away
5. Jukebox – Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

Pay-what-you-want, minimum $5 for the digital download only, $15 for the vinyl + download. Get some new music, and help out a good cause!

http://analogindustries.bandcamp.com

It’s like musical survival training. Quick: you’re stuck in a hotel. Can you make some music?

Our friend Recue, aka Riku Annala, was unexpectedly being stranded in a hotel and made it into a musical opportunity. The results are damned fine listening. (Thank whatever act of God / airlines prompted this.) You can enjoy the results, free. Riku writes:

Dunno if you remember but some time ago I shared the little cheap tape head “saturation” thingy with you.

I was recently ‘stuck’ in an airport hotel room (for other reasons than music), but the good thing was that I had my mobile studio setup with me. The released set started out as this sort of a spur-of-the-moment, tongue-in-cheek live jam, as I was messing around with random hip hop/pop-music vocals on top of bits and pieces of my own projects. Eventually, it started to sound so twisted in a good way that I decided to record the whole thing. The set is split in half with the first part being a performance video and the second the complete set as audio. The tools and methods are exactly of those covered on CDM regularly (NI Maschine run as a plugin on Ableton Live and controlled by Liine Lemur on an iPad).

More:
http://www.recue.net

Sure, the accessibility and mobility of music making is seen by some as some sort of assault on civilization. (I think frankly those are the sort of people who don’t like food and hate joy, grimacing every time they pass a playground.) But if you’ve made an investment in some nice mobile music tools, put them to good use. Heck, hand-wash your underwear if you have to make more space for music tech. That next unintended layover (oops, thunderstorms) could mean a new album instead of a frustrated, wasted, lonely night. And I like to think that the beauty of modern music tech is that it salvages wonderful music we might otherwise not hear, allows it to come into being.

Have a listen to the full set, and give it a download:

We’ve passed from Record Store Day to Earth Day – and here’s the perfect segue. Having ventured into the woods to find a music release, now we can hear trees transformed, by way of sampling, into catchy rhythms. Our friend Diego Stocco, that evergreen source of creative timbres, now makes everything from trees to beans into sounds that are subtle and complex, full of personality and uniquely tied to their origin materials. There’s no real violence done to nature, either; you can make all of these noises with little more force than a small thundershower.

Remarkably, the video – shot as a promotional for Burt’s Bees – is all real-time. After-the-fact sampling manipulation is itself a fun activity, but there’s none of that business here; this is all improvisation, not editing or effects.

And that brings us to the real message of what Diego Stocco can do. Microphones matter, yes, but the real expertise here is not mic technique; it’s listening. Diego comes up with this great material because he’s had a lot of practice listening to the world around him. As the skill of his listening improves, so do his sounds, as though the planet unfolds new possibilities. (In fact, even the question of technical experience also comes down to the same idea: you’ll get better at mic selection and placement with more experimentation and listening closely to the results.)

Other examples he’s released in the past months drive that point home. In “Improv on a Plate,” the composer and sound designer plays a plate as though it’s an instrument.

I was about to cut a chocolate cake and when I moved the plate on the countertop I noticed a very interesting sound.
One side of the plate was free to vibrate because the tiles were not perfectly even, so by applying pressure with one finger and tapping it with another I was able to create some tonal beats.
I hope you’ll enjoy it!
The recording setup was very simple, Røde NT5, Apogee ONE, Pro Tools 9.

At a recent workshop at Berklee, Diego gave this advice to students explicitly: listen. (The suggestion comes across in a way that to me resonates with the teachings of Zen Buddhism – and, indeed, the teachings of just about all teachers in all disciplines. Observation is essential.)

He illustrated that point with a case study: a taxicab with a funny trunk can be the beginnings of a piece of music.

One of the things that I talked about during my sound design lecture at Berklee http://bit.ly/y89Wtr was to listen to the world around you all the time.

There are many reasons, there could be something interesting happening from a sonic standpoint, you could enrich your sound vocabulary by building references, and most of the time you can create something useful out of that recorded material.

On my way back home, I took a cab from the airport, and I noticed that there was a strange chirping noise coming from the trunk. Of course, I recorded it right away : )
I took that sound, did some work on it and created this short sound designed piece.
You’ll hear the dry sound first, and then the sound designed version, enjoy!

I can think of no better way to celebrate Earth Day than with that reflection: listening to your environment, “organic” and man-made, and the world all around you will help you discover possibilities you’ve missed. That’s not just sound design: it’s a way of (better) life. Happy Earth Day; hope you’ve all had a good weekend.

http://diegostocco.com/

For more hot mic-on-tree action this Earth Day, here’s the 2009 video Music from a Tree:

Where do you get your ideas? Sometimes, it can be a challenge just to start a track, or can simply feel a bit, well, lonely. Finding fellow music makers can solve that. Artists gathering around SoundCloud and online ambient music chronicle Disquiet work together, with inspiration from recording ice to ancient found samples of music and spoken word. Disquiet itself has challenged artists with Instagram photos and the city of Lisbon. The results are imaginative, varied, superb music. And they’ve been surprisingly popular, earning lots of ears and inspiring still more music.

Now, given the Instagram sale for US$1 billion, I would value the free compilation inspired by its photo sharing at least a couple of million dollars. Finding a welcoming community both to spur on new musical ideas and share the results? Priceless.

And, okay, while perhaps they haven’t netted any massive Facebook buyouts, the past months have proven that ideas like this can motivate music makers and listeners alike.

The Disquiet Junto, started by Disquiet and its editor, Marc Weidenbaum, describes itself as “a collaborative music-making space in which restraints are used as a springboard for creativity.” New projects are announced on Thursday, and then you have until the following Monday just before midnight to upload tracks. In just fifteen weeks, that’s inspired some 700 tracks – not bad, especially considering ambient music, lovely as it is, is hardly considered a hot commodity as genres go. (Non-ambient submissions are welcome, too, so long as they fit the brief.)

This week’s challenge, for instance, due Monday the 23rd of April, starts with samples of a piece of sandpaper and a pair of dice. The challenge: make one the foreground, and one the background. (The samples came from free sharing site freesound.org.) Previous challenges including Shostakovich and old rural music, bird song, a spoken word Benjamin Franklin autobiography, and old Edison cylinders as source material, and challenges like working from recordings of ice in a glass.

Weidenbaum has also been assembling some lovely compilations. The most recent “remixes” the city of Lisbon, entitled LX(RMX). Marc explains:

It’s 16 tracks, two each by eight musicians — each musician recording one under a pseudonym, and one under their own name, all exploring the sounds of urban Lisbon:

http://disquiet.com/2012/02/14/lxrmx-lisbon-remixed/

The 17th track is the source material.

Here’s what the resulting tracks sound like:

A separate compilation from the end of last year explored the notion of using photos on Instagram as source material. In two separate conversations, artists told me recently they felt that we lived in a “visual” culture, one in which the image was more important than sound. I’m still not convinced that’s true, or even how this oft-repeated statement is evaluated. But on the other hand, finding visual inspiration for music is a compelling exercise, a change to feed one part of the mind with stimulus from another.

Marc reflected on the project when I spoke with him in January – long before Instagram became part of business history, and when the Junto group was just starting:

The first week of release of Instagr/am/bient was much more intense than I had expected — intense in terms of how quickly it garnered an audience. The first week it averaged over 2,000 listens per day, not counting downloads (which I posted over on Archive.org). I had hopes that the mix of visuals and sound would be of broader interest than some of this music (drones, abstractions, extended phonography) might be on its lonesome. Apparently that proved to be the case. Clearly, tying it to a familiar software (Instagram) helped ground people’s imaginations, as of course did the visuals. I think there’s a lesson in that. The correlation also functioned thematically: not just how the music was inspired by the photos, but how Instagram images and ambient music both involve, in their own ways, filters/processes that alter existing documents (photographs in one case, often field recordings in another).

It was interesting as well how the musicians acted on their assignments. Each of the 25 sent to me an Instagram photo they had taken. I then gave thought as to how to disperse them, sometimes assigning one to a musician whose work I thought it shared an aesthetic with, sometimes to a musician for whom I thought the image would provide a creative
challenge. For example, I gave the image to Evan Cordes that showed the wheel of an office chair against floorboards. To my eye, the lines of the floorboards resembled sheet music, and indeed when I later discussed the project with Cordes he confirmed that he had interpreted it as a graphic score.

This project differed from past Disquiet.com projects in that it was looser. The assignments were fully conscious, but in the end one has less overall control over something when 25 geographically dispersed musicians working from 25 different source subjects are involved, versus when a dozen musicians are involved. The next major Disquiet.com project is very controlled, just eight musicians, all with a very specific assignment. It should be out in a few weeks.

The relative openness of the Instagr/am/bient project inspired me to push the idea a step further. So, I created a Soundcloud group for communal sound experiments, which launched today. It is called Disquiet-Junto. It already has 40 members, which is great. The idea is that I come up with a sound/music assignment and post the idea on a Friday, and then Monday by midnight the groups’ members post their recordings in response to the assignment. Already there are a half dozen tracks based on the first assignment, which is to make music from the sound of ice in a glass.

The aftermath of the Instagram compilation is itself a fascinating story. The compilation captured the imagination of writers well outside the world of music. But most tellingly, you can read how the group of 25 musicians worked to translate what they saw into sounds of their own creation – whether in the microcosm of technical details (gear used and such) or bigger ideas of how to work between the visual and aural media. Their reactions are sometimes formal, sometimes emotional, intuitive, or fanciful.

Evan Cordes even posted video of his Pd patch, ticking away:

Hilobrow has this revelatory review:

Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?

Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”

Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.

But, Instagram hype aside, consider what this could mean for finding inspiration anywhere, for reinvigorating your musical process. Actually, don’t think about it too long – just go do it.

You can check out the Juno group:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

And read up on the two curated compilations – each released under a Creative Commons license:

LX(RMX) / LISBON REMIXED

INSTAGR/AM/BIENT: 25 SONIC POSTCARDS

http://disquiet.com

Note, too, that the SoundCloud Meetup Day is on the 17th of May. I expect to be keeping tuned into what’s happening in Berlin and involved in something in London, but wherever you are in the world, I’d love to hear what ideas you have for exchanging sound, and if you’ll be doing something to celebrate if you’re a SoundCloud user.

SoundCloud Global Meetup Day May 17th: Get Involved!

Delicate and dense, melodies and sounds from church contexts, found sounds of bells and voices, are set against crisp, sharply-solid, forward-driving electronic beats. And then, there are the visuals: an archaic architecture of mystical symbols and three-dimensional, evolving forms interpret the music in visual form.

Swedish-born artist and technologist Eric Wahlforss, in other words, has been busy. As the artist Forss, his album is an app, appropriately for someone who is the co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud. Eric showed me an early build over cheeseburgers. It’s reactive, perhaps, more than interactive, but there’s still a chance to use your hands to rotate both visuals and music, a bit like picking up a sculpture and viewing it from different angles – though with the added element of sound. What you get is a sense of an interwoven visual and musical world, and an aesthetic vision that Wahlforss has pulled together.

From the man who built the world’s largest online recording business, it’s little surprise that recording features prominently, in two threads:

Recordings of strings, choirs, organs and ambient noise from church concerts which have been cut up into fragments and rearranged into a new mosaic of music, and recordings of wooden, stone and metal objects which make up the beats and percussion. These are the plosive, rhythmical noises that provide the link between the traditional to modern electronica.

That musical combination sounds to me familiar, though also clearly comfortable to Mr. Wahlforss. The collaboration is especially intriguing, though, as a Viennese graphic designer (Leonard Lass) and German computer graphics artist (Marcel Schobel, Untouch) collaborate to produce an audiovisual experience. Berghain, that cavernous church of techno (and occasionally more experimental sounds), seems an appropriate setting in the city that also played home to SoundCloud’s founding. (The fact that the former power station has the acoustics of a church doesn’t hurt, either – even if it’s ill-suited to denser music for the same reason.) Ecclesia will get its launch across media: live show in Berlin, app on iPad, album. For now, you can hear the tracks streamed via – of course – SoundCloud, even shared directly from Ableton Live.

The live show premieres May 2 in Berlin at Berghain/Panorama Bar, with the app out the same day. The album itself releases on June 12.

http://forssmusic.com/

Visuals come from Untouch (Marcel Schobel):
http://www.untouch.fm/
…and Leonard Lass:
http://depart.at

Through the eyes of satellites, roving Google trucks, aerial imagery, and more, we have plenty of eyes on our planet. But what does it sound like here on Earth?

In a Web application and accompanying art installation, the world turns as it echoes sounds recorded around the world on Creative Commons-licensed site Freesound.org. It’s stunning to hear our world’s acoustic diversity – in some strange way, even more than seeing it, in that sounds can instantly give you a sense of place and time. You can load a version on your browser or on the iPad; then, from the world’s cities, listen as sounds mix automatically from one locale to another in an ambient sound score.

Browser Version (animates a bit slow for me, but works)
iPad World Sound Mix app [free | iTunes]
(via Hermann Helmholtz – great tip!)

The basic notion is something we see repeated regularly, even with this visualization; this is a fantasy those of us who work in sound routinely entertain. But it’s doubly worth mentioning, in that it’s an excuse to mention the lovely Japanese label/artist/laboratory 43d.

43d engages sound through a variety of tools. In the 43d laboratory, the spinning Earth interface finds its way into an installation (video below), iPad app, and browser app, as workshops send participants into the field to listen to their environment and gather more sounds. Such exercises have an added bonus for us electronic musicians, of course, as collected sounds can easily become the raw materials of music in any genre through the wonderful alchemy of our machines.

http://labs.43d.jp/

The installation and sound mix project:

“World Sound Mix for BankART LIFE3″ is a sound visual installation, generating new soundscape around the world. This work continues mixing the sounds at selected two points somewhere in the world from the database of huge quantities of environment sounds and generating new soundscape.

For this exhibition, we set up a magic box that resonates mixed soundscape in Sapporo and somewhere in the world. During the exhibition, a globe in the box keeps turning and resonating sounds in real time.

About sounds data:
World Sound Mix is based on a sound database from Freesound project, its sounds have been recorded and gathered by sound hunters around the world. The use of sound data is under the CreativeCommons Sampling+ 1.0 License. By the username and “freesound sound ID” shown on the globe, listener can refer to original content.

http://www.43d.jp/wsm2011/

Freesound.org, a terrific source of sounds:

http://www.freesound.org/

But what I especially like about all of this is that the environmental sounds don’t have to exist in a vacuum. 43d is also an ambient music label, the work of artist Junichi Oguro:

A sound artist who widens the realm of music. Born in Sapporo in 1974.
He started to compose music since his childhood, and received a grand prize at a national contest. In 2006 he visited Berlin for making music in various fields from commercial music for TV spots to sound space design in various areas of Europe. He also showcases sound art pieces in the realm of the contemporary art. He manages an ambient label “43d” which was established for creating leading edge sounds.

The just-released “Unfield” is breathtaking, turning effortlessly from rough-shod digital glitches to icy-sweet ballads and intimate, gorgeous vocals by Malloy Nagasawa. It combines custom software and control with more conventional recording techniques:

http://www.43d.jp/releases/

Have a listen:

Hope to hear more from this whole project.
43d.jpg

Mouse on Mars’ Parastrophics for Monkeytown has been an early highlight of the year, a record packed with musical ideas in densely-configured arrays of sound. The duo is now taking that music on the road, in ambitious, improvisatory live performances.

Perhaps all of this can be summed up in one word: energy. Their studio and its arrangements of objects has an energy, an energy that’s present in the craft in the record. And talking to the artists, you get a sense of energy, of enthusiasm, crackling away like an amped-up oscillator.

It was therefore a pleasure to get to hear some of the thought and philosophy that produces all that musical energy. Jan Werner talks to CDM about how he and Mouse on Mars think about sound, melody, and the act of listening – and why he hopes people will find a way to listen to this record actively. I was glad to convince Jan to put this into written words, because they take on a dynamic of their own. I overuse the word poetic, but I find what he says poetic and provocative, in how I think of my music as well as his. And unlike a live interview, here those answers had some time to simmer.

It’s fitting to place those words amidst images of the workspace, their studio deep in Berlin’s Funkhaus facility. Against that backdrop, here’s what Jan has to say about music:

CDM: What does your studio setup, and all of this tactile, traditional hardware, mean in your music making? Obviously, sound is important, but apart from sound, what does it mean for you to be in that place and surrounded with those particular objects?

Jan: Our studio is very important to us, because it acts as a workspace as much as a hideout, an archive, and a rehearsal space. Still, we would pretend that we could make music anywhere and even without any electronic tools, if necessary. Maybe this gesture of personal freedom provides us with the artistic freedom to change things at any given
time, in any given direction, and be at ease with our complicated digital protheses.

We collected quite a bit of hardware over the years, too, without becoming collectors, and we are very keen on software applications, plug-ins, Max patches, etc. We like to use as many different sound sources as possible, and then go for the challenge of bringing all these elements together as one consistent idea of music.

You speak articulately about the idea of listening. What did listening mean in the making of the record? How would you like people to listen to the album – or how do you listen to music, when you wish to focus on it?

Listening can happen in any situation that allows your brain to adjust to acoustic sensations in a non-judgmental way. By non-judgmental, I mean taking the sounds for what they are, and not using them as vehicles for pre-set intentions. Also, active listening does not mean to identify and understand a sound’s origin, but to let the idea of what a sound can be in itself evolve to a possible maximum. This maximum of what a sound can become surely depends on your experience, attention, interest, ambition, fantasy, physical condition, etc.

We’re all limited and skilled at the same time, and that’s what makes a difference in how sound appears to us. You could say that ideal listening would be listening without prejudices and even without expectations. But here, a paradox kicks in, because without any preparation or expectation, you might not even be aware of listening to something. Music is a great tool to avoid this paradox, because it attracts a listener’s attention, draws the focus away from the purely physical origin of a sound, but opens up to a vast field of references and emotional and rational responses.

Music, as such, has no purpose, and does not make sense other than offering more or less appealing arrangements of frequencies. The problem is that this definition, which lies within the nature of music, can easily be covered by propagandistic intentions, coming in the form of lyrics, performances, visual stimulations, etc. Blindfolding is not the answer, because all our senses take part in making sense of listening.

I got to see your live performance at Berghain, though admittedly, being in the back of the space I could only listen and couldn’t always see. What I felt was a sense of fresh energy, that this was indeed something new and spontaneous. How are you adapting the studio album to live performance? What elements do you maintain live, versus those that must be prepared in advance? What did you find as you tried that in that first performance?

Each concert is different, and we usually pretend that we don’t care about an upcoming performance as much as we consider all of them to be our first ever performances.

Berghain went well, because the setting up during the day was relaxed, the crew was great, the sound was superb and the atmosphere in the room was concentrated. We also premiered our new visual show, which our long-time friend Karl Kliem had put together, and we were glad that it worked out well.

During a show, we play parts that we’ve rehearsed in the studio. We throw in samples and pre-recorded elements, but also sample on the spot, and use each other as sound sources. Most of the sounds are synthetic and use software to produce and manipulate sound. We play and modulate synthetic sequences a lot, use plug-ins to manipulate and shred sounds or song elements, and add new and unexpected elements on the fly. We also use the drum kit to trigger sounds, use microphones and analog effects and hardware samplers. All in all, it’s more than we can handle at once, which sometimes stresses us out or makes the sound more dense than it needs to be.

How do you approach melodic gesture in your music? There’s much discussion of rhythm in your music, but to me there’s also almost a sense of polyphony across textures, a sense of depth that requires listening on more than one level. How did you assemble this in the composition and production of the music?

There are always various timelines across one song or album. Some sounds appear only once, others repeat and get manipulated throughout the course of a song with every reappearance indicating a rhythmic idea. We try to avoid a strict hierarchy between melody and rhythm, and consider one being as important as the other. That means that a melody can have a strong rhythmic character as much as rhythm can have a predominantly atmospheric or harmonic (balancing?) quality.

Sometimes a melody might stretch over the course of a whole song, so only if you time-stretch the track, you would get the full melodic phrase. Maybe it’s the continuously-changing distance towards a song, like you would quickly twist the zoom of a camera, which makes fun for us. Or, maybe, it’s rather a discontinuously-changing focus, because we allow ourselves to slow down and even suddenly stop the movement as much as we cut elements so fast that they seem to skip. Music for us is a play on time and spacial tension. You can add layers along time as much as you can stack them in depth. And coming back to melody vs. rhythm: there is a blurred border, where one becomes the other, and we have great interest in strolling around this wasteland.

And more from inside and around the Funkhaus on a wintry, Prussian afternoon.

http://www.mouseonmars.com/