Archivi categoria: Confine

Musica di confine

Bang on a Can

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Bang on a Can is a multi-faceted musical organization based in New York City. It was founded in 1987 by three American composers who remain its artistic directors: Julia Wolfe, David Lang, and Michael Gordon (photo). It is a major force in the presentation of new concert music, and has presented hundreds of musical events worldwide.

It is perhaps best known for its Marathon Concerts during which an eclectic mix of pieces are performed in succession over the course of many hours while audience members, who are encouraged to maintain a “jeans-and-tee-shirt informality,” are welcome to come and go as they please. [wikipedia]

The three founders are still composing. Some interesting pieces:

Symphonies of the Planets 1

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coverIn the August and September 1977, two Voyager spacecraft were launched to fly by and explore the great gaseous planets of Jupiter and Saturn.
Voyager I, after successful encounters with the two, was sent out of the plane of the ecliptic to investigate interstellar space.
Voyager II’s charter later came to include not only encounters with Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1981), but also appointments with Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).
The Voyagers are controlled and their data returned through the Deep Space Network, a global spacecraft tracking and communications system operated by the JPL for NASA.

Although space is a virtual vacuum, this does not mean there is no sound in space. Sound does exist as electronic vibrations. The especially designed instruments on board of the Voyagers performed special experiments to pick up and record these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing.

These recordings come from a variety of different sound environments, e.g. the interaction of the solar wind with the planet’s magnetosphere; electromagnetic field noise; radio waves bouncing between the planet and the inner surface of the atmosphere, etc.

In 1993 NASA published excerpts from these recordings in a set of 5 CD (30 minutes each) called Symphonies of the Planets (now out of print).

This is the CD 1.

Perle dimenticate

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coverNon c’è niente come rimettere in ordine una casa che contiene, fra l’altro, varie migliaia di dischi (CD e vinili) sparsi fra diversi mobili, per ritrovare cose che non ricordavi di avere. Orologi russi, vecchie foto in cui fai fatica a capire chi c’è e anche qualche disco che non ascoltavi da una vita.

Così, per caso, mi arriva in mano un disco di Julie Driscoll, vocalist di grande successo con Brian Auger & The Trinity nei roaring ’60, poi sposata Tippett (Keith) e convertita alla musica improvvisata e al jazz sperimentale in una carriera solistica ben più oscura di prima sotto il nome di Julie Tippetts (con una ‘s’ aggiunta).

Oscurità da cui, però, ogni tanto escono piccole perle come questo Sunset Glow, che risale al ’74, al confine fra jazz, canzone alla Wyatt (non è impossibile che sia proprio lui l’R a cui è dedicato il brano che vi presento) e un po’ di sperimentalismo. Gli altri musicisti del disco sono Brian Godding, guitars; il marito Keith Tippett, piano, harmonium; Mark Charig, cornet, tenor horn; il compianto Elton Dean, alto saxophone; Nick Evans, trombone; Brian Belshaw, bass; Harry Miller, bass; Louis Moholo, drums.

Julie Tippets – Behind the Eyes (For a Friend, R)

UPDATE: qualche altro brano da Sunset Glow su YouTube

Eno for wine

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cover“Long Now (aka Pelissero Wine)” is a rare, limited edition promotional CD by Brian Eno, produced in 2002 to celebrate an Italian wine and offered to wine sellers. The wine is the Pelissero’s Long Now, so named in honour of the Long Now Foundation.

It features five unreleased tracks, in the same mood as his 2003 album, “January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now“: these compositions experiment possible melodies and atmospheres for bell towers.

Relying on digital bell sounds (from FM synthesizers such as the Yamaha DX7), processed through various reverbs and delays, these compositions create strange and hypnotic soundscapes, between ambient and experimentation, with cycles of repetition ruled by mathematical laws.

The Azienda Agricola Pelissero is a family-run vine-growing estate located in the district of Treiso, in the heart of the zone of production of Barbaresco [in Piemonte, Italy].

Here we can hear excerpts from tracks 1 and 3.

c4 – transient

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coverDalla netlabel Abulia Concepts, specializzata in 8-bit e lo-fi music, eccovi il gruppo denominato c4 di cui presentiamo transient, una piccola raccolta di loop, rigorosamente lo-fi e distribuiti in ogg a 12 kbps

each file is intended to be looped for an indefinate period of time by itself, rather than all 3 files played in succession

Tutti i file sono in formato ogg (forse con windoze dovrete avere un player come vlc o simili).

Potete scaricare l’intero album qui in un unico zip.

Jliat

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site site

La home page del sito del rumorista inglese Jliat (James Whitehead) offre ottime cose, come una serie di drones liberamente scaricabili, esempi:

I suoi lavori si collocano sempre agli estremi: nella più assoluta cacofonia o nella quiete più totale. In ogni caso vivono in una immobilità irraggiungibile.

Si possono scaricare da Youtube e Soundcloud

Tornado

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coverUn po’ di sana aggressione sonora in stile post free jazz europeo non fa mai male. Dalla netlabel Insubordinations, l’ultimo lavoro del gruppo svizzero Diatribes, un duo formato da cyril bondi (drums, percussions) e d’incise (laptop, obects, treatments), attorno ai quali gravitano molti musicisti ospiti.

Diatribes,a strongly libertarian ensemble, began its existence in a Geneva basement in Winter 2004. Their idea was to mix distinct various types and approach of the sounds, in order to develop a malleable musical mass. The instruments merge into the electronics treatments in a primary dance, where construction and deconstruction coexist, and envy and disgust unite. There are no limits in the way of playing, where rhythms, melodies and noise meet sporadically, merging into each other until they are almost forgotten. Free jazz in its approach, acoustic and electronic in its execution, the trio is capable of exploring the minute like the intense.
Initialy a trio with Gaël Riondel on saxophone, diatribes became a polymorphous formation, extending its spectrum with guest musicians such as the guitarist Christian Graf, the electroacoustician Nicolas Sordet, the pianists Jacques Demierre and Johann Bourquenez, the bassist Dragos Tara or the saxophonist Piero SK..

L’intero album è scaricabile qui.

  • Diatribes – Tornade
    cyril bondi: drums, percussions – d’incise: laptop, objects – jacques demierre: grand piano – johann bourquenez: grand piano

We will become insects, someday

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Osoroshisa (Japanese for “the amount of terror”) is the moniker of Tim Salden from Belgium, who has both a good command of Japanese (speaking and writing).

Some notes from the author:

What does the main title mean:
Itsuka, Oretachi Mushi Ni Naru means We will become insects, someday. I kinda thought of Buddhism and  reïncarnation. And since I’m studying Japanese at the University, I wanted to write all the titles in Japanese.

Songmeanings:
The first song [Gakushou 1 – Hotaru No Shoumetsu] means: Movement 1 – Extinction Of The Firefly

Why those title:
I love the view of fireflies during summer, so I tried to recreate a summernight,
but with a bit more tension. Starting from the middle part, the fireflies start to shine their light.

Excerpt:

Listen to and download the whole album from Rain netlabel

Nanimo Nai Wakusei

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Osoroshisa - Nanimo Nai Wakusei - front cover Nanimo nai wakusei means “empty planets” in Japanese and is an apt description for key elements of Tim Salden’s music as Osoroshisa. It reflects the width of uninhabited and lonesome worlds and how time becomes a secondary factor on an empty planet that lacks any point of reference for perceiving its continuous passage. In the broader sense, it may also refer to isolated persons living in a solar system of their own, without a way of taking notice of other worlds apart from theirs and where chains of events have gradually been replaced by a constant train of thoughts. Accordingly, the music is located between drone and dark ambient without being particularly representative of either genre and evolves slowly, with recurrent figures weaved into persistent drones and subtle changes in modulation rather than thematic variation and progression.

Osoroshisa (Japanese for “the amount of terror”) is the moniker of Tim Salden from Belgium, who has both a good command of Japanese (speaking and writing) and a sizable collection of obscure vinyl records with synth-music from the seventies and eighties. Perhaps it is this vintage analogue sound that left its traces in his drone inspired sound, as well as the impression of cavernous space. His musical works involve slow motion changes and addition or subtraction of sound layers (where “stock drone” has the tendency of being static and repetitive) and pictures a feeling of loneliness and sadness, the recursion of thoughts and events without an actual resolution.

Download the whole album from Internet Archive

Excerpts:

SOCIAL [net.work music]

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logoDrawing influence from both contemporary DJ culture and the Fluxus musicial traditions of artists like Ben Vautier and John Cage, SOCIAL [net.work music] is a new improvised network sound project and performance which utilizes the MySpace Music social network as its core sound library.

Recently, I’ve been interested in the the aural connections created through the MySpace Music social network. By navigating the “Friends Space” link section on each member’s page, reminiscent of web 1.0 webrings, the user can access an interconnected network of each artists influences, friends and label mates, allowing them to discover new artists and different genres of music. Most of the pages feature a jukebox with samples of the musicians work which automatically begin to play once the page has finished loading.

The SOCIAL [net.work music] project and performance begins on my own MySpace Music page. I select at random an artist from my “Friends Space” list and allow the page to load. Once the music begins to play, i select a friend link from that artist’s list and open the page in a new tab. This permits the music to layer over top of the previous track. The process continues until, eventually from the inability to handle the incoming data load, the browser crashes, bringing the composition to an end.

Each performance yields a spontaneous and unique, layered score without the use of  sample preparation, sophisticated hardware or software. All of the resulting audio produced in each performance is unedited and live in the moment. These works can be created  and performed anywhere at anytime with simply a web browser and internet connection. I sculpt the layered audio on my end with a hacked kaoss pad, to add my own color to the sonic collage.

[Jason Sloan]

Jason Sloan is a new media artist, electronic musician, composer and professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.

Go to SOCIAL [net.work music] to listen.