Nonwrestler Blog

Amazingly contemporary sounding - The Units

2009-07-04T17:24:00.004+12:00

This is from 1980. It's been re-released this year with some contemporary remixes, but the original sounds like it could've been recorded this year too, I reckon. Which probably says more about what's cool right now than it does about the song. I like it, tho.

Facebook users, do you see this sentence? If so, click "View original post" to see the Youtube link, because I think Facebook won't have imported it.

Weekly mp3 #63: Moon Unit - Connections (Ewan Pearson Slo NRG Dub)

2009-06-30T18:00:00.003+12:00

Again, get it from Spinner.

Swung, appropriately "slo" tech track. Rolling toms, a softly squelching sawtooth bassline, huge pulsing chords that remind me of contemporary Kraftwerk. As with most Ewan Pearson tracks, it's as slowly developing as a tech-house number requires, but is certainly far from a bunch of loops. Lots of nice little dynamics - breakdowns, build ups, sudden stabs to punctuate the mix - and then about 5 minutes in we head off into a new section. The bassline gets tighter, more insistent, and a great riff comes in on top. Nice shift in tone. The Kraftwerky chords come back, but it certainly feels like we're in new territory.

I can't remember when it became OK to have harmonic and melodic progression again in the austere world of techno, but I, for one, welcome our new contrapuntal overlords.

I don't know the original and it appears to be Moon Unit's one and only single, but a bit of snooping on Discogs.com suggests they're the German duo Mogg and Naudascher. Not that I know their music, anyway! This is another case of grabbing the tune because of the remixer. Ewan Pearson is a British producer, who I'd say is most well known for his remixes. I was really into the mixes of Kelley Pollar he did with Al Usher, thoroughly recommend them. He does the mix on one of the stand-out tracks on the latest Junior Boys album. Never checked out his album (EP?) 'Piecework', but guess I should. Anyone heard it?

Weekly mp3 #62: Rumpistol - Plutonium2

2009-06-23T18:00:00.003+12:00

This is on 5 Little Treasures From The North. The EP is a collection of tracks from artists on Danish label Rump Recordings hosted by German net label Yuki Yaki.

Soft electric piano chords are mirrored by reversed guitar. Lots of crackle and fizz in the high end makes it feel like a radio slightly off station (in the best way). To add a bit of edge to the ultra-mellow, some overblown sax creaks and squawks on top of the mix. Everything falls away and comes back with all manner of bright and buzzing synth textures and we're done in under 3 minutes. It's rool noice.

Rest of the comp is worth a go, especially Acustic (member of System / People Press Play / Future 3).

Rumpistol is a solo act from Copenhagen. I guess he runs Rump Recordings, since he's released all his albums through them and due to the name similarity, etc.

Great R&B mix from So Bones

2009-06-20T09:41:00.005+12:00

Really enjoying this little mix by Robin from the blogs So Bones / 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

"I’ve always had a mutual appreciation for pop music and experimental sounds and for me r&b/hip hop often encapsulate both of those things with incredible potency. [....] I’m very unapologetic about the fact that there’s room in my heart for Neu and Britney Spears both."

I relate.

I'll admit it's also great because it's short. Guess that's how pop functions, but also that volume wars business... the tracks are all SO LOUD.

Weekly mp3 #61: Pariah - Detroit Falls

2009-06-16T18:00:00.003+12:00

Another download from RCRDLBL .

Big male soul vocal gets abruptly chopped and diced over downtempo, clap-laden beats. Massive stabs. Lots of chopping and changing between the sliced vox and spacious breaks. Should appeal to anyone who enjoyed that Hudson Mohawke track or El Guincho remixing Kuroma, also either of the two (?) fans of J Dilla reading this. ;)

Pariah are a UK trio that have been going since '97, but I have to admit this is the first I've heard from them. They must've been drum'n'bass, judging from their discogs page . Turning down a deal on LTJ Bukem's label cos you're too busy seems a bit craaaaazy.

Weekly mp3 #60: Dudley Perkins - Funky Dudley

2009-06-09T18:00:00.002+12:00

Been a while since I linked to a tune on Better Propaganda.

A mid-tempo sorta funk, sorta hip-hop track. There's a fairly slow, thudding beat with some heavy sub bass, a swung clavinet lick and some snippets of horns jutting out from time to time. Quiet, tinny soul vocal samples layer up from time to time for texture. Dudley's basically channelling George Clinton all over the track, half-rapping half-singing about the history of funk in his life. "How'd you get so funky, Dudley?" he apparently asks ... himself in the refrain. :)

I think Dudley Perkins is from the West Coast of the US, but not sure where exactly. I first heard him rapping as Declaime over some Madlib beats (as he is again here), Madlib being a thoroughly overrated and often very boring American hip-hop producer. Still, this is a good beat. Likewise, Declaime is quite an awful MC, but under his own name Perkins has done some good tracks...

Keyboard jam that makes me smile

2009-06-08T10:45:00.004+12:00

This is a guy called Dorian Concept. It's one of his earlier vids, but I keep dropping back in on it and getting excited, so figure I should share.

The thing of soloing over an unchanging rhythm section is something I find a bit boring after a while, but watching it happen live has its own kind of enjoyment. Not that the rhythm needs to change much to keep me happy, but ... yeah ... I can't imagine that a completely unchanging beat / bassline is the best way to complement every noodling solo.

Weekly mp3 #59: Ghostface - The Sun (feat. Raekwon, Slick Rick & RZA)

2009-06-02T18:00:00.002+12:00

The Wu-Tang Corp site has a page with masses of free downloads including this track. I resisted the madness that is Old Dirty Bastard & Macy Gray covering Don't Go Breaking My Heart - laughing at ODB's incoherent rambling felt much too much like gallows humour given how he died - in favour of a slightly tamer oddity.

Basically, a bunch of New York MCs swoon over how GODDAMN FANTASTIC THE SUN IS, over a looped sample that sounds like some cheery woodwind and pizzicatto strings that may have once been the opener of some 60s soul tune like Just My Imagination or Betcha By Golly Wow.

"As God is my witness / It's the scriptures in pictures / It's scrumptious, sunkissed, nutritious" gushes Ghostface Killah. This is the man who brought us lines like "Remember when I long-dicked you and broke one of your ovaries?"

"You my favourite / I wish we had three more of you / I adore you" raves Chef Raekwon, after recounting how cute is nephew is looking out the window to check out the sun. He's not really known for being particularly filthy, but, hey, this is still fairly out of character.

Guest, non-Wu-Tang MC Slick Rick (he who wrote 80s numbers like Treat Her Like A Prostitute ) reveals "A theory I've clung to deep within / Is that souls have to go through the sun to reach heaven / [...] It's a peep-hole which leads to the firmament above us."

RZA just burbles a bit, but that's what producers-turned-MCs tend to do.

Not really sure what I think of the track, but I find it sufficiently odd that I've kept coming back to it. Maybe I started out on the wrong foot and it'll seem nothing out of the ordinary to everyone else. But still... WTF, etc.

I'm going to take a punt that anyone who'll bother checking this out already knows the Wu-Tang Clan and knows that Ghostface, Raekwon and RZA are founding members. Slick Rick's probably best remembered for La-Di-Da-Di and Children's Story in the 80s, but being in jail for many years certainly hindered his ability to release more hits.

More CD Reviews

2009-05-31T13:28:00.006+12:00

Man, it was February last year when I last linked to CDs I've picked up, so here's almost a year and half's worth of reviews.

Don't know why I'm being medium-centric - could be posting rave ups of my favourite MP3 purchases or 12"s (OH SHIT THAT KING MIDAS SOUND 12 LAST YEAR WAS GREEEEAAAT) but I guess it just gets too much.

Anyway, linkies through to my last.fm journal:

Cut Copy – In Ghost Colours (Modular, 2008)

Kelley Polar – I Need You To Hold On While The Sky Is Falling (Environ, 2008)

The Notwist - The Devil, You + Me (City Slang, 2008)

Radian - Juxtaposition (Thrill Jockey, 2006)

Deep Sea Shipping (Lagunamuch community, 2006)

Trapist - Highway My Friend (Hat Hut Records, 2002)

Unit 21 - November (Peace Technologies, 2007)

Eru Dangerspiel - Great News For The Modern Man (Independent, 2008)

Fennesz - Black Sea (Touch, 2008)

ii - Landlakes (Feral Media, 2008)

Tycoon To$h - Major Force (Bridge, 2007)

Francis Plagne (Synaesthesia, 2008)

Amplifier Machine - Her Mouth is an Outlaw (Uncanny Valley Records, 2007)

Sandro Perri - Plays Polmo Polpo (Alien8 Recordings, 2006)

Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care (Domino Recording Co., 2009)

Lawrence English - A Colour For Autumn (12K, 2009)

Weekly mp3 #58: Miike Snow - Animal

2009-05-26T18:00:00.001+12:00

This is another one from Spinner, and has been getting an absolutely thrashing on a bunch of the usual places I link to, due to there being a seemingly never ending stream of free remixes... If you're busy being an RSS-fiend on any blogs or whatever you probably know all about this.

Jabby guitar snippets bang out offbeats in a somehow not-at-all reggae fashion. Regular kick drums drop in, suggesting something dancey, and then a somewhat shouty, but kinda pop guy starts singing loud in the mix. Lots of vocal harmonies. Funny synths that remind me of The Cars. Twinkly xylophone melodies. Acoustic snare drum fills suggest a marching band. Well, a bit. The chorus hook is ridiculously catchy, and I've spent the last few months rewinding this one to hear it multiple times running, which is not something I often do.

"I change shapes just to hide in this place / But I'm still / I'm still / An animal"

Yeah.

Miike Snow are a trio from the States and so far as I know this is their first single. Being savvy they've made it free. No doubt they named themselves after the movie director who did Audition, etc. Kind of smacks of thinking they're pretty cool to me, but whatever, doesn't distract from the song.

Weekly mp3 #57: Tosca - Springer

2009-05-19T18:00:00.001+12:00

Been a while since I linked to something on RCRDLBL.

Mellow opening electric piano chords. Downtempo metronome kick drum doofs along, brushed snares all jazzy-jazzying on top. A bass guitar lays out a bassline. Tinky palm mute guitar action and some gentle harmonics. More layers of clean guitar come along from time to time, sorta semi-Albatross, filling spaces when there isn't a tranquil Hill Street Blues Theme synth echoing about. Things build up a bit with some more elements, but mainly it's about cruising in the one mode.

This is not what Tosca used to be like - they were part of that Viennese downbeat thing with bods like Kruder & Dormeister (indeed the latter is in Tosca) - but here it sounds like they've jumped right on the (slightly uneasy) easy listening, slow-mo beardy disco sound. Mudd, Lexx, Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, and labelmates Quiet Village (sometimes). As with all of these there's something that suggests Pink Floyd instrumentals more than it suggests dancefloor action.

Weekly mp3 #56: Duckett - Stock Up On Antibiotics

2009-05-12T18:00:00.000+12:00

A bit of softish ambientish technoish stuff from Mind Net the free sublabel of UK techno label Mind Tours.

A soft repeating riff almost sounds like guitar .. or Boards of Canada. I dunno what's going on. Scratchy textures cruise about and all of a sudden a surprisingly fast kick drum pattern cranks up the forward momentum. Little shakers and percussive bits come sneaking in and out. Somehow it adds up to almost a samba feel on a track that's otherwise super washed out and spacious. Half-way through the track actually changes (oh shit!) and it's pretty exciting. Gosh.

No idea who Duckett is, although his discogs entry suggests he's released a few tracks on other UK-based tech-ish labels. The rest of the free EP this tracks from is a bit more generic and very much of its time (2005).

Getting in before the 90s revival kicks in

2009-05-05T21:50:00.001+12:00

These guys will definitely be at the forefront.

What.

Weekly mp3 #55: Hudson Mohawke - Polkadot Blues

2009-05-05T18:00:00.000+12:00

Another bit of wheat separated from the chaff on XLR8R's website.

Glitchy, helium party beats. Pitched-up synth stabs. Cheery melodies played on vocal samples like they did in the 80s, or would have had "they" been really drunk and/or 4-year olds. Or both. The track manages to keep from keeling over thanks to the instant-summer chords and bassline.

This seemed to fit with last week's contribution - a fairly similar mix of hip-hop and otherwise influences and that vein of syncopation that suggests the creators like feeling a bit sea-sick. Also, Hudson Mohawke is another young producer I kind of resisted checking out properly because there was so much hype surrounding him. He's from Scotland. Saw him play at a great party in Auckland last year (thanks Dave ) and he pulled out a bunch of 80s soul amid the fairly noisy, chaotic electronic sounds. Makes a lot of sense of the mood of the above mp3 I reckon - formally quite nuts, but mood-wise pretty cheerful and approachable.

Weekly mp3 #54: Kuroma - In New York, Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)

2009-04-28T18:00:00.002+12:00

Weekly mp3 #53: Kuroma - In New York Everything Is Tropical (El Guincho Mix)
This fine track comes to you courtesy of Mountain Dew. (Haha, what?) Yeah, they've started a web label thing. The El Guincho mix is the second one down if the crap interface is not helping.

This really is ridiculously tropical sounding, if you include having some kind of weird fever with accompanying hallucinations as part and parcel with being in the tropics. What was a fairly straight (and fairly shit) 60s-ish poppy song is mixed into a swung thing that sounds like layers of digitally-generated analogues of marimbas (ahaha). Pizzicatto synth plucks jab away at the top end. The beat suggests all that post-Dilla instrumental hip-hop stuff, but the instrumentation is really bright and cheery. Vocals from the original are reduced to fragments, repitched, slurring, and reversing as required.

Someone somewhere made some reference to a psychedelic Spongebob Squarepants and I can see why.

I have no idea who Kuroma is / are or why he / they took the Japanese word for "car" as a name, and am really not interested. It's the substantial distance from the original that gives this mix any chance to be good, I reckon. El Guincho is yet another one-man production outfit, Pablo Díaz-Reixa. He's from Spain. He played my town recently and I didn't bother to go because he seemed young and trendy. Gah, if only I was joking. Gah, classic example of the DJ = producer conflation I complained about a while back.

TV, computers, reading... thinking up titles sucks

2009-04-23T10:24:00.001+12:00

I've been waddling through another David Foster Wallace book of articles, and got particularly excited about one essay on US fiction writing and television. He's basically looking into the impact of the oft-touted 6-hours-a-day of TV-watching on Americans and therefore American authors.

He digs deep into how he thinks TV functions and how a society of watchers are in turn more and more paranoid about being watched... It's the kind of thing that's probably more persuasive when you read through all his explanations about it, but he's really on the money, I reckon: TV's rewards to the viewer are indulging fantasies and that's not in itself a bad thing, but near-constant indulgence will fuck you up faster than your mum & dad. ;) He returns multiple times to the image of a treat - e.g. chocolate cake is not actually the devil, but eating chocolate cake even 50% of the time wouldn't be good for you.

There's a lot more in there about irony and passivity and how the powerful tools of post-modernism (rebellious / destructive / not offering alternatives) have been happily absorbed into TV's own content so we get to feel like the cognoscenti smarter than the mass of TV viewers while still being the mass of TV viewers. It's good times, I promise you. It's also almost painfully balanced and well thought out, which my summary probably doesn't convey.

ANYWAY, the most intriguing bit in the article is where Wallace's mulling over the future. It's written in 1990. He does a kind of mini-review of a book about how the TV techology is the issue and that once that's revised things will be sweet. The revised tech the book talks about is removing the master-slave relationship of broadcaster and TV set, replacing them with some device that allows you to receive the video and images you want, manipulate and tailor them to your whims, and feed your versions back into a collaborative space where othes can continue to do the same.

Wallace dismisses this pie-in-the-sky talk as no kind of fix for the underlying problems. I obviously don't have to spell out the irony in either me being here blogging that I agree with him, nor that he seems to see the possibility as far-fetched. Still, I think the current state of play vindicates his predictions about what would happen if such "telecomputers" did start to muscle out traditional TV. That the passivity and people's assumption of the role of viewer rather than real participant still remain, in the very real sense that you're still sitting in front of a box and the coolest stuff for the largest number of people still comes from media companies. If anything it's yet more seductive - that increased feeling of your own personal power with no actual effect.

I'd love to hear Wallace's views on how things have transpired, but he killed himself last year.

I've deliberately skipped over all the stuff about literature, because I'm feeling sour about people bothering to read anything more than a few lines of text on a website anyway. :p

Weekly mp3 #53: Will Gresson + Luke Munn - Six Oh Seven

2009-04-21T18:00:00.000+12:00

Luke hosts this on his band The Ribbon's Soundcloud account and it's also available via the Audio Foundation website.

Another ambient cruiser. The track starts with some distant, hollow noise and develops through a series of bell tones, quietly building pads and towards the end of six minutes and seven seconds there are some woobly synth tones making things downright melodic. The end.

Luke Munn and Will Gresson are two Aucklanders. Don't know anything about Will but know bits about Luke via the mailing list attached to the Audio Foundation, bods committed to "innovative audio culture" in New Zealand. So far as I can tell "innovative audio" means replacing the genre constraints of e.g. rock or dance music with another set of genre constraints, but whatever... my snarkiness is really limited to the attitude around the music and some of the AF list members. I like enough of the music discussed on the list to stay subscribed.

Weekly mp3 #52: Mobius Band - Friends Like These (and another whole EP of goodies)

2009-04-14T18:00:00.000+12:00

Well, I guess week 52 means I've done this for a year. Or maybe next week will be a year, like how 2001 is the first year of the 3rd millenium... Crazy maths!

Anyway, this week's mp3 is from the Mobius Band's own website.

Major pop hooks and quirky production. The verses are all crashing drum machines and weird bendy synth chords, with a guy singing in a slightly country rock vibe, then the cheery straightahead chorus reminds me of nothing so much as Nik Kershaw stuff like 'I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me'. Then we're back into syncopated drum machine land.

I've found Mobius Band a bit patchy over the years, but have been enjoying this tune a lot for the last year and a half or so. I've already linked you to the band's site above. They're an American 3 piece and have put out a few albums. If you liked this tune, I'd recommend checking out the free release they put out on Valentine's Day, Empire of Love. It's a bunch of covers, ranging from Gram Parsons to Kanye West. I'll certainly be checking out their next release...

DJ = Producer = DJ?

2009-04-07T18:34:00.002+12:00

Since some time in the 90s, a person who makes "electronic music"¹ tends to be called a "DJ". I find it a bit frustrating. Most producers I know are not DJs. Most DJs I know are not producers. I should throw up some illustrative video clips rather than expect anyone to read anything on the web, but I'm in the mood for writing...

Those great masters of not-understanding-process, music reviewers, provide many obvious examples of this. I don’t think they’re shaping people’s views, though, because people that merge the ideas of producers and DJs together aren’t usually interested in reading about music.

Still, the confusion is really very understandable, and I only get sour about it because I produce music myself and am not a DJ. Well, OK, I’m a radio DJ, but here I’m thinking of a DJ in the sense of someone who can mix.

It’s this "mix" business that I think is the biggest cause of confusion. In the above para I mean "mix records live by matching their tempo". Could be vinyl, could be CDJs, could be any number of setups involving software. It’s a performance thing - it happens in real time in front of an audience - and the vast majority of time the records are other people’s. A person doing this is a DJ.

Then there’s the idea of "mixing a track", which usually means remixing someone else’s music. In most cases the person doing this has been given one or more components of a recorded song (e.g. vocals, a keyboard melody and a guitar riff) and re-arranges them, adds new parts and basically writes a track of their own incorporating something from the original. There are many, many ways this may happen, but the key thing is it will as good as never involve any of the tools involved with DJing. It may involve a bit of performance, e.g. playing (piano) keyboard parts or tapping out beats on little rubber pads, but not in front of people. Still, the end result is a track to listen to later. A person doing this is a producer.

A large number of people make music that includes samples of other people’s stuff and for many of them the process is largely the same as remixing. Maybe with less compunction to use specific samples and more nerves about covering your tracks (sorry) by concealing sample sources. So it’s no surprise that the above idea of "mixing a track" extends to someone producing their "own" track. Needless to say, a person doing this is a producer.

There’s all kinds of ambiguity and weirdness.

Heaps of people are both DJs and producers. Plenty of bods making dance music clicked that either DJing would be fun or that they could make more cash by it. On the flipside, heaps of DJs saw the next step from working with other people's tunes was to making their own music.

Among fans of dance music, there’s prestige in being a DJ. This translates to expectations on a producer to act like one. If you happen to go to a gym that plays lots of horseshit Ministry of Sound also-ran crap, you’ll have the joy of hearing music that shows no trace of DJ mixing at all while watching vids featuring awkward producers miming strange gestures over DJ setups. Not that this pains me at all. I mean, mad respect and big ups to those guys. One love.

Tracks produced by DJs often get credited "DJ whoever". There's two scenarios here. DJ Spiller feat. Sophie Ellis Bexter. DJ Tiesto. DJ Hell. DJ Koze. These people produce tracks that to my ears sound like they have nothing to do with anything these people might do as DJs. Maybe some of them aren't DJs at all? Then there's DJ Premier. DJ Krush. Others I can't think of. ;) People producing tracks and scratching on them. I'm not suggesting for a minute that in either case people should not bill themselves how they like, but both scenarios do help to confuzzle what the hell a DJ does and what the hell a producer does. Especially when combined with what I was writing about in the para above.

Scratch DJs in bands. The conga players of the 90s.² I guess they’re not DJs in the way I’m defining DJ mixing above. Regardless, when they’re on stage doing baby scratches before the guitars kick in, they’re not producers. Things get murkier when their role is actually to mix in beats etc. that were done earlier. A detailed study of ‘Encore / Numb’ by Linkin Park & Jay-Z suggests generally that shits sequenced, not beat-mixed.

More extreme are turntablists, who use a DJ’s tools and techniques to meticulously slice and dice other people’s music into short tightly structured tracks, which are surely as much their own as any made by sample-wielding producers. Sometimes they release remixes of other people’s tracks put together like this. None of the varied tools a producer might use come into play here. There’s no way they’re not DJs in the traditional sense, but they’re using exactly the same set of skills when performing or when recording a track. For the purposes of the distinctions I'm trying to clear up, the key thing is that the proportion of DJs who do anything like this is as good as zero. Generalising anything about how tracks are written from checking out turntablists is therefore fairly crazy.

People like Richie Hawtin (both producer and DJ) took drum machines on the road with him and would sequence new beats on top of multiple layered DJ mixes. I guess the thing for me here is the performance aspect, as well as the long format of a DJ set – he’s not doing something intended as a track to be listened to later. He’s also already a DJ and a producer, so ... whatever.

I feel like I’m spelling out the obvious throughout all of this, but sometimes I need to pretend that someone will be interested and/or learn something. I wish I had a pithy closing remark here, but I don’t.

¹ Don’t get me started on what "electronic music" means and the logic of who is in or out of that club. Contemporary hip-hop producers out, even Britney is out, but indie rockers with keyboards are in...? I guess "acoustic music" is a similarly ... informal ... description - generally it's about the overall sound, rather than the technicalities. A good thing?

² I do know there are bands where a DJ is fully involved in the music with other band members, I'm just having a smirk at the nu metal bands.

Weekly mp3 #51: The Phoenix Foundation - Going Fishing

2009-04-07T18:00:00.001+12:00

Spinner hosts this number.

Country-rock stylings, high-drama organ melody and a man singing a chirpy melody. The guitars go FRANG for the chorus. Boy-boy harmonies. Big nods to Grandaddy all over the shop.

I doubt any of my buddies in NZ reading this blog need any introduction to The Phoenix Foundation, from my hometown of Wellington. Others may have already heard my remix of the same song. That'll do for now.

Weekly mp3 #50: Plat - Aftur

2009-03-31T13:10:00.000+13:00

Another one from BetterPropaganda.

Low-key electronic beats are laced with scrapey, dry guitar sounds. The track bips and bobs about. No vox. More guitars. Feels like something might be lurking around the corner or the whole thing might explode, but, nah, it just cruises along.

It looks like the official web presence of this Icelandic duo has long gone, as has their label's website. So all I can really say is, yeah, this is a duo from Iceland. They released one album, which this track appeared on. I never investigated further than this one, so dunno how the rest sounds.

The Craziest Web Design I've Seen

2009-03-26T13:11:00.003+13:00

OK, 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 has been a consistently crazy website for a long while, but it's in an obvious way an art site. This is what appears to be a "normal" shop website, for a bridal and formal wear.

Yvette's Bridal Formal

Be warned if you have Quicktime there are bagpipes that you can't turn off, and basically crazy music on every page you dare to click on.

Scroll to the bottom of the first page to witness where the site designer has done screenshots of entire Windows desktop layouts and pasted a bunch of them up as images.

Be baffled by the fact there's an "ENTER YVETTE'S" link that suggests that all of the chaos you see is just a landing page or splash page or what have you...

Click through for animated blocks of squiggles that turn into faces and back again, on top of a background that looks like Mark Chagall using MS Paint to draw a peacock.

And hell, why not take in the image essay? I love the way it almost all looks like MS Paint doodling until there's one very professional fashion model pic. Not to mention the text at the bottom which I guess is supposed to be keywords for a search engine to pick up on.

My lord.

Thanks to Peter Hollo for kind of incidentally bringing this to my attention via a link to Web Pages That Suck's worst web sites of 2008 on Facebook.

Weekly mp3 #49: Stephen Vitiello and Pauline Oliveros - Minutes after Frogs

2009-03-24T13:10:00.001+13:00

This track is part of a massive repository of free music called Tu M'P3.

Initial crackles say this is going to be some bog-standard, impenetrable microsound / glitch mallarky. Then the accordion kicks in. Drawn out notes pass over the electronic textures and quietly develop. Towards the end what sounds like some deliberately lo-fi shuffling and microphone ambience builds up and then it's all done. Very simple arrangement for an electronic piece, but really good.

I don't know much about American composer and visual artist Stephen Vitiello, but associate him in my head with microsound / ambient noise type artists. He has another solo track on Tu M'P3, which is also really good.

Pauline Oliveros is much more well-known, chiefly for developing and spreading the word of "deep listening". Admittedly I don't really know what deep listening is, but in her hands it seems to be an excuse to bust out some delicious drones. Her Deep Listening Band did some great recordings in massive empty underground water tanks, using the reverb of the recording environment to deliberately swamp their acoustic instruments.

Also her accordion looks huge. Does she play a bass accordion? Is she just really tiny? What the hell's going on?

The idea behind the Tu M'P3 site was writing soundtracks for images. Italian sound artists Tu M' gave pictures to people they liked and then made the pics and MP3s available online. It ran from 2002-2005 and there's so much decent stuff there that it was hard to pick one MP3 to write about. It's a bit of a catalogue of contemporary electronic music producers. Guess I can always post more in later weeks...

Weekly mp3 #48: Amplifier Machine - Her Mouth Is An Outlaw

2009-03-17T13:10:00.000+13:00

Last one from the local CDs I picked up while in Melbourne. Pretentious, no-fun review site The Silent Ballet have put this track on one of their mixes. Um, but don't let that put you off. :p

This beatless track sounds like 2 guitars - one scratching out a low repeating riff, one making a shimmery mess - and a violin providing a mix of textural scraping sounds and deep sustained notes. It ebbs and flows over the course of a good 9 minutes, with the textures shifting, but the harmonic content basically staying the same. An uncharitable summary would be a Mogwai track that never kicks in? All for the better, I say. Bloody post-cock.

The three-piece released their debut album with this as the title track, first in 2007 through some Arts Victoria grant, then last year through US awesomeness label 12k.

Youtube clips diced into seamless tunes

2009-03-12T14:43:00.002+13:00

So this guy Kutiman takes makes really seamless sounding songs out of snippets of Youtube audio and video. The videos are just edits of the original clips, so help to expose which bits come from separate clips. He provides an explanatory vid and another with a full list of credits, which is a good touch, I reckon.

ThruYOU

The idea is pretty old hat, c.f. Hexstatic and his/their work with Coldcut, but the execution's pretty intriguing. The seamlessness of the results is really the bit that I find interesting. I mean, you can hear editing taking place, but it could easily be editing of parts all purpose-written to go together. Depending on your mood, this could point to the homogeneity of popular music styles or the extent of Kutiman's skills.

Also. OH SHIT WEB 2.0 OMG BRO PARTICIPATORY MEDIA FAR OUT YOUTUBE WILL EAT ITSELF IT'S A NEW ERA.

That's all.