FREE SS 10
SOON OUT ON CDR
Taku Unami
"malignitat
2"
When improvisation becomes psychological!
In this new recording by Taku Unami expectations are constantly twisted
leaving the listener in a perplex and uncomfortable position. We never
know what is next: a pig, the wind, a river, a beat, a nasty
noise,
silence, clapping, impatience, pleasure, sadism, humor, good taste, a
horror movie... or the very nice and polite Unami that we all know.
Taku Unami is a master of the on-off. The careful structure that holds
malignitat-2 comes from years
of investigating silence and tension in the very active Japanese
improvised scene that he is part of together with others including
Masafumi Ezaki, Kazushige Kinoshita or Taku Sugimoto (Taku has
documented these musicians on his amazing hibari music label). Once,
when we were about to play a concert, Taku went to the record shop and
rented a CD of sound effects, which he then ripped off and played in
the concert. This was later to become the famous helicopter sounds from
his 1st malignitat record. Of course the CD contained other sounds
which are further explored here. So many records of improvisation are
about producing "good quality experimental music". The problem with
this type of experimentation that tries to achieve certain aesthetic
forms, is that it becomes too self-enclosed and too precious about
refined and well worked out sounds. Instead Taku poses questions of
what elements can be brought into improvisation and how we perceive and
judge them in different ways. Taku Unami is opening up possibilities in
improvisation through
exploring new ways of appropriation.
Anti-Copyright
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FREE SS 09
SOON OUT ON CDR
xxxxx
"is-land"
xxxxx includes Martin
Howse, among other things an Emacs master living in Berlin where he has
been running all kinds of workshops (mostly on free software and
hardware) at his studio on Linienstr. 54. Martin has written
extensively about Free Software and has engaged in many types of
experiments: I heard about one of his projects in which he invited
different people to a discussion, then started to process their voices
and interrupt the easy and smooth development of the conversation. The
session got into chaos. Not all of the people appreciated it, but when
you take risks it is likely that some people are not going to like what
you do. Something similar happens with is-land, a tough record which
demands time and concentration but can be extremely rewarding. One of
the hardest and most exiting releases that I heard for a long time.
GNU GPL license
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FREE
SS 08
PATO
"clip_clap_crisis"
Rubén Patiño aka Pato originally comes from Barcelona,
a city he describes as being something in between
Orwell's 1984 and Disneyland. Nevertheless he sometimes does the
most brutal DJ sessions that I have heard. Pato is now living in Denmark
doing some stupid sound course in which he already got into trouble by
playing
too loud. Pato is a total character, which you can already
get a sense of in clip _clap_crisis. After living 3 years in
Berlin,
he is well known in the city's underground scene for his volume
abuse.
In clip_clap_crisis Pato breaks sounds following the
Viennese laptop tradition of making fucked up digital
collages. While other laptopers tend to be more clinical, Pato
uses ultra fast crappy dsp tricks to produce the kind of
kinky and dirty computer music that only a latino could do.
The fact that his computer screen was broken
might have helped to produce such a nasty but sexy and
coherent work.
Anti-Tutti
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FREE
SS 07
THE NOISER (aka Julien
Ottavi)
"Trilogie
des fantomes"
Julien Ottavi who is part of the sound/activist
collective APO 33 in Nantes, has moved recently to London
where he has set up up a media lab in the artist space Area 10.
APO 33 produced the GNU/Linux audio-media distribution Apodio, which is
the one that Julien uses. Ottavi is likely the most intense laptop performer, always
ready
for new challenges and finding new ways of experimenting and this new
work is a continuation
of his extreme engagement in sound. With Trilogie des fantomes Julien comes back
to his
roots in concrete poetry, updating the genre by using free software to
process his voice in order to express and redefine his Corcegan
identity. Think of an angry Henry Chopin after an indigestion
of Sunn O))) LPs and not being able to vomit.
GNUart
licence
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FREE
SS 06
Hometown Feilding
"Simulations"
Hometown Feilding is the artist name from Mark Sadgrove,
a New Zealander living in Tokyo. We all know
about the whole kiwi noise scene but while most
of it is rock orientated, New Zealand has some of
the greatest musicians working with computers such
as Rosy Parlane, Dion Workman, Richard Francis
and Sandgrove. Mark is the probably the only programmer
of all of them. Simulations is a playful collection of
pieces with a warm and natural feeling to it.
The more you listen to Simulations, the more you can relate
to the New Zealand aesthetic but in a different and very
personal way. What at the beginning seems to sound like an early
electronic version of African music then leads to a second
half that, under a kind of dirt behind the digital sounds,
demonstrates an exquisite sense of time, pace and
development.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
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FREE
SS 05
Miguel Prado
"Dios
aborrece una
singularidad desnuda"
Second solo
release by the galician guitarist Miguel Prado
(Volanté, Taumaturgia label).
It requires confidence and a special sensibility to be able
to combine the kind of radical guitar playing influenced by
Derek Bayley & Bruce Russell with digital manipulation
without falling into some cheesy dsp processing. By pushing
lo-fi aesthetics and raw energy to their ultimate
consequences, Miguel Prado achieves a truly original voice
with such a historically loaded instrument. Always
remaining human and tactile, Miguel destroys clichés from
both improv or noise rock. “Dios aborrece una
singularidad desnuda “ shows the non-idiomatic, un-academic
most forceful side of improvisation. The dialectics between
specificity and abstraction makes this new work of Miguel
Prado an extremely focussed example of how to use perversity
with digital means.
Anti-Copyright
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FREE
SS 04
MATTIN
"BROKEN
SUBJECT"
Try to find a centre to this cd and you will be lost.
Broken structures, desillusioned, desolate but delicate computer noise
that wants to physically twist your head around.
The rest is only happening in your imagination.
Minimal yet brutal, this is noise beyond the ethics of volume!
Anti-Copyright
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FREE
SS 03
Julien Skrobek
"Le
Palais
Transparent"
Elegance is the
first word that comes to my mind to describe the "Le Palais
Trasparent".
Julien Skrobek expands the paths of Radu Malfatti and Taku Sugimoto
exploring time and structure by placing sinewaves and guitar notes that
brake the very rich silences. Carefully constructed, "Le Palais
Trasparent"
creates absorbing spaces that produce calm and intelligently suspended
tensions.
Anti-Copyright
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FREE
SS 02
KAKOFUNK
"FRUTAMENTAL"
Straight
from Barakaldo (a workers area in Bilbao), Kakofunk is an
eclectic
artist that incarnates the most radical approach to music making.
The
first time that I saw Kakofunk playing live, it made me think of the
music Sachiko M would have made after spending 16 hours in a factory
working hard. While listening to "Frutamental" you can feel
a sense of freedom which scorns genre divisions and narrow
understandings of what electronic music can be. "Frutamental"
is a molotov cocktail to be thrown at all those "factories
without walls".
Copyleft
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FREE
SS 01
Tim
Blechmann
"re-reading"
Debut
album from the PD master Tim Blechmann (now living in Vienna).
Many
programers try to show off the possibilities of their programs,
instead
Tim achieves the most focus and rigorous contemporary electronic
music that I heard since Dion Workman.
Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
2.0
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Links:
Free Software Foundation
linuxaudio.org
linux-sound
Distributions:
pure:dyne
apodio
debian
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