sound expanse

A number of days have gone by since my last post, and I've been hoping to write something substantial. But as it happens, some much-needed work has been keeping me very busy. If you'd like to read something like, say, an interview with a young and fascinating composer, complete with a score and sound excerpt, you could do no better than the inaugural post of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's 10 for '10 series on The Rambler. Included in that post is an interview with Evan Johnson, a complete score, and a sound excerpt from Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum), that will be performed by ELISION on February 8th at King's Place in London. Oh, and if you can make it to that concert, do. (See my earlier post for background or the rambler's recent plug for the relevant info.)

ELISION's November 20th performance of Richard Barrett's Opening of the Mouth is currently available on BBC's Hear and Now. It's the final broadcast of Huddersfield 2009, available through Saturday. Scroll directly to the 16:30 mark to start listening to the material about the piece. Following an interview with Barrett, the performance starts at 19:54.

I had two parallel experiences within the past month.

On the bus ride home from New York, I was tired and uncomfortable. Finally I realized the discomfort was of an aural sort. Someone a row ahead of me had decided to make all of her phone calls during the four-hour ride, and it was irritating me no end. I pullled out the CDs I had gotten the day before from Michael Pisaro after quite a wonderful performance of his new piece at Experimental Intermedia. Several of them involved quite a lot of silence, and that was not going to help me in this situation. But then there was hearing metal 1: three pieces, all made from sine tones woven in with recordings of a tam-tam played by Greg Stuart. I put it in my laptop, put on my (early Christmas present) Bose headphones, and in a moment realized I was not stuck on a bus hearing someone's conversation. I was traveling through one incredibly beautiful and complex sound world after another. The closest visual experience I can think of is walking through fresh snow. There is a sameness, but you can watch how it settles in different contexts and how the light hits it, and how you impact it by being in it. That afternoon on the bus, I fell asleep in this world (I really needed to sleep), woke up and listened with that special waking-listening, heard it through to the end, started over, and over, and stayed right there until we pulled in to South Station.

Last Tuesday, nothing was going smoothly. Everything that might have happened seemed blocked, or delayed, or just too difficult. Finally I had to leave the house in the mid-afternoon to drive to one meeting and then another. I brought a CD called Over Shadows. Rhodri Davies was playing his own piece on harp, using EBow throughout. Normally road noise is a huge obstacle to hearing what is happening in the music that interests me most. But these sounds carried beautifully, and made the drive (up Route 128 through rush hour traffic near Boston) totally beautiful and interesting. The ways that Davies layers the sounds, and pulls off them one from another and combines them towards other effects are really masterful. I put it on just now to try to find a better way to describe it and realized two things: that I can't, and that I can't bring myself to turn it off. (The review included in the title link is much more descriptive.)

These two CDs have something else in common beyond using limited materials and completely turning my day around: they're both available in the US through erstwhile records. Primarily a label for electroacoustic improvised music, it has also become a very successful US distributor for wandelweiser CDs, among others. Worldwide distributors for Pisaro's recordings are listed on this Edition Wandelweiser directory. In Europe, you can get most of Davies' CDs at Sound 323. In reading about Sound 323's history, I finally learned about the origins of a beautiful and fascinating book and DVD that I got hold of a couple years ago, Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum.

Since this post has morphed into a listing of helpful distributors, I'll go ahead and mention one that I just learned about that is quite close to where I live--miramoglu music sales, based in Porter Square in Cambridge, MA. They don't happen to have the CDs in stock that I wrote about, but they have other work by both Pisaro and Davies, as well as many other artists that you're not likely to find on Amazon.

I'm thinking about a number of trips I want to take this year, mostly for concerts and festivals. I've found some new resources for finding cheap flights since my last post on the subject, which was well over a year ago. (Some of those sites no longer exist, and others have been outdone.)

Here's my current strategy:

Read more »

I first heard of John Tyndall through Alvin Lucier's piece, Tyndall Orchestrations, which is based on a set of experiments in his book, Sound. So I was very pleasantly surprised to come across this book by chance on Distributed Proofreaders, a site where many volunteers prepare ebooks to be posted at Project Gutenberg. I became more and more fascinated with this book, and signed it out for post-processing.

Now the html version is finally nearly finished. But "nearly finished" can be a long and drawn out stage of any process. I've been fixing it up, rescanning illustrations that were not of high enough quality, and just generally trying to get it right. But I'm sure there are things I have missed. Over at Distributed Proofreaders, there is a process called smoothreading. People can read through a project before it is posted, to point out any errors that have been overlooked.

This book is so great, and so incredibly relevant to experimental music, that I thought I would post it here, as well as on DP. If any of you have a bit of time to look a section or a chapter over and find anything that needs fixing, could you please let me know? I'm planning to submit it in two weeks, around October 24th, so there is a little time. Once it's posted, it will be widely, permanently, and freely available to anyone.

Here is the link, still on my own server space:

http://www.soundexpanse.com/tyndall/sound.html

I'm sure you'll enjoy it. And any input would be much appreciated.

I'm just waking up to the possibilities of scheduling live streams to record on my home computer. I've found a good application, Wiretap, that I am testing out on my mac to make sure it serves my purposes. So far it's been great.* It allows me to schedule the recording of any live streaming web radio, whether it is a single event or a weekly show. Now that I know that I don't have to be planted at my computer for a particular span of time to hear these broadcasts, I want to know what the most promising shows are. Here is my (very partial) list so far.

Of course there are always streams. My favorite that I know of so far is wandelweiser web radio. You can check out what is playing at any time in their status window.

Let me know, please, of any other shows or streams I should know about. This is only a beginning. I'll update or fix my little table, and make a permanent spot for it on the links page once I have filled it out more.

*Update: Wiretap is working very well for me, and has been recording all of my scheduled shows reliably.