“Drone” (Used 78 times)

I've been listening to drone since around the age of seventeen, sometimes I forget that it exists until a dark, dreary, rainy day appears when you have been waiting for sunshine for months and then suddenly, you turn on some drone and feel like you are falling into the sky.

This is what happened to me today with Love Cult.

Sitting at my desk, listening to the cars drive outside on slick wet roads, splashing through puddles, as I stared at a blank piece of paper thinking of desert inspiration from a road trip I took a month ago to Death Valley. I read "Love Cult" on the front page of FMA and thought, "well that would be the type of cult I would join" and then I was transported into a feeling of clouds, dreams, nightmares. I sat drawing for hours listening to the repetitive sound of tings, haunting voices, dull sound.

Sometimes it's those dull sounds that capture your imagination. You could almost sit and stare at a wall for hours listening to the sounds of Love Cult.

Listen when you feel a bit too excited and you need to calm down.

Listen in a rainstorm when you've decided to stay inside but you want to feel like you are outside.

Listen when you want to be enveloped in sound.

Eliane Radigue, really one of the great living composers in the world, was in Brooklyn last year for her New York debut performance of the epic Naldjorlak cycle.  I've been an almost rabid fan of her music after first hearing it on Lovely Music, Robert Ashley's label, and my fervor was renewed when Important Records released Triptych and Vice Versa last year. So when I found out she was coming to play in Brooklyn, I was more than ecstatic.  When I found out she would agree to do a short interview with me for DRAM and New World Radio I think I melted.

DRAM has an archival presence, meaning we are in the process of digitizing and preserving a number of stockpiles of amazing music for streaming on our site.  This is basically the meat and potatoes of my job here at the office.  My most recent project has been to work on the archive of Phill Niblock's Experimental Intermedia space.  Our first undertaking was to digitize and preserve 40 radio shows that Phill made with artists that visited the EI space in the 1980s.  Among them is an interview and live performance of Eliane Radigue.

Kismet, right?  I totally agree.  This gave me something to talk about and a neat little package to wrap it up in.  The stars were aligning in a very lovely little pattern. I should have known better. I woke up on the Sunday we were supposed to meet with the meanest of flus. The Mr. T of flus. I drank as much tea as possible, bundled up and headed out to Brooklyn anyway, eager not to miss a chance to meet with Eliane, and with the plans to keep my germ-ridden self as far away from her as I could without being rude.  On top of this, there was a lot of confusion as I walked into the space with my microphone and recorder, because there was supposed to be a recording engineer there to do a soundcheck and I guess he hadn't shown.  Glares of disappointment and disapproval hit me like waves, snapping me out of my dream of warm embraces and handshakes of friendship.  Luckily, Carol Robinson (who had been setting up the interview) realized I was just a helpless bystander, and not the engineer errant. Glares were retracted and, while no hugs were exchanged, we continued on much friendlier terms.

All in all, the stars aligned, albeit in a somewhat skewed pattern, and it was an amazing 15 minutes of talking with Eliane and Carol Robinson about their work as composer and performer respectively in a warm hotel room in downtown Brooklyn.  The piece is presented here in combination with Phill's original radio show and with excerpts from a live performance of Adnos III and Charles Curtis' performance of one of the movements of Naldjorlak.

Fall 2010 Artist-in-Residence Richard Garet gives his last performance at ISSUE—also, coincidentally, the last ISSUE-sponsored performance of 2011—this Friday at 8:30 pm (FREE | RSVP). Garet is multidisciplinary in that his processes and interests often draw lines between the visual (moving image, photography, or painting) and the auditory (electronic manipulation, or unpredictable analog processes), and that he invests conceptual and technical energy in both realms to great success.

Still from Garet's Rupture: Material Landscape

This latest work, Rupture: Material Landscape, consists of a single video channel created from treated and processed 16mm film. The film was subjected to bleaching and hand-treating, and played back changing its speed and frame rate. In a similar process, the sonic material was recorded onto cassette tapes, which were then subjected to magnetic interference, tape feedback, and erasure. Collaborator Bonnie Jones will be improvising speech while projecting subtitles generated by speech-recognition software on a layer over Garet's own projection. Throughout all of this, programmer and sound artist Wolfgang Gil will be spreading the sound around the in-house 15-channel hanging speaker system using Max/MSP and his custom-made program Roctor.

For now, enjoy this audio excerpt from Garet's first Artist-in-Residence performance back in October, from a series called Light Fields. The entire piece (Light Fields 1, 2, & 3) will be out on a DVD box set in the coming year, so check Garet's site for information as that develops. Although it will eventually be released as a fixed (and edited) work, this particular audio sample was entirely performed live, using the setup in the photo above. The photo also shows the hanging speakers that are a fixture of Friday evening's performance. Hope to see you there.

Concrete, Room, Drone, Experimental, Industrial, Shoegazing, Granular Music, Noise, Electroacustic, Ambient, Field recordings, Dark Ambient, Glitch, IDM, Psychedelic, Lowercase, Microsound, Improvisation, Montage, Soundscape, Avant Garde, Plunderphonic, Copyleft.

LINKS:

http://amp-recs.com

http://www.myspace.com/amplifiedmusicrecords

http://www.archive.org/details/amp_records

nisei23’s album Soft Shapes is an overture of Drone-driven and melodic textures & rhythmic loops at the same time. It is product of over 3 years of work. nisei23’s music on this album is designed to be amorphous, shifting through time and space. Soft Shapes contains 19 Tracks, including extensive cover arts and release credits.

“It’s like a dream where everything is familiar but everything is different”, he confesses. The sounds on his album were carefully constructed from acoustic instruments and natural sounds which were manipulated and molded into drones, rhythmical loops and melodic patterns. The only exception was “Don’t Panic” which is entirely electronic. The melodies themselves are equally unconventional, sometimes with slow and subtle movements and other times making dramatic and unexpected twists.

Tracklist # Soft Shapes

01 Prologue (Horizontal Afternoon)  02 Gela Alta  03 I Am Siam  04 I Dreamt of Music 05 Sakura  06 Drowned in Space  07 Don’t Panic  08 Gymnopedie 1 09 Interlude VIII 10 Saturn Dreaming of Mercury

DOWNLOAD Soft Shapes by nisei23

Artist Info

nisei23 aka. Rob Allen is currently living in Bangkok and has been making music and visuals for many years. In april 2010 he will also be releasing his Bare Bones EP via Lona Records. Rob also contributed with his eclectic remix track I love Special K to the remix album Fragment – Consider Revising by label mate Radio Scotvoid (half of Small Radio duo).

Websites

Official Website of nisei23/ nisei23 visual works on vimeo / nisei23 photography at flickr