I’ve been spending a lot of time gathering new findings of intentionally unintended, random beauty from the school of experimental field recording lately. As a result, Xeni Jardin’s interview with David Byrne regarding his project, “Playing the Building” for BBTV naturally caught my attention when it wound through some friend’s sites over the past week.

Watch: Playing the Building (stills via the header)

Alhough the audio acoustics of Byrne’s Building are intentionally engineered and by definition more installation-based than field recording, the resultant environmental susceptibility certainly blurs the line between the two. Beautifully.

Straight jacked from Roy Christopher’s site, June 10th, 2008:

My favorite Talking Head, David Byrne, turns an entire old building in New York City into a giant sound machine in an installation called “Playing the Building.” Xeni Jardin takes a tour.

Under David’s manipulation, New York’s hundred-year-old Battery Maritime Building becomes a giant sound sculpture. He explains:

“Devices [have been] attached to the building’s structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate, and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”

Read the full post at Roy’s site, soon to include the 2008 edition of his reknown, Summer Reading List.

via: Dave Allen / Roy Christopher / Xeni Jardin / David Byrne / Boing Boing

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I don’t want to live in your conformance.

I had a friend named Ryan who was always up for mayhem. Typically drunken. We skated together a lot in the early 90’s. He had a kid brother named Brandon who didn’t skate much, but exerted the same energy with dual tape decks, his guitar and whatever else was lying around his bedroom in his parent’s Kendall townhouse in Miami, Florida.

His explorations ran the gamut. From teen-angst/devotional ballads, to goofy instrumental hip-hop-de-blanc, wailing distorto-noise, and minimally accompanied field recordings. I remember them impacting me almost as much as they do now. It all swells with nostalgia, not just because it was so long ago that these recordings were made but because of the time in Brandon’s life he made them. A time which he communicated with youthful and heartfelt ease.

Perfectly flawed. Familiar, yet signature Sparling.

I ran a short-lived cassette label called TIMEKILL Recordings at the time, and worked with Brandon to gather enough work to fill a 90 minute tape. That part was easy. Life got heavy and TIMEKILL collapsed under the weight along with it’s third release.

Over a decade later, in one of those decisive moments of synchronicity, I found the cassettes and photos we’d planned on using for the j-card while digging through separate boxes at nearly the same time. It took it as a sign.

14 years in the making, Four Years of High School in My Room is the perfect first release to get things moving and start killing time again.

With only a few exceptions, track names for this collection have long-since been forgotten or never existed in the first place. I don’t know where Brandon is now, but I hope this finds him well. Say hello and let me know, B.

Get the full cassette rip here.

via: timekill recordings

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The unchallenged existence of Numbers Stations is a symptom of the somnambulistic state that the worlds educated populations live in. Anything can be done to this population, and no one will notice or react in any way.
—Akin Fernandez

Sometime in 2002, I stumbled into Aquarius Records trolling for some new sounds, when I was immediately drawn to the image on the cover of something called The Conet Project. I didn’t even skim the review before clicking the first sample. I waited for the first track to load with no expectations.

Distant, warbled voices drowned by seven brief tones…interrupted by Swedish Rhapsody being played on an over-amped musicbox…repeat.. repeat…repeat…numbers read by what sounds like a young girl…the musicbox again…repeat…repeat…the girl, more numbers…

By the the time the shortwave distortion took over 2:45 minutes into the track, my attention had shifted toward a singular point of focus and remained there until all the tracks had played out. It’s difficult to describe it any other way. I tried to reassemble what i’d just heard.

Each recording was a like vignette, replete with it’s own signature nuance and voice, but there was something else going on here. Something more than Toshiya Tsunoda meets Kraftwerk. Something utterly captivating and altogether different.

Digging a little deeper I began to understand just what set it apart.

Expand Post (tome, media:8+)*
*includes full download (133.9MB, mp3.zip + 76pg.pdf)

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This ultra-rare, out of print, and extremely obscure recording is documented proof that “real life” can be stranger, and 1000x more hilarious than The Comedy Channel could ever presume to be. Part prank, part voyeurism, and totally not safe for work, Daddy’s Curses is the field study of a man alone, attempting to repair the family piano. It also happens to be one of the most disturbingly hilarious things you’re likely to hear. Ever.

Unwittingly recorded in 1987 by his 14 year old son while miserably failing the task at hand, Bruce (Daddy) unleashes an eleven minute schizoid torrent of rage and brilliant, unexpurgated profanity “ranging from the milquetoast Ned Flanders end of the spectrum to out and out Raymond & Peter nastiness.” (AR).

After my first exposure in the form of two short excerpts at Aquarius Records years ago, I tried to track down a full version of Daddy’s Curses. Thanks to years of searches with results well under 30 (all reiterating its out of print status) I’d pretty much given up. That is until recently, while drafting a future post about another unforgettable title Aquarius had exposed me to, when I was reminded of Daddy’s Curses and gave it another shot. Without too much scrolling I landed on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog page and found it there, in all it’s freakish, full-length splendor.

Depending on your surroundings chances are really good you’re going to want headphones for this one. Besides, how else are you gonna hear Bruce’s furious pounding send pieces of antique piano dropping to the gosh damn floor?

Download: Daddy’s Curses (15.4MB, 192bit.mp3/zip, MF)

via: Aquarius Records / WFMU / ProCon
(leave your faves in The Cursebook!)

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Another entry in the acoustics of frozen water thread.

This time from a recording made by researchers studying seismic activity on Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica’s South Atlantic coast in 2002. Christian Müller, Vera Schlindwein, Alfons Eckstaller and Heinrich Miller registered acoustic activity from a nearby iceberg that when sped up, revealed audible changes in pitch and tone.

Ekstroem Iceberg (WAV, 23.6MB)

Marc Weidenbaum of disquiet sums the discovery up nicely.

Please don’t mistake this for a figment of casual animism. The point here isn’t to attribute sentience to an iceberg; at best in that regard it’s an exercise in enthusiastic anthropomorphism. The point is to revel in the rich sonic attributes of nature, attributes that we can only appreciated thanks to the mediation of technology.

post thread via Disquiet, The music of sound and ABC.au

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Jacob Kirkegaard: Eldfjall (mp3, 23.1MB)
via TouchRadio Podcacst 12

Jacob Kirkegaard - Eldfjall Live at Observatori Festival, Valencia:
“The sounds I here perform with were recorded in two ways: with an acoustic microphone and with an accelerometer. For the acoustic recordings I used a Sanken CSS-5 which I held very closely to the tiny bubbling surface. The accelerometer was inserted approximately 4 cm into the earth and picked up a denser timbre than the acoustic microphone. As opposed to the Eldfjall CD release (where I chose to let the sounds stand by themselves), I here mixed the different sounds with each other to create a more organic sound and a narrative. I began the concert with creaking ice from different lakes in Iceland. These were also recorded with accelerometers. None of the sounds have been processed.”

More TouchRadio

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