Nonwrestler Blog

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

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...

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM