Nonwrestler Blog

Weekly mp3 #50: Plat - Aftur

Another one from BetterPropaganda.

Low-key electronic beats are laced with scrapey, dry guitar sounds. The track bips and bobs about. No vox. More guitars. Feels like something might be lurking around the corner or the whole thing might explode, but, nah, it just cruises along.

It looks like the official web presence of this Icelandic duo has long gone, as has their label's website. So all I can really say is, yeah, this is a duo from Iceland. They released one album, which this track appeared on. I never investigated further than this one, so dunno how the rest sounds.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

The Craziest Web Design I've Seen

OK, 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 has been a consistently crazy website for a long while, but it's in an obvious way an art site. This is what appears to be a "normal" shop website, for a bridal and formal wear.

Yvette's Bridal Formal

Be warned if you have Quicktime there are bagpipes that you can't turn off, and basically crazy music on every page you dare to click on.

Scroll to the bottom of the first page to witness where the site designer has done screenshots of entire Windows desktop layouts and pasted a bunch of them up as images.

Be baffled by the fact there's an "ENTER YVETTE'S" link that suggests that all of the chaos you see is just a landing page or splash page or what have you...

Click through for animated blocks of squiggles that turn into faces and back again, on top of a background that looks like Mark Chagall using MS Paint to draw a peacock.

And hell, why not take in the image essay? I love the way it almost all looks like MS Paint doodling until there's one very professional fashion model pic. Not to mention the text at the bottom which I guess is supposed to be keywords for a search engine to pick up on.

My lord.

Thanks to Peter Hollo for kind of incidentally bringing this to my attention via a link to Web Pages That Suck's worst web sites of 2008 on Facebook.

Labels: misc time-wasting

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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

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Weekly mp3 #48: Amplifier Machine - Her Mouth Is An Outlaw

Last one from the local CDs I picked up while in Melbourne. Pretentious, no-fun review site The Silent Ballet have put this track on one of their mixes. Um, but don't let that put you off. :p

This beatless track sounds like 2 guitars - one scratching out a low repeating riff, one making a shimmery mess - and a violin providing a mix of textural scraping sounds and deep sustained notes. It ebbs and flows over the course of a good 9 minutes, with the textures shifting, but the harmonic content basically staying the same. An uncharitable summary would be a Mogwai track that never kicks in? All for the better, I say. Bloody post-cock.

The three-piece released their debut album with this as the title track, first in 2007 through some Arts Victoria grant, then last year through US awesomeness label 12k.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Youtube clips diced into seamless tunes

So this guy Kutiman takes makes really seamless sounding songs out of snippets of Youtube audio and video. The videos are just edits of the original clips, so help to expose which bits come from separate clips. He provides an explanatory vid and another with a full list of credits, which is a good touch, I reckon.

ThruYOU

The idea is pretty old hat, c.f. Hexstatic and his/their work with Coldcut, but the execution's pretty intriguing. The seamlessness of the results is really the bit that I find interesting. I mean, you can hear editing taking place, but it could easily be editing of parts all purpose-written to go together. Depending on your mood, this could point to the homogeneity of popular music styles or the extent of Kutiman's skills.

Also. OH SHIT WEB 2.0 OMG BRO PARTICIPATORY MEDIA FAR OUT YOUTUBE WILL EAT ITSELF IT'S A NEW ERA.

That's all.

Labels: music, youtube

Posted at 2:43 PM  0 Comments Links to this post

Weekly mp3 #47: ii - Oho

Carrying on my theme of music I picked up in Melbourne, this is one you can download from XLR8R magazine's site.

Low rattling noises are dwarfed by a loop of what could be guitar or violin or both, before big, live-sounding drums take centre stage and bell melodies and bits come in. Bass guitar starts chugging along before you know it. It's something like Tortoise before they got too huge (soundwise, not popularity). It's a good track, but I think one of the less distinctive on the album.

Perpetually lowercase ii (pronounced like "eye eye" or "aye aye ") are a duo from Melbourne. Apparently they play live, and are mostly improvised, but not sure how they'd pull off half the stuff they've ended up with on their lovely album, Landlakes.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

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Weekly mp3 #46: Francis Plagne - Wings 6ft Leather Briefcase

Another Melburnian, this one with a free MP3 sitting on the Mistletone record label site.

Ramshackle lo-fi pop song based around seemingly random strings of lyrics such as the title (and opening line). He reminds me of Jon Brion (he of Eternal Sunshine soundtrack / Kanye West co-production fame), but less "properly" produced. Beatles-y piano bits, multi-tracked backing vox, acoustic guitar, but not an obvious retro throwback.

Francis Plagne is, as I said, a Melburnian and this song off his second album was done when he was only 19. So screw that guy. :P (Just jokes. Honest.) The album is a mix of this kind of music with really odd sounding lo-fi / noisy electro-acoustic bits. You know the business, burbly tones meet what basically sounds like someone running around recording the noises of scraping, buffing, hitting random objects. I like it a lot.

Labels: music, weekly mp3

Posted at 1:10 PM  0 Comments Links to this post