go go go ! meet morrei's choice
From Pecsvarad, Baranyan in Hungary. Minimalistic, subtle and well-structured 'noise' scapes, that merit repeated listening. Visit them at porousher.net.
From San Diego, California. A series of very subtle and inventive 'abstract' electronic tracks, by Henry Duclos...
From Los Angeles, California.
James Davis, alone or together with Dylan Shearer, Les Hodgkins, Mike Wilson, Colleen Russel, Shaun Russel, Kiowa Hammons, Justin Baker, Jody, Chris Sulots, Brandon, The Reverend Scurge, The Strange Brothers, Jed Mcgowan, Nick, Jordan, Adam Stacey and Randy Moore (all members, the info says, vary at shows and on albums), produces thoroughly wrought improvised noise'n'instruments tracks, the sonority of which continues to fascinate me.
"Standing in a place's and listening to places, spaces and conductors, whether it be filled with activities of various creatures, or a field with only wind and grass, there is always something to be listened to."
Yeah. Ears wide open. But listening to HA makes it pretty clear that most of James's world of sound actually rises up from deep within.
Human Abstract have a steady and pretty voluminous output, and the selection of tracks on their artist's page changes regularly.
From Worcester, Massachusetts. Jacob's tracks - most of them from his solo album 'Ordem e Progresso'
(a phrase that one will recognize as the motto written on the Brazilian flag, which on a green background has a large
yellow lozenge shape, in the centre of which there is a blue sphere with 27 stars and in the middle a white banner
reading: 'Ordem e Progresso', order and progress) - are first and foremost an awful lot of fun.
Jacob Berendes' music is pretty smart, full of ideas, variation, humor and self-relativation, while always remaining
refreshingly lo-tech. In fact, in spirit some of it made me think of the Residents in their glory days.
(These, unfortunately, are long, long gone.)
Do take some time to visit the "Jacob Berendes Webpages of High Fashion and Ideas",
at www.fujichia.com...!
From Montgomery, Alabama, a taste- and thoughtful collection of largely guitar based tracks, most of them improvised.
Visiting Jeff's page, I (re)discovered the absolutely fabulous My2k
project ... The concept - apparently coined by the German musician
Karsten Schulze - was as simple as it is fascinating: record ten seconds
of sound/music each and every day for a period of a year - that year being
the infamously numbered year 2000 - thus creating (the basic material
for) a diary in sound ... Several artists got inspired by this, and as
far as I know, two of them rounded of the project with an My2k-CD. Jeff
McLeod is one of them. He put all together in "Ye shall be cut into many
pieces", which can be ordered at his Sound
and Chaos site.
From Aurora, Colorado. Ben's a fascinating collection of tracks in the grand and honorable tradition of naïve - as opposed to academic - rock expressionism: intimate acoustic songs, lyrics spoken, rather than sung (Ben has a very nice voice, with a timbre and diction reminiscent of that of Mr. Lou R.), out-of-sync with a mostly sparse, edgy and out of tune, but highly effective, musical accompaniement; a fifteen minute one-take free style electric freak out jam ('Graceless Age'); some almost dreamy instrumental (piano, synth) tracks ('Sparrows', 'A woman of affairs') ... It all adds up, pretty consistently, to an intriguing personal 'exposition'. Rather melancholic over all, actually. And definitely 'not ready for mainstream'... But that's just our luck, I guess.
From Moscow, Russia.
I found Vitaly's mp3.com page while checking out the URL which was the sole contents of a message entitled 'Music',
posted on the 'Promote Your Station' board on may 17th.
"I try to express power of spirit. I like electronic sounds. It's sounds of soul. It's pulse of human's feelengs,
of human's life. It's wonderful," Vitaly writes in his artist's info.
His 'Music', as indeed this ís music!, struck me as being pretty unusual, original and
highly personal. There's something strangely disturbing about it, that I find difficult to put into words.
From Brooklyn, NY.
I found this page while searching for tracks to feature on Better More Trains.
But except for the fact that one of mk_hbr's tracks is called 'toy trains', this is not about trains. It is about tasteful and inventive electronics. It is
a bit about mystery as well, for I never came across a page so void of any additional information. The 'Main Artist Image' is truly a nihilistic masterpiece ...
I was wondering whether the page was still being updated, or whether this is one of those things once done, uploaded and then left behin for the
occasional surfer-by to find
So I dropped mk_hbr a line, and found out that this is what you get when you skip the vowels in Mike Haber.
"Im glad you like the song/s," Mike replied. "It's all very old stuff from the very first year or so I started making digital music. So, I'm
not really updating it right now, though I'm actively making songs and trying to get a demo together sometime this summer. I'll probably update
the mp3.com page (or make a new one) with a couple of those tracks in the next couple of months, but I haven't really updated the page in about
two years. My new songs will probably be under the name I've been using more recently, 'aviatrix'."
From Edmonton, Canada. The tracks on kendal Zier's artist's page form
an impressive collection of seventies/eighties bedroom psychedelica! It's
been a long time since I've heard this kind of stuff... and, yeah I enjoyed
it! I do suspect Kendal of having a keen sense for sounds. If he'd be
able to lay off some of the bigger chuncks of navel-gazing and get things
somewhat more into focus... better... more ... Ever thought about getting
a band together?
Kendy, zear ... ;-)
Improvising guitaris/banjo-ist based in Kansas City. His let's-go no-bullshit recordings have so much of this 'undeniable midwestern rural roughness', that some will call this self-indulgent crap. I however was won over by the liner notes to Mike's "Juice Motor" - "Self-indulgence at its finest," Mike writes; but then, all of this was "composed,recorded, edited, mixed, encoded and uploaded before I went to work Thursday morning" ... (where's that, Mike?) - and by the fact that one can go and hear Mike perform "near every Friday from about 8 til 10 at YJ's Snack Bar, 128 W. 18th St, in beeee-youtiful downtown KCMO." Gee man! YJ's Snack Bar! How I'd love to drop in there one of those friday nights... Shame that it's so damn far from this here Paris ...
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'Old' stuff ... I keep this page available for 'historical reasons' only. Pretty much all mentioned here relates to the 'old mp3.com', which was taken off line in december 2003. I have - obviously - removed all links to pages that once were part of that site ... All that remains are some images, some names of and words about artists that I enjoyed. If a search engine took you here, please continue to the SoundBlog ... [ page cleaned - june 2004 ]
Each month another edition ... updated almost weekly ...
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A Better More Special, featuring twisted and intriguing tracks in which custom recorded sounds of trains and on stations are the - or at the very least a - main ingredient. With our hat-tip to Pierre Schaeffer, whose 'Etude aux chemins de fer' from 1948 is sort of a virtual 'zero'-item on this playlist ...
The Better More All Stars Station.
Nosings in music, sound, audio art and other - related or not - thisses and thatses...
Amsterdam based sound-art site, containing nothing but the sounds. Sober and recommended ...
"Unconventional Music Magazine", from Turnhout, Belgium
The digital archives of an Amsterdam independent record label, active in the early eighties. Info, flash, downloads, goodies.
Home of HarS' Sound Chronicles. Info, news, lo-fi Flash streamer, and downloadable unedited field material.
"An evolving exhibition of cast away sounds ..."
A 'classic' project, the recording of which has been unavaible for a long, long time ... Done in Kingston-upon-Thames, 1982. With Dagmar Krause...
A duo exercise in Frippertronics, recorded in Amsterdam, summer 1980. Resplendently lo-fi ...
Questions, remarks, requests? Drop morrei a line ... visit the SoundBlog
