November 2010
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Eno & Co. Improvising Electronic Music
Ambient music guru Brian Eno recently released a recording called Small Craft On a Milk Sea (2010 Opal Ltd.). Perhaps as part of a promotional strategy for the new release (?), Eno is making a series of seven videos called “Seven Sessions On a Milk Sea” documenting improvised performances with two other musicians (Jon Hopkins… Continue reading
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Acoustic Territories
A recent addition to the growing literature on the field of sound studies is Brandon LaBelle’s Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum 2010). LaBelle is a sound artist, writer, and editor of Errant Bodies Press (which brought us the book African Feedback). Acoustic Territories offers an acoustic politics of space, or what the… Continue reading
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Making Musical Systems Public
Over the years, a lot of electronic musicians have shrouded their work in a veil of mystery: they tell us very little about how they make their music–the tools the use, their working methods, and so forth. We are reminded of vinyl DJs back in the day who would cover up the labels on their… Continue reading
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The Music of Arvo Pärt
Arvo Part‘s music moves me. It could be the scales he uses, his sense of silence and space, the dissonances and unresolved tensions–all that musical stuff–but I suspect that it’s also something more. Born in Estonia in 1935, Part is considered one of the most important living composers of sacred concert music. His music has… Continue reading
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C.Wright Mills: On Intellectual Craftsmanship
“Thinking is a struggle for order and at the same time for comprehensiveness.” – C. Wright Mills Charles Wright Mills (1916-1962) was an American sociologist best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination (which is still in print). For me, one remarkable aspect of the book is its Appendix, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship.” Here Mills… Continue reading
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Freemuse
In a post on the Freesounds website a few days ago I noted how easy it is for sounds to go free: how anyone can upload or download sound samples to and from this website and use them in their work. But while sounds may go free, in many parts of the world the people… Continue reading
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The Hang Drum: Real and Virtual
Do you like the sounds of steel pans and gamelans? Then you might really be intrigued by the sound of the Hang, a percussion instrument created and hand-built by the Swiss company PANart (Felix Rohner and Sabina Scharer) since 2000. The Hang consists of two steel sheets welded together to make a convex shape, a little… Continue reading
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Sounds Want To Be Free: Freesound
Freesound (www.freesound.org) is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Sampling Plus-licensed sounds. At freesound, anyone can upload or download sounds. What kinds of sounds are here? You name it: environmental sound field recordings (wind, rain, ice cracking), industrial and mechanical sounds, human voices, sound effects, digitally processed sounds, drones . . . All of the… Continue reading
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