Milieu

Kris Moyes got in touch to let me know about a video, Wolfmother’s White Unicorn. He was responsible for the editing and colour grading.

The video consists of live footage edited together, and matches nicely to the retro feel of the track. I haven’t heard any other tracks by Wolfmother, but this one’s worth checking out.

Also have a look at my interview with Kris about his work, and have a search around for his other videos!

If you’ve come here from Cool Hunting - hello! Evan Orensten wrote a very kind post about Milieu, and I’m touched by his kindness. If you’re new to my weblog: I generally cover netlabel audio and culture, digital art and occasionally comment about (related or contemporary art) events in London. My primary drive is to encourage people to listen to artists who release work through copyleft/creative commons/open source licenses - and also into the public domain. These artists are working unbelievably hard, so I attempt to help their work get into the wild. Since music is one of my passions, I’m biased towards covering music.

Scott Waddell is a musician who releases work on his site and through Opsound. He also works with John Holowach, and you can read more about that in my review of Shape Of Impact by John Holowach. Waddell has a series of excellent tracks on his site, released under a Creative Commons license. There’s elements of old skool rave breaks, hip hop, and the kind of sample play you might have heard from John Holowach. Like Holowach, Waddell really loves his drum samples, so if you’re into laid back beats and sample-based music, you should check out his stuff.

Tally is the definitive, seminal Waddell track. Seriously, play this at your next party and keep it in your mp3 player. It consists of ambient synth sounds, solid drum loops and programming, nothing out of the ordinary - but everything is in just the right quantities. I suspect Waddell doesn’t realise just how good Tally is, but I consider it netaudio anthem.

I must ask Waddell about his track names, because I can’t figure out what 3501cn3t5i1 and 5^ddn355r^1n5 could possibly mean. Perhaps they relate to the album title somehow. Anyway, they’re both excellent tracks, using piano melodies and arpeggios. 5^ddn355r^1n5 sounds inspired by Japanese music to me, the intro reminds me of Ken Ishi a lot.

Away is another well-balanced track, using mysterious vocal sounds which impressed me. The guitars are good too, they give it a relaxed and natural feel, although the underlying construction of the music is presumably largely founded on samples and synths. Silo is a delicious and short ambient track, with pianos sparkling in the distance. Waddell gradually introduces lower notes, making the track feel as if it culminates towards the end.

Ambiii is another ambient piece, with very interesting bass synths and occasionally distorted bass percussion. Ambiv follows in a similar vein, but is totally focussed on piano sounds, arpeggios, repetitions, and then backwards twists of the piano notes. There’s very subtle use of vocals in Ambiv. The way Waddell holds back his use of the samples is impressive, it shows he has a good ear for composition. Practice is reminiscent of Tally, with a bit more freedom in the use of samples and processing.

If you like these tracks, also consider downloading more of Waddell’s work by searching archive.org.

Soutien Gorge’s Revoir, out on Complementary Distribution, is another strong Complementary Distribution release. The flavour is noise and delicious ambience, with 8 delicate and sweet tracks like Érkezés, and A jelzőlámpák nem villognak tovább. It’s best to listen to the album as whole since the tracks are quite short and cross-pollinate themes between each other.

Gorge treats sound somewhat like a water-colour artist, washing timbres across either noise or melodic themes. Sustained notes often reverberate to their natural end, leaving silence, where other sounds are introduced. Gorge has adopted the technique of working with silence as much as noise, and this results in moments that resemble clarity and awakening.

The use of crackling textures in a lot of these pieces, Hazafelé for example, puts into mind images of sparks, fireworks, or even sea crashing on a shore. Judging by the photographs, which contain images of a city at night with a long shutter setting, and the album title “Revoir”, the theme appears to be good bye at night. I made the assumption that the album would be far more melancholic than it actually is, excluding the first track, which made me wonder if Gorge was stretching the metaphor of parting to mean rebirth.

on_14 contacted me to let me know about on_14 - Photon, released on another excellent and promising Japanese netlabel, On-Li. These are re-released, but apparently re-mastered and renamed (see: View/Room).

These are emotional pieces, demonstrating the depth of timbre and range on_14 can get out of a guitar. The re-mastered versions sound crisper than the other release. The cover art for each track, which you can view in some mp3 players like iTunes, encourages the listener to interpret the sound in a certain way; the reds and blues from the skylines in the images seem to suggest a gentle relaxed warmth, and an essentially ambient feel.

I find it encouraging to see people using images within the MP3 files, as it’s all too easy for audio files to slip between the tracks and lose their original context. This kind of meta-data could become a tool for artists to leave some kind of imprint on their work which can become lost when music is distributed digitally.