Three things I like! The Fun Years, container shipping, and general weirdness.

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Rocking! Droning! New TFYs : baby it’s cold inside.

English sound artist / composer Janek Schaefer offers downloadable MP3s of two of his performances for sale: the recent The Sporting Guide to The Speed of Sound and the slightly older Recital in the old library. I’m not much for writing music reviews, but this guy got to attend the performance of TSGTTSOS and had good things to say about it:

I’m an indie kid at heart, but entirely open to all sorts of music and unique musical experiences. And this one was really unique. “Sound artist, musician, composer and sound designer” Janek Schaefer, who I’d never heard of, was performing a specially commissioned work relating to sport at nearby Loughborough University. I had to be there.

[...]

He had also brought along his instruments – most importantly a mixer, plus several minidisc players (with samples and field recordings loaded up), effects pedals, and his home-made record player with two arms (so that two parts of the record can be played at the same time). For an inexperienced tech geek like me, this was all great stuff.

[...]

And then it was straight into the rest of the work. Long, brooding, warm electronic sounds were merged with all sorts of other material, looped and warped, speeded up and slowed down. Highlights for me included a wonderful repetition of noises of cars driving past, which after a while started to sound like people playing musical instruments. Also Schaefer’s live xylophone was sampled and looped to become a beautiful chiming section. There was a baffling extract of speech from ex footballer Jackie Charlton. And at the end there was a great looped bit of Ravel’s Bolero (the piece of course being famous in sport for the Torvill and Dean connection), followed by looped and warped cymbal sounds.

There’s an interesting interview with Schaefer at rarefrequency:

I moved to London to the final two years of my M.A. at the Royal College of Art, which was a very fine establishment, which had a broad emphasis on creativeness, rather than anything technical, I suppose, or at least it enabled me to do that. When I got there, the program wasn’t functioning very well, but you were also encouraged to do whatever it was you wanted to do, so, while everyone else was moaning about the program not functioning very well, I just started to do stuff. I was very interested in music. I studied classical music as a child and was a DJ in the college bar, but I thought about sound and how important it is to us and, because I studied architecture, of course, sound is space. It’s a very simple sentence, but that’s what all my work is about: that we experience space through our ears and I started doing projects with architectural designs, where I turned the acoustic nature of a building inside out, or I’d make solid structures invisible, or transparent to sound. You’d think you were going into this big, solid concrete block, but actually it sounded exactly like it did on the outside, as if it were made of sheet material, like a tent or something. So I did all these experiments and that went very well. They appreciated what I did, those people that focused on it then.

Anyway, I’ve got the MP3s of both performances and think they’re great. If you like this kind of thing (JMD? NZC?), I recommend you go buy ‘em. Also outstanding is the CD release In The Last Hour.

(and… a John Byrne mouseover?!?)

Last night, almost a year after the last time I made it out to absorb some local culture, CK, JMD & I (no TJICisphereans expressed interest) wandered over to PA’s Lounge for the first “Uppercase Sound” event (since people actually attended, apparently there will be an Uppercase Sound #2). On the bill were Rise|Set|Twilight, Asher, & The Fun Years. Pardon my lack of review-writing skillz – this is mostly an excuse to post some photos.

Rise|Set|Twilight did a sort of sound collage thing that wasn’t melodic enough for me, but it was interesting. Listenable, and somewhat enjoyable, but not so much that I’d seek them out. At least, based on the one piece they played. The guy playing the mac reminded me of NZC a little.

Asher had this sort of layer of quietly crackling static going, like when an album has played out and the needle’s still on it, and snippets of barely audible conversations and operatic singing would rise up out of it and fall back in. Very quiet, very cool. I bought a CDR (haven’t listened to it yet), which I hope is as good as his performance.

During the show I was happy to see that we weren’t the oldest folks in the room – there was a guy who was five to ten years older than me, and a couple who were probably in their fifties. After a while it dawned on me that they were probably someone’s parents, whom I could imagine saying “Son, we support what you’re doing, even though we don’t quite understand it”. Just before Asher’s set, a bunch of people came in, including two young women with sleeping babies strapped to them. The emcee mentioned Asher was recently relocated to Somerville from Brooklyn (I think) and apparently his whole family had dropped in for the show. It was pretty cute – wish I’d snapped a picture, but it would’ve felt intrusive.

The Fun Years was more my thing. This bit from a Rare Frequency review:

[...] The Fun Years create a long, oneiric mix of melodic, crackle ‘n’ hum ‘n’ buzz-filled drones that flow leisurely one into the other. [...] The Fun Years are not about stylistic sea changes or harsh musical juxtaposition, preferring to explore the pleasures of slow evolution, repetition, and decay.

pretty much captures what I like about their music. I bought a new CDR from ‘em – the crippling paranoia of flourenscent quinine. It’s great.

By the time TFY was up, I had been screwing around with my camera enough to be able to take some photos with deliberate effect (earlier ones were just lucky):

I also took some pics wandering around Union Square in the rain after the show, which I’ll post seperately.

For those who like this sort of thing, here’s just the sort of thing you’ll like.

I still need to get their new CDR.

You can now download the set from The Fun Years’ great MassArt show.

It’s 31 mins / 36mb of cool sounds, the sort of thing I love listening to when I’m working or doing something else requiring creativity*. Even better than the set (in my opinion, anyway) is their CD now that’s what i call droning, vol. 4 – which doesn’t seem to be available through their site.

* a rare treat now that The Delta Factor is no more (although the good news is Cleary says he’ll notify me if he gets himself a new show-that-streams in California).

I dragged JMD to a nonevent at MassArt tonite: The Fun Years (some MP3s there), Geoff Mullen, and Tim Hecker. It was excellent, and I’m extremely glad I mustered the willpower to get out of the house and actually do something. JMD reported that he was glad he went, and that when his eyes were closed he was actually just listening to the music (it was too loud to drift off to, anyway).

Some… “instruments”. Needless to say, no one was in any danger of breaking a sweat.

Local band The Fun Years. Bad name, great sounds – I bought their excellent home-made CD for five bucks, and it’ll be replacing Casino Vs. Japan as “the-only-music-in-my-car-for-the-next-six-months”. I also picked up Hecker’s My Love Is Rotten To The Core, an entire ablum made up of sounds plundered from Van Halen songs and interviews (the inside sleeve says “You only thing you have to lose is your hair.” LOL!).

Geoff Mullen was OK. He played something a little too discordant and full of fast, weird clicking for my taste, though.

Tim Hecker, er, playing the laptop. I was curious about how “live” music might differ from the stuff on CD, and it turned out to be really interesting to listen to (OK, so I’m not slick enough with the language to be a music reviewer). It seemed to be improvisational, built from the same sounds that he wove the more melodic pieces on Mirages (some MP3s there) from. The sounds were great, densely textured, and they just washed over you.

I really admire these guys who are so into what they’re into that they can produce so much cool stuff, so unlike most of the junk out there, whole little worlds. Damn.