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.

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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.

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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?!?)