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Two Variations marks the return to Umor Rex of the Los Angeles based musician & producer M. Geddes Gengras, following his two volumes of "Collected Works" from 2013 and 2014. The two pieces here are the result of Gengras' continuous exercises and obsession with his modular synthesizer, yet (technique aside) Two Variations is a new statement, the reinforcement of MGG's prowess in this area, and how through these machines, he is able to build harmonic music pieces, contours between the electronic collage and concrete music.
'The first side of this tape is an edit of the first two run-throughs of a patch that I had been conceptualizing for a while before I majorly rearranged my system to accommodate this obsession. Four voltage-controlled oscillators (Make Noise Music STOs) are controlled by the output of a four-stage shift register (synthtech e102) which takes a single sequence of voltages and distributes them (in the style of a round) across the four voices. The e102 is being fed a long sequence from an Antimatter Audio Brainseed. A single clock controls the sequence speed, the shift register's 'action', and a gate sequencer (Noise Engineering Zularic Repetitor operating in a probability mode) which in turn activates four AD envelopes (Intellijel Quadra) to open the four channels of a Make Noise Quad Multi-Mode Gates module which is mixing the four voices of the VCOs. The 'delay' in the shift register (essentially how many clock pulses it takes for a note to advance to the next output) is modulated by random voltage from a Make Noise Wogglebug. The end result is two pairs of marimba mallets attached to a pair of dice. The b-side is a soundboard recording of a performance utilizing this patch, among others, from the same period.'
More information can be found here and here.
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Four years in the making, in partnership with Teranga Beat (the current leading label for Senegalese music), Analog Africa proudly offer an insight into the musical adventures that were taking place in the major Senegalese cities during the '60s and '70s. This compilation reflects the unique fusions of Funk, Mbalax, Cuban Son and Mandigue guitar sounds that transformed Dakar into West Africa's most vibrant city.
It all started in 2009 when Adamantios Kafetzis travelled from Greece to Senegal with a brand new tape machine that he used to digitize the musical treasures he had discovered in the city of Thiés. These treasures took the form of reel tapes, and had been recorded by sound engineer Moussa Diallo, who had spent the previous four decades immortalising, onto magnetic tape, the bands that would perform in his club, the legendary Sangomar.
300 Senegalese songs that nobody had ever heard before were discovered - five of them were selected for this compilation.
Thanks to its history of outside influences, Senegal - the western point of Africa - had become a musical melting pot. Cuban and American sailors had brought Son Montuno from Cuba, Jazz from New Orleans and American soul tunes: sounds that were swiftly embraced and adopted by urban dance bands and intuitively merged with local music styles.
One band in particular excelled at this fusion. 1960 marks the formation of Star Band de Dakar, a milestone that left an indelible imprint on Dakar’s musical landscape. Indeed, the whole country was soon grooving to their intoxicating mixture of Afro Cuban rhythms and Wolof-language lyrics.
The 1970s brought a new generation of stellar bands; Le Sahel, Orchestre Laye Thiam, Number One de Dakar, Orchestra Baobab, Dieuf Dieul de Thies and Xalam1 who fused traditional Senegalese percussion instruments such Sabra, Tama and Bougarabou with organs and keyboards, giving birth to new hybrids. Merging the folkloric and the experimental, these sounds, embraced by the youth, took centre stage and gave the previously dominant Cuban music a run for its money.
With this burst of musical and artistic creativity, driven predominantly by the modern vision of President Senghor, Dakar began attracting international stars. The Jackson Five, James Brown, Tabou Combo (Haiti), Celia Cruz (Cuba) and an array of African stars like Tabu Ley Rochereau (Congo), Manu Dibango (Cameroon) and Bembeya Jazz (Guinée) joined in with the local scene, improvising jam sessions and bringing new flavours to a music scene that was always open to new inspirations and influences. Johnny Pacheco immortalized his passion for the city with a song called "Dakar, Punto Final."
The comprehensive booklet that comes with the CD - 44 pages and with the double LP - 12 pages LP size - is a precious document attesting to the decades of transformation that led to modern Senegalese music. Featuring biographies of music producers and a legendary record cover designer, as well as the life stories of all the groups represented here, the booklet also includes a fantastic selection of photos that have never seen before.
More information can be found here.
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Matmos announces new album Ultimate Care II, sound-sourced entirely from a washing machine
Harvesting the machine’s chugs, drones, splashes, and clanks, Matmos has crafted a work of sly humor and dazzling artistry
Since their formation 20 years ago, driven by their abiding belief in the musical potential of sound, the duo Matmos (Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt) have created a wide range of imaginative recordings and live performances. In addition to releasing a string of acclaimed electronic music albums, they have played the uterus and reproductive tract of a cow at the San Francisco Art Institute, canisters of helium at Radio City Music Hall while opening for Bjork, and John Cage’s personal collection of conch shells at Carnegie Hall. Their forthcoming album Ultimate Care II perfectly reveals their artistry; they made it entirely out of the sounds generated by a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II model washing machine in the basement of their home in Baltimore, Maryland.
Harvesting the machine’s rich vocabulary of rhythmic chugs, spin cycle drones, rinse cycle splashes, metallic clanks and electronic beeps, Matmos have crafted a work of sly humor in which one of the quintessential sounds of everyday life is transformed into an unlikely source for a surprisingly listenable suite of music. Dan Deacon, Max Eilbacher and Sam Haberman of Horse Lords, Jason Willett (Half Japanese), and Duncan Moore (Needle Gun) all took part, either playing the machine like a drum, processing its audio, or sending MIDI data to the duo’s samplers. The result is a suite of rhythmic, melodic and drone-based compositions that morph dramatically, but remain fanatically centered upon their single, original sound source. Ultimate Care II swirls with perverse paradox: it is at once funny and sad, bouncy and creepy, liquid and mechanical.
Ultimate Care II will be released on February 19, 2016.
More information will eventually be found here.
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Steve Hauschildt's new album is his first since the late 2012 release of Sequitur. Although Where All Is Fled sonically harkens back to his earlier albums such as Rapt for Liquid Minister and Tragedy & Geometry, it slowly becomes apparent that it is also a divergence from those recordings.
Both the artwork and the music on this new work were heavily inspired by surrealist landscape paintings, early alchemical emblems, and recurring visions.
The result is a pristine series of cascading melodies, fantastical terrains of layered lattices, and overlapping patterns of synthesizers superimposed with orchestral instrumentation. Hidden in the crevices of the album are processed crowd sounds, re-sampled text-to-speech synthesis, piano, and animal noises which reveal themselves after repeated listens and blur together notions of artificial and natural sound. While slowly unfurling, each sound is given it's own place and space, never hurried, never cluttered.
More information can be found here.
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