Daniel Menche interview

Sorry for the lack of posts here lately. Now that summer is here and we're about to take a few months off from presenting shows, I'll do my best to start sharing my internet finds with all of you.

To kick things off, I just found a great interview with Daniel Menche conducted by music journalist (not musician) Elliott Sharp. Elliott asks Daniel about his recent releases on Editions Mego and Touch with Daniel really opening up on how they were made and what drives him artistically. Worth checking out!

While you're over on Elliott's blog, check out his brief impressions on our show with Toshimaru Nakamura last month. Thanks for coming out Elliott, nice to see a new face at our shows!

Web Radio: Experimental Music from Spain + more

Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (EVOL) curates "AVANT" on Radio Web Macba in part of their "Research" series. Reseach is "a line of broadcast programmes that aim to provide up-close views of scenes and key persons in the world of contemporary art". Roc's "AVANT" is the first of this series focusing on experimental music from Spain. In his own words:

From the most academic electoacoustics to industrial music, from radiophonic art to post-no-wave improvisation, AVANT retraces some of the key moments of the Spain's musical avant-garde, scarcely documented until now. Each AVANT focuses on the work and career of a group project from the scene, documented and composed of two parts: the first part reconstructs the artist's context through interviews, and the second part retraces the artist's work with musical examples.

Scarcely documented indeed! Here at the PSF office the only name I could immediately recognize was Francisco Lopez so needless to say I'm very excited about checking out the rest. Check it out for yourself here.

RWM also has a great downloadable essay (also by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros) on Japanese CD/MP3 manipulator Yasunao Tone. This essay is also accompanied by a collaborated audio piece from Tone and FM radio pioneer Tetsuo Kogawa, which appeared on an earlier radio series called "Lines of Sight".

This site looks rather promising, so I'll make sure to keep everyone updated on anything else I find here in the future.

Russell Haswell

Been enjoying Russell Haswell's latest, "Value + Bonus" (“It’s kind of a combination between a stereo test CD, like one of those things that reveals to you that you’ve got your speakers the wrong way around,” Haswell tells FACT, “And kind of free live acid noise improvisation, recorded in one take with no over-dubbing or anything like that. But then there’s editing that’s done in a kind of free style – well, inspired by the freestyle editing of Omar Santana and Latin Rascals, all these people from the 80s whose edits I used to be really into, even if it was pop music or whatever. They were the ones who did it better than anyone else.”) here at the PSF offices (heh. . .). Check out a lengthy interview with the man himself over at FACT magazine. Note that it's 6 pages long, though the page buttons are kinda buried under teasers for other articles. Poor design!