Trente Oiseaux pour rien!

The fantastic and influential Trente Oiseaux label, run by the fantastic and influential quiet electronic composer Bernhard Günter, has begun offering free flac downloads of many of their releases. Feel free to sample about, but I HIGHLY recommend the classic Günter albums Univers Temporel Espoir and Un peu de niege salie. Note that, at least when I downloaded, Details Agrandis was inexplicably LOUD and was not at all pleasant.

Check them here.

How to play flacs here.

Wikpedia on Günter and on the label.

Mark Fell interview

Great interview with snd member and solo artist Mark Fell, whose recent UL8 and Multistability have been getting a lot of play around PSF HQ. You can sample some tracks as well.

People who come to my house are always annoyed at me because I just play 30 seconds of stuff here and there. Actually, I never listened the whole album through until recently. With UL8 I didn’t even listen to individual tracks the whole way through until I got into the master studio in Berlin, haha! At one point I had to stop Lupo and change something because it was a part I hadn’t really heard properly.

Most of the tracks on both UL8 and Multistability are procedures implemented on a computer to generate patterns and timbral data that I will typically mess about with as they go along. It’s all dead simple, I have no real interest in technical complexity. I find the best systems are the very simple ones, where it’s just a very few linked procedures. They sound complex, but could be summed up in a couple of lines of text. So there might be a few parameters I change and that’s enough to create the level or change I want; I tweak the parameters until it sounds right.

Video interviews with BSC members

We just discovered a fantastic series of videos shot by Mike Bullock, wherein he interviews other members of the Boston-based improvising ensemble the BSC. Vic Rawlings talks about his elaborate custom electronics in one video and his modified cello in another, plus talks with Howard Stelzer and Liz Tonne about their techniques. Check them out here. Unfortunately, we can't embed previews here, so check out this BSC performance instead.

. . . and another Drumm interview

Here.