To say that I was touched by "Melody Mountain", by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra would be an understatement. In fact, it hit me quite hard.
It may seem a bit strange to have an entry on this blog about a vocal cd containing pop covers...if it weren't for the music in the background. This sparse, mainly electronic music will certainly appeal to the ambient music fan. It is created by jaga Jazzist keyboard player Morten Qvenild and produced by Deathprod (Supersilent) - who is well known for his own ambient music and his collaboration with Biosphere. Backed by this (almost ambient) soundtrack, Susanna's voice sounds even more intimate and honest.

The selection of artists covered may well raise an eyebrow (or two): Prince, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, AC/DC (!!), Kiss (!!!!), Depeche Mode, Fairport Convention (the cover of Fotheringay is especially moving) , and the inevitable Joy Division (sampled here). If you like Nouvelle Vague but think they were a bit too light-hearted, be sure to try out Melody Mountain!

At the start of the new radio season, a new program is scheduled for tuesday nights: FOLIO.
Folio will be focussing on ambient, electronic, experimental music and soundscapes. 
From november, the programs will be totally new (watch this blog for more news about this program), but in september and october FOLIO will celebrate it's new start start with a series of rebroadcasts of remarkable broadcasts from the past.
I am very proud that all october programs will contain one of the mixes from the past years!
This totals 5 hours (I'm lucky the last tuesday of this month is Oct 31) of ambient-electronic mixes!

This is a great chance for those that missed the earlier broadcasts: be sure to catch 'em this time.

FOLIO is broadcast on the dutch Concertzender/Radio 6, every tuesday night from 0:00 - 01:00 (GMT+1)..
Since this is cable radio, you'll have to check HERE for your local cable frequencies (or use the familiar Concertzender frequency).

If you cannot receive Concertzender/Radio 6 (no cable, or not dutch), you can click the 'live audio' link on the same page to listen to a realtime webstream. There a three versions available for various bandwidths.
(Note: there's a cool Yahoo widget too on this page, so you never have to look up this info again)

Schedule:
03-10 - "Vergeten Tijd" (2002)
10-10 - "Mantra of Walls and Wiring" (2005)
17-10 - "Ambient Mix #3" (2000)
24-10 - "Peinzing, part 1" (2003) (slightly shortened for this broadcast)
31-10 - "Klanksluis" (2002)

You can still find all playlists for these programs here

Recently the Impakt festival in my hometown presented a ‘street’ version of the Dreamlines Project, originally created by Argentinian artist Leonardo Solaas for the internet. We’ve seen this kind of image-gathering trick done before (using Google or Flickr image collections), but never with results as beautiful as this! 

As the information states: “Dreamlines is a non-linear, interactive visual experience. The user enters one or more words that define the subject of a dream he would like to dream. The system looks in the Web for images related to those words, and takes them as input to generate an ambiguous painting, in perpetual change, where elements fuse into one another, in a process analogous to memory and free association.“

Yes – this is generative ambient art! It’s your visual companion to your ambient soundtrack.
So…start up the sound (by clicking the ‘play all available tracks’ above right), open up a new browser screen through the link below, enter some random keywords and enjoy…. 

Some examples? Just click here for the ambient association. Funny thing: entering four-letter words has equally aesthetic results (but with harsher colours). And just entering black is equally enchanting..

Thanks, Leonardo, for this beautiful vision.

If you're a fan of the music of Bill Laswell, then probably you're also one of the followers that cannot seem to get enough of that stuff! Check out www.sacreddub.com.
Apart from a wealth of information, hot news, and an extensive discography, the collection of downloadable podcasts is especially interesting. At time of writing there are already 13 available, each one lasting one hour, and complete with full track details!

As the title suggests, these podcast focus on Laswell's (ambient-) dub experiments. Apart from Laswell's own music there's also interesting material from artists closely related to his style. The nonstop mixes are available as 128 Kbit MP3-files, which is good enough to listen on your MP3-player. Polish up your internet connection and start downloading before it's too late!

Ambient electronic music sometimes seems to lack self-relativism and humour. That's why track-titles like "ECM Haircuts" or "Sign Everyone in Iceland" call for immediate attention.

"Excellent Swimmer" - the latest Modern Institute Album on Expanding Records - has just the right mix of relativism and seriousness, and a perfect blend of electronic and acoustic sounds too..

It's Martina Bertoni (on cello) and Teho Teardo (on everything else) - with a little help from Mark Beazley (Rothko) on the track you can listen here (called "post.ino"). 

"Excellent Swimmer" defies standard genres; there's quite a lot of references found in it...sometimes it even reminded me of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra.

Nice. Or more than nice - Great!

Environmental ambient music. Peace & Quiet, Whales, Birds. The reassuring sounds of the city. The dreamlike landscapes of your subconscious mind.
Most of us hardly have any serious worries.

Mazen Kerbaj is a musician playing improvised music using his trumpet in a sort of Arve Henriksen style.
He is living in Beirut. Hís environmental sound at this very moment is the sound of the Israeli airplanes bombing his city.

On the night of 15/16 july 2006 he recorded this track ("Starry Night") on the balcony of his flat in Beirut.
This is where environmental music gets very, very frightening.

We already enjoyed Pole, of course, and Deadbeat, and don't forget Rhythm & Sound. And now from London comes Burial with this self-titled CD.
The genre is called 'DubStep' - and there are quite a lot of new electronic DJ's exploring it. Lot of times it sounds flat, one-dimensional, analogue and not very inspiring. But every genre has it's geniuses.
Burial is a very good example of how adventurous this new music can be. Neither Dance(-able) nor Reggae, neither ambient nor classic dub. Yet all of these at the same time, and very heavily electronic. A bit like Adrian Sherwood mixes from another dimension...??On the 'Hyperdub' label, which describes it as "Burial’s parallel dimension sounds set in a near future South London underwater. You can never tell if the crackle is the burning static off pirate radio transmissions, or the tropical downpour of the submerged city outside the window. In their sometimes suffocating melancholy, most of these tracks seem to yearn for drowned lovers."

'The tropical downpour of the submerged city' ...(well it wás quite hot in London, that's true)....'yearn for drowned lovers'...Just top thát for a description!

[read more...]

...And while in London, the inevitable visite to the Tate Modern Museum brought an unexpected auditive experience:Bill Fontana's 'Harmonic Bridge' sound installation.
Just imagine a massively immersing multi-channel sound in the Turbine Hall pictured above!

In this installation, the Millennium Bridge acts as a giant string instruments. The processed sounds can be heard in the Tate Turbine Hall, as well as in London Underground's Southwark Station (both locations are linked by this Millennium Bridge).

You can find more information HERE: 
"A network of vibration sensors have been placed within the bridge turning it into a vast stringed instrument which plays an ever-changing musical composition based on it's surrounding environment. The noise created by pedestrians passing overhead, the wind, bicycles and the architectural elements which make up the bridge have been transformed into a sound installation which can be heard simultaneously in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and also at Southwark Underground station."

The sound from the bridge is picked up through "accelerometers" and is processed and transformed into "live sonic mappings". As this sounds like a live (real time) process, I wondered why the sounds faded sometime to periods of silence - as this resulted in a bit of a pre-recorded feel..
The answer is in the project description on the artists website: "The work would enter the space as a slow moving wave, emerging from the ground tone of the background hum and then slowly decaying back into it."

This installation is extended until august, 23. So when you're heading for London be sure to visit the Tate Turbine Hall. Use the Underground, get off at Southwark Station and be sure to bang the bridge heavily while crossing it!

If you have a reasonable internet connection, decent sound speakers, some spare time and if you're not afraid of Flash and/or Shockwave plugins, you'll find some lovely online audio tools here. Some only for laughs, some quite serious and some ridiculous. Enough for a good night of fun!

My personal favourites: the Grotran Pianos (try the Satie - let it play for a while and it'll get quite generative), the DJ trainer (reggae version), and the best of all: I know where BRUCE LEE lives!

Away for a small vacation in the next weeks...visiting London and Oxfordshire...
Expect much more ambient clips upon return...