Appearing in variety…

Audiobulb has released a free sampler of music from eight artists on the label, including a track off Supple (see post below), subtly arranged and expertly mixed by label owner David Newman. Others included are: Jimmy Behan, Biosphere, Ultre, NQ, Mark Harris, Hans van Eck and He Can Jog. I’m honored to be among the talent in that lineup, and the music is just awesome.

Also recently, Xynthetic produced their Second Statement, a stunning cross-section of the artist roster that displays the wide variety to be had on the netlabel. My track “Herbsttag” is a taste of some dub to come, so keep yer eyes peeled for more Craque on Xynthetic. 🙂

A new .microsound project has come around again, this time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch [player will auto-start].

Uncle Bill was a huge influence on the way I thought about putting things together to arrive at previously impossible conclusions, plus I was drawn to his relationship with my favorite beat, Paul Bowles. In fact, I wrote a piece for Comma called Sevenroughs just after he passed to the next level. This time around I still used the number 7, but applied it to divisions of the time limit, 3 minutes. I also kept to the fractured use of text (Sevenroughs uses The Western Lands), and the title is the first two words of the score: Making Pink [6.4MB 320mbps mp3].

To prepare a score, I started on page 1, with the last printed entity on the first line, page 2 the last entity on the second, and so on. Punctuation was taken alone, words only half-hypenated, and once I had reached the bottom of the page, I’d start back up on the first line. There were several happenings of the [ .” ] combination, so those became major delimiters of form. The outcome [fixed-font best for viewing] is a full cut-up of Naked Lunch, upon whose text I layered improvised sounds, with additional form and structure derived from the placement of the randomly intruding punctuation.

In addition to these recent projects, I’ve posted an archival recording of a live gallery show at Fetiço in Chicago, 2001. It’s in three parts, and is the most recent entry on CraqueCast, also subscribable and previewable in iTunes.

A special treat for blog readers: my collection of ringtones, RINGTONALITY! Great name huh? Well, these are loopy sort of poppy sometimes glitchy electronica beat things that I’ve made along the way, and are pretty loud with all sorts of variety. There are two versions available for download: the “m4r iPhone” version [6MB zip], and the FLAC version [42MB zip] for those who want to convert and use on another platform, or just want them otherwise. Feel free to pass them around.

Despite being laid off from my job in May, I’ve been trying to stay positive and keep active doing things: gardening, reviewing stuff for job interviewing like perl and networking and other unix/linux peculiarities, job searching of course, but also a good bit of music making. Other than some possible releases of newly improvised excursions, I’ve been attempting to make contact with some local galleries (Orange County, CA) for presenting experimental sound work and/or events. So as you can see, creativity continues to attempt its way out of my subconscious, and I continue to be hopeful that the perfect job is right around the corner.

Craque: Gamma out now on Test Tube

Photo by Kamaco

October brought many exciting things for me, including not only a new job, but also a new album that I’m very excited about. The Test Tube netlabel is featuring this new release, called Gamma.

Six tracks, mostly beat-driven, of downtempo styled expressionism ripe with electro-acoustic improvisation; acousmatica for the brainwaves.

I was also honored to have Matt Mercer (of Microfilm) write up the release on Under the Lens, here’s an excerpt from the full article:

Craque [is] a project of highly abstract instrumental electronic music that often defies easy categorization. He’s not afraid of melody or traditional rhythm, even at times can lay down a healthy groove, but most of his music is characterized by heavily processed and manipulated sounds derived from everyday objects. Typically, though, these sounds are far removed from the source and take on a weird, synthetic life of their own.

Also from the release page:

…Craque assaults our senses with an eclectic amalgam of rich rhythmic patterns that derivate from dub, hip hop, techno and other urban languages, but instead of driving us straight to the physical emotion center, they drive us to the ‘braindance’ center… Excellent and extremely elegant electronic music.

Craque: “Tekuchesti” out now on Constanta

I’m very happy to announce the release of a project I did this summer called Tekuchesti (a transliteration of текучести, which is a Russian word meaning “fluidity”), a piece in shuffle time for listeners and improvisers.

Download the entire work, and remember to listen on shuffle. Weird request you say? Read the liner notes below for more detail…

Please also visit the release page at Constanta and check out the other artists on this new boutique netlabel, which features some unique approaches to the microsound/glitch/experimental/drone genres; beauty through subtlety and simplicity. I personally enjoy op.cit.’s and To4ka.Dna’s most recent releases.

Here is my description and instructions for performance (these notes are also available in Russian through Constanta):

In tectonics, slices of the earth can be reduced bit by bit to their constituents, all in motion consistent with the plate. Below these fractured mantle pieces is a thick world of geology: elemental chemical reactions, intense temperature changes, varying strata of materials. There may be violent upheaval or capitulation of forces, or just still and silent veins of metal. If we could travel as a massless beings through the earth to the antipodal, each layer of Hell opens not a Dantean dream, but a surreal tour of random pockets describing the origin of the solar system.

Tekuchesti represents “fluidity” in physics, describing instability or fluid states. The piece consists of constructions mostly taken from free electro-acoustic improvisations, first recorded to create large elemental plates of experience, and secondly edited and combined into subdivisions of space. There were no structural or material limitations placed on the recording or editing of the improvisations, they simply happened.

Just as there are myriad structures and surprise events, there are the lack of these events, represented by the isochrons; dating scatterplots of history, constructions made from the lack of material to represent that which has passed on. The sonic architecture of each isochron in this piece is taken from relationships found in the five Platonic (or “perfect”) solids, found everywhere in nature, above and below the crust.

This piece is meant to be played in random order, where the slices intermingle anew each time to create an emergent form. Playing it in order will reveal some of the underlying structure, and is a perfectly acceptable way of listening – the shapes of the plates become much more clear, but it is an altogether different listening experience. Improvisers are encouraged to play along as well, but if done in a live context, it must be played on shuffle, as this will give the improvisers less expectation of what sounds will appear.

The work also ties in an immediate tectonic experience: I live only 10 miles from the epicenter of the 5.4 magnitude earthquake which hit the LA area on July 29, just shortly before the album was finalized. It also represents the “solid ground” – both as shared vision and literal Earth – between me and the constanta-label.ru headquarters in Perm, Russia.

Constanta on the web: http://constanta-label.ru
Constanta on myspace: http://www.myspace.com/constantalabel

New Release: Material

MaterialSince this release came out while my blog was unavailable, thought I would shout it out that a new Craque album called Material is available on Kahvi Collective! From the website:

“Guest artist craque arrives on Kahvi Collective with a unique blend of textures and IDM elements. Five track ‘Material’ verges on the style of ‘MigloJE’. Torus Europa sets the scene with its lush, drawn out passages of sound and textures and leads into the interesting ‘strawberry jam’, an atonal melody drawing on a paced bass line which makes a nice combination and the extraordinary ‘organum’ (my personal favourite of this release) with ‘that’ sample hook that fits so well with the rest of the track. a great first release from craque, perhaps we`ll see more from him in the future?”

I think probably so there will be more Craque appearing at Kahvi, and hopefully others real soon!

New Releases on Metatron: Joe Zitt, GWME

Metatron Press has re-released a few more recordings on archive.org:

  • Gusty Winds May Exist consists of Comma member Tom Bickley on recorders and electronics with Nancy Beckman on shakuhachi. This is the first in a series of three releases by each member of Comma with hand-made packaging and album design by Joe Zitt.
  • All Souls is a vocal improv collaboration between Joe and Tom.

Check out these rare recordings, some brilliant improvisation and collaboration here!

More Metatron Press music to come… this year is the 10th anniversary of Comma’s (voices), we’re working on a remix album to be released as the original is re-released in digital format on archive.org.

New Release: Density Operator

Behold the appalling beautiful world of Density Operator now available on Stadtgruen.

“The title is program: everything in this world seems to be under pressure in order to extract the highest concentration of agility. Computer sounds are algorithms, just another form of mathematical strings. Thus the densification of sound works by finding the shortest possible expression.”

Music on this album picked its own paths and themes as it emerged from ideas I’ve had about quantum mechanics and atomic theory, and how the same conceptual mindspace is occupied by the intense spontaneity of improvisation.

Album art done by Walter Montes de Oca is a spectacular accompaniment to the sound, merging organization and chaos in a beautifully simple manner.

There’s some nice things being written about the album: