909s and good times
memories made in the coldest winter aren’t always so badArchive for music
dead in salem
My pals over at Resonator Magazine have lost a member of their extended family and I’ve lost an internet acquaintance. Dr. Shlomo Zelig, someone with whom I’ve always shared similar taste in music and culture, passed away — the apparent victim of poisoning — while live-tweeting (yergh) the live show for Salem, a band Dr. Zelig mentioned to me a while back. His twitter feed on the subject (linked on the Resonator page) is amateurish, rank with doe-eyed fanboy cliches and a sort of starry optimism for his never-to-be-realized music journo potential, but nevertheless remains a tragic monument to a man who died doing what he loved. It’s also, in my opinion, an interesting example of how new and social media can be used to capture the mood and feel of something like a live show of an ultimately obscure, underexposed band like Salem.
It’s hard to become truly emotionally affected by the death of a “friend” I’ve only known on the internet; the cessation of what he might have said is merely an artifact in all the noise. Still, pour out a glass of whatever you drink and turn up the bass for Shlomo.
snow in berlin
wieland samolak - steady state music
When this album came out in 1993, I was 13 years old and just cutting my teeth on electronic music. Like any pale, computerbound, awkward teenager with a German techno fetish, I spent hours on what passed for the Internet finding musicians related to my then-favorites. Wieland Samolak, if I recall, engineered/mastered/sat-around-looking-seriously-German for some of the Basic Channel releases and what followed. Or maybe he was just hanging out with Moritz, Robert Henke and other surly Berliners.
The narrative doesn’t really matter. The cavernous dub sounds have spawned a million minimal techno imitators (especially since Ableton Live added the Resonator plugin) and in recent memory have become our Zeitgeist: look to the success of the equally sparse and lush Gas – “Nah und Fern” (review on Pitchfork), the clinical made personal of Telefon Tel Aviv (interview on Resonator), and even the presence of a Maurizio-esque bassline in Kanye’s Love Lockdown (if you need a link for this, you’re fired.) These are the soundtracks for our manic urban generation, whether we, like Kraftwerk, are silently marveling at the shimmering neon lights, or traveling with the slow thumps into Voigt’s decaying Koenigsforst.
Steady State Music, however, is not that. Here you will not find four on the floor (there aren’t even three, two or one.) Hardly to be considered music, it’s instead the texture of urban detachment. The 60-hz hum, white noise static and low level train rumble are part of our sonic space (or, mine anyways; maybe you’re Amish), and Wieland perfectly captures that here. In his own words (it works best if you read it in a serious German accent):
“When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sound of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discreet[sic] sonic events usually found in music.”
His spelling misstep (pretty sure he meant ‘discrete’) speaks to the theme of the album: Samolak takes the discrete and makes it discreet, and the result is ausgezeichnet.
mp3 download (rapidshare): Wieland Samolak – Steady State Music – Untitled 1 (11:11)
Edit: Per Robert Henke’s request, I have removed the download link. Please check out Steady State Music on the official site: http://www.monolake.de/downloads/steady_state_music.html
In fact, all 5 tracks are there, along with a specific notice not to upload to sharing sites. Sorry, Robert.
summary exhaikution: kanye west – 808s and heartbreak
[beginning a project to summarize albums, movies, etc with haiku]
“dear ex-fiancee,
listen to the following:
(insert album here)“
