Soul Gourd
April 16th, 2007
I really like the netlabel Intelligent Machinery Dot Net. They book themselves as an “anti-music label”, although another apt slogan, if I were their slogan-writer, might be “finding music in sounds that others overlook”. Their artists tend to make dark ambient and minimalist noise albums. All are available under Creative Commons licenses. I am particularly partial to the work of jfox on that label, although there are other very fine artists there.
The label ran a compilation project lately called “Pieces”. The format is long to explain verbatim (and is, I believe, quoted in the NSI weblog). I will focus on the fun parts. One gets a half-zillion (well, maybe 12) free 4 second samples exported from a live concert by im.net artists, and then uses the samples to create something new.
I popped the samples into Sawcutter 2.0, and began to have fun with them.
I think it is safe to say that I am not exactly a “beats” guy. I’ll do a techno remix once in a while, and I listen to a lot of minimalist-beat downtempo. I love work like Henri Pettersen and Psonikadia, which take dancefloor ideas and re-imagines them as intelligent electronica–what I call “IDM for can’t-dance kids”. It’s true that I do cross genre when I remix. I recently did a rather rough but fun one called “It’s a hot one, baby”, because I heard a vocal samples of two kids doing ad-libs like “it’s a hot one, baby”, and “bangin’ beats!” and I thought those kids deserved a remix on the grounds of sheer enthusiasm. But in general, count me beatless (and perhaps a little down(tempo)).
Yet when I fired up my synth to do my “pieces’ compilation, what came out was something rather like a granite formation dancing to motown on a gourd of glacial rock. So I named the result “Soul Gourd”, and enjoyed its odd, weirdbient fun.
The cool pieces compilation is available for free download at:
the Intelligent Machinery page for the album.
I hope that you’ll give it a download and a listen.