Friday, October 8, 2010 at 12:07 tagged anothersound, review 
For the fourth edition of Another Sound, my contribution to Joachim Baan’s blog Anothersomething, I wrote about Glasser and her newly released album Ring. I was pleasantly surprised by the sound of it at first listen. Curious? I invite you to read the complete article on Anothersomething!
Friday, June 11, 2010 at 18:41 tagged albums, field recording, review 
If you have ever edited sound which was badly recorded, you have probably used a denoiser of some sort. And if there was a lot of noise to be removed (I recently received an interview recorded during heavy rain, with the request to remove the sound of the rain and no, I am not joking), you know the side effects such a treatment can have.
Looking at them from another perspective, these side effects we try to avoid most of the time can sound pretty interesting themselves. Richard Eigner from Austria created his project Denoising Field Recordings based on this idea. He made recordings of particularly noisy environments and used denoising techniques to create the material for his compositions.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 22:58 tagged anothersound, review 
The second edition of Another Sound on Anothersomething is now online. This time I wrote a little piece about Midlake. I recently visited one of their live shows, but I already fell in love with their music quite some time ago. Click through to read the whole story on Anothersomething: Another Sound - Midlake.
It is great to have the opportunity to write for Anothersomething. On Everyday Listening I like to still my hunger for innovative, thought provoking or just inspiring sound-related projects, but it is fun to write about music in a different way as well. A big thank you to Joachim for this!
Many artists follow all the classic pop music rules and recipes to get into the favor of the masses. Others just do what they like, and some, like Autechre seem to do only things that go against those rules and recipes.
R Ess, the first track of their newest album Oversteps for instance, starts with a fade in of almost 1:30. Once the melodic synthesizer part is at its peak volume it is time for the beats to slowly fade in as well.
On the left ear we hear the direct sound of the synthesizer, while the rest of the sonic panorama is covered in an ocean of reverberation as the muffled kick drum and crispy snare come in at the center. Towards the end of the track we are treated to some extra low frequencies, it is hard to really call it a bass line.
Compared to some other, rather complex Autechre songs it is quite easy to nod your head to the beat of R Ess, while enjoying the pitch shifting synth tones, even though some snare drums will not be where you expect them to be.
Autechre’s Oversteps is the first album I bought online in a higher-than-CD-audio quality: 24bit/44.1kHz at bleep.com. I really think as storage and bandwidth capacity increase, online music stores like the iTunes store should at least offer an option to buy uncompressed, or at least lossless formats.
It is time for something new. Every now and then I would like to write a review of a song. Not a whole album, just one song. In these reviews I will focus on the feeling those songs give as opposed to rating them for their quality, so you could say they will be very subjective.
For one person a certain sound might be completely annoying while for another the same sound might bring back beautiful childhood memories. I hope you will enjoy reading my reviews, and they will make you curious of what it will sound like and what images it will bring up in your own mind. We start off with Híbakúsja by Ben Frost:
A strange, modified piano starts playing a sequence while the brass section blows haunting tones over the repeating notes. Dark winds surround the stage as something takes over the melodic elements. After a while I realize it might be a huge double bass as I recognize the rambling of the strings when they are played too loud. But instead of a gentle jazz combo this sounds more like a massive sea monster playing the moorings of the ships in a harbor.
The texture of the sounds is beautiful and round unlike the digitally distorted sounds Frost tends to use a lot - and yes, we hear those later on in Híbakúsja as well, hard panned left and right. While this is all happening the monster keeps breathing and hissing and only loosens its grip about a minute and a half before the end of the song, when a quiet string section lays down its soft tones in the background and the rattling comes to an end.
Híbakúsja is the fourth track on Ben Frosts latest album By the Throat.
As you might have noticed I use the SoundCloud player on my website. For website owners it’s a nice way of offering streaming audio without having to worry about hosting and the use of bandwith. I’d like to share my experiences with this review.
As a artist it’s great to have a professional looking way of sharing music with fans, label owners and venues. You can create a set of tracks on SoundCloud to embed it on your MySpace page, a much better sounding solution than the standard MySpace player.
