Listening to birdsong is really good for you. But many of us live in urban environments where birdsong is a scarce resource, so you might consider opening up
this YouTube audio clip, or
this one, or
this one, and just let those little birdies serenade you while you work at your computer, or savor your morning coffee, or do your household errands. It's good for the soul.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Apr 26, 2013 -
53 comments
GRiZ - Mad Liberation. Take a 21 year old bedroom producer from Michigan, raise them on the the internet with a near complete access to the history of modern music with a focus on electronic/dance and apparently you get this incredibly humanistic and cross-cultural album that's both homage, monument and appropriation of hundreds of influences in modern music in an incredibly dubby dubstep framework. (
Free album download here.)
posted by loquacious
on Sep 5, 2012 -
67 comments
Ambient bus arrival monitor from hacked Linksys WRT54GL. Transport for London has a wonderful service called
Countdown that can give live bus arrival times. For example, here's a page showing live buses passing
No. 10 Downing St. Underlying this is a simple JSON API that, while not public, seems to be usable by the average programmer. So with its details deciphered (hardly hard since the web site uses the API) John Graham-Cumming set about building an ambient bus monitor into a model London bus. The idea is to glance at the model bus and see the times of the next two real buses you're likely to want to catch, and know when to leave the house.
posted by netbros
on Mar 20, 2012 -
35 comments
"The following is a short demonstration of Quintronics' latest musical invention called The Singing House. This drone synthesizer can be installed into any building in order to provide its inhabitants with a pleasing chord that is constantly changed by the weather." Brought to you by the maker of
The Drum Buddy.
[more inside]
posted by crunchland
on Jan 17, 2012 -
17 comments
"
One of the most moving releases I heard in 2010 was the 90-minute cassette entitled Ornitheology, by a mysterious individual by the name Chubby Wolf. Two long, 40-minute long songs that recalled beautifully the best moments of Brian Eno, yet the two songs struck me as something more…more. In doing research, I discovered two things about this mysterious band: a. that Chubby Wolf was the moniker of Danielle Baquet-Long, who performed in a group entitled Celer with her husband, Will Long, and, b. sadly, that Danielle had passed away suddenly, at the tragically young age of 26."
Joseph Kyle of The Big Takeover interviewed Will Long, providing an overview of Danielle's life and art. Much of her music, which was
released on limited edition CDrs, cassettes or vinyl is
streaming on bandcamp, along with
music she created with Will as
Celer.
posted by filthy light thief
on Nov 19, 2011 -
17 comments
Taksim Trio is a super-group from Istanbul composed of Hüsnü Senlendirici, one of the greatest clarinet players alive, Aytac Dogan on qanun (zither) and Ismail Tuncbilek on saz (long necked lute). More of their music that can be found on
Youtube. A glowing
Album review & some background. Their
Myspace.
posted by growabrain
on Oct 15, 2011 -
6 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
Soundmaps are field recordings of the unique audio ecology of a particular place and time. Often they are cities:
New York,
Berlin,
Montreal,
New Orleans,
Barcelona,
London (previously),
Madrid, and
many others. Sometimes they move through space:
Ramallah. Sometimes they are
mixable (probably my favorite, from Portugal). They might be of entire countries (
Spain, the
United States (previously), the
United Kingdom, or continents (
Africa, while on a bike!). Sometimes they cover the
entire world:
aporee (you may prefer the map interface). Some attempt to
preserve sounds that are in danger of being lost. And sometimes soundmaps are of the
deep ocean.
Most of the sounds are, appropriately, licensed under Creative Commons.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Sep 6, 2010 -
8 comments
The Jónsi and Alex (Recipe) Show: join
Jónsi Birgisson (frontman of
Sigur Rós),
Alex Somers and their very loud blender to make
raw food recipes. They made three videos from their
Good Heart recipe book, for
Macadamia Monster Mash,
Raw Strawberry Pie, and
Nammi Nammi. If coconut, almonds, dates and agave (heavily featured in their three recipes) aren't your thing, enjoy a couple dreamy videos from the couple's album
Riceboy Sleeps:
All the Big Trees and
Daníell in the Sea. See also:
Sometimes I Get Scared (a distortion-heavy non-album track), and
Jónsi and Alex talk about their album, with parts of the tracks in the background.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 12, 2010 -
7 comments
9 Countries was recorded on location in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Tibet, India, Egypt and Greece between October 2005 and March 2007 by Tom Compagnoni. What you hear has been entirely assembled from these field recordings, no additional samples used.
A mashup / sound-collage / ambient / documentary album by
Wax Audio.
posted by flatluigi
on Dec 21, 2009 -
6 comments
24 Hours: The Starck Mix is a unique 24 hour soundtrack, selected, arranged, composed and mixed by
Soundwalk for leading French designer Philippe Starck. Whenever you press play, the mix will start from the exact time it is in his current time zone, no matter where in the world he is that day. More
soundwalks here. Examples:
India,
Chanel.
posted by vronsky
on Oct 9, 2009 -
3 comments
Dave of
Low Light Mixes spins together all manner of textural musical goodness into solid, themed sonic experiences. Component parts include but are not limited to ambient, jazz, "jazz", noise, field recordings and one hell of a lot of Brian Eno.
posted by colinmarshall
on Mar 18, 2009 -
2 comments
Muslimgauze was the sound of an angry Middle East, a prolific source of music
dark,
spacious and
smothering. Tension was a constant theme not only in the music but in the packaging. (For example,
Betrayal shows the hands of Yassir Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, and guns, knives, and news photos of an Arab world at war were a common motif in titles and sleeve art.) However, the music wasn't the usual agitprop fare: Music meant to rile a public to a cause isn't normally pigeonholed as
ambient,
electronica or
musique concrete. But the band, hidden from public view, was rumored to donate proceeds to Palestinian terrorists, and that they were eventually silenced by Mossad.
Despite the prodigious output -- issuing almost a hundred EPs and albums between 1983 and 1998, over a hundred more since -- limited distribution and perpetual obscurity ensured the rumors were easier to find than the music. While the facts about Muslimgauze have little in common with the fictions, they are, if anything, stranger...
[more inside]
posted by ardgedee
on Dec 22, 2008 -
48 comments
Connecticut's
Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most
acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness.
The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of
shoegaze,
new wave,
ambient drone,
post-rock,
experimental industrial,
avant-garde dark metal, and
electronic music, and citing references such as
My Bloody Valentine and
Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out
within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available
here. Direct mp3 samples
here and
here.
[more inside]
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Jun 28, 2008 -
34 comments
Spartacus Roosevelt Hour Podcast is a weekly hour of obscure noise, glitchy electropop, fake nostalgia, bastardized exotica, tweaky lounge, creepy ambient and musical non-sequiturs. Also, it features an Alabaman with a Skype account named Spartacus Roosevelt.
posted by panoptican
on Feb 14, 2008 -
8 comments
Even if Lou Reed had dropped out of music after the break-up of the Velvet Underground, his name would still be forever etched in the history of rock music. Yet his solo career, filled with eccentric detours and radio-ready rockers in equal measure, remains one of the most fascinating canons in all of rock music. Metal Machine Music, however, is a unique entity in itself, proudly pushing at the very boundaries of what pop music is capable of. Zeitkratzer’s performance not only makes the original album ripe for critical re-evaluation, but it’s a performance that stands on its own ground...
Why Does the Music Have to End?: An Interview with Lou Reed regarding how he came to play
Metal Machine Music live in 2002.
posted by y2karl
on Nov 17, 2007 -
47 comments
