I Could Wait A Thousand Hours / Just To Be Quiet

Today is No Music Day?

"NO MUSIC DAY EXISTS FOR VARIOUS REASONS, YOU MAY HAVE ONE"

Would it even be possible? Even if I were to barricade myself in my room, I'd still hear the bass from undergraduate-filled jeeps at the stoplight down the block. And does reading about music count?

Intriguing, but I think I'll go watch an opera now.

(via largeheartedboy)

Oh, Live Like It's The Style / Whoa, Waltz On Your Front Porch

Henri Chopin is known as the father of the Sound Poets. Sounds like a college IM team. Maybe broomball.

Sound Poetry! Think: the manipulation of the human voice, "verse without words." Right up my alley, kittens.
I've embedded this video (Chopin was 85 years old, by the way), but I also recommend poking around the ubuweb page for more audio bits.

The Lobster Quadrille

I could listen (/okay, have listened) to Matmos all day long. Music concrète meets electronica? I'm in love.

An excerpt from an interview with NewMusicBox:

We were making a biographical portrait of the writer Patricia Highsmith....As we thought about what else this arrangement needs, we looked into Highsmith's life and a bunch of details started to emerge. She really loved snails. She collected snails her whole life, wrote short stories about snails, so we knew we wanted to collaborate with snails somehow or get snails involved in the process of making the music. The first thing that we thought of is that the shell of the snail is shaped a little bit like a French horn. So we got somebody to play a French horn. But then I thought, well, that's not good enough. We need to really work with snails directly, but they're very quiet so it's difficult to get a snail to, you know, pipe up. You could crush one, but that would be sort of wrong, ethically. I decided to set up a situation in which the movement of snails would have a musical outcome. We got a light-sensitive theremin that I bought on eBay, and we aimed a laser at it. Then, in a totally dark room, we put the snails inside a glass tube. They would crawl up the glass and as they would interrupt the path of the laser, that would affect the pitch of the theremin. We then sped that up and turned it into a sort of crazy solo that is played by snails.

They're also known for sampling fresh hair cuttings and the neural activity of crayfish. Like I said: this is love.

The Ice is Thin / Come on, Dive in

There is snow on the ground!--or at least a dusting on the train tracks outside my window. In celebration: "Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull" by Katie Paterson.



The artist spent some time in Iceland recording the sounds of three glaciers. She pressed the records, cast them, froze them using meltwater from each of the glaciers, and let them play simultaneously on turntables for two hours until they melted.
Not only are these ice records beautiful all on their own, they make some really gorgeous sound (you can listen here).

(For more on the piece, and more on Paterson.)