09 January 2010

Beat magazine article

a special message for my german-speaking readers:
the latest edition of the german-language Beat magazine, available on newsstands this week, features an article on making music wth the iPhone, and mentions the iPhone performance which i attended last year. along with the article is a photo of me during the performance! you can see a preview of this article and several other sections of the magazine here.
i have subscribed to Beat magazine for the past year and i can personally recommend it. along with the usual gear and software reviews, it features music recommendations and interviews not only with commercial artists, but netaudio and creative commons artists and netlables as well. not only that, the editor in chief @thomasraukamp and main contributor @tokafi are fellow netaudio enthusiasts and good buddies of mine on twitter.

03 January 2010

Ergo Phizmiz & Friends - The Faust-Cycle

i interrupt this longer-than-expected pause of hiddenplace music posts to feature what is certainly the most astonishing piece of netaudio i have ever come across. "The Faust-Cycle or, The House of Dr Faustus" is definitively the ultimate piece of sound collage.
completed over a period of 3 years, with a playing time of more than 14 hours(!!), and featuring an long list of collaborators, voice actors and guest musicians, words like "epic" do not even begin to describe the mind-boggling expansiveness of this work.
i usually try to listen to a release several times through before writing a review, but i must admit in this case, i have not yet heard the entire piece all the way through. what i have heard so far consists of surreal, dream-like spoken word narratives, interspersed with even more bizarre sample-based "songs" enveloped in extended passages of sound collage and audio pastiche made from a dizzying array of identifiable and unidentifiable musical pieces and sound sources. the moods range from melancholic to nostalgic, insane to inane, dream-like to nightmarish, classical to common; all unfolding like an opium-induced phantasmagoria played through a dust-covered 1920s phonograph found in an eccentric retired circus performer's attic. this is probably the most inaccessible piece i have featured on hiddenplace music, but certainly a thrilling and epic(?) piece of audio art for hardcore fans of avant-garde sound design.