Two Open Ears on Central Station

For the month of February, Two Open Ears will be writing a blog for the design community Central Station as part of their 'Month of Sound'.

Our first post starts the debate here's a link

http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Two-Open-Ears-OUT-OF-TUNE/blog/1782538/126249.html

Open Ear November Music Updates

November Music Update

Little Dragon - Machine Dreams (Peacefrog)

Gothenburg's Little Dragan are back after two years with their sensually essential second album. A beautiful concoction of digi-funk, down-temp rhythms and twitchy electronica, this has been a regular on the office CD player.

LISTEN:

Machine Dreams





Marco Di Marco - Quartet in New York (Arision)

Classically trained Italian pianist Di Marco is the master of exquisite, complex, intense and touching jazz and this release demostrates that just perfectly.

LISTEN:

Camparenda





Leisure Society - A Product of the Ego Drain (Full Time Hobby)

Beautiful pastoral Beach Boy-isms from the Burton-on-Trent seven piece, who's members used to include Shane Meadows and Paddy Considine. This will delight fans of the Beta Band, Leonard Cohen and the Fence label.
LISTEN:

The Sleeper & A Product Of The Ego Drain






Sufjan Stevens - The BQE (Asthmatic Kitty)

Inspired by New York's Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Sufjan Stevens' latest opus is a cinematic, idiosyncratic romaticized choreography of movement and gridlock. Built in thirteen parts and borrowing phrases from Wagner, it's unlikely anybody will ever pay such tribute to the M8.

LISTEN:

The B.Q.E.






Fink - See it all (Ninja Tune)

Ninja Tune's Fink returns from his REM support slot at New York's Carnegie hall with added piano, lo-fi beats and vocal breaks. This tune paints a perfect picture of the NY skyline, and seems more than appropriate for these dark nights.

LISTEN:

See It All








Micah P. Hinson- All Dressed Up and Smelling of Strangers (Full Time Hobby)

Another record perfect for the time of year! Cosy fire-side vibes aplenty on this double album of cover versions- Hinson takes us through a country-tinged selection including his versions of tracks by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Leadbelly and Roy Orbison.

LISTEN:

All Dressed Up And Smelling Of Strangers






Shafiq - En' A-Free Ka EP (Plug Research)

We love this! Shafiq Husayn of Sa-Ra here, on a limited edition Plug Research/HHV.DE release. Composed with an armoury of outboard gear, effects, synthesizers, electric guitars, strings, horns, a lot of modulation and a lot of weird stuff. Listen out for the Flying Lotus and J-Rocc remixes!

LISTEN:

En' A-Free Ka EP






George Demure - Boomtown Medallion (Musiqware)

Moody, cool, leftfield electro-indie from the uprooted Scotsman who clearly has an obsessive love of music. Drawing inspiration from a massive amount of genres, it is clear why Demure has been such a hit at Glastonbury and Sonar.

LISTEN:

Boomtown Medallion

New Music - Open Ear on Ten Tracks

For this months Ten Tracks Open Ear have teamed up with ace Berlin label powerhouse Morr Music to put together this bundle of new and yet-to-be-released music from a selection of our associated labels such as Type, City Centre Offices, Monika Industries, Pony Recs, Italic, Karaoke Kalk and Morr themselves.

Check it out here -
http://www.tentracks.co.uk/channel/open-ear/open-ear-may-09

Track list

Sin Fang Bous - Catch The Light
Gudrun Gut - Monika In Polen
Ritornell - Golden Solitude Part 1
Masha Qrella - I´m A Stranger Here Myself
The Seasons - Out There
Ursula Bogner - Begleitung für Tuba
Antonelli - Acid Oscillations
Miwon - Round And Round
Sylvain Chauveau - Et Peu À Peu Les Flots Respiraient Comme On Pleur
Dakota Suite - One Day Without Harming You

we're really happy with this selection. hope you like it too!

http://www.openearmusic.com

Animals now need a music license!!

I was sent this article in today's Telegraph newspaper about how a woman who runs a stables in England was told that she must pay for a license to be able to continue her practice of playing ClassicFm to sooth her horses which she has been doing for over 20 years! The PRS (performing rights society) have deemed this a public performance meaning she qualifies for a mandatory annual music license costing £99!!

This is further evidence of the current PRS crackdown on unlicensed premises playing music. Unfortunately, as they have no way of properly accounting with the specific performers played, it is more than likely that if this woman does end up paying, the money will filter down to pop performers such as Girls Aloud or Take That rather than the artists who's music she actually plays. And they say the banking crisis is a scandal!

From China - Music for Museums

Music for Museums' creates a soundtrack for museums using the history of the muzak corporation in the tradition of composer Erik Satie's proposal in 1917 that music fit specific rooms and architecture in the way that furniture is designed. Featuring Beijing-based musicians 718, Yan Jun and Zafka as well as UK-based musician Isambard Khroustaliov and duo ISAN, each track was developed for a specific functional area within gallery and museum spaces. Addressing the existing cultural and commercial typologies of the museum, 'Music for Museums' reconsiders these spaces of 'neutrality' to stimulate a critical engagement as places of production.

http://www.farwest.cn

Limiters in Clubs - NO!

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/NoNoiseControl/

At Open Ear we hate noise where they shouldn't be noise but like noise where there should be. Clubs and live music venues should be allowed to play music at a volume where the music has maximum impact - it should be a physical experience as well as aural.

So, the governments move to ban music in clubs comes a big disappointment and distress to us.. please sign the above petition to the prime minister so the ban is not implemented!
now a ban of music too loud in shops, bars, and other public spaces is fine by us!

Music for airports Report by Martha Hawley

This month, we've invited Dutch based writer Martha Hawley to contribute a special report on Music used in Airports (inspired, no doubt, by Brian Eno). In a new feature on the blog, you can now listen and purchase the music mentioned in this article on using Amazon Mp3. Enjoy..


An early morning train ride between Barcelona and its airport (so early that I can’t remember whether I was arriving or departing) offered a tender tableau: male passengers, who were possibly factory workers (the dress was not corporate), leaning against the wall of the train or onto a nearby shoulder, fast asleep. No conversation accented the setting, no metallic traces of sound seeped out of earbuds - there was only a soft blanket of classical music floating out of the loudspeakers. The train chugged along past concrete blocks stacked in supply yards, rubble in bleak empty lots and junk heaps. Inside, we dozed on in dignity.

Across the ocean, another scene with sleeping passengers, but now: in a transit lounge at a Colombian regional airport. The waiting area was spacious and clean, but how anyone managed to sleep in the rows of hard plastic chairs has me stymied to this day. Not because of the chairs, but because raw meringues blasted in video clips from the many overhead TV monitors. My first thought was: how hyped up can these people be, if over-amplified rapid-fire Caribbean dance music works as a lullaby? Either that or the stuff of dreams. When a sweeter ballad, Estrellitas y Duendes by Juan Luis Guerra, took over the air waves, a few people stirred and began to yawn. Go figure.

Speaking of airports: Brian Eno’s album Music for Airports (helping travellers to ‘check their emotional baggage,’ see Chris Richards in the Washington Post) may have inspired more musicians than airport sound system planners when it was released nearly thirty years ago. Have airports reciprocated with support for musicians? It does happen.

The concept of “audio enrichment” is changing ideas about ambient sound at Bristol Airport in the UK, where local musicians are being hired for live performances inside the terminals, to promote development of local arts and to advertise regional diversity! Concerts are held at the Wellington, New Zealand Airport, where the slogan is ‘Wild at heart.’ Wellington even released a compilation CD featuring artists who had performed there. At Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas, in the USA, before post-9/11 security measures set in, non-passengers would go to the airport and elbow past security to hear the live performances at a stage inside the terminal.

Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport sporadically schedules special live music programs to promote an opening at a major Dutch museum, for example, but other than that, live music is heard twice a week only for one hour in the morning, when a pianist plays light classics for an audience of strollers in transit. The pianist picked up where a Friday jazz ensemble left off, at some point in the past. That’s it. Wat niet is kan nog komen, which means: it’s not happening, but it could. Let’s do it.

Other airports highlight heritage and name the whole operation after revered national figures. Antonio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim, better known as Tom, who gave the world The Girl from Ipanema, was posthumously honored by Brazil when the name of Rio de Janeiro’s airport was doubled in size to “International Airport Galeão - Antonio Carlos Jobim.”

Liverpool has its “John Lennon Airport”, and Hurricane Katrina did not break Louisiana’s “Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.” In 2001, Warsaw renamed its airport in honor of Frederic Chopin, arguably Poland’s most famous musician on a worldwide scale. Some Poles compare his stature within European cultural history to Poland’s recent entrance into the European Union. For others, the symbolism is less important than the fact that Chopin’s name is easy for non-Poles to pronounce. Definitely something to keep in mind when Dutch transport hubs decide to hone their musical potential.



http://www.renfe.es/rse/index.html

http://www.guavaberry.net/playlist.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/31/AR2007083100166.html

http://www.bristolairport.co.uk/at_the_airport/sense_of_place.aspx

http://www.jobim.com.br/e.index.html

Torture Season: Xmas Muzik

I was in Starbucks a few weeks ago (Early November) and couldn't believe that they were already pumping in christmas music! Jumping the gun a bit are they not? I wondered if anyone could tell me who actually enjoys hearing the same old christmas tunes year upon year in EVERY bar, restaurant, shop that they go to for a whole month!! TORTURE!! Are all businesses following their neighbours without thinking about the consequences?

I suppose the people who suffer the most is the staff. Music Psychologist Prof Adrian North was quoted in an article in the Scotsman as saying

"Shops would be better steering away from the Christmas pop tunes and opting for something a little calmer, like sleigh bells," he adds.

"It's festive and it's gentle. And who wants to listen to Merry Christmas by Slade over and over again?"

I agree, but i also think there needs to be a balance where places can use music to create a festive atmosphere but not play the same played out christmas pop tunes we've all heard a millions times before. So, i took a browse through Open Ear's music library and came up with a few 'wintery' suggestions -

1. Max Richter - From 553 W Elm Street. Logan Illinois (Snow)
2. Vashti Bunyan - Coldest Night of the Year
3. Blockhead - The First Snowfall
4. Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
5. Frightened Rabbit - It's Xmas so we'll stop
6. Roots Manuva - Too Cold
7. Peter Broderick - A Snowflake
8. Casiotone for the painfully alone - Cold White Christmas
9. Mogwai - Christmas Song
10. Readymade FC feat Feist - Snow Lion

come on, be inventive! Anyone else got some selections? please post some up!

Ten Tracks for a pound

In the sea of new business models that attempt to find the best way in which music can be sold to consumers so that the everyone involves benefits, Ten Tracks is making a mark. Already featured in the Guardian in only it's second month, Ten tracks allows users to download ten tracks for only a pound. You have to buy the bundle, meaning you get exposed to new music and all the artists benefit by receiving 50% of the sales.. We think it's great and were flattered when Ten Tracks asked us to curate November's selection.
We went down the electronic mutant-disco route, with tracks from Neil Landstrumm (Planet Mu), Ali Renault (Heartbreak) and Alex Smoke (with a Various Production remix).

Check it and the other selections out at Ten Tracks and please download at least one selection - at 10p a track, what have you got to lose?!

Event: NO MUSIC DAY

Ever wonder what you do after burning a million pounds of your own money?
Well Bill Drummond, formerly of early 90's subversive pop ravers the KLF, famed for burning most of their pop career earnings in 1994 has resurfaced over a decade later with his manifesto for No Music Day - a five year project which aims to eliminate the world of music on one day each year. The day - November 21st - is the day before St Cecilia's day who is the patron saint of music.

Music is so ubiquitous in our lives it is a rare experience for us to actually pause and actively listen to it. Having said that, the power of music is impossible to escape. Whilst we may not consciously be able to recall individual track played during a trip to a bar, restaurant or club it will always affect us - It works away at our subconscious and influences our mood and overall experience.

With studies showing that on average we listen to between 3-5 hours of music a day, it is certainly an interesting prospect to have music turned off for a whole day. Will this help us to enjoy hearing music even more when it floods back into our lives on St Cecilia's day? I hope so. At the very least, if No Music Day can draw our attention to the music that we all experience and connect with on an everyday basis, i think it will have done it's job.

Website

David Byrne and Daniel Levitin on music

This is a fascinating discussion between former Talking Heads singer and all round musical pioneer David Byrne (who we mentioned a few months ago) and Daniel Levitin a former musician, music neurologist and author of 'This is your Brain on Music', a fantastic book on music and the mind which acts as a great companion to Oliver Sacks 'Musicophilia' released around the same time last year.

Particularly interesting is the chat about 'mirror neurons' about how we experience a musical performance by neurologically mimicking the musician on stage. In other words - we are all air guitar enthusiasts !!.

Check out the video interview at Seed Magazine

Hidden Radio

I like the look of this. Designed by San Francisco based John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen it's basically a nicely design radio. The coolest thing is the volume control: to increase the volume you lift the top part to reveal more of the speaker allowing it to emit more sound - i.e. revealing more 'hidden' sound.

check it out at John's site

Dreams Kaimin: Music and the Science of Sleep

A mass experiment with around 1500 participants took place in Japan recently to investigate the power of music to help people sleep. Not a new phenomenon, but the experiment was unique in that it was presented as a concert playing a selection of music designed to help send people into slumber. The event was called Dreams Kaimin (translated as 'good sleep') and organised by Dr Takuro Endo who is a neurologist and a music designer for sleep, selling CDs that help induce slumber.

Quite what the point of the mass experiment was, i'm not sure. Taking 1500 into a mass arena that surely excites the senses akin to a night out is surely an unusual way to recreate a setting that most would find themselves in when trying to catch some Zzzz's. However, maybe that was the point - if the music was so powerful as to override the other senses and event signifiers, Endo would surely be onto a winner!

But, with a few exceptions, most of the audience were wide awake at the end. Feedback questioned the choice of music as being too 'popular', therefore triggering opinion-based memories amongst listeners keeping them awake. I would suggest that instrumental, soothing, repetitive, minimalist, slow music from one of two artists (so the style is similar throughout) such as James Blackshaw or Arvo Part or even the wonderful buddha machine (pictured - portable playing soothing loops of instrumental sound) would be better choices than Endo's mixture of Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Mary Hopkins and Japanese pop...

or maybe the point was to try and sell a few more of his sleep CDs?!

N.B. i personally don't listen music to help me sleep as i listen to so much during the day, at night i like natural ambience to help me drift off..

if this article didn't send you to sleep, feel free to post your sleepy tunes below!

Event: Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo

I was a bit slow on the uptake on this interesting event taking place in Edinburgh right now. It features one of our fave bands Found, with installations and performances from Chinese acts and composers. I've copied and pasted info below -

Welcome to Dialogues of Wind and Bamboo. This is the story of a journey exploring themes inspired by the connection between plants and people. For Kimho Ip, a composer and musician from Hong Kong working in Edinburgh, wind symbolises change while bamboo represents traditional Chinese culture but it also stands for constant renewal.

In the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh on June 21, Midsummer night, the audience will be invited to join the journey, following different artists as they explore themes of change and continuity through music, art, dance and song. Click here for full details about the performance.

As we travel from the Palm House to the Chinese Hillside we will move from the ‘reality’ of the technological modern world to an idealised view of traditional Chinese culture at the T’ing. What we discover there is likely to be different for every member of the audience but Kimho hopes that as we return to the Palm House we can bring a memory of the ‘ideal’ to reconnect us with an understanding of nature in the ‘reality’ of the modern world.

Website

Sound Art: David Byrne - Playing the Building

Former Talking Heads singer and all round musical legend David Byrne has unveiled his new installation at The Battery Martime Museum in New York. The building is kitted out with various devices attached to a variety of different parts of the building itself. These devices are used to make sound through striking wind or vibration and channeled into a customised keyboard allowing you to 'play the building'.

Reminds me of an arty version of Barry Blesser's 'Spaces Speak' book we talked about here.

check out the pics and vids at DavidByrne.com

Sweet Child of Wine

Research commissioned by Chilean wine producer Aurelio Montes (pictured) by Dr Adrian North of Heriot Watt University has discovered that music plays a big influence on how we perceive taste in food and drink. When they played Gun n Roses "Sweet Child Of Mine" to people drinking cabernet sauvignon, they thought that the wine tasted 60% more robust than they did when no music was playing.

This is rooted in cognitive priming theory which we've talked about before and again goes to prove the powerful effect that music has on our behaviour. The article in the Times prompts that this could be an end to piped music in restaurants as more places seeks to nulify music's effect. However, i don't quite go along with this - why don't the restaurants take advantage of this effect by focusing more on the music design in their spaces to have a positive influence of taste and perception of the food such as the "Sound of The Sea" experiment by Heston Blumenthal

It is also significant that during any restaurant experience we are being primed by mixture of factors including the visual decor, lighting, service etc not just the music - and it is only by getting all these factors correct in combination can the restaurant really make proper use of this priming effect.

Times Article by Melanie Reid

Event: Tree Listening @ Atmospheres 2

The fantatsic Touch records (Fennesz, Philip Jeck etc) have collaborated with the Museum of Garden History to present the Atmospheres festival in London from tomorrow till Sunday. Focusing on the sounds of the natural world the thing that caught my ear was an installation from recent RCA design graduate Alex Metcalf called Tree Listening. Metcalf has designed an ear trumpet that can be used to listen to the microscopic sounds that trees make as they carry out their daily routine - mostly drinking water and creaking!
Apparently the trumpet filters out low frequency tones emitted from the earth to leave a clicking sound which is actually the tree drinking water and distributing it to it's branches.

Alex Metcalf Web

Atmosphere2 / Touch Music Web

Run to the music

Following years of research at Brunel University, Dr Costas Karageorghis has launched Run to the Beat, a half marathon where you run accompanied by live music strategically placed around the route, and designed to help ease the torture of pounding concrete for a couple of hours. Of course, readers of this blog will know that this 'music design' phenomenon that Karageorghis has spent the last two decades on is nothing new and is found in many other aspects of our life, dating as far back as the 1920's with the Muzak corporation's experiments on music and 'stimulus progression' of worker's in factories in America (There are undoubtedly even earlier examples, but that, to the best of my knowledge, was the first time music was turned into a 'science').

Anyways, Karageorghis ambitious project has exposed the benefits of music to a wider audience and the whole thing looks like a bit of fun rather than a huge devious experiment disguised as a charity run.. My concern is that by using pop bands whose music most will be familiar with and either love or completely resent, there's bound to be an element of

'oh- here's my fave tune by my fave band, i'll slow down to listen'
OR
'awww- i can't stand this song, i'd better speed up to get away from it'...
thereby making the whole thing a bit of a farce..

Especially when looking at the tunes that are talked about in the science

The half marathon will take place on the 5th of October this year. We'd better get training - dubstep for the snailpaced anyone?

runtothebeat.co.uk

Sound Art: Beneath and Beyond by Stephen Hurrel

Beneath and Beyond is an audio visual installation by Stephen Hurrel at Glasgow's Tranway as part of the annual GI festival for Visual Art. The installation presents a realtime feed of seismic shifts recorded from data of 100 of so seismic monitoring stations around the Earth. We are presented with the sound of the various vibrations going on within the Earth's core at that very moment. We also see two visual screens showing graphical displays of particularly large tectonic shifts or events at that one time.

We went to this on Saturday and were totally blown away. The work has been two years in the making following Hurrel being awarded the prestigious Creative Scotland award in 2005, but the hard work has paid off - we could have sat there all day just listening to the sound of the Earth grinding away.

Highly recommended!

Stephen Hurrel - Beneath and Beyond

The birds take on radio

A digital radio station which plays the sound of bird song from an English country garden is causing quite a chatter by swooping up over half a million listeners. There is now a campaign to keep the station on the air before a commercial station takes over it's frequency range..

I love the idea of this - we have all come to accept that mainstream radio represents annoying 'personality djs', offensive adverts and playlisting formats which limits diversity of music being played. The fact that so many listeners would choose to listen to bird song instead should acts as a wake up call to radio producers.. tweet tweet

listen to birdsong radio