Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 156

This Week in Sound: Comics, Construction, Illusions

These sound-studies highlights of the week are lightly adapted from the March 7, 2022, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

▰ Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara have created a new comic book, Step by Bloody Step, that has no sound — no dialogue, and no sound effects. Spurrier, the series’ writer, makes the case that the absence of sound eliminates one of fantasy fiction’s crutches: “I think that the reader’s desire always gravitates towards detail. That’s why you end up with endless maps and encyclopedias and taxonomies and ancient histories, all of which don’t actually help you to tell the beating, throbbing, emotional heart of the story.” A lot of my favorite comics and graphic novels don’t use sound effects. (That said, some of my favorite comics have extraordinary sound effects, notably Michel Fiffe’s.) Dispensing also with dialogue entirely — not for a special standalone issue, but for the series as a whole — is next level, especially for a comic targeted at a popular audience. ➔ ew.com (Via Mike Rhode)

▰ “Construction vehicles are equipped with new back-up alarm systems featuring multiple broadband frequencies, which replace the traditional ‘beep-beep’” — breaking municipal news from Montréal. ➔ montreal.ca (Thanks, Anne Bell)

▰ Diana Deutsch, author of the book Musical Illusions and Phantom Words, is one of the subjects of the Unexplainable podcast episode on how sound becomes hearing, part of a six-episode Making Sense sequence. ➔ pod.link/unexplainable (Thanks, Alan Bland)

▰ “Duvall Hecht, whose boredom at listening to music and news on the radio during his long daily commute in Southern California led him to start Books on Tape, which broadly commercialized the audiobook, died on Feb. 10 at his home in Costa Mesa, Calif.” And: “In 1975, Mr. Hecht was craving intellectual stimulation during his rush-hour commutes between his home in Newport Beach and his office in Los Angeles, where he worked in marketing for the investment banking firm Bateman Eichler, Hill Richards. At first he rested a reel-to-reel tape recorder on the seat beside him and played recordings of books that had been made for blind people.” ➔ nytimes.com

▰ Pranay Parab of Gizmodo came up with eight ways to make Siri less annoying, among then: changing when Siri shares spoken responses, disabling “Hey, Siri,” and stopping Apple from listening to your interactions with Siri. ➔ gizmodo.com

▰ The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast explores the “signature, soothing voice” of painter Bob Ross. ➔ shorefire.com

▰ David Haskell is the author of the new book Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction. He spoke with KQED radio: “Haskell describes a global sonic landscape that’s threatened by human-induced habitat destruction and noise pollution and warns that by smothering the earth’s many voices, we’re not only imperiling species but losing our connection to the natural world.” ➔ kqed.org

▰ “Underwater noise pollution is causing turtles to experience hearing loss that can last from minutes to days” — per Andria Salas, researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts. ➔ phys.org

Sound Ledger¹ (Oscar Protest, Noise by the Pound)

8: Number of Oscars categories whose elimination from live broadcast led sound mixer Tom Fleischman (who won for Hugo and was nominated for Reds, The Silence of the Lambs, Gangs of New York, and The Aviator) to resign from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

100: Cost of a ticket, in British pounds, for vehicle noise violation following introduction of “acoustic cameras”

72: The legal British decibel threshold for cars registered since 2016 (74db for cars between 2007 and 2016)

________
¹Footnotes: Oscar: thewrap.com. Noise: thetimes.co.uk.

Originally published in the March 7, 2022, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter tinyletter.com/disquiet.

1992 Flashback

I started editing comics three decades ago this year, back in 1992. I don’t do it anywhere near as often as I used to, but I still do on occasion, and I read comics all the time. The first artist I worked with was Adrian Tomine. The second was Justin Green. Both became long-running collaborators in the pages of Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine. This weekend, while tidying up my office, I came upon this 1991 issue of Raw magazine, which is how I first met Justin. Each issue of Raw listed on its table of contents the home base of each artist, so it was always places like London, Paris, New York (back when New York was more likely to mean Manhattan than Brooklyn), Milan, Chicago, and so forth. And yet there, in volume two, number three, was Sacramento, California, which is where Justin lived, and where I happened to live at the time, as well, because it was the home base of Tower Records, where I’d started working in 1989 (after relocating from Brooklyn a year out of college). As with Adrian (also then a local, still in high school), I reached out to Justin to see if he wanted to talk about comics, and he ended up doing a lengthy series for Tower, Musical Legends, which Last Gasp collected into a paperback in 2004. Stumbling on this page after so many years brought back such a flood of memories, and also a distinct sense of how different media and communication were in 1992 — how location, and print, and correspondence differ from how they function today.

Marking the 30th Anniversary of Selected Ambient Works 85-92

It was a pleasure to have been interviewed my Ed Power for his independent.co.uk article about the 30th anniversary of Aphex Twin’s 1992 album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92:

“There was little that sounded like either record that came out much prior to them, especially Volume II. When we listen to them, not only do we hear them, but we hear an Ur-text for so much that followed,” says writer, critic and ambient music expert Marc Weidenbaum, who wrote about Selected Ambient Works Volume II for Bloomsbury’s 33⅓ series of short books about landmark records. “They resonate with listeners today because we sense so much of their impact on today’s music.”

Power also spoke with Paul Nicholson, the designer of Aphex Twin’s logo; Neil Mason, editor of Electronic Sound; and Aaron Kent, poet and founder of publisher Broken Sleep Books.

There was quite a bit more to our correspondence on the topic, so I thought I’d share my other thoughts here, responding to questions from Power. This is lightly edited from what I initially wrote in my email. We discussed both 85-92 and Volume II.

On whether Richard D. James’ rural upbringing had an influence on his music: I can’t imagine that it didn’t. I think being in a fairly remote place lends one to needing to entertain oneself and one’s peers. I’m a city mouse myself, so I’m prone to thinking that urban ghosts are no less interesting than are their country cousins, but perhaps part of the attraction for me to this music is its expression of a perspective alien to my own.

On the emotional content of these early recordings: For a long time, my emotional response to Selected Ambient Works Volume II was somewhat muted. The music was so beautiful, and when it first came out, so mysterious, so murky and confusing, that my appreciation of it was much more about admiring it than feeling something from it. Over time, I came to get senses of wistfulness, nostalgia, despair, and longing from it, and once in a while even joy and abandon. That came in time. When I was researching the book, one of the biggest surprises I found was how many people found the music to be scary, haunting. I understood that to a degree, but the sounds were so beautiful that the album’s beauty kept the sense of foreboding at bay for me. Apparently, though, not for everyone.

The challenges I faced when writing my book about the sequel album, Selected Ambient Works Volume II:

I only spoke with James once, when I interviewed him on the occasion of his self-titled album back in the mid-1990s. I was warned in advance, even by his record company, not to get my hopes up, that he was (and this is the word repeated by many) “difficult.” At the appointed time, the phone line connected, we confirmed we were each other, and … then the line went dead. I thought, “My god, it’s even worse than I’d been warned.” And then immediately he rang back and apologized. Turned out he’d accidentally dropped the phone or something. We went on to have a very nice call. He was totally clear-headed and plainspoken, and answered every question (very much as you describe in your question). There was no grandiose ego, no obfuscation, nothing cryptic. As for when I wrote the book, it wasn’t so much a challenge that I didn’t get to interview him specifically for the book so much as that I didn’t know if I’d get to interview him, so the whole time I wrote it, I had to keep in mind that at some point he might suddenly become available, which didn’t happen.

The year my book came out was an interesting one. It was 2014, the 20th anniversary of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. In the spring of that year, when the book came out, Aphex Twin was still largely spoken about in the past tense. That’s the world into which my book was released. It had been over a dozen years since his last album, Drukqs, and longer still since his last single, “Windowlicker.” But later that year, the blimp famously appeared over London right before his birthday, and then he came back. So I wrote the book toward the end of his extended quiet period, as it turned out.

When I set out to propose the book, which was for the 33 1/3 series published by Bloomsbury, I knew I’d need to write about a record that I could listen to endlessly. I’m not a historian. I’m not a writer about celebrities. I think in terms of critical essays, musical analysis, culture. This meant I wouldn’t be writing about him so much as I’d be writing from about the record: culturally, aesthetically. Whatever record I proposed to 33 1/3 was something I had to be able to listen to on repeat for a year, which is what I did. I’d once previously proposed a different book to the 33 1/3 series, the debut album from Latin Playboys, years earlier, but that wasn’t accepted by the publisher. This time around, I chose another inventive, experimental, intimate album. I think the main thing I took away from the whole process of researching and writing the book was how different people’s appreciation of the album can be, and how much cultural activity occurred in its wake (appropriation for movie scoring, discussion in then nascent online discussion forums, dissection by classical composers). When I started writing the book, a lot of people asked if I could write that much about a record that “didn’t even have any lyrics.” The book, as it turned out, could easily have been twice as long, if not longer.

Spacers

Maybe not a long-term solution, but fun to experiment with

Shelfie, Office Rental Edition

That thing where you rent a tiny office and then select a few feet of books from home to make it feel like home

twitter.com/disquiet: Fortnight, Headphones, Bridge

I do this manually each Saturday, collating most of the tweets I made the past week at twitter.com/disquiet, which I think of as my public notebook. Some tweets pop up in expanded form or otherwise on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud. This isn’t a full accounting. Often there are, for example, conversations on Twitter that don’t really make as much sense out of the context of Twitter itself.

▰ Will there be a Bandcamp Friday every fortnight?

▰ Jokes aside (for the time being), any favorite video game soundtracks that are available on Bandcamp? The first I ever listened to there was Minecraft. I use a screenshot of Minecraft’s Bandcamp page in my course each semester.

It’s also an argument the UI could use an update.

▰ As many people who listen to white noise know, you sometimes hear music in the white noise. Right now I hear Soundgarden, Led Zeppelin, and Pearl Jam all mashed together — albeit behind the equivalent of a raging waterfall, which is sorta epic, come to think about it.

▰ There are noise-cancellation headphones, and there are noise-cancellation headphones where you feel like you’ve been dropped into a VR simulation and someone forgot to turn the sound on, perhaps as a practical joke.

▰ Rented a teeny office near home just to be away from home a bit. It’s month-to-month. Getting used to a whole new flavor of HVAC. In fact, after two years of working in a building (aka home) with a gravity heater, I’m getting used to HVAC in the first place.

▰ We don’t get a lot of rain in San Francisco, and we get even less thunder, so I’ll happily take this morning’s jet plane flying above the dark clouds during a gentle drizzle.

▰ Asks self: “Self, are the noise-cancelling headphones even on?”

Turns setting from 10 (high) to 5 (mid). Sound: a gentle breeze, when in fact it’s HVAC.

Turns setting to 0. Sound: like you’re standing next to a raging river (well, a river made of air).

Turns setting to 10.

▰ Stepped outside (Richmond District, San Francisco). The Golden Gate Bridge hum / drone / live-action musical is louder than I’ve previously heard it. I thought Billy Gomberg’s tweet had prepared me, but it’s like if Hildur Guðnadóttir scored everyday reality. Cold, windy reality.

▰ The area near the Golden Gate Bridge is like a large scale Éliane Radigue concert today. The concert may be coming to a close. Or this may be just an intermission in advance of a second set.

▰ Got the new Mark Fell book this week. Looking forward to interviewing him, Rian Treanor, and James Bradbury at the Algorithmic Art Assembly on March 11 here in San Francisco. Details on the three-day conference/festival: aaassembly.org, grayareaorg.

▰ Weekend strategies:

Record yourself doing an everyday task (e.g., doing dishes). Listen for what your brain edits out of the sonic routine?Write a letter to a favorite musician. Maybe even send it.Identify a favorite song that’s not on a streaming service.

Electric Meters

Band name, logo, and album cover all in one tidy readymade package

Disquiet Junto Project 0531: Noise Sculpt

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 7, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 3, 2022.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0531: Noise Sculpt
The Assignment: Listen for a mirage of your music within white noise.

Step 1: You’ll be listening closely, intently to white noise (or some other noise type: pink, brown, the ocean, wind, etc.) for this project. Select a noise source.

Step 2: Listen closely for an extended period of time to the noise source you selected in Step 1. Try to get lost in it.

Step 3: Listen for music in the noise you selected in Step 1. Listen for some hint of — a mirage of — pattern or melody.

Step 4: Create an original piece of music that builds on the melody or pattern or other mirage of music you heard in Step 3.

Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0531” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0531” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0531-noise-sculpt/

Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.

Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, March 7, 2022, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, March 3, 2022.

Length: The length is up to you. What do you picture in the noise?

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0531” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 531st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Noise Sculpt (The Assignment: Listen for a mirage of your music within white noise) — at: https://disquiet.com/0531/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0531-noise-sculpt/

When Tonality Is the Excursion

Norwegian musician Eivind Aarset opens this piece for his quartet (featuring bassist Auden Erlien and two credited drummers, Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen, though one of them, Holte, only spends some of the time drumming) with syrupy held notes, Aarset’s electric guitar’s tone extended beyond the instrument’s inherent, unmediated possibilities. Delays that slowly fade keep notes in play, clock-like pings becoming whisps, strums becoming halos. There seems to be a precognition of this early on: right at the start, it’s as if another performance is layered under this one, if you listen closely — perhaps bleed from a nearby room, perhaps an intended substrate, perhaps a bit of something caught in the digital buffer of one of those tools arrayed in front of Aarset. A drummer’s soft-ended sticks provide muted thumps amid brush strokes. The bassist plots the contours. Though credited in the video with drums, Holte is clearly up to something else, playing what appears to be a lap steel or pedal steel guitar. It’s a stately performance: jazz more concerned with tonality than with melodic excursion; pop more interested in sonic potential of phrases than in the rigor of repeated verse and chorus. Which is to say, it is Eivind Aarset through and through.

Video originally posted at youtube.com.