Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 188

Writing About Radio as an Instrument

The latest issue of The Wire, July 2021, is out, and it’s all about radio. I wrote a piece for it on musical instruments that have radio reception built in. I interviewed five instrument designers (Andre Goncalves at ADDAC in Lisbon on the ADDAC102, Joel Davel at Buchla in the San Francisco Bay Area on the 272e, Christian Zollner at KOMA in Berlin on the Field Kit, Piotr Raczynski at Polyend in Poland [can’t recall the city] on the Tracker, and Jens Rudberg at Teenage Engineering in Stockholm on the OP-1), plus three musicians (King Britt, Thomas Dimuzio, and Robin Rimbaud). I think this is the first time something I wrote for The Wire got mentioned on the cover.

A Rainy Night in Japan

You hear the cars before you see their lights. You hear the footsteps, a deep, constant pulse in contrast with the pointillist rain. You hear the pressurized air, when it comes into view to clean off the lens. You hear a small thudding, somewhere between footsteps and raindrops, this being the sound of the rain hitting, no doubt, an umbrella or a broad-brimmed hat. You look for a reflection, a shadow, to confirm this inference. This is the Rambalac video “Rainy backstreets of Japan at night 5.” Rambalac has nearly half a million viewers on YouTube, admirers of often hour-long, unedited footage of long, winding walks that are, like this one, generally set in Japan. Sound is a byproduct in these videos, a part of the document, but more frame than focus, more color than subject. Still, here the crackling — the sort that always, oddly, sounds more like fire than rain — is very much a centering component. One can be tempted to just watch, and sometimes I do have one of these running, perhaps at quarter speed, on a side monitor as eye candy, but the full audio-visual experience is where it’s at.

Video originally posted at youtube.com.

Crow

The sharp Caw is maybe almost fRiendly sOmetimes, except if the Winged neighbors are beingterritorial

Liner Notes for Marcus Fischer’s Monocoastal

The Portland, Oregon–based musician Marcus Fischer invited me to write liner notes for his album Monocoastal on the 10th anniversary of its release by the 12k Records label, run by Taylor Deupree. The reissue, on glorious vinyl for the first time, with a cover image by Gregory Euclide, will be released later this month, on June 18.

Monocoastal (10th Anniversary Edition) by Marcus Fischer

1. This Second Hum

There is music that one might hum, and there is another musical hum entirely. The latter is music as hum, music that approaches the quality, the substance, of hum itself — music that both envisions and enacts a deeper hum, something that the listener is not merely entranced by but ensconced within.

The first hum can feel intimate, certainly. It forges a bond between the original musician and the person who picks up the tune, who comes into sync with the source material through the process of exhaling melody. The subject music needn’t be intimate. One can hum a ballad, a symphony warhorse — even, and perhaps this is most often the case, a half-remembered song just at the edge of memory. This sort of humming often occurs involuntarily at first, and then the listener-hummer encourages the sense of connection by doing so consciously.

This second hum, however, isn’t mere connection. It is embrace. This second hum, the music that is itself hum, is music as environment, as atmosphere. It is music as activated soundscape, wherein the given aspects of a physical space (reverberation, warmth, size, shape, air current, noise from adjoining spaces, structural emanations such as creaks and groans) are enhanced, even usurped, through compositional intent. It is music that aims to amplify this essence of space, to reconstitute sonic spatial awareness into a higher order of sensorial experience.

Played aloud on speakers, music that aspires to this second hum slowly seeks out the contours of the room in which it is heard, and then it layers the enclosing walls as if with thick wool, with soft felt, with accumulated dust, pulling the world in close, making the setting ever more finite, cozy, personal than it was to begin with. Played on headphones, this second hum expands one’s mental space to another place, turns the headphone experience inside out, trading insularity for transportation, isolation for sanctum.

This second hum is the music of Marcus Fischer’s Monocoastal, a quiet beacon of an album released toward the end of 2010.

2. Life After Dust

Marcus Fischer began 2009 with a new website and ended 2010 with an album, twin exertions that exercised his skills and secured his voice as an exceptional musician of ambient and adjacent modes. Fischer’s site, which he titled Dust Breeding, opened with a simple plan: the goal was, he wrote, “to try and post one thing a day for the next year.” He proceeded to do exactly that. There was all manner of creative pursuit as 2009 unfolded, some figurative, some abstract, some practical, all handcrafted — and there was music, lots and lots of music, short bits of experimental sound that included tweaked field recordings and adventurous explorations of his equipment’s capabilities and restraints.

Often this equipment was bought secondhand and then put to use beyond its initial intent, notably tape recorders, the surface noise of which was exploited for its textural qualities. Even the newer utilities Fischer engaged with, such as granular synthesis — a process by which nano-slices of audio, measured in milliseconds, can be digitally extracted, looped, and layered so as to situate the listener as if within a frozen moment of time — were employed with a graceful hand.

True to the website’s name, the sounds Fischer created often had the quality of dust, sometimes of accumulated detritus, often specifically the dust as caught by a beam of light cast through a sliver of drawn curtain. The music of Monocoastal is fragments of sound slowly dancing, dangling, floating in a room cast upon wherever its listeners might find themselves.The accumulated creative tasks Fischer assigned himself daily on Dust Breeding were an autodidact’s curriculum. It cemented skills, and workflow, and processes. It refined techniques and contributed, step by step, to the accomplishment of unique artistic expression, and a deeply personal one at that.

All those happenstance moments were then put to work toward a formal document, not a collection of chance snapshots of off-hour woodshedding, but quite the contrary, a proper album.

Monocoastal arrived in mid-November 2010. Where before, on his website, there were short bursts of creativity, the sonic equivalent of sketchbook entries, this was finely honed, each of its eight pieces stretching out for extended periods of time, the shortest track three and a half minutes, the longest six and a half. In each, a deep underlying sonic foundation sets the stage for a cautiously choreographed procedural of interstitial elements: a squeak here, a piece of paper seemingly crumpled there, a knocked piece of wood elsewhere in the stereo spectrum. At times you might think it’s Fischer’s own bones creaking, so patient is his practice.

There are more traditionally understood musical sounds on Monocoastal, as well: strummed guitar strings, single notes enacted on electric keyboards, rung bells. But often as not, the sounds heard are offhand ones, not the perfectly fretted chord, but the fissure where feedback splits the air; not the initial physical ringing of a bell, but what comes after, the tremulous sine wave of decaying oscillation. And they are all recorded as if the microphone is as close as can be. They are heard as if in a room where the room’s sound is as important as what resounds within it. Monocoastal is like a house of eight rooms, each with its own tonally unique, subtle qualities.

3. Hypothetical Territory

If Dust Breeding took its name from a threadbare aesthetic, Monocoastal took its from a vast stretch of geography. Fischer was raised in Los Angeles, California, and has long been based in Portland, Oregon, and he is used to touring even further still both up and down the edge of the Pacific Ocean. As the album came together throughout 2010, he came to conceive of it as a representation of the land that he loved, often despite itself.

Monocoastal is an anthem for a hypothetical territory, and it is appropriately as expansive and dreamlike as the imagined region; it is sound at the edge of music for a land at the edge of the world. The zone he celebrates is one even more sizable (as well as more environmentally and ethnically diverse) than the Cascadia that many Northwest social visionaries have come to triumph. Cascadia is merely a subset of the mass that Monocoastal elects to map.

Taking a cue from that utopian ecological movement, there’s a track on Monocoastal titled “Cascadia Obscura,” its blurry beauty lingering like thumbprints on a window. The piece hints, at times, at an earlier revolution in quiet music, Miles Davis’ 1969 album In a Silent Way, much as another track, “Mossbank,” echoes the naturalist inclinations in Brian Eno’s 1970s recordings.

But while nods to such precedents can be discerned, the hazy throughline is Fischer’s and Fischer’s alone. His is a light touch that sets the dust spinning. Listen for the way tiny pin pricks move around the stereo spectrum as “Between Narrow and Small” comes to a close. Listen for the upper-register pings of “Monocoastal (Part 2),” bringing to mind retro-futuristic exotica, scifi promise rewritten with ukulele and wind chimes, lap harp and tuning forks. Listen for the gear-like motivation that churns quietly through “Wind and Wake.” Listen for the frayed timbres of “Shape to Shore.” Then get lost in the hum that is Monocoastal, succumb to its embrace, and let it fill the room where you are sitting right now.

Check out the record at marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com. More from Marcus Fischer at mapmap.ch.

twitter.com/disquiet: Bookends, Shadow of the Colossus

I do this manually each Saturday, collating recent tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, 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.

▰ Even as the world opens up, I suspect I’ll spend much of the end of 2021 in my living room:

John le Carré’s Silverview (Oct. 12, 2021)

Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock (Nov. 16, 2021)

James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Falls (Nov. 16, 2021)

Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy (Nov. 30, 2021)

▰ I’d swear Dropbox search used to be useful.

▰ Yes, I’m enjoying Nick Suttner’s book on Shadow of the Colossus.

▰ 1. I love writing liner notes.

I really love writing liner notes for music I love.

I really truly love writing liner notes for music I’ve loved for a decade and that is now being reissued in a glorious format.

▰ This is the Disquiet Junto music community’s 492nd consecutive weekly project. We’re now 8 weeks from the 500th!

▰ There’s a Japanese ceramics tradition called kintsugi that involves mending broken pottery, and in the process embracing the fractures, using them as decoration. This week in the Disquiet Junto, musicians are exploring kintsugi as an inspiration to remixes/reworkings.

▰ Have a good weekend, folks. If you’ve got a favorite film score (Michael Clayton here), I recommend playing it on shuffle. Most scores have one major motif. Listening in a new order brings the music back to the foreground, refreshing how its melodies and tonalities develop.

Hummingbird

THis week I gained avian wisdom: soUnds I think of as birdsong are Made, in fact, not froM voIce but from feathers' Nimble claps. The backyard Groove Box turns out even more complIcated than eveR I imagineD.

Disquiet Junto Project 0492: Kintsugi Rework

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, June 7, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 3, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0492: Kintsugi ReworkThe Assignment: Employ the Japanese technique of mending broken ceramics as a metaphor for remixing.

Step 1: This week’s project explores the ceramic method called “kintsugi.” If the term is unfamiliar, read up on it a bit. Here’s a description from an article in the Washington Post: “That means ‘golden joinery’ in Japanese, and it refers to the art of fixing broken ceramics with a lacquer resin made to look like solid gold. Chances are, a vessel fixed by kintsugi will look more gorgeous, and more precious, than before it was fractured.”

Step 2: Consider how kintsugi can be employed, through metaphor, as a means to rework/remix an existing piece of music.

Step 3: Take an existing track, perhaps one of your own, and by some means “break” it.

Step 4: Take the “broken” piece of music from step 3 and make it whole by employing a musical adoption of kintsugi.

Source for above quote, from art critic Blake Gopnik: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202723.html

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0492” (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 “disquiet0492” (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 tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0492-kintsugi-rework/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks 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.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 7, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 3, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0492” 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 492nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Kintsugi Rework (The Assignment: Employ the Japanese technique of mending broken ceramics as a metaphor for remixing) — at: https://disquiet.com/0492/

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-0492-kintsugi-rework/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The image associated with this project is by Kate, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:

https://flic.kr/p/jEFjbJ

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Tayla Roberge’s Unhappening

Tayla Roberge is TR. “Noctural Hum” is TR’s latest SoundCloud track. The track is a simple four-minute exercise in true techno minimalism. The beat hovers at under 80 bpm. On first glance, first listen, it can sound like a simple head nod, but there’s more to it, more within it. Between each nod there’s a flutter. The flutter is itself not just syncopated, not just pitched, but fitted perfectly between the nods. Throughout, there are slight variations. A shudder takes over, until it disappears. A buzz is pitched up or down, until it resolves. A whir cycles free, as if it might spin off like a broken spring — instead, it evaporates. No matter what happens, it unhappens. This is the thrilling certitude of “Nocturnal Hum.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/taylaroberge. Roberge is based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Siren

Every TueSday at noon I feel the absence: MothRa is just off the coast but no alErt booms"This is oNly a test"

A Swell Drone Day Swell

Drone Day takes place each May, at the initiation of Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan, who came up with the idea in the first place (more at droneday.org). This year, Drone Day took place on the 29th of the month, this past Saturday. Material from that widely distributed event is now popping up on SoundCloud and other services. One favorite of mine is this video by Zachary Wilson, who combines deep, shining swells with rough textures.

This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube.