Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 193

Videos Games Killed Ambient Hyperreality

YouTube is filled with videos of ambient sound from cities and nature alike. There are walking tours of Notting Hill in London, and still-camera video documents of redwood forests. You can even hop aboard someone’s bike as they cycle around Tokyo, mic to the world, picking up traffic and chatter and wind. Some of these are too good to be true. If your browser finds you in picturesque desert or drenched Amazon rain forest, there’s a good chance the sounds originated elsewhere entirely, perhaps nowhere — which is to say, the nowhere that is an audio technician’s computer, refining idealized sounds of what we think the world sounds like, what the world “should” sound like. Reality is rarely as good as one might hope, especially reality recorded for hours straight without an edit and immediately uploaded to the internet. As for fictional reality, that is something else entirely. Right alongside the audio-video of seaside boardwalks and mountain tops are extracted segments extracted from television, movies, and video games. This one, for example, shows different settings from the video game Cyberpunk 2077, soaking with precipitation, the city streets circled by occasional cars, haunted by solo pedestrians, and flush with enough little sound objects — a honk here, a crossing signal there, the buzz of electricity everywhere, the halfhearted appeal from advertising on repeat — to feel not so much real as dourly welcoming, a false reality that’s arguably all the more real than the hyperreal hillside lake or island paradise, or campsite fire that manages to stay lit for a quarter of a day.

Video originally posted to the Slow Walkthroughs / Video Game Ambience channel at YouTube.

1 Harp x 50 Guitar Pedals

You should know this old line, “Question: What was the acoustic guitar called before the electric guitar? Answer: the guitar.” Now, here’s a new one: “Question: What was the guitar pedal called after Emily Hopkins? Answer: the pedal.”

Emily Hopkins’ videos are always a treat. She regularly puts her massive harp through guitar pedals, transforming both in the process. We hear the harp as it is rarely heard, and we hear the pedals put to use that is unusual for them, as well. In this video, Hopkins plays the same exact phrase through no fewer than 50 guitar pedals. Sometimes we just hear the phrase, rendered through echo, or delay, or crushed nearly beyond recognition; others we hear it on repeat as the pedal is itself manipulated — or, in a manner of speaking, played. The result is a sparkly rainbow of electronic possibility.

Video originally posted at YouTube.

Current Favorites: Instagram Bits

Another post in acknowledgement of the small bits of music that pop up on Instagram over the course of the week and are enchanting on loop. Instagram doesn’t particularly lend itself to the playlist treatment I do on YouTube.

▰ This is Sarah Belle Reid, based in Los Angeles, California, excerpted from a livestream concert, combining her flugelhorn with software and hardware synthesis:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sarah Belle Reid (@sarahbellereid)

▰ This is exactly the sort of lovingly sodden, deeply nostalgia-laden synthesis listeners of Orbital Patterns’ music have come to expect. He’s based in Rochester Hills, Michigan, and is one of my favorite modular synthesizer wizards:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Orbitalpatterns (@orbitalpatterns)

▰ This is Todd Kleppinger, of Fairfax, Virginia, producing delightful melodic, rhythmic patterning on the Orca software, running on a Monome Norns Shield and stimulating an Elektron Digitakt.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Todd (@toddkleppinger)

▰ This is Mark Lentczner (aka Electric Kitchen, of Mountain View, California) producing industrial joy with a combination of the Recursive Machine and the Beebo from Poly Effects.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by electric.kitchen (@all.electric.kitchen)

▰ Listening to UK-based Ryan Lerigo-Jones drum along with synth collaborators is one of my fave new pleasures:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Ryan Lerigo-Jones (@ryanoelifino)

I’m at instagram.com/dsqt, and I follow a vast amount of this.

twitter.com/disquiet: The Skateboard and the Human Seismometer

I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet, my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ Someone rides a skateboard down the block weekday mornings around 7:15am. It’s such a beautiful sound, almost always entirely alone in the serene quiet, the cars still dormant. I imagine its rider, heading likely to a job, and I enjoy the clatter of wheels on pavement equally.

▰ Why didn’t anyone tell me the new Godzilla vs. King Kong movie features a young deaf actor whose character, acting as a human seismometer, recognizes the vibrations of Godzilla arriving long before the actual alarms go off?

▰ There are things I wish would happen, and among those is a subset are things I kinda expect to happen, and one is that online crosswords will let us enter words in two colors: black if we’re certain, and a second if we’re uncertain.

▰ Good time to play Prince’s “Baltimore”:

▰ Recent but Tired: Taking comfort that the majority of concerts I attend are usually below 25% attendance.

Upcoming(ish)* Wired: Being part of as many of those 25% audiences as possible.

*Pending, you know, a whole lotta tier-based variables

▰ TFW you think spellcheck is broken or paused because nothing in the document is underlined but it’s simply because nothing in the doc is misspelled

▰ Q: What’s the plan for the upcoming 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project?

A: I’m not sure one project can properly note the collaborative effort represented by the 500th project. So, we’ll probably celebrate the 500th project for the next 500 weeks until we hit 1,000.

▰ vertiginous
existential
condensation
verklempt
wherewithal

^ Words patiently awaiting their emoji

▰ Out loud I say, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.”

In my head I say, “The Falcon and no, not the Snowman, yeah the Winter Soldier — hope no one caught that pause.”

▰ One of these has arrived (barter for a writing project) and I am stoked.

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend.

A Certain Type of Ambient YouTube Performance

A bit more about how that YouTube playlist I’ve been doing of fine live ambient music performances originated:

It started with me trying to watch tutorials of music tech I was interested in, and the music in such tutorial videos being often not to my liking. I have a hard time listening to music I have a hard time listening to. Time and again, I’d see someone in concert use a piece of equipment, or discuss it in a BBS, and then I’d want to learn more. And then I’d find I’d need to listen through unbearable music in the tutorial to try to get to the technique, to the technology, to the instrument.

Over time, tutorial videos began to surface that I didn’t find hard to listen to. I also got better (somewhat) at dealing with the music in most tutorial videos. In the process, I came to notice a subset of performance videos that while not tutorials still shed light on process. Those videos all had something specific in common: while listening to this ambient music being performed, you got glimpses, and sometimes a full-frontal view, of the performance itself. Even with super quiet, near-static sound, the eye and ear correlated action and result. As of today, there are 203 videos in the playlist.

I remember during college watching a VHS tape of a King Crimson concert. Every time Robert Fripp, the band’s leader and guitarist, performed a solo, the video went psychedelic, obscuring the performance, the director clearly having no sense of what the audience was interested in. That stuck with me. These ambient videos are the opposite. In the videos I’ve focused my attention on, the image is more than decoration, more than a narrative or abstract decoration for (or complement to) the given track. Instead, the video was the music, was in sync with the music. This was valuable to me: informative and heartening (good combo).

By no means am I suggesting performance videos are a higher plane of music activity, for obvious reasons, among them:

There’s a big audience for the music that many tutorials use. (I’m just not part of that audience.)

Video needn’t document technique. (I’m just focused on the ones that do.)

The studio is itself an instrument. (Live sets aren’t the be-all and end-all.)

The music I’m talking about, ambient music, tends to embrace and explore stasis. Watching video of stasis in action (yeah, stasis in action) is itself a form of exploration, providing a rough map to elusive territory, a loose timeline to something that aspires to timelessness.

Anyhow, it was a slow process, coming to this playlist — it originated with a disgruntled disinterest in one sort of cultural activity, which led to awareness of another sort. Even when I first started noting these live performance videos of ambient music, I didn’t fully sense the commonality.

I also admit it was also an act of encouragement, collating such a video playlist. If I made such a thing, maybe more people would make such videos.

The playlist is at youtube.com/disquiet.

Disquiet Junto Project 0486: Earths Days

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, April 26, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 22, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0486: Earths DaysThe Assignment: Celebrate Earth Day on or for another planet.

Step 1: Each Disquiet Junto project begins on a Thursday. This Thursday happens to be Earth Day. Reflect on the concept of Earth Day, and how it might map beyond our big blue marble.

Step 2: Record a piece of music or sound celebrating Earth Day for or as if on another planet.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0486” (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 “disquiet0486” (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-0486-earths-days/

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, April 26, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 22, 2021.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0486” 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 486th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Earths Days (The Assignment: The Assignment: Celebrate Earth Day on or for another planet) — at: https://disquiet.com/0486/

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-0486-earths-days/

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

Image associated with this project is in the public domain courtesy of NASA. Image credit: Zolt Levay Photography: http://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2021/001/01EWXK6QFEF57A7W1RV6TC6ZZB

Beirut Drone Duets

The Drone Sessions Vol. 1 – Live at Tunefork Studios by Various Artists

The definition of drone on the first volume of Ruptured Records’ The Drone Sessions gets pushed, challenged, and, in the end, enriched over the course of the set’s seven tracks. Each is a duet, 14 participants in all with none repeated. It opens with a mix of throttled, soft-attack keyboard sounds paired with inhumanly extended vocals, heavenly choir as manifest in a machine, and utterly gorgeous. That’s Fadi Tabbal and Julia Sabra’s “Roots.” Elsewhere, Charbel Haber and Sary Moussa bring a shimmery glitch to “And Yet Another Romance on a Sinking Ship,” while on “Woe to Him,” Sharif Sehnaoui and Tony Elieh emphasize string instruments, what appears to be an acoustic bass particularly prominent, such that the track is only drone-like in its adherence to a repetitive, underlying rhythm (it eventually explodes into a raucous noise).

Which is not only fine but kind of wonderful. Rather than parse out one held tone after another, The Drone Sessions uses the tension between artistic voices in combination with widely varied approaches to explore a far richer palette than an album with this title might have otherwise. All but one of the musicians is Lebanese, the exception being Aya Metwalli, who is Egyptian. Ruptured, the label, is based in Beirut, Lebanon, and the session itself was a collaboration with Nathan Larson, his Lumen Project inspiring the pairing inherent in the lineup.

The other performers are Jad Atoui, Liliane Chlela, Nadia Daou (aka NÂR), Ziad Moukarzel, Jawad Nawfal, Anthony Sahyoun, and Elyse Tabet. “Courbe Lisse,” Tabet and Nawfal’s more traditional drone, is an epic, nearly 12-minute expanse, and how it veers from gossamer pleasure to rougher terrain is one of the album’s many highlights.

All the music was recorded live over the course of two sessions back in November 2020 at the Beirut studio Tunefork. Album originally posted at rupturedthelabel.bandcamp.com. It was released back on March 19 of this year.

Fine Drone Partita in a Minor Synth Setup

This is a solid example of the sort of videos I’ve been collating in my YouTube playlist of fine live ambient recordings. The equipment is in full view, and the actions in the video correlate with the generally subtle though sometimes not inconsiderable alterations to the pulsing drone as it proceeds. This video isn’t a tutorial. There are no instructions, just two hands enacting manipulations, turning knobs, clicking buttons. In addition, as the music plays, the ear’s sense of interior activity can find consonance with the eye’s attention to the pace of the various lights, providing clues as to which parts of the assembled tools align with what aspects of the music. The track takes its title (“Eurorack ambient drone featuring Morphagene, C4RBN, Magneto, DLD and FX-ai”) from the form of the music and the equipment employed (a bit like old-school classical music, such as Bach’s Partita in A minor for solo flute).

This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video by Little Ambient Machines, based in Amsterdam, and posted today at YouTube.

Herron x Bryars

There are some great, often telling, always culturally informative moments when music pops up in the spy and detective novels of Mick Herron. This quote is the kicker to an earlier set-up in the scene. It’s from Slough House, the seventh novel in Herron’s Slow Horses series.

Current Favorites: Samples, Horror, Perfume, Fusion

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them.

▰ I’m a sucker for many things, among them low-key propulsive fusion featuring Rhodes piano and a muted, economical horn section, along with liner notes stating which drummer is in the right channel and which in the left. This is the new Dosh track, “If U Strike Me Down,” off the forthcoming album Tomorrow 1972. Dosh is Martin Dosh, longtime drummer for Andrew Bird’s band.

If U Strike Me Down by Dosh

▰ There’s an excellent new Kev Brown hip-hop instrumentals set out, The Music Underneath! The “GOOD​.​” Instrumentals. I’d love to know what the opening track samples. Its stately procession reminds me of David Byrne’s Knee Plays.

The Music Underneath! The "GOOD." Instrumentals by KEV BROWN

▰ Heymun has been summoning up her inner synesthete, channeling perfumes into music in an occasional series she calls “Scent to Sound.” This floaty, enjoyably askew ambience correlates with her sense that the particular fragrance suggests “Butterflies fluttering in my stomach.”

▰ Clint Mansell has a new horror score out, In the Earth, for the Ben Wheatley film, and it is a dark, intense, highly recommended listen. One track, “Spirit of the Woods,” is up officially on YouTube, and all 16 tracks are on streaming services.