Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 202

Scanner Modulates the Source

Robin Rimbaud goes by the name Scanner due to his early work, which involved snatching people’s conversations from the ether and lending those often fraught words new emotional meaning by composing accompanying soundtracks. His atmospheric scores deepened the words’ presence, turning domestic squabbles into radio dramas, monologues into manifestos, idle chatter into comedy of the absurd. This work was intimate and abstract, trenchant and seeking. When I think about early Scanner recordings, which I do often, in my imagination they sit alongside the output of other artists whose unique vision connected human speech and composed music, notably the way Dennis Potter’s screenplays gave voice to the inner turmoil and fantasies of his characters by having them lip-sync popular songs, and how the composer Scott Johnson transcribed the ticks and nuances of human utterances and wrote settings that were, in effect, arrangements fleshing those words out to the scale of a chamber ensemble. Potter found the big dreams within small lives. Johnson found the density in the linear. Scanner found the spectacle in the everyday.

And so it was a huge pleasure today when one of Scanner’s old voices appeared in a new piece, albeit a brief one. Today is Fat Tuesday, and perhaps by chance or perhaps by perfect design, the music synthesizer company Mutable Instruments, based in Paris, France, released a new module called Beads (having lived in New Orleans for four years, I found the connection natural, but it was likely coincidence). The module had clearly already been in the hands of many forward-thinking synthesizer musicians for some time, because right on cue YouTube and Instagram (as of this evening, I couldn’t find any on Vimeo) were filled with video demonstrations of this new module’s features. (Full disclosure: the four-panel comics I created last year were done so with illustrator Hannes Pasqualini, who, with his wife, Elizabeth, designs the interfaces at Mutable.)

For one of his Beads pieces, Scanner took a spoken voice that will be recognizable to fans of his 1997 album, Delivery. In the original, titled “Heidi,” the backing music is a moody, melodramatic bed, like some slurry hybrid of Angelo Badalamenti and Bernard Herrmann, while an unnamed man both pleads his case to and verbally assaults the titular woman.

In Scanner’s brand new track, “Heidi Concrète,” the man is back, nearly a quarter century later, as if caught all along in some mythic limbo, ever ruining his own chances at reconciliation. Now, however, in place of the original music is simply the voice as it is transformed in the Mutable Beads module (hence the “concrète” in the title, borrowed from “musique concrète,” or music made from preexisting sounds). The voice in the new “Heidi Concrète” is fractured and looped, battered and frayed, and ultimately utterly dismantled into a pool of splattery assonance. And because it’s a video, the viewer can associate the varied treatments to specific actions: buttons pressed, knobs turned. While many other musicians are exploring the tonal possibilities of the new module, a common mode for such first-patch videos, Scanner dug deep in his personal crate.

Whenever I hear Scanner’s early work, I wonder if the speakers ever recognized themselves in it. Musicians coming to “Heidi Concrète” to witness an accomplished musician’s initial take on the new module will, I hope, recognize new creative possibilities in what Scanner has done.

Video originally posted to Scanner’s YouTube channel. More from Robin Rimbaud, who is based in London, England, at scannerdot.com.

Gallery: Ron Regé Jr. Mixed Media

Much of what I follow on Instagram is musicians and visual artists. And sometimes the two interests combine, as with this comic strip by Ron Regé Jr. where, seven panels in, the main character is seen unspooling a room-filling tape loop contraption that, true to the medium, brings to mind, among other things, Rube Goldberg.

Reprinted here with permission of the artist. The full sequence is at Regé’s Instagram, instagram.com/ronregejr.

Originally published in the January 26, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

Gallery: Grid Refinement

This gorgeous, shimmering image is a photo by Brian Crabtree (aka tehn) of work being done for a revised version of the Grid, a musical instrument synonymous with his company, Monome. It’s reproduced here from his blog, nnnnnnnn.co, with his permission.

He explained in correspondence: “it’s fundamentally a manufacturing optimization though that means it’s also 100% (literally every part) redesigned,” and “it’ll allow us to build them easier, have them be more robust and efficient, and pass on some price savings.”

Originally published in the February 1, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

twitter.com/disquiet: captions, envelopes, dentists

I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet (which I think of as my public notebook) that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. Some tweets pop up on Disquiet.com sooner than I get around to collating them, so I leave them out of the weekly round-up. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud, especially these days, when a week can feel both like a year and like nothing whatsoever has happened or changed.

▰ Protip: When garbage trucks noisily come by in the morning, just pretend you’ve taken shelter from violent robots patrolling the streets

▰ Spoken: “pièce de résistance”

Automatic caption: “P.S. dude assistance”

(Admittedly, Brian Cox’s accent can be a bit strong when he wants it to be)

▰ Got the new Mick Herron novel, Slough House, today, the day of its release. The first of the three novels I’m currently most looking forward to this year, the others being the end of The Expanse trilogy of trilogies (Leviathan Falls, from the duo who write under the name James S.A. Corey) and the final Jade trilogy book (Jade Legacy, from Fonda Lee).

▰ I stand with Soseki.

▰ Maybe it’s me, but this seems like a trick question

▰ Current sounds, 7:40am: chirruping of birds celebrating the sun that just rose over nearby buildings, laptop fan whirring under pressure of several dozen open tabs, rattle of skateboarder enjoying a street devoid of traffic, occasional creak from house as it warms

▰ Today’s guitar class homework

▰ I know I’m at home on the web when I go to a message board I participate on regularly and see a new thread titled “Envelope Problems.”

▰ Went to the dentist, one admirably steeped in pandemic precaution.

Yes, there was an instrumental version of a Steely Dan song playing upon arrival.

Yes, the increased presence of whirring HEPA filters made me drowsy.

And yes, if my parents are reading: no cavities.

Dustmotes Ambient

Dustmotes is a musician whose new releases always have me expecting slow broken beats, ones where the particulate from which he takes his name is as much a part of the sound as are elements that would be more commonly experienced as music (that is: “music”). He works at the atmospheric reaches of instrumental hip-hop (check out this live performance from a few years back).

This is different. “Ambient 12022021,” the title taking its name from the recent palindrome date, has a beat, certainly, a slim pulse click that slowly surfaces as the midway point of the four-minute track approaches, but mostly the piece is layers and layers of drones, some deep and husky, and others like shimmery echoes. It’s as if he’s skimmed the aura of his more metrically inclined work. Drift off with this one.

Originally posted at youtube.com. More from Dustmotes (aka London-based Paul Croker) at twitter.com/dustmotes.

Disquiet Junto Project 0476: IAH Forecast

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, February 15, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 11, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0476: IAH ForecastThe Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.

Step 1: This is the cover of your next single:

Step 2: Now record your single.

Note: The photo was shot in Houston, Texas, by Robert Boyd and is used with his permission.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0476” (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 “disquiet0476” (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-0476-iah-forecast/

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, February 15, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 11, 2021.

Length: The length is up to you. However you picture it.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0476” 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 476th weekly Disquiet Junto project — IAH Forecast (The Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.) — at:

https://disquiet.com/0476/

The image that is the source of this project is by Robert Boyd (www.thegreatgodpanisdead.com) and has been used with his permission.

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-0476-iah-forecast/

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

Sound Ledger¹ (Text-to-Speech, Cyberpunk 2077, Machine Learning)

5: The estimated value, in billions of dollars, of the text-to-speech (TTS) market by 2026

800: Roughly the number of audio files overhauled in the troubled game Cyberpunk 2077 by an 11GB user mod

13,000: Roughly the number of piece of (Western) classical music processed by an machine-learning AI at EPFL’s Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab to discern patterns in the music’s development

▰ ▰ ▰

¹Footnotes: TTS: prnewswire.com. 2077: dsogaming.com. EPFL: epfl.ch.

Originally published in the February 8, 2021, edition of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet).

Solace via Beirut

Enfin La Nuit – Live at Ahm (9/20/2020) by Charbel Haber and Fadi Tabbal

We live at a moment during which live performance in person is nearly absent. Solace for those who prize such pleasures comes during Zoom concerts and recordings, and sometimes the solace even manages to sound like solace. That is the sense the pervades Enfin la Nuit, a beautiful live set performed by Charbel Haber and Fadi Tabbal last September at Ahm, a nightclub in Beirut, Lebanon, the city where both musicians live.

The album’s three tracks, each roughly 11 minutes or so long, are suffused with longing. The opening piece, from which the album takes its title, goes from whisper to loud sigh, layers of what appears to be guitar pushing a collective drone to higher and higher places. “Couvre-Feu” nods at pandemic life, the title being French for curfew, and the music like a sonorous mix of sirens and barbed wire (the latter featuring as the release’s cover image). Like “Enfin la Nuit,” this second track escalates over time, achieving something piercing and fierce. The closing entry, “Chaque Rose Porte en Elle Une Petite Mort,” introduces a woman’s voice, perched on the boarder between full-blooded and ethereal, and benefits from delectable glitchy treatments throughout.

More from Haber at charbelhaber.bandcamp.com and from Tabbal at faditabbal.com. Last October, I hosted the premiere of Tabbal’s fifth solo album Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions.

Three Loops

Happy to support someone who’s made blank tape loops for sale. These are 4.25, 5.8, and 8 seconds in length.

An Improvised Atmosphere

Beautiful five-minute ambient jam by Pat Carroll, student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Wisps of sound fly this way and that, warped in an improvised atmosphere. Sounds turn back on themselves, tones and noises vying for lack of prominence.

This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted to YouTube. More from Carroll at instagram.com/patcarrollmusic.