Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 205
January 27, 2021
Ambient Amateur Hour
The ever-inventive Lullatone share a gizmo that’s part turntable, part children’s toy, and all manner of delight — or what Lullatone call “ambient amateur hour” in the best possible way. The device, what the Lullatone duo have named their Perpetual Melody Machine, has four bells rotating, evenly spaced, with a suspended ball bouncing between them. It’s like a wind chime benefiting from the equivalent of a most consistent wind, yet nonetheless retaining the sense of chance that gives chimes their nature-like quality.
Using simple editing techniques, the initial video is doubled, then doubled again, slowed and and reversed, resulting in variations of combinations of layers. It’s to Lullatone’s credit that not only are the individual variations entirely enjoyable, but the whole thing, almost seven minutes long, is edited together into one seamless stretch of musical economy, right up to the very end, when Shawn James Seymour, half of Lullatone (the other half being Yoshimi Tomida), reaches a hand in from off-screen, hits the off button on the turntable, and brings the spinning to a close.
Writes Seymour of the Perpetual Melody Machine’s development two decades back:
The pendulum-like swing of the mallet was kind of a nod to the minimalist music of Steve Reich and Kousugi Takehisa, with the way ideas are sometimes better than finished products like John Cage, and the somnolent spinning of Alexander Calder (I had to use a thesaurus to find a good word that started with s), mixed with the playful experimentation in the “Useless Machines” of Bruno Munari.
Video originally posted at YouTube. More from Lullatone at lullatone.com.
January 26, 2021
Buddha Machine Variations No. 39 (Hazumi Chord)
A little test run of the new Hazumi sequencer, running on VCV Rack, the free modular synth emulator. Hazumi, the grid on the far left, is from the Voxglitch family of modules, created by Bret Truchan. The audio is the initial loop of sound from “Ma,” the first piece of music heard on the very first Buddha Machine (this is from a digital file, not from the physical device). It’s heard here in three pitches, rendered in Adobe Audition: the original, then up four semitones, and then up one additional semitone. The original is also running through Glitch Shifter, a module from Unfiltered Audio, the company of Joshua Dickinson, Michael Hetrick, Ryan McGee, and Benn Cooper. Hetrick spoke to my Sounds of Brands course last year. The additional noise comes courtesy of two sources: the fan of my laptop, and the wind from a chimney, the latter due to the storm (an “atmospheric river”) currently assaulting San Francisco.
More at vcvrack.com and unfilteredaudio.com. Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a video playlist of the Buddha Machine Variations.
Lightbath’s Glitch
The glitch is strong on this, which is to say that the glitch is weak, which is to say that Lightbath is admirably elegant and selective when employing such abrasive techniques on the two tracks that comprise Surface Bender, “Day” and, naturally, “Night.” Both evidence the frantic switcheroos, the temporary holds, the broken patterns that make glitch glitch, but they do so in a way that still manages a dreaminess, a gentility. They may sound, especially midway through “Day,” like myriad Pixar nanobots are reenacting “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” but the result is as judicious as it is uproarious.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/lightbath. More from Lightbath, aka Bryan Noll of Brooklyn, New York, at lightbath.com.
January 25, 2021
Buddha Machine Variations No. 38 (Virtual Ma)
Monday night. Your batteries have run out, so to get the Buddha Machine source audio, you opt for the album version of the first track, “Ma,” on a streaming service. Running through the Glitchlets script for Norns (albeit on a Fates).
Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a video playlist of the Buddha Machine Variations.
January 24, 2021
Buddha Machine Variations No. 37 (Tape CV KO)
That is, indeed, a cassette player in the foreground. It’s been modded in a couple ways, the key one here being that the speed of the playback can be manipulated electronically. Specifically, the sort of control voltage that works between synthesizer modules can be applied externally to the speed of the cassette. In this case, a slow waveform is increasing and reducing (back and forth, pendulum-like) the pace of the cassette playback, lending it that slurry, warbling quality. (Note the long, pink cable that plugs into cassette player.)
The recorded sequence itself is a Buddha Machine as sampled, sequenced, and played by Teenage Engineering Pocket Operator (PO-33 K.O.). I recorded that PO-33 K.O. sequence onto the tape, and then rewound the tape and played it back as controlled by the control voltage (CV) output of the synthesizer (seen in the background). This is the first patch I’ve tried out with the CV cassette player, which I received on Friday in the mail and have been eager to give a test run.
The slow wave form, an LFO (low-frequency oscillation), is from a Batumi (by Xaoc), its highs and lows compacted by the SPO (by WMD / SSF). SPO stands for Scaler / Polarizer / Offset Generator. The cassette player mod is by the awesome Chester Winowiecki, of Whitehall, Michigan. (The other mod is it can take an audio line in. The standard device only used its own microphone.) I shared some photos of the tape cassette player a few days ago: “Cassette Bent.”
Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet. There’s also a video playlist of the Buddha Machine Variations.
January 23, 2021
twitter.com/disquiet: Slough, Hildur, Weegee
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.
▰ Last week I mentioned I’ve learned many things about myself during pandemic shut-in life, and key among them is that I’m way more into Miss Marple than into James Bond. The very next episode up of Marple, as if to make good on my personal realization, featured none other than Timothy Dalton as guest star (as a would-be successor to Churchill), no less. (Former Bonds do seem so relaxed once the Bonding period is over.)
▰ Not surprised Mick Herron listens to Gavin Bryars (theguardian.com). The Slow Horses books have a lot of attention to sound in them, and ECM Records gets particularly name-checked (Arvo Pärt and Keith Jarrett). I just finished book 6, and look forward to 7.
▰ Got some new noise-canceling (over-the-ear) headphones with this seemingly nifty feature: you run a finger up or down an earpiece to adjust volume. Except that interfaces unintentionally proves much louder (and more audibly annoying) than traditional buttons.
▰ Got new headphones. Been listening to Hildur Guðnadóttir all day (Without Sinking). Will through Wednesday, at least. Except when sleeping. And maybe even then.
▰ Q: “What Happens Now to Michael Apted’s Lifelong Project ‘Up’?” (nytimes.com)
A: A live feed from Nest doorbells installed at the entryway to each of their homes.
▰ If I did the math right, then the 500th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project will begin on July 29th of this year. Ooh, and this means the 500th project somehow manages to end on August 2nd, one day before my birthday.
▰ The wind crazy at 4:30am, the house rattled like a kid’s toy. I grabbed earbuds and listened to the audiobook of a spy novel, my eyes too tired to focus on my Kindle. I slowed its speed to that of a sleep story: “left … crumbled … tarmac .. in .. its …wake.” Oddly soothing.
▰ The longstanding ban on public performances of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” will be temporarily lifted tomorrow, January 20, 2021, for a period of 12 hours, from noon until midnight, Eastern Time.
▰ Getting an extra light for Zoom calls has helped, but when I actually step back and look at my desk, it feels like Weegee is probably in the hallway snapping photos for the morning edition.
▰ Yeah, I downloaded DC’s version of Marvel Unlimited
▰ I’m not signaling anything, just asking a question. If SoundCloud suddenly disappeared tomorrow, people should post their Disquiet Junto tracks to their:
The poll has now ended.
▰ And a poll from the week prior I neglected, it appears, to archive here:
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▰ Glad to see that portrait of the guy who came up with the concept of a “Junto” in the first place hanging in the newly redecorated Oval Office (via washingtonpost.com.
▰ I am now at peace (via twitter.com/GuyBirkin)
▰ Have a great weekend, folks. See you Monday. Or heck, maybe Tuesday. Listen to some captions. Read some music. Play some textures.
January 22, 2021
Cassette Bent
About five minutes passed between me thinking, “I’m gonna take a break from picking up new music gadgets for a while” and someone online offering up hand-modded, circuit-bent cassette recorders that can change speed with CV input. This just arrived. (Not DIY. SEDIT: someone else did it themselves.)
And new inputs (one for CV, the other to add audio-in, versus the preexisting microphone) require new labels:
January 21, 2021
Inside Man
Listen to the Michael Clayton score too often on your phone and it’s inevitable that you’ll look down to find this staring back at you.
Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect (2 of 3)
Special Note: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 5 below.
Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have uploaded a solo in last week’s project to participate in this week’s duet project.
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, January 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 21, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0472). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Keep this in mind. Leave space for what is yet to come.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by 68 musicians in all to choose from, 62 as part of this playlist:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0472
(Note that it’s possible another track or two will pop up in or disappear from that playlist. Things are fluid on the internet.)
Count as the 63rd this track from RPLKTR:
https://soundcloud.com/rplktr/disquiet-0472-jam-time-1-of-3/s-ABJKYjr9Pvx
And count as the 64th this track from Jason Richardson:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/3?u=disquiet
And count as the 65th this track from Pineyb:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/59?u=disquiet
And count as the 66th this track from Sevenism:
https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/ymist
And count as the 67th this track from Chris Ledwidge:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/40425/64?u=disquiet
And count as the 68th this track from Hardworking Families:
https://hardworkingfamilies.bandcamp.com/track/corn-pop-disquiet0472
To select a track, you can listen through all that and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 68, the first 62 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and 62-68 being the ones linked to above.
Note: It’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.
It is strongly encouraged that you look through the discussion on the Lines forum, because many tracks include additional contextual information there:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0472-jam-time/
Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0473” (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 “disquiet0473” (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-0473-placebo-effect/
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, January 25, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 21, 2020.
Length: The length should be roughly the same as the solo track you selected.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0473” 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 473rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Placebo Effect (1 of 3) / The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0473-placebo-effect/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is by Israel Avila, and used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license allowing editing (cropped with text added) for non-commercial purposes:
January 20, 2021
The Quiet Today
Closest I can say to how it feels right now is I used to live near a horrible band that made horrible music loudly day and night, and then one day they moved out and it was quiet, a quiet I came to recognize was not momentary but the new normal. That’s the quiet I feel right now.
