Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 220
September 22, 2020
Transistor Ga Ga
Often, the most beautiful sounds are all around us. We just have to learn to pay attention to them. Sometimes, however, to access these sounds, we must listen in ways our ears alone can’t accomplish. Case in point, this recording of a transformer station from Robert Cole Rizzi. Rizzi’s three-minute track is an atmospheric tour de force. It combines the inherent buzzing of the transformer with the sound of the structure itself vibrating, plus sonic evidence of the presence of electromagnetic radiation. Writes Rizzi, “You can hear a low rumble I believe is the current running through the wires and fog condensing into drops hitting the thinner zigzag beams of the mast as they fall.”
To access this depth of sonic experience, Rizzi employs the Geofon, or what I described as “the landlubber’s hydrophone in a post earlier this year. The electromagnetic information comes courtesy of another device, called the Priezor. Both are from the company LOM.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/rizzi. More from Robert Cole Rizzi, who is based in Kolding, Denmark, at twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi.
September 21, 2020
Real World, Real Time
The Italian musician, designer, and illustrator Hannes Pasqualini debuts a new project in which he reworks real-world audio in real time. The series, of which this video is the first, is titled Sounds on Location. The above clip, about four minutes long, shows him setting up on a bench. White noise and passing traffic fill the stereo spectrum. Then, about 30 seconds in, the video fades to black and then back again, the sounds now running through Pasqualini’s iPad. The processed result emerges from the source audio: more rhythmic, more foregrounded, spare noise given improvised purpose through compositional intent.
Pasqualini outlines his approach as follows:
Step 1: go to a place that inspires me, record sounds
Step 2: create some loops from these sounds
Step 3: create a little track on location, mostly with the sounds I have recorded in step 1
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Pasqualini (who collaborates with me on the recent comics I’ve been posting) at papernoise.net.
September 20, 2020
Current Listens: Questlove(s RBG) + Meditative Loops
This is my 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. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰
NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ Friday night, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Questlove of the Roots spun three hours of Radiohead, chopped and screwed, as he put it, thick with reverb and delay, echoed to dubby extremes. He talked in between songs, and during them, about fending off stress-eating, and about his own political awakening during the Obama campaign, and how when he plays early Radiohead he has to remind himself that the band once employed what he calls “mortal instruments.” The screen displays details from his DJ software, confirming the mournfully slow BPM. (Thanks for the tip, Alex Hawthorn.)
▰ Jeannine Schulz keeps up the relentless pace of slow-music releases with Unfolding Circles, five tracks of melty loops made from guitar parts and, of course, the textural quality of the degraded tape itself. (Based in Hamburg, Germany.)
Unfolding Circles by Jeannine Schulz
▰ Three lengthy tracks of music for meditation comprise the Zazen set by Insomniac Hotel. Dense, murky drones with melodic and percussive undercurrents. (Based in New Jersey.)
September 19, 2020
Listening to “King Lear”
If you study insults, then “King Lear” is an endless resource. If you study sound, there’s still some solid material.
. . .
“the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high.”
This moment (for sound-studies types) in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is from when Edgar (in disguise) is tricking dear old (and horrifically blinded) dad Gloucester from jumping off a cliff.
The cliff isn’t actually there, of course. After the avoided jump, the two try to listen in the opposite direction, which is to say up. Edgar, who has convinced Gloucester that they have indeed jumped but by chance survived, reports:
“the shrill-gorged lark so far
Cannot be seen or heard”
And then King Lear shows up, as does a gentleman. The observational tables are turned when Edgar asks, “Do you hear aught, sir, of a battle toward?”
And the Gentleman replies:
“Most sure and vulgar: every one hears that,
Which can distinguish sound.”
It’s a beautiful turnaround.
. . .
If Shakespeare is even remotely your thing, take advantage of the rare benefit of Covid-19, which is that the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival has been presenting “King Lear” online for free, due to social distancing concerns, and that those shows are available worldwide to anyone with internet. The thing is, they’re only available live, and as of this writing, only three performances remain. They stream at youtube.com/SFShakes. The way the troupe makes use of Zoom, the platform on which they perform, is amazing. Each actor is alone is her/his/their room, against a green screen, speaking their lines live, the individuals then combined against a background image as if on stage together. I watched last Sunday, and was blown away, not just by the work, but by the ingenuity.
. . .
One more sonic observation: because all the actors are performing on their lonesome, each spoken voice appears from within its own room tone. Each voice carries with it the space in which that voice is enunciating. Each actor is subject to a different echo, a different hum. They’re all on the same virtual stage, but they’re all in very different rooms. The strange ever-shifting background sound, the way each voice has its own contours, its own dimensions, makes a perfect match for the slightly low-resolution shapes that each human form takes on screen, as their features blur into the shared virtual background. Per chance the image on the festival’s website, at sfshakes.org, is from the scene described above. That’s, from left to right, Yohana Ansari-Thomas as Edgar, Phil Lowery as Gloucester, and Jessica Powell as Lear.
. . .
There are three more shows on the calendar: Sunday, September 20, at 4pm; Saturday, September 26, at 7pm; and Sunday, September 27, at 4pm.
Grace Notes
Some tweet observations I made over the course of the past week:
▰ “Host is not in the meeting yet”
▰ I frequently have the Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish live YouTube stream running at quarter speed on a spare screen (an old tablet) at my desk, and I recently noticed that if you click on the options menu, it reads “Captions – unavailable.” And I thought, but what if they were.
▰ Wonderful reminiscence by Eugene Holley, Jr., on the late Stanley Crouch, acknowledging his pugilism but focused warmly on the way Crouch “was supportive of young writers beginning their voyage into the literary dimensions of jazz”: theundefeated.com.
▰ There will be a season 3 of Trapped! Burning question: will there be new music cues, or will the production reuse the preexisting material?
▰ AQI 0 (as in zero), and the fog horns are rejoicing.
▰ A beautiful Fantastic Voyage piece on Hilobrow by Matthew Daniel, for whom as a child the idea that “agents use shrinking technology to enter the body of a colleague and attempt to remedy the damage a clot in his brain has caused” was deeply personal: hilobrow.com.
▰ I learned a lot from Stanley Crouch. He was also an early version of what I learned to call a hate read (cf., some of those Wynton Marsalis LP notes). RIP, deep thinker whose love of jazz was unquestionable (if at times a culture warrior in a less constructive sense of the term).
▰ Fog horns in full effect. Outdoor temperature at 61° and rising. Semi-hyper-local microclimate AQI at 48. I could get used to this, though I know better not to (Sunday forecast is looking ugly).
▰ Breaking news: it is possible currently to have the windows open.
▰ I believe I’m listening to the Tenet score backwards, if that’s what is meant here by “inverted”: youtube.com.
September 18, 2020
Today
Today
I added an unnecessary “that” to a sentence because blue underlines in my draft email were annoying.
I said hi to an old friend on social media because some algorithm decided I should be reminded of their existence.
I carried my phone at a particular angle while going for a walk because Bluetooth was faulty otherwise.
These things are connected.
The Mechanisms
Cassette Loops by Michel Banabila
This loop is three minutes and thirty three seconds during which time moves forward and backward. There is a clickety-clack to it that tells you the mechanisms are functioning, but also that they are old ones. There is no expectation on the listener’s part that those clicks and clacks are literal, that they are fully in sync with range of sounds we hear, that they are the sounds of what is transforming what we hear. They may be in part, but more than likely the technological processing of which the music is fully redolent is beyond that which mere gears can accomplish. The clicks and clacks are signals of the transformation that is underway throughout. The results of which include piano that composer Gavin Bryars would nod approvingly toward: underwater like a shipwreck, like a memory. The ground-level fog of a drone has a breathless quality, held in a manner no mere mortal could achieve without something plugged in or otherwise powered. The little crevices here and there are like the broken pottery equivalent of grace notes, fractures that lend texture, warmth, humanity. It’s a beautiful piece. Based on the track’s title, “Cassette Loops,” those bits of mechanical curiosity are, perhaps, the sounds of the loops playing back, little plastic wheels turning round, seams causing a slight tug and then the tape’s release, motor running on the most mundane of batteries: the fragile enterprise writ small, and magnified through our loudspeakers and headphones.
The music is from an NTR documentary, Kein Geloel, by Thomas Vroege and David Kleijwegt, about sports figure Ernst Happel. Track originally posted at banabila.bandcamp.com. More from Banabila at banabila.com.
September 17, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0455: Inner Invertebrate
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 Monday, September 21, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 17, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0455: Inner Invertebrate
The Assignment: What does a moment (or a day) in the life of a jellyfish sound like to a jellyfish?
There is just one step:
Step 1: Compose a piece of sound/music that summons up what a moment, or an instance, or a day in the life of a jellyfish is like to the jellyfish.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0455” (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 “disquiet0455” (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-0455-inner-invertebrate/
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 Monday, September 21, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 17, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. Consult your inner invertebrate.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0455” 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 455th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Inner Invertebrate (The Assignment: What does a moment (or a day) in the life of a jellyfish sound like to a jellyfish?), 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-0455-inner-invertebrate/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project drawn from Flickr.com (by James Broad) and used thanks to a Creative Commons license allowing for non-commercial adaptation (cropped, text added):
Expand the Virtual
Went for a walk after dark, first time since before the sky forgot to brighten. Windows filled with monitors on kitchen tables and in bedrooms, as if to expand the virtual world’s surface area in compensation for the narrowed real one. On the street: masked faces, silent nods.
September 16, 2020
Kosma Catch-up
Continuing the catchup, this arrived today. Three of the 12″s are now in the box, which first came out in 2000. This 12″ in the series came out in 2005. One more is en route, the final yet to be ordered.
