Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 224
August 19, 2020
When Music and Video Are Truly Paired
This is far from ambient, so it won’t be going on my live-ambient video playlist, but it’s an excellent live video. There’s no sound until just about the 30-seconds mark. That’s because mafmadmaf, the musician whose hands dart in and out of view, up until then is still getting the patch started. That is, he’s still adding cables, and until enough are connected, his small synthesizer setup has no sound to make. And then it begins. First with a drone, a low undercurrent of foundational noise. Then the rapid clicking of industrial action, like a fervent sewing machine doing its duties. Not every cable connection alters the sound. Some, as at the opening, are subsets of multi-stage efforts to accomplish a sonic goal. The beauty of this piece, including the intent rhythmic quality, is how precisely the sounds and image correlate, how the viewer takes in the music not merely as sound, but as connected to the device from which it emanates, much as the music itself is predicated on connections made with patch cables.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from mafmadmaf, who is based in Guangzhou, China, at mafmadmaf.com.
ClockSkip In Effect
Simple evening beat experiment: four pulses in sync, each triggering a different percussive envelope of a different spectral subset of a pair of waveforms heard in combination. One of the waveforms is having its pitch alerted occasionally, both in and out of sync with the overall rhythm. The element of chance results from the four triggers all being muted on occasion (slightly less than 50% of the time) by the ClockSkip function in the Hemisphere alternate firmware in the Ornament and Crime module. Envelopes courtesy of the Xaoc Zadar. Waves courtesy of a pair of Mutable Instruments Plaits (here in the form of clones: the Antumbra Knit).
Video originally posted at youtube.com/disquiet.
August 18, 2020
A Modular Study
The ER-301 is a great and powerful synthesizer module, not in the Wizard of Oz sense, where there’s a man behind the curtain ready to spoil any sense of wonder, but in the sense that it requires significant effort due to, as the musician mafmadmaf puts it, the considerable amount of depth and complexity it represents. All of which said, in what is billed as a first study here, mafmadmaf induces a tremendous operation of chamber electronic music from it. Initial pulses glitch out, yielding trailing drones that combine with rhythmic trills, filigrees of error. In time, a seesaw melody gently brings the disparate pieces into a lulling whole.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from mafmadmaf at instagram.com/mafmadmaf.
August 17, 2020
Light to Sound
The saying goes that it’s only experimental music if there’s a chance it won’t work. A corollary observation would be to point out: Sometimes what sounds like experimental music isn’t experimental music. It’s simply an experiment. And nonetheless, it can be musical. Case in point, this little DIY project by the musician who goes by Suss Müsik. He’s been experimenting with illumination-responsive circuitry, creating a theremin-like apparatus that creates and alters sound abased on the presence of a flashlight. As he notes in a brief accompanying text, “Somehow it created layers of harmonic dissonance in nearly perfectly phased, overlapping sequences.”
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Suss Müsik at sussmusik.com.
August 16, 2020
Current Listens: Japanese Ambient, Lubbock Classical
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
▰ Like many contemporary synthesizer musicians, Takeyuki Hakozaki has welcomed the old-school Nagra reel-to-reel player-recorder into his toolkit, hence the sense of buckling to the audio in this billowing ambient recording.
▰ “Lightway” is a soaring demo recording posted by Lubbock, Texas-based composer Jennifer Jolley. Mallets and woodwinds summon arpeggio birds and droning clouds.
▰ Last night on the walk back from the ocean, as clouds that later revealed themselves to be providing cover for heat lightning slowly gathered, I listened to “Into,” the slow, 20-minute track by Dzöon. Twice. Be prepared to hit pause early on to confirm that cottony under-drone is, indeed, part of the track and not some hum from elsewhere. Then listen as the piece ever so patiently reveals itself, one carefully placed sonic element at a time.
▰ And if you missed out on the thunderstorm, the musician r beny recorded it for you. He writes, “The thunder was so loud and so close, it shook my windows and clipped the audio recorder.”
August 15, 2020
Projecting Back
Dug this out of storage. Projected close on a wall, its images are so sharp as to challenge description. The high level of detail hovers somewhere between a printed image and a televised one, between page and screen. It has the proto-hyperreal quality of the latter, yet even given the sheer force of the slide projector’s light, it lacks the screen’s directive presence, how the screen shines its light at you, into you — how you are the thing onto which the image is, in a sense, projected. In contrast, light experienced from the projector is reflected, diminished, softened.
Still, the slide projector’s end result is brilliant and illuminated, in a way that a printed photo simply isn’t. One thing they have in common, though, the slide image and the printed photo, is texture. The wall’s surface becomes part of the image’s appearance, much as a photo owes some of its quality to the material on which it is presented.
And then, of course, there is the sound. The machine’s motor and the fan vibrate with an industrial intensity, the density of this metal device so unlike commonplace 21st-century household gear. The click of each slide swapping in for the previous one announces with a multi-syllabic gesture, several clicks bundled into one. There are steps to the process: the wheel turning, the metal guide entering and retreating, not to mention the plastic impression of the button setting things in motion at the narrative juncture between each observation period.
None of these aspects were experienced as quiet way back when, but they’re especially loud now. Not just loud, they are part of the viewing experience, rather than detritus. Rather than byproduct, these are sonic part and visual parcel. In an art gallery, the slide projector today would have to get credit as “single channel audio,” or some such. But even that wouldn’t do it justice. Each sound comes from a different part of the machine. The sound of the slide projector is as three-dimensional as the resulting image is flat.
August 14, 2020
An Orchestra of Two
Cinchel + Akosuen by Cinchel + Akosuen
Cinchel and Akosuen, both based in Chicago, Illinois, have combined resources to for three tracks of majestic, tension-laden music. Two of the pieces are orchestral not just in aural scale — broad, spacious, enthralling — but in length, one at nearly 20 minutes, the other well over 16. The hallmark of this collection, titled simply Cinchel + Akosuen, is how strands at varying paces combine for simultaneous effect. “Sequest,” with which the set opens, has genteel piano against even more ethereal vocals, while guitar rages like some fiercely focused machine is rapidly scratching at electrified strings. At moments in “Tether,” the shortest piece here, six and a half minutes, it sounds as if a college radio DJ forgot to fade out a psychedelic folk record before potting up a metallic shoegaze hybrid. The result is brisk and commanding, and as long as the tracks are, you want to start them all over again when they’ve reached their natural close.
Cinchel is Jason Shanley (guitar, feedback, effects), Akosuen is Billie Howard (violin, piano, voice, synthesizers), and together (likely with more tools than listed here) they get blissfully lost in their airy frenzy, taking the listener aloft and along for the ride.
Album originally posted at scriptsrecords.bandcamp.com. More from the releasing label, Scripts Records, at scriptsrecords.com. More from the respective musicians at cinchel.com and akosuen.bandcamp.com.
August 13, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0450: Texture Analysis
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, August 17, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 13, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto:
Disquiet Junto Project 0450: Texture Analysis
The Assignment: Create a piece of music from sounds related to working with rocks.
Welcome to the 450th consecutive weekly Disquiet Junto project. Thanks to everyone who has participated, supported, and pitched in along the way.
This project is the third of three that are being done over the course of as many months in collaboration with the 2020 Musikfestival Bern, which will be held in Switzerland from September 2 through 6 under the motto “Tektonik” (“Tectonics”). For this reason, a German translation is provided below. We are working at the invitation of Tobias Reber, an early Junto participant, who is in charge of the educational activities of the festival. This is the second year in a row that the Junto has collaborated with Musikfestival Bern. Select recordings resulting from these three Disquiet Junto projects will be played on a listening booth at the Steinatelier on September 5, as well as being aired on Radio RaBe (rabe.ch), an independent local radio station partnering with the festival.
Step 1: Download the field recordings made at Carlo Bernasconi AG, a company that has been working in stone for over a century. The sounds range from machines to manual tools to spatial ambience.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/e3xo7qpydat4x2r/AAAPAs5QJVWcNWTrrScEnejta?dl=0
Step 2: Listen for aspects of the recordings that attract your ears. Focus on textures in particular.
Step 3: Create a piece of music combining elements from as few or as many as you chose in Step 2.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0450” (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 “disquiet0450” (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-0450-texture-analysis/
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 and #musikfestivalbern 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, August 17, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 13, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0450” 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 450th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Texture Analysis — The Assignment: Create a piece of music from sounds related to working with rocks) at:
This is the third of three projects in collaboration with Musikfestival Bern 2020 which will take place in Bern, Switzerland, from September 2 to 6. More on the festival at:
https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern/
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-0450-texture-analysis/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Photo by Tobias Reber.
. . .
Jeden Donnerstag wird der Disquiet Junto eine neue Kompositions-Challenge gestellt. Mitglieder haben dann vier Tage Zeit, ein Stück hochzuladen, in welchem sie auf die Challenge reagieren. Die Mitgliedschaft in der Junto ist offen: du kannst einfach mitmachen. (Ein SoundCloud-Account ist nützlich, aber nicht zwingend.) Es besteht keine Verpflichtung, bei jedem Projekt mitzumachen. Die Junto ist wöchentlich von Donnerstag bis Montag, so dass du immer dann mitmachen kannst wenn du Zeit hast.
Deadline: Die Abgabefrist für dieses Projekt ist der Montag, 17. August 2020 um 23.59 Uhr, wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 13. August 2020 gepostet.
Dies sind die Anweisungen, welche an die Email-Liste der Gruppe (unter tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) versandt wurden:
Disquiet Junto Project 0450: Texture Analysis
Die Aufgabe: Komponiere ein Musikstück mit Klängen aus der Arbeit mit Steinen
Willkommen zum 450. wöchentlichen Disquiet Junto-Projekt in Folge. Danke an alle, die in dieser Zeit teilgenommen, das Projekt unterstützt und dazu beigetragen haben.
Dies ist das zweite von drei Projekten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2020, welches vom 2.-6. September zum Thema «Tektonik» stattfindet. Wir arbeiten auf Einladung von Tobias Reber, einem frühen Junto-Teilnehmer und Verantwortlicher für die Musikvermittlung beim Festival. Dies ist das zweite Mal in Folge, dass die Junto mit dem Musikfestival Bern zusammen arbeitet. Ausgewählte Stücke aus diesen drei Disquiet Junto-Projekten werden an einer Hörstation im Rahmen des Steinateliers am 5. September präsentiert sowie auf Radio Rabe (www.rabe.ch) gespielt.
Schritt 1: Lade die field recordings herunter, welche auf dem Geländer der Carlo Bernasconi AG gemacht wurden – einer Firma, die seit über hundert Jahren mit Stein arbeitet. Die Klänge reichen von Maschinen über Handwerk-Geräusche bis zu Raumklängen.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/e3xo7qpydat4x2r/AAAPAs5QJVWcNWTrrScEnejta?dl=0
Schritt 2: Lausche auf Aspekte der Aufnahmen, die dir gefallen. Fokussiere besonders auf Texturen.
Schritt 3: Gestalte ein Musikstück aus allen oder einigen Elementen, welche du in Schritt 2 gewählt hast.
Sieben weitere wichtige Schritte wenn deine Komposition fertig ist:
Schritt 1: Verwende „disquiet0450″ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) im Namen deines Tracks.
Schritt 2: Falls deine Audio-Plattform Tags zulässt: stelle sicher dass du den Projekt-Tag „disquiet0450″ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) verwendest. Vor allem auf SoundCloud ist dies hilfreich um anschliessend eine Projekt-Playlist erstellen zu können.
Schritt 3: Lade deinen Track hoch. Es ist hilfreich, aber nicht zwingend, wenn du dazu SoundCloud verwendest.
Schritt 4: Poste deinen Track im folgenden Diskussions-Thread auf llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-...
Schritt 5: Füge deinem Track eine kurze Erklärung zu deiner Herangehensweise bei.
Schritt 6: Falls du den Track auf den sozialen Medien erwähnst, verwende gerne die Hashtags #disquietjunto #musikfestivalbern so dass andere Teilnehmer deinen Hinweis besser finden können.
Schritt 7: Höre und kommentiere die Stücke deiner Junto-Kolleg*innen.
Weitere Details:
Deadline: Die Abgabefrist für dieses Projekt ist der Montag, 17. August 2020 um 23.59 Uhr wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 13. August 2020 gepostet.
Dauer: Die Dauer des Stückes ist dir überlassen.
Titel/Tag: Wenn du das Stück postest, verwende bitte „disquiet0450″ im Titel des Tracks und, wo möglich (beispielsweise auf SoundCloud) als Tag.
Upload: Wenn du bei diesem Projekt mitmachst, dann füge deinem Post eine Beschreibung deiner Vorgehensweise bei – Planung, Komposition und Aufnahme. Diese Beschreibung ist ein zentrales Element im Kommunikationsprozess der Disquiet Junto. Fotos, Video und eine Auflistung der verwendeten Instrumente und Werkzeuge sind immer willkommen.
Download: Ermögliche gerne das Herunterladen deiner Komposition und erlaube attribuiertes Remixing (z.B. eine Creative Commons-Lizenz welche nicht-kommerzielles Teilen mit Attribution erlaubt und Remixes zulässt).
Wenn du den Track online postest, füge ihm als Kontext die folgende Information bei:
Mehr über dieses 450. wöchentliche Disquiet Junto-Projekt (Texture Analysis – Die Aufgabe: Komponiere ein Musikstück mit Klängen aus der Arbeit mit Steinen) unter:
Dies ist das dritte von drei Projekten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2020, welches vom 2-6. September stattfindet. Weitere Informationen unter:
https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestiva...
Mehr zur Disquiet Junto unter:
Abonniere die wöchentlichen Projekt-Ankündigungen hier:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Die Diskussion des Projekts findet statt auf llllllll.co unter:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-...
Ausserdem gibt es einen Junto Slack-Channel. Sende deine Email-Adresse an twitter.com/disquiet um Zugang zum Channel zu erhalten.
Foto: Tobias Reber
August 12, 2020
Listening to Colossus
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) is very much my jam.
Late Early Punk (or Early Late Punk)
Hilobrow.com update: My piece on the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project will be online soon as part of the Klaatu You series, in which writers “revisit their favorite pre-Star Wars sci-fi movies.” But first, I’ve got another short essay due up. The series Cabona Your Enthusiasm contains 25 posts about participants’ favorite punk songs (from between 1974-1983). I selected a very early Billy Childish track, “Dreams of ’63,” from the 1979 debut album of his band the Pop Rivets. None other than Mike Watt (of the Minutemen) has contributed to the series, along with personal favorites Deb Chachra and Douglas Wolk. Here’s the great lineup. Several of the posts are already online:
Mimi Lipson on Flipper’s “Sex Bomb” | James Parker on The Jam’s “Going Underground” | Dan Fox on The Cramps’ “Human Fly” | Adrienne Crew on Bad Brains’ “I and I Survive” | Devin McKinney on Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never” | Deb Chachra on The Buzzcocks’ “Ever Fallen in Love” | Mark Kingwell on The Demics’ “New York City” | Jessamyn West on Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” | Douglas Wolk on The Homosexuals’ “Soft South Africans” | Josh Glenn on The Freeze’s “This is Boston, Not L.A.” | Stephanie Burt on Sorry’s “Imaginary Friend” | Luc Sante on Public Image Ltd.’s “Public Image” | Miranda Mellis on X-Ray Spex’s “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” | Adam McGovern on The Clash’s “Washington Bullets” | Mandy Keifetz on Germs’ “Forming” | Gordon Dahlquist on The Sex Pistols’ “Problems” | Anthony Miller on The Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” | Deborah Wassertzug on The Mekons’ “Where Were You?” | Tor Aarestad on Gang of Four’s “Return the Gift” | Marc Weidenbaum on The Pop Rivets’ “Dream of ’63” | David Smay on The Rezillos’ “(My Baby Does) Good Sculptures” | Vanessa Berry on The Cure’s “So What” | Chelsey Johnson on The Slits’ “Typical Girls” | Lynn Peril on Crass’s “Smother Love” | Mike Watt on The Dils’ “You’re Not Blank.”
