Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 227
July 24, 2020
Marc Kate Live on the Prophet 12
One highlight of last year’s San Francisco Electronic Music Festival was a disarmingly simple set on the part of local musician Marc Kate. While many participants in the annual festival bring a richly performative aspect to their work, not to mention a range of devices, Kate sat behind a single Prophet 12 synthesizer atop a card table. I reviewed the concert series that year for The Wire, noting that Kate “plays stately, increasingly lacerated chords.” There were a lot of performers in 2019 and only a little room in the review, so that’s all Kate got in the piece. Now he’s uploaded the performance, all 20 minutes, giving it a larger audience than it did that evening. When you listen, and you should, do pay attention around the halfway mark. That’s when the piece, which bears admirable qualities of the Blade Runner score, transitions from gentle atmospherics to threatening ones, from chamber music to something far more orchestral. Early on, the tones are not necessarily comforting, but the drones have a sleepy quality, with hints of the depth of night, the undercurrent of something wicked coming this way. Then the wickedness arrives, and does it ever. The second half is full of climatic (and climactic) tumult, the force and bluster of a raging storm, combined with the anxiety of an alien invasion. It’s a pretty masterful performance.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nvrknws. More from Kate at marckate.com.
July 23, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0447: Listen Ahead
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, July 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 23, 2020.
Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0447: Listen Ahead
The Assignment: Make some music for the near future.
Step 1: Imagine what the world will be like in six months, what your world will be like six months from today.
Step 2: Make some music that reflects what you imagined in Step 1. You might make music about that time, or music that responds to that time. In some manner, make music for the near future.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0447” (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 “disquiet0447” (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-0447-listen-ahead/
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, July 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 23, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. The future can feel a long ways away, but the music needn’t be long.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0447” 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 447th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Listen Ahead (The Assignment: Make some music for the near future), 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-0447-listen-ahead/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this track is from Andrea K., used thanks to Creative Commons licenses and Flickr. The images have been cropped, colors shifted, and text added.
July 22, 2020
The Dark Side of Ekin Fil
Back in mid-April, perhaps when it felt more like an end might be in sight, when the new abnormal was more new and more abnormal, a group of musicians under the umbrella of Katuktu Collective individually recorded nine tracks with a shared theme. The album is titled Isolate With I. It’s described as follows:
A compilation of music recorded entirely during the coronavirus pandemic in two parts, a dark and a half-light, messages in a bottle from our island to yours. Both parts are free downloads; if you hear something that resonates with you, please visit the individual tracks for more information and to support the artists directly.
This album is the first half, the dark half. (If you didn’t know the title of the second half, you might read the “I” as first person. It’s a Roman numeral one, in fact; the second album is Isolate With II.) The participants include C. Brickell, German Army, Fading Tapes, Danni Rowan, the Corrupting Sea, Aidan Baker, Anders Brørby, Brian Case, and Ekin Fil. Fil’s track, “Detour,” is a highlight, the underlying rumble like a train running fast, the intermittent patches of noise like echoes in a series of tunnels. It’s so stark, so precise, one could easily imagine that the piece isn’t electronic, and that she had scored it for strings and timpani.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ekin-fil. The full album is available for free download at katuktucollective.bandcamp.com. More from Ekin Fil at ekinfil.com.
July 21, 2020
Five Nights
New Tapei: construction in the distance, a mid-rise building illuminated with color bands, the music an orchestral drone with a sublimated pulse. Hong Kong: viewed from above, a forest of lit skyscrapers, the music lending the drama of a thriller. Tokyo: a dark street corner, much of the light coming from a set of vending machines, the music introducing a glitchy twitch.
Those are three of the five cities that set the scene for Wander the Night, a collaborative online project from photographer Cody Ellingham, who has a way with images that seem intended to benefit from the projection of screens, and musician SJF (Simon James French), who has a way with held tones and underlying drama.
The website contains five pages, each pairing one of Ellingham’s striking photos along with a roughly 10-minute recording by SJF. The images are still, but a gentle current pushes clouds across the screen, from left to right. (Pictured up top is Bangkok.) For added emotional undercurrent, there’s an option to add some rain. It’s a beautiful collection, and a moody accompaniment if you have a spare screen at your disposal.
The score is also available for streaming and purchase:
Wander The Night by Simon James French
Visit at wanderthenight.com, and don’t expect to leave anytime soon. The photos are available as prints and in book form: store.derive.tokyo.
July 20, 2020
Listen Out a Window
The great thing about window-swap.com isn’t necessarily the view. WindowSwap is a site where people can experience browser-spanning views out other people’s windows, and the folks sharing their view generally seem to leave the microphones on. So you don’t just see. You hear. You listen. When you have a glimpse out a window in Wangerooge, Germany, for example, you can hear water gurgling, as well as what seems to be office noise. When the feed switches to Haridwar, India, there’s birdsong. A siren passes, the source unseen, by someone’s pad in Mexico City, Mexico. There’s pots and pans rattling from a home in the Indonesian city of Tangerang. It goes on and on, around the globe and back again. It isn’t an endless itinerary, though. I’ve only used it a few times, and already come to notice repeat windows.
If WindowSwap brings the world close, details from the individual settings make the notion of distance (that is, of difference) more amorphous. The Tangerang kitchen has a radio playing, of all things, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual.” The shot of Bangkok, Thailand, is as generic as might be: open laptop inside, dangling power cables outside; nearby are sounds of construction work. And then there’s the houseplants, which are universal, with an emphasis on pint-sized succulents. As it turns out, nothing is unusual.
Nothing is unusual in part because a shared aesthetic has kicked in. No human is in view, at least not on the inside of the buildings. The window in each is likely centered and fairly horizontal, or outside the frame of your browser. No brands are to be seen. And what we hear is quiet precisely because the people doing the filming are themselves, for the most part, keeping quiet. We’re hearing their world in a unique circumstance where they are doing their best not to be heard. It isn’t everyday life; it’s life minus us (with some exceptions made for actual activity, generally at least a room away).
It’s also not everyone’s life. It’s a self-selecting cohort who have the interest and time to participate, and whose domestic life allows for such a thing. The supposed quiet of right now, amid the pandemic, can be overstated. There is violence, and protest, and anxiety, and noise. To a degree, the windows viewed through on WindowSwap comprise the opposite of disaster tourism. It’s a depiction of placidity in a world that is, in point of fact, anything but. That siren in Mexico City is the rare discordant sound in all the videos I witnessed. WindowSwap is, in a manner of speaking, another form of peer-to-peer sharing.
That said, though, the service is beautiful, and serene at a time when serenity is in short supply. In my office-chair travel, I didn’t just tour the quiet world; I also came across some familiar views, one from far across San Francisco, where I live, and another from a window on a rainy evening in Manhattan. The latter was especially familiar, and then I noticed the name Nomadic Ambience in its corner. That’s a YouTube channel I subscribe to, one of several that post lengthy, uncut footage of stationary and ambulatory periods. It was a uniquely internet experience to run into not someone but someplace, someplace that was familiar, a place I’ve never been and yet where I have spent considerable time. I often have such videos running in slow motion on a secondary screen at my desk.
According to a Guardian story by Poppy Noor, WindowSwap’s developers, Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, are based in Singapore, and initially created it for friends during our extended pandemic, and later opened it up to submissions. The videos aren’t live, which explains why so many tend to be shot during daylight hours. The submission guidelines request the recordings be 10 minutes in length, long enough to immerse oneself in. And there’s a caveat, listed as an “update” on the submissions page, that brings up privacy concerns: “All videos have sound. So please make sure not to say anything private or sensitive. If you want your sound to be removed please let us know. Or record a video without sound. To safeguard your privacy, we will only display your first name in the credits. If you want your full name to be added, let us know.” Sound may have been a secondary consideration upon launch of WindowSwap, but it’s at least 50 percent of the experience.
Check it out at window-swap.com. The above images are, from top to bottom, of Shanghai, Copenhagen, and Singapore.
July 19, 2020
Current Listens: Noctural Tokyo, Philly Beats
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.)
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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ Deborah Walker’s Starflux, on the Elli Records label, ends with a spectral reworking of the prior tracks, committed by Emanuele Battisti, who also mastered the record and, thus, knew Walker’s work intimately. The metronomic rhythms of the source audio are re-rendered with a halo effect, the earthy original material turned into something intergalactic.
▰ This isn’t music, per se. It’s an hour-long video someone took while walking around a neighborhood in Yokohama, Japan, at night. There is sound, however, the associated field recording of overheard chatter, and footsteps, and crosswalk signals. I usually have something like this running at half speed on a second screen when I work. Even better in black and white.
An added treat: the recorder of these videos, who goes by Rambalac, posts a map of the route. Here’s the one for this footage:
▰ A couple months ago I highlighted a set of Small Professor’s instrumental hip-hop, and then missed the arrival of a subsequent downtempo hip-hop collection, A Jawn Supreme (Vol. 1). As the title might suggest, Small Pro, who traffics in expertly reworked samples, is based in Philadelphia. One highlight is the fractured piano lead on “Reflection,” in which the producer’s hand is just as light yet present as that of the original pianist.
A Jawn Supreme (Vol. 1) by Small Professor
July 18, 2020
This Week in Sound: Web-Only Edition
I haven’t sent out an issue of the This Week in Sound email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet) in awhile, not since mid-May. The world and life are complex right now, demanding in unfamiliar ways. I had some material stored up last week, but just didn’t have the time. Or more to the point, I had time, but not the time; the time I had, I spent alternately. As many who are spending far more time at home than they might be accustomed to, the logical expanse of time that might result from stationary existence is an illusion; there is, in fact, less time. Certainly less productive time, because recuperation is harder to come by, and more necessary than usual. The world outside is both more quiet and, especially in metaphoric terms, more noisy. Inside, we focus, take breaks, make progress.
In any case, had an issue of This Week in Sound gone out last Monday, this is the core of what would have been in it. I hope to get back to the email version soon.
And as always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.
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THIS WEEK IN SOUND
▰ “[A]nimals that lower their voices to sound bigger are often skilled vocalists,” goes an uncredited story at phys.org. “Both strategies — sounding bigger and learning sounds — are likely driven by sexual selection, and may play a role in explaining the origins of human speech evolution.”
https://phys.org/news/2020-07-animals-bigger-good.html
▰ Mariusz Kozak wrote in the Washington Post about the role songs play in protests: “The first is that the meaning of music is deliberately imprecise — in technical terms, music is referentially ambiguous. The same song can be significant in different ways to different listeners, or even to the same person on different occasions. The second feature is that listeners can still connect with each other emotionally by moving together in synchrony with what they hear and with each other.” (via Diana Deutsch)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/07/protest-chants-musicology-solidarity/
▰ Much as Darth Vader has that trademark breathing sound, “a distinctive ambient sound,” in the words of sound designer Ben Burtt, was also planned for Boba Fett. The problem was, the audience never heard it “because he never appeared in a quiet place.” Germain Lussier gets into the details.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-boba-fetts-sound-was-a-mystery-for-almost-20-years-1844280863
▰ “What started as a minor change to a common song has now morphed into a continent-wide phenomenon before our very ears,” writes Carly Cassella of a sparrow’s song, and its viral influence on the broader bird population. “Between 2000 and 2019, this small change has travelled over 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) from British Columbia (BC) to central Ontario, virtually wiping out a historic song ending that’s been around since the 1950s at least.” (via subtopes)
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-sparrow-song-went-viral-across-canada-and-it-s-unlike-anything-we-ve-heard-before
▰ “Scientists have developed a gadget that can reduce the intensity of noise pollution passing through an open window,” writes Anthony Cuthberston. “A proof-of-principle study is published in the journal Scientific Reports, detailing a prototype that makes use of 18 microphones and 24 speakers to eliminate half of the sounds passing through a window.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/noise-cancelling-windows-sound-reduction-traffic-pollution-a9610856.html
▰ There’s a fundraiser to save the Dream House of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/save-the-dream-house-keep-our-dream-alive
▰ Reading John Zorn on the late Ennio Morricone is like reading Zorn on Zorn: “Having roots in both popular music and the avant-garde, Morricone was an innovator, and he overcame each new challenge with a fresh approach, retaining a curiosity and childlike sense of wonder.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/arts/music/ennio-morricone-john-zorn.html
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GRACE NOTES
▰ The local school district is SFUSD (San Francisco Unified School District). When there’s an auto-call with an announcement of some sort (tl;dr: “You probably wanna know if school will open come fall. Well, so do we.”), the alert pronounces it as if it were a name: “Suh-fuh-sed.”
▰ One word disappointingly absent from all those tracks listed in the upcoming expansive box set of my favorite Prince album: “instrumental.”
▰ I’m not practicing guitar. I’m performing a trio with dishwasher and passing traffic.
▰ Aretha Franklin foresaw the nuanced social negotiations involved when planning virtual-conference events during a pandemic. “You think you’re smooth / And you can pick and choose when the time is right.”
▰ I recently watched both seasons of Star Wars: Resistance, and the the best caption was “[distressed beep].” Those rollie droids sure are emotive.
▰ Once I realized that the voice actor of Neeku in Star Wars: Resistance is the same actor as Big Head in Silicon Valley, it all made sense.
▰ Heads up to musicians who regularly send out PR announcements to as many email addresses as they can. Those are, increasingly, showing up in my spam folder. Having your email designated as spam is the internet’s karmic response to what is, big surprise, actually in fact spamming.
▰ Why does Twitter keep recommending that I follow the account of a composer who died toward the end of 2016, an account that hasn’t been updated since about a month prior to the death?
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Subscribe to This Week in Sound at (tinyletter.com/disquiet).
Listening to The Lawnmower Man
Bean re-watching some old cyberpunk (and “cyberpunk”) movies lately, among them The Lawnmower Man (1992). As someone who does record an audio journal most nights before going to sleep (and auto-transcribing it so that I can read it in the morning over coffee), I enjoyed feeling called out at this moment, when the scientist played by Pierce Brosnan dictates the findings of the day from his underground experiments. (That’s not my reflection in the screen. That’s another scene fading with the current one.)
And there’s this bit, which is in the Blade Runner mode of Roy Batty’s “tears in the rain” speech (from a decade earlier), straining for a bit of singularity grandiosity. The title character, recognizing his digitally enhanced ascension, proclaims, “Once I’ve entered the neural net, my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison.”
July 17, 2020
4’33” on Ukulele
It’s World Listening Day tomorrow, July 18, coincident with the birthday of the important composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, who will turn 87 years of age. It was Schafer who helped us understand the world of sound around us as a consensual composition. Like John Cage, who was two decades his senior, Schafer helped us strive to hear through our cultural experience so we could gain perspective on it. It is to him we own the modern sense of the word “soundscape.” In this video, uploaded this evening, the night before World Listening Day, Todd Elliott performs John Cage’s 4’33”, and true to the original, he notes the change in the movements: he fingers new chords, but the music remains silent. Or does it? A point of Cage’s 4’33” (I hesitate to say “the” point, as doing so would be helplessly reductive) is to both recognize the contours of the performance, the cultural signifiers, and to hear through them, to hear the world framed by them (in his writings, Cage brings up the wire scupltures of Richard Lippold as a useful comparison). The beauty of this video is that the quietness tempts you to just leave it as is, and imagine it to be silent. But it isn’t silent, not in the sense of a digital void. Turn up the volume and hear the fan, a sliver of which is in view, haloing Elliott’s head. Gain a sense of the room tone. Note variations, like the uptick in the room’s hum that happens around the 2:30 mark. Part of the composition-ness of Cage’s 4’33” is the extent to which it is truly perform-able. There are rules to it, and the thoughtful performance considers them. It isn’t merely sitting still for the prescribed length of time. Elliott’s rendition is solid, including the brief bit of heard uke and the broad smile at the end.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. Todd is friend who recently relocated to New Orleans, where this was shot. It serves as a parallel listening experience to the recent home-office field recording of another NOLA-based friend, Rob Walker.
July 16, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0446: WWWLDD
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, July 20, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 16, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0446: WWWLDD
The Assignment: Celebrate World Listening Day for the whole weekend.
Step 1: This weekend it’s World Listening Day, which occurs every year on July 18, which is the birthday of R. Murray Schafer, the composer and acoustic ecologist. This year, the theme for World Listening Day is “The Collective Field,” as proposed by Katherine Krause.
Step 2: Read about this theme, “The Collective Field,” at:
https://worldlisteningday.org/
Step 3: Make a piece of music for World Listening Day, inspired by the theme, or just in the spirit of the occasion.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0446” (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 “disquiet0446” (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-0446-wwwldd/
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, July 20, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 16, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0446” 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 446th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0446: WWWLDD — The Assignment: Celebrate World Listening Day for the whole weekend — at:
More on World Listening Day at:
https://worldlisteningday.org/
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-0446-wwwldd/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image detail via the Wikipedia page for R. Murray Schafer:
