Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 228
July 15, 2020
Orbital Patterns Goes Deep
“A Vessel in the Fog,” uploaded to the YouTube channel of the musician who goes by Orbital Patterns just this Monday, is a live ambient piece. Textures twist and turn like clouds of smoke, turning in the air before vaporizing and being replaced by something else, something similar and yet apart. There’s numerous such elements at any given time, packed like sediment in a vibrant terrarium: surface noise, and muffled chords, and crunchy percussives like fall leaves under foot, and what sounds like psychedelic guitar riffs going round and round. It’s a beautiful piece, gaining depth as it goes, a deep bass tone slowly making itself heard and lending a slow, thoughtful pace to what might otherwise be an understated roil. It is clearly, so to speak, the title vessel.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More at instagram.com/0rbitalpatterns and twitter.com/orbitalpatterns.
July 14, 2020
Yo La Tengo Summon the Now
James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday) by Yo La Tengo
The Terry Riley force is strong with this new Yo La Tengo single. Bearing the title “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” it’s the famed indie-rock band in full meditative mode. It’s a flowing drone that has the raga quality of early Riley. If you’d said this is something off the new Laraaji album, it’d make sense, what with the echoey, zithery goings-on — except of course, the new Laraaji record is solo piano. So while that early ambient musician is revisiting the purpose of songs, this song-making band is exploring spaciousness, formlessness, song-less-ness.
Well, not song-less, so much as pre-song, proto-song, nascent song. As member Ira Kaplan explains in an accompanying note on the track’s Bandcamp release page: “If you’ve spent any time hanging out with us at our rehearsal space in Hoboken — that pretty much covers none of you — you’ve heard us playing formlessly (he said, trying to sidestep the word ‘improvising’). Most of the songs we’ve written in the last 25 years have begun that way, but often we do it for no other reason than to push away the outside world.” So, what this is is the space in which a song might occur, the raw stuff from which a song might arise. Sidestepping the word “improvising” feels like a solid step. This doesn’t sound like improvising so much as it does like three people finding common tonal ground, and upon finding it, holding onto it for as long as feels right, and not a moment longer.
“James set up one microphone in the middle of the room in case we stumbled on something useful for the future,” writes Ira (the James is fellow member James McNew). “Instead we decided to release something we did right now.” This is the sound of right now. Or it was yesterday, when it came out. We’re not currently inhabiting a now worth celebrating, and yet yesterday’s now was splendid — is splendid. Here’s to more of such a now, while the broader, untenable now persists.
The song’s release coincided with the launch of Yo La Tengo’s Bandcamp page. Track originally posted at yolatengo.bandcamp.com. More from Yo La Tengo at yolatengo.com.
July 13, 2020
Details in the Beat
NoLetUps. [Beat Tape] by Jansport J
How the central sample seems to melt on “Antiques,” atop a rhythm that nudges along, little changes making themselves heard, a glitch on the beat here, a volume tweak there. How the snare on “KutKlose” is trimmed within a millisecond of its snare-ness, so compact is the repeated snippet. How the vocal-harmony sample on “letmyselfgo” is so muffled that it’s virtually unintelligible, and all the more musical for it (ditto the solo female voice reduced to a bell tone and a warble on “gimmethereason”). There’s much to love on NoLetUps., a beat tape from Jansport J, released back in mid-March. Those are just some starting points. Dig in.
Album originally posted at jansportjmusic.com. More from Jansport J, who is based in Los Angeles, at twitter.com/JansportJ.
July 12, 2020
Current Listens: Philadelphia Beat Tape, Spacious Score
Minimalist patterning. Atmospheric score. Philadelphia beat tape. Fripp’s quietude. 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
▰ Gorgeous little pre-release taste of Memory Loops, an album due out July 31 from Arms and Sleepers (aka Mark McGlinchey and Mirza Ramic). The soft repetitive patterns and descending melodic riff sound like the start of something, which makes sense since the track is the first of the album’s projected 14.
Memory Loops by ARMS AND SLEEPERS
▰ Cello, violin, voice — spare elements are the building blocks for the roomy music Martha Skye Murphy composed for a film titled The Late Departure, by Ivan Krzeszowiec. Listen for the entrancing electronic touches, like the glitchy delay midway through “Connecting Flight.” (Felix Stephens on cello, Murphy on the remainder.)
The Late Departure (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Martha Skye Murphy
▰ David Evan McDowell, aka Philadelphia-based musician æon, started 2020 with Rebirth, a dozen downtempo hip-hop (mostly) instrumentals full of jazz samples, surface noise, rhythmic play, and a remarkable sense of space.
▰ Robert Fripp continues to make good on his promise of 50 straight weeks of “Music for Quiet Moments” instrumentals. The latest, “Skyscape (Chicago 12 Oct 2005),” number 11 in the series, is more synth-driven than some of the others, though his guitar certainly makes itself heard.
July 11, 2020
Listening from Afar
Some of my earliest regular Twitter activities involved simply posting descriptions of what I heard: the whir of cars driving by, the droning inside a train, the birdsong outside a window. I consider such posts a form of field recording, just using words instead of a microphone (a perspective I wrote about at more length a few years ago at nmbx.newmusicusa.org). This activity happened back during a more civilized age, before social media became the conflicted zone it is today. These days it takes some solid muting and circumscribed attention to keep Twitter to something approximating useful and enjoyable. Once in a while I’ll go back to that old habit, and post what the world sounds like at a given moment. And sometimes the world answers back, not with an echo, but with reports from elsewhere, and not just on Twitter, but via Instagram and Facebook, where I’ll post as well. This is what I posted this past week:
Evening sounds: dishwasher and low-level electric hum. A single car passes, producing a light rumble, felt as much as heard*, neither all that much. Time passes. No foot traffic. No animal sound. No voices.**
*Yeah, hearing is a physical sensation.
**Yeah, humans are animals.
And these are responses I received:
1: the loud cyclical white noise pulse of the AC fan and it’s low frequency throb felt through my desktop. Rain splatter on the steel AC case, rain splatter on the window glass, rain splatter on the plastic over the hole in the plastic AC side panel, all three distinct filters
(from twitter.com/cranksatori)
2: An indistinct, muffled thump from who knows where, a cat meowing repeatedly somewhere outside, the crunch of tires on gravel fades out into the distance, wind blows through the trees.
(from twitter.com/PhilBerdecio)
3: There is a heat wave going on where I am. Lucky to have air con, which has been running constantly. Reminds me of the sound inside the cabin on a long haul flight.
(from instagram.com/sodajonze)
July 10, 2020
Sofie Birch Explores the Fourth World
Themes For A Better Tomorrow Vol. II 'Hidden Terraces' by Sofie Birch
Sofie Birch’s album Hidden Terraces describes itself in various ways. It is an “audible postcard produced in Colombia,” and it serves up “Remedial Sounds for a Forlorn Nation,” and it is part (volume two) of a series titled “Themes for a Better Tomorrow.” What it is is splendid, sometimes downtempo, often rhythm-less music that takes a very long time to arrive, and much of its pleasure is in the experience of that arrival: not where it starts or where it ends up so much as how it traverses the space, the continuum, in between. Those grooves, slowly and only in retrospect, appear out of an opening collage of field recordings, bits of spoken — mumbled, really — language, and tonal material that the ear might recognize as musical subconsciously before becoming aware. That’s “Morgenånder” (“Morning Spirits”), the first of the album’s two tracks (one is available for free-streaming, the other after purchase, at vaagner.bandcamp.com). The second is “Vidsyn” (“Broad Views”), which is more expressively amorphous, beginning with the rattle of a wooden instrument before delving into birdsong, drones, and chanting, often at the same time. The album should have strong appeal to listeners to Fourth World music. The material was collected during a trip that Birch, who is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, recorded in Colombia. Now that she has returned, it’s the listener’s turn to travel.
More from Sofie Birch at birchis.com.
July 9, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute
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 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 9, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto:
Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute
The Assignment: Read maps of a river as a graphic score.
This project is the second 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: Look at the three maps below, all of the river Aare, a tributary that circumnavigates the city of Bern. One is from the late 18th century. The other two are modern renditions from Google Maps.
Step 2: Use one or more of those images by interpreting them as graphic scores and composing a resulting piece of music.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0445” (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 “disquiet0445” (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-0445-aare-tribute/
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 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, July 9, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0445” 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 445th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute — The Assignment: Read maps of a river as a graphic score — at:
This is the second 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-0445-aare-tribute/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
. . .
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, 13. Juli 2020 um 23.59 Uhr, wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 9. Juli 2020 gepostet.
Dies sind die Anweisungen, welche an die Email-Liste der Gruppe (unter tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) versandt wurden:
Disquiet Junto Project 0445: Aare Tribute
Die Aufgabe: Interpretiere Karten eines Flusses als grafische Partitur
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: Sieh dir die drei beiliegenden Karten an. Sie alle bilden die Aare ab, welche die Stadt Bern umfliesst. Eine Karte stammt aus dem späten 18. Jahrhundert. Die anderen beiden sind moderne Abbildungen aus Google Maps.
Schritt 2: Wähle eines oder mehrere dieser Bilder aus, interpretiere sie als grafische Partituren und komponiere davon ausgehend ein Musikstück.
Sieben weitere wichtige Schritte wenn deine Komposition fertig ist:
Schritt 1: Schritt 1: Verwende „disquiet0445″ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) im Namen deines Tracks.
Schritt 2: Falls deine Audioplattform Tags zulässt: stelle sicher dass du den Projekt-Tag „disquiet0445″ (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-project-0445-aare-tribute/
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, 13. Juli 2020 um 23.59 Uhr wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 9. Juni 2020 gepostet.
Dauer: Die Dauer des Stückes ist dir überlassen.
Titel/Tag: Wenn du das Stück postest, verwende bitte „disquiet0445″ 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 445. wöchentliche Disquiet Junto-Projekt – Aare Tributary -Interpretiere Karten eines Flusses als grafische Partitur – unter:
Dies ist das zweite von drei Projekten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2019, welches vom 2-6. September stattfindet. Weitere Informationen unter:
https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/
https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern
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-project-0445-aare-tribute/
Ausserdem gibt es einen Junto Slack-Channel. Sende deine Email-Adresse an twitter.com/disquiet um Zugang zum Channel zu erhalten.
July 8, 2020
Cortini Plays with a PlayStation Score
The forthcoming PlayStation game Ghost of Tsushima has an original score by Ilan Eshkeri (veteran of such movies as Still Alice and Dr. Thorne) and Shigeru Umebayashi (whose lengthy career includes House of Flying Daggers and 2046, the latter by Wong Kar-wai). The releasing game studio, Sucker Punch, has enlisted some big names in popular electronic music to rework cues. These include Alessandro Cortini (best known as a member of Nine Inch Nails), the Glitch Mob, Tokimonsta, and Tycho. The resulting EP is due out Friday on the record label Milan. Cortini posted his remix to his YouTube channel. It’s a thrilling, cinematic piece, at once densely atmospheric and yet also pulse-rising. Absolutely gorgeous. It’s as much an alternate cue as it is a remix.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More on the game, due out July 17, at playstation.com.
July 7, 2020
Hainbach on Asynchronous Loops
This isn’t a performance video, per se, but it’s a brief, informative spotlight on the musician Hainbach talking about something central to his music-making process. That thing, the “One Thing,” per the title of this series from the music equipment (software and hardware) company Ableton, is asynchronous loops: two or more loops that are of different lengths, as a result of which, they don’t overlap in a consistent manner, leading to an ever-changing series of sonic instances. I love asynchronous loops, which is why I have two foot pedals that are simple loopers, and why I’ve been confused over the years as various highly functional music-making tools I’ve tried out (such as the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and, more recently, the Synthstrom Deluge) don’t support asynchronous loops.
Video originally posted at youtube.com.
July 6, 2020
Rob Walker Shares a “Sound Shot”
Time passes, and it’s awhile since you’ve seen a friend. And then you get a sense of their life that fills in the gaps a bit. Sure, there’s phone calls, and email, and voice conferencing, not to mention second-hand glimpses of them through their work. But then there’s something special, something unusual: a field recording of what their daily life sounds like — say, for example, what their office sounds like on a Sunday morning. Such a recording was posted by Rob Walker yesterday, a week after it was captured. The brief track, just a minute, is a glimpse of quiet from somewhere else. (He lives in New Orleans. I used to. We both lived there at the same time, then we both moved away, and then he moved back.) The track is tagged “sound shot,” a term that will be familiar to readers of Walker’s book, The Art of Noticing (which included some nice words about some of my work with sound). It’s from a chapter about “sonic journalist” Peter Cusack, and the idea is to record the sound of a place much as one might take a photo of a place: a sound shot, in lieu of a snapshot.
Read more about “sound shots” in Walker’s email newsletter. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/murketing.
