Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 232

Record Respectfully

If you use the Google Recorder app, this is the default screen when there are no recordings presently stored. I’d love to see the dozen or so alternate bits of language that preceded this one’s refinement and selection. This is the “Drink Responsibly” of our current tacit-surveillance era.

Disquiet Junto Project 0441: Three Stones

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, June 15, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 11, 2020.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0441: Three Stones
The Assignment: Make music that explores territory sonically.

This project is the first 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 in independent local radio station partnering with the festival.

Step 1: Find three stones from one location.

Step 2: Consider how the stones can be thought to connect (physically, historically, culturally, psychologically) with where they originated, with a sense of region, of place, of terroir.

Step 3: Record source audio from the stones identified in Step 1.

Step 4: Compose and record a piece of music with the sounds from Step 3 exploring the ideas from Step 2.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0441” (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 “disquiet0441” (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-0441-three-stones/

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, June 15, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 11, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0441” 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 441st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0441: Three Stones — Make music that explores territory sonically — at:

https://disquiet.com/0441/

This is the first 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:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0441-three-stones/

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, 15. Juni 2020 um 23.59 Uhr, wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 11. Juni 2020 gepostet.

Dies sind die Anweisungen, welche an die Email-Liste der Gruppe (unter tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto) versandt wurden:

Disquiet Junto Project 0441: Three Stones
Die Aufgabe: Mache Musik, welche ein Terrain klanglich erkundet

Dies ist das erste 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: Wähle an einem Ort drei Steine aus.

Schritt 2: Denke darüber nach wie diese Steine mit ihrem Herkunftsort in Verbindung gebracht werden können – physisch, historisch, kulturell, psychologisch -, in Bezug auf die Region, den Ort, Terroir.

Schritt 3: Mache Aufnahmen mit den in Schritt 1 gewählten Steinen.

Schritt 4: Komponiere ein Stück mit den Klängen aus Schritt 3, in welchem du die Überlegungen aus Schritt 2 auslotest.

Sieben weitere wichtige Schritte wenn deine Komposition fertig ist:

Schritt 1: Schritt 1: Verwende „disquiet0441″ (ohne Leerschläge und Anführungszeichen) im Namen deines Tracks.

Schritt 2: Falls deine Audioplattform Tags zulässt: stelle sicher dass du den Projekt-Tag „disquiet0441″ (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-0441-three-stones/

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, 15. Juni 2020 um 23.59 Uhr wo immer du bist. Das Projekt wurde am Donnerstag, 11. Juni 2020 gepostet.

Dauer: Die Dauer des Stückes ist dir überlassen.

Titel/Tag: Wenn du das Stück postest, verwende bitte „disquiet0441″ 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 441. wöchentliche Disquiet Junto-Projekt – Three Stones
Die Aufgabe: Mache Musik, welche ein Terrain klanglich erkundet
– unter:

https://disquiet.com/0441/

Dies ist das erste von drei Projekten in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Musikfestival Bern 2019, welches vom 11.-15. September stattfindet. Weitere Informationen unter:

https://www.musikfestivalbern.ch/

https://www.facebook.com/musikfestivalbern/

Mehr zur Disquiet Junto unter:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Abonniere die wöchentlichen Projekt-Ankündigungen hier:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Die Diskussion des Projekts findet statt auf llllllll.co unter:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0441-three-stones/

Ausserdem gibt es einen Junto Slack-Channel. Sende deine Email-Adresse an twitter.com/disquiet um Zugang zum Channel zu erhalten.

Listening Backwards to Slow Meadow

By the Ash Tree by Slow Meadow

Slow Meadow’s new album, By the Ash Tree, opens with cascades of delays and proceeds through three tracks of reflective piano, but the real keeper is the outro, which is helpfully titled “Outro.” At almost exactly the same length as the album’s opening cut, “Prelude,” barely two minutes, perhaps “Outro” is just that played backwards. Backwards is very much its mode, little wisps of melody and sound doing slow-motion back flips as they fade beyond of hearing range, barely apparitions during their brief spell, and quickly gone. It’s a delicate little bit of ambience, as the liner notes describe it, and while “Outro” serves to close the record, the piece deserves the close listening of its audience.
Album released on June 5 at slowmeadow.bandcamp.com. Slow Meadow is Matt Kidd of Houston, Texas. More from Slow Meadow at slowmeadow.com.

Counter-intuitive, Counter-clockwise

What a thing of beauty. Four buttons in two vertical pairs, tan ones on the right, white on the left. For no apparent reason, the lowest number of the four addresses is in the lower right, and then the others proceed counter-clockwise, which is to say counter-intuitively: 303, 305, 307, 309. The two labels on the right are from a different era than the one in the lower left. Both typefaces, however, share an oddness: the threes overly stylized, the zeros out of proportion. (It’s as if in the intervening years, the label maker was upgraded, but the product number remained the same, so when time came for a replacement, a process-oriented property manager trusted the paperwork and not their eyes.) As for poor 307, it lost its label long enough ago that the subsequent hand-written number has, itself, faded, left virtually illegible without the context of the neighboring units. Someone, at least, has learned a lesson and taken preemptive action with 303, reinforcing the label’s aging message with black magic marker. But what giveth also taketh away. The same marker appears to have been used to draw an arrow on the 303 button. It points up and to the left. That instruction remains open for interpretation.

An Ecosystem Unto Itself

Organic Adventures by Natural Life Essence

Organic Adventures earns its title over six tracks of field-recording-filled, rain-dappled, thunder-enhanced, bird-song-adorned tracks. The album comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina’s Juan Pablo Giacovino, aka Natural Life Essence. Presumably the release is a thematic follow-up to Giacovino’s earlier In-Organic Adventures, which was all soothingly digital music: shimmery, quivering, shiny tracks of synthetic unrealism.

In contrast, the music on Organic Adventures is all pleasure-zone-out bliss. The album is an ecosystem unto itself. Some of it gets downright funky, like the dub-flavored “Organic Adverntures-3,” but more often it is densely, droningly minimalistic. “Organic Adventures 4(Part II)” could be a lost Terry Riley recording, a Fourth World raga. “Liberation(Flying Free)” mixes actual nature sounds with fillips of timbral debris.

Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid the music is that it seems not only organic but generative. So sedate yet shifty are the various layers of sound, that they leave behind the traditional concept of composition and come to work more as expertly honed atmospheres. Science fiction that explores artificial life often employs the trope of the expert craftsperson, one who can shape an eyeball or a bonsai tree from inorganic substances and yet make it as real as that which it emulates. Juan Pablo Giacovino is just such a craftsperson of sound. The scifi vibe is affirmed on the album’s final track, “Organic Adventures 8,” which includes an exploratory voiceover — what appears to be someone reading Robert M. Hazen’s 2012 book The Story of Earth — that sometimes struggles to be heard amid the overwhelming sound field it can be imagined to describe.

Album originally released by the Neotantra label on June 5, 2020, at neotantra.bandcamp.com.

Current Listens: Violin Minature, SuperCollider Outtakes

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

▰ The Castle of Our Skins ensemble has been running a challenge to black composers to create miniature compositions. The latest is a piece for viola and voice, composed by Yaz Lancaster, and performed by Ashleigh Gordon. It’s less than a minute long, and every second has been taken into consideration. (Thanks again, Tom May, of memeteria.com, for having introduced me to Castle of Our Skins.)

▰ This album of various Norah Lorway tracks from the past decade is a powerful collection of music made in the audio-coding language SuperCollider and employing field recordings. And Then You Win ranges from light glitchy atmospheres (“Crackly Sky”) to pulsing techno (“Clatter”), nine tracks in all.

AND THEN YOU WIN by Norah Lorway

▰ The Japanese musician Michiru Aoyama, who runs the small Bullflat3.8 record label, uploads an enormous amount of ambient music to his SoundCloud account, often multiple tracks today. “Recording 20200606060100” is a lush, shoegazy trip with a sedate but promiment pulse.

The Golden Gate Bridge Hum

This 30-second video, filmed through my open back door around 6pm California time today, Saturday, June 6, gives a sense of the hum whose emanation from the Golden Gate Bridge has gained notoriety this weekend. There’s quite a bit of wind and rustling to be heard, and amid that is a clear, guttural drone, as if a bullfrog had taken up Tuvan throat singing. This is not the way this part of the world usually sounds.

I first got word of the hum Friday evening, June 5, shortly after 8pm, when Barry Threw, executive director of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, DM’d me a tweet from Aki Rodić, a local computer graphics specialist. Rodić’s tweet read “New railings on the Golden Gate Bridge are producing deafening eeirie sound that can be heard for miles,” accompanied by an emoji for the bridge and linking to a video, the sole video, on a YouTube account attributed to Roaming Records. The video is titled “Deafening Sound Over Golden Gate Bridge.” Recorded at 2:34pm earlier that same day, it plays for 59 seconds, showing the view through the front window of a car as it crosses the bridge. A haunting sound is prominent, a ghostly choral effect, like the world’s largest glass harmonica had been brought in to score a film titled Escape from San Francisco.

This evening, reports of the strange phenomenon outrank the demonstration that blocked traffic on the bridge this afternoon. A report by CNN’s Alisha Ebrahimji quoted a spokesperson for the bridge, “We knew going into the handrail replacement that the Bridge would sing during exceptionally high winds from the west, as we saw yesterday.” A KQED report notes, as well, it was understood in advance that the design change “would begin to hum” in high winds.

The Golden Gate Bridge Hum should not be confused with “the Hum,” a “low-frequency buzz” that numerous people around the world complain about, and that has led to numerous theories as to its origin. Nor is a fully intentional music composition, like the “singing road” on a stretch of Route 66 in New Mexico that plays “America the Beautiful,” produced by National Geographic:

San Francisco has its share of soundmarks, to use Canadian composer and acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer’s term for the sonic equivalent of landmarks. One of them, the weekly Tuesday noon test of the outdoor public warning system, went silent this past December, at the start of a two-year rehabilitation project. Perhaps by the end of 2021, we’ll hear it in a duet with the bridge.

For geographic reference, I live in the Richmond District of San Francisco, just north of Golden Gate Park and roughly three miles from the center of the Golden Gate Bridge. We’ll see, in the coming weeks, as the wind slows, whether this is an isolated event, or if the high winds have awoken our ears to a sound that we’ll now notice more regularly.

Video originally posted to youtube.com/disquiet.

A Hat for Social Distancing

The sounds of footsteps, birdsong, and occasional beeps accompany Håkan Lidbo as he walks around Stockholm, Sweden, in this video he posted on May 31. The beeps aren’t a soundtrack, any more than are the other heard elements. The beeps are the result of proximity alerts courtesy of the Corona Hat he’s seen wearing. The hat, Lidbo’s own invention, looks like what might have happened had Devo been given control of the CDC back in January. Costing less than 20 euros, it’s constructed from a parking sensors and a globe. Lidbo has a very specific recommendation for powering it: “rechargeable robot vacuum cleaner batteries.” He notes in the accompanying explanatory text that Sweden has not been enforcing lockdown. The hat appears to be his informed precaution.

Major thanks to Michael Calore of Wired for drawing my attention to the video. I’m sad to say I lost track of Lidbo for more than a decade. According to the disquiet.com archive search, I first wrote about his music back in early 2004, but haven’t since mid-2009. According to the massive navigation at his own website, he’s been up to an enormous amount in the intervening years. Plenty to dig into.

More on the Corona Hat at hakanlidbo.com/coronahat. Video originally posted at youtube.com. Moe from Lidbo at hakanlidbo.com.

My Inbox

Snapshot of my email. An occasional reminder that if you’re wondering why I haven’t replied to your music PR it’s because of the sheer amount of music PR. As always:

I listen continuously.
I write about what I’m drawn to write about.
I’m a horrible pen pal.

BLM x Bandcamp

The excellent Bandcamp site is again waving its share of record sales today. The initial announcement referred to the current pandemic as the inspiration, and also noted “organizations in support of racial justice and change.” The event gained traction as a means to support black musicians in particular. Below is a list of some recommendations. Also, on Friday, June 19, they’re donating all their share of profits to NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The June 5 sale runs “from midnight to midnight Pacific Time.”

arckatron.bandcamp.com
damuthefudgemunk.bandcamp.com
djrobswift.bandcamp.com
dualsite.bandcamp.com
galcherlustwerk.bandcamp.com
kevbrown.bandcamp.com
klein1997.bandcamp.com
kmru.bandcamp.com
laraajimusic.bandcamp.com
lorainejames.bandcamp.com
markusfloats.bandcamp.com
matana-roberts.bandcamp.com
meroitic.bandcamp.com
pete-rock.bandcamp.com
relizee.bandcamp.com
robertaikiaubreylowe.bandcamp.com
smallprofessor.bandcamp.com
tyondai.bandcamp.com