Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 251
February 12, 2020
Hallmarks of Space Music
Like some sort of interstellar cowboy music, the track “;) collection of inadaptable flint” (the title also includes an emoji or emoji-like image of what appears* to be a cat with a red headband riding a dinosaur), merges flanged-out vapor trails that fill your speaker spectrum and closely mic’d instrumentation that plucks out a slow, reflective melody. The recording is at once sprawling and intimate, broad as the sky, and yet also close as your shoulders gathered tight in front of a campfire. Throughout there are rattly, earthy sounds, and (again, a stark and somehow welcoming contrast) the sort of whispy weirdnesses that are hallmarks of space music intended for headphones only. The recording is by Léo Pensette, who goes by #T.one.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dark_tone.
*And, yes, I did look it up and learned all about ninja cats and dino cats. Because, as the saying goes, internet.
February 11, 2020
Teaching “Sounds of Brands” (2020), Week 1 of 15
This past Wednesday, February 5, 2020, was the first class meeting of Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds: The Role of Sound in the Media Landscape, a course I’ve been teaching since 2012 in San Francisco at the Academy of Art. The course is about the way things express themselves through sound, and by “things” I mean companies, products, services, and so forth. It can be everything from the sound design of an electric vehicle to the jingle of a fast-food restaurant to the music played in a retail establishment. How sound is employed as a form of expression in the marketplace, especially beyond the realm of pop-music storytelling, is what we explore each week.
I’m hopeful to find the time this semester to detail the class sessions here on Disquiet.com, but I also know I’ve tried and failed every semester so far. I’ve occasionally started off strong, and then the realities of teaching, and work beyond school, and life beyond all of that become reality, and the posts pretty soon fade out. I’ve documented the first week of class several times in the past, so the point of today’s post — as I get tomorrow’s class materials together — is primarily to link to those posts (2012, 2015, 2016).
To recap in brief, the course is divided into three sections, as depicted in the above chart. We spent the first three weeks on Learning to Listen (aka Listening to Media); the following six weeks on the core of the course, Sounds of Brands; and then the final six weeks on the opposite proposition, Brands of Sounds, or how things related to sound (headphones, music equipment, streaming services, record labels, etc.) express themselves in non-sonic ways.
Up top is what the blackboard looked like at the end of the first day of class. The writing seen here is a repository of notes, not a structured document. I’ll unpack some of that here:
“Sound Journal” refers to the centerpiece of the homework: writing four times a week in a diary about one’s experience of and thoughts about sound.
Below that are things like “laugh -> ha” and “keyboard -> click,” a list of a half dozen or so correlations between “things” and “the sounds things make.” That’s the result of the opening exercise in the course, when students sit for 10 minutes and write down every sound they hear. There are various things that come out of the exercise, among them an opportunity to discuss the difference between object and emission. To understand that saying “car” isn’t sufficient to describe the sound a car makes is an important lessons for a student just beginning to explore sound.
The note about onomatopoeia is pointing out that several of the things people heard (the list originated as bits of the students’ work in the exercise) that much of the description is quite literally a verbal expression of the sound. But some achieve a greater, more verbal level of detail, such as the “deep, guttural” sound of a motorcycle, and the “high-pitched, repetitive beeping” of a truck backing up.
The list in the upper left-hand corner contains elements the students noted in a series of TV commercials that, creatively, employ everyday noise sources (keyboards, pencils, coffee, books) to recreate the melody of a classic jingle.
Other terms, such as “soundscape” and “anechoic,” will be discussed more in week two, which happens tomorrow. I’ll try to get the time to report back on that class meeting, and the others as the semester proceeds. There are 15 weeks in all, 16 if you include spring break. There is one class meeting each week, and it lasts roughly three hours, a mix of lecture, discussion, and in-class exercises. Students than have nine hours of homework outside of class. If you’d like a copy of the syllabus outline, shoot me an email at marc@disquiet.com.
This Abiding Flow
“Dovum” by Suss Müsik is a study in contrasts: static against hum, broken melody against stately backdrop, gentle swells against fractured pulse, and overall a digital purity of sound that is employed to present materials whose cumulative chaos strives to approach that of the natural, analog, flesh-and-blood world. This balance of varied powers occurs over the course of 10-plus minutes, throughout which a sense of development, drama, and change are self-evident, but with none of the section markers that classical or pop music would employ. There is no brief chapter-break silence, no shift in key. There is, instead, simply this abiding flow. Only at the end does “Dovum” alter its pace, settling in for an extended denouement that presents its own, final contrast: it is at once quiet, peaceful to situate oneself amid — and yet in its attenuated quieting it makes the ear strain for every last, fading, fraying nuance.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/suss-musik. More from Suss Müsik at sussmusik.com and sussmusik.bandcamp.com.
February 10, 2020
Not Frozen, but Froze-ish
Granular synthesis lends itself to music that is at once majestic and circumspect. By capturing the tiniest slivers of sound and holding them for extended moments, it puts the listener in a place akin to near stasis: not frozen, but froze-ish. It gives your ears the chance to luxuriate, and contemplate, sound as a surrounding expanse. The mingling of experiences, when implemented well, can balance the breadth of a landscape painting with the focus of a haiku. The new album You Were Away by Stray Wool is well implemented in this regard. Its four tracks — some a leisurely five minutes, others nearly twice that length — take their time, and ours, to explore crevices within piano samples and, presumably, other sources. The results range widely between emotional states. The collection opens (“A1”) with what sounds, at times, like fog horns pushed to the breaking point, and ends with platonic ideal of pastoral ambience (“B2”). For all the slow motion, though, it is not without a sense of humor. The penultimate track, “B1,” begins with a sample of what appears to be an ethnographic researcher interviewing a musician who performs Celtic mouth music: “There are no instruments at all?” we hear her ask in amazement. The piece then moves forward like metal being bent by a powerful force, moaning under the pressure. Depends, apparently, on your definition of “instrument.”
Stray Wool is Pedro Figueiredo, a Portuguese musician and software developer. More on the album at his blog, coruscate.xyz. You Were Away was posted at straywool.bandcamp.com.
February 9, 2020
Simulacrum PSA
During the filming of the series’ fourth film, we San Franciscans find ourselves living in The Matrix more literally than even is usually the case:
February 8, 2020
“The Time Traveler’s Karaoke”
It is unclear how a piece paper this old could have the word “Beyonce” printed on it. The page is yellowed and crumpled, bent and faded. The top edge looks burnt. It is something that has seen constant use for more decades than the singer has been alive, let alone performed professionally, or, in the case of this piece of paper, recorded music. The page is a register, a ledger, a list of songs from a tidy little karaoke bar across town.
We had wandered in after dinner. One of my friends apparently knows the host, who has worked here for three dozen years — roughly, I note, since just a few years after Beyonce was born. This timing later occurs to me as curious.
The page is one of many in a narrow, black binder. Each sheet is held in a thin plastic sleeve. We commence looking for a song. None of us intend to sing, but the binder is a compulsory magnet, like a TV playing sports headlines on a restaurant wall, or a couple arguing in a convenience store, or a fender bender on the side of the road: You can’t look away. You, in fact, slow down to observe. You can’t break away. You’re absorbed.
Looking for the song in question — which song doesn’t matter — makes us realize that our brains have begun to hurt. Spending time with these documents has initiated some sort of painful demagnetization. To look for the song is to suppose some organization on the page. The documents imply alphabetization, and when that strategy seems to fail us, we assume the pages are out of order. But that’s not it, either. Within each page, the amassed listings reveal a mishmash of small groups, groups that make sense until a sudden shift occurs with the appearance of a stray song.
The documents look like an Excel spreadsheet, and this produces an additional sense of frustration: If only I could tap at the top of one of these columns and reorganize the way the data is presented. If I could do that, maybe order would be restored. One of my friends takes a more analog approach, asking the proprietor if there is another binder, organized by artist. For the first and only time this evening, we are looked at with something other than a friendly smile. “No,” we are told, and that is all. We have tread on a sore subject.
We return to the page, half expecting it to have changed while we had looked away. Upon closer inspection, the list of songs unravels further, and our brains along with it. Peter Cetera, best known as the singer of the pop band Chicago, didn’t do a version of “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” no matter what this document says. It was a Dead or Alive hit.
That’s right, right? We resort to our phones — we check, half expecting to have no reception inside the bar — to reconcile our pop-culture memories with some third-party source of truth. I’m stuck on the way the song appears on the page, where you can read straight across the line: “You Spin Me Round (Like Peter Cetera.” The lack of a close parenthesis fills me with sudden, palpable, and utterly unfamiliar fear. What if this experience never ends. We have been turned around. What if, like Peter Cetera, we have stumbled into another realm.
The bar’s one television has been quietly but not silently running uniformly wan karaoke videos all evening. At some point the opposite of karaoke music streams from the TV: all vocal, no backing track, and yet equally bland as the soft-focus nature footage and crying young women who populated the previous videos. What is the point of this particular track? Who sings karaoke along with a prerecorded singer?
I then briefly wonder: What if all karaoke-bar music is streaming from an alternate universe, a universe where compressed, largely vocal-free, synthesizer-driven versions are the original hits. What if karaoke bars are crosstime saloons where our respective, independent universes touch. What if the factual and alphabetical fissures in the spreadsheet aren’t errors so much as rifts, rifts initiated when time travelers have unintentionally triggered forks in the very fabric of reality?
We’re asked if we want another round of drinks. We politely decline. The steady flow of free peanuts and pistachios begins to dry up. We take the hint. We pay up and head out into the night, back into our reality. We glance simultaneously at our phones, as if they would register, right alongside the date and time, that we’ve returned to our sliver of the multiverse: 9:34pm, February 7, Earth Prime. We sniff the air and look around. The music of the bar’s TV is inaudible from the street.
February 7, 2020
Synth Satie
I half-joked when Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) posted this synthesizer cover of Erik Satie’s classic “Gnossienne No 1” to YouTube yesterday that it will, someday, be the theme song to a TV show. Half, because the drama he elicits from the melody is palpable. This is a more full-bodied rendition than a Satie performance usually engages in. It’s not remotely difficult to imagine a showrunner might appreciate the combination of antique composition and only slightly less antique technology (Scanner employed the Buchla Music Easel to record this), and how one works in service of the other. There is so much more going on at any given instant of this piece than would occur in, say, a solo piano rendition. The reverberations of the synthesized tones and the sheer breadth of coloration are remarkable. It’s been over half a century since Wendy Carlos’ classic Switched-On Bach. We’re long overdue for Switched-On Satie.
Video originally posted to Scanner’s YouTube channel. More from Scanner at scannerdot.com.
February 6, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0423: Hold Noise
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, February 10, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 6, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0423: Hold Noise
The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call.
Step 1: Think of a time when you were put on hold by customer service or waiting for a conference call to begin. Think about such a situation when the hold music sounded like it had been run through a washing machine, or put through a bit crusher, or photocopied 100 times in sequence before it got to your ear.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a modern phone call. Think of this as “hold noise.”
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0423” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0423” (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 track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0423-hold-noise/
Step 5: Annotate your track 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, February 10, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 6, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better. Then again, you could end up stuck on hold for a long time.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0423” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.
Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 423rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Hold Noise / The Assignment: Record music intended to sound just as garbled as the hold music on a phone call — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0423-hold-noise/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this track is by Milo Tobin, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
Agent Listening in the Field
A passing moment from the novel Agent Running in the Field, John le Carré’s latest. It was published late last year. (I’m of the belief that le Carré, now 88 years old, should be in the running for the Nobel Prize in literature: for his gifts to the English language , for the formidable character George Smiley, and for the unmagical realism of his writing.)
February 5, 2020
Early Mann
I thought I’d seen every Michael Mann movie but I’d never seen The Jericho Mile (1979), which he directed even before Thief (1981), his first film for theatrical release. The Jericho Mile is an ABC TV movie about a prisoner at Folsom with a gift for running. Peter Strauss stars, and the cast includes Richard Lawson, Brian Dennehy, and Geoffrey Lewis, as well as, apparently, numerous actual Folsom residents at the time of the movie’s filming.
This week I finally got around to watching it. The Jericho Mile has, already, a lot of the classic Mann themes (later on view in such films as Heat and Collateral), including the unwritten rules of the criminal underclass, and a view of the subculture from the perspective of a charismatic outlier. It’s not packed with music the way later Mann productions would be. There is, though, great use of a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”; a looser version with no vocals hits the sweet spot between pop and score. The opening montage is a virtual trial run for Miami Vice, everything in sync with the music, even inmates doing jumping jacks.
There were a few other sonic moments worth mentioning:
(1) Midway through, following a riot, there’s a fade-to-white that aligns perfectly with the slowing of the prison’s manual siren.
(2) There’s a minor but unmistakable character in the form of an inmate with a boombox. The role is a bit underdeveloped, but it does allow for diegetic blurring, Mann leaving it unclear at times if what we hear is the score or an emanation from the speakers.
(3) And then there’s the final race, which alternates segments of huffing and puffing with serene silence, the latter presenting the runner’s psychological escape from the prison system, and arguably from the whole of society. This utilization of silence at the end of The Jericho Mile is powerful. It gets at the false dichotomy between diegetic (in-narrative) and non-diegetic (off-screen, such as score or voice-over) sound. What the director has prioritized is representing the point of view, the experience, of the character.
I wrote a short study of Thief, Mann’s subsequent film, last year for Hilobrow.com, and in the interest of time, I avoided the temptation to revisit other past Mann works. I think I’m going to revisit some more soon, including Straight Time and perhaps the Mann film I appreciated the least when I first saw it: The Last of the Mohicans.
