Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 252

Closer to the Code

Each year, my listening seems to get a little closer to the source. This habit, this tendency, goes back to my earliest music explorations. Enamored of a given album in my teens and early 20s, I’d track down music by the individual players on it. In part this pursuit was to expand my horizons, but in part, especially I recognize in retrospect, this was to narrow them; I had the sense that if I gained a comprehension of the individual player’s sound, I’d better understand their contribution to the initial album that seeded my interest.

Fast forward to 2020, and much of my listening is to sketches, to rough drafts, to works-in-progress that people post to SoundCloud and, increasingly, to YouTube of the most inchoate of musical inventions. In the case of this video, it is Nathan Wheeler documenting his participation in a coding circle. (That’s a social, mutual-improvement scenario adopted online from the classic sewing circle, in which people gather to do solitary creative work in a communal situation. The sewing circle was an influence on the Disquiet Junto, as well.) The circle in which Wheeler is participating originated on the excellent llllllll.co music community. Members were given about a month and a half to write a script for a shared hardware device — the details don’t matter, but if it’s of interest, click through above to llllllll.co and learn more — based on a few guidelines. These amount to a provided set of audio samples, and some broadly defined parameters: volume, brightness, density, “evolve,” and a switching between “worlds” (switching that the accompanying visuals are then intended to represent distinctly). The project is titled “drone in three worlds.”

Understanding those briefest of guidelines is more that sufficient to interpret the video, in which the worlds are depicted as eclipse-like, a receding perspective, and a rapid starfield. If you have more interest, you can read the llllllll.co discussion, and click through to the the GitHub repositories where the source code of the various project responses will be stored. GitHub being where, according to my lifelong trajectory as described above, much of my listening will likely being taking place within a few more years.

Corrption in Space

When the audio that Japan-based composer Corruption/Corrption uploads regularly to SoundCloud isn’t snippets of alienated urban field recordings, it ventures into music, more properly understood. Which isn’t to say the results are any less esoteric, or less enticing. “VUHDRL” is a series of Radiophonic motifs, sound design for a science fiction film that is not only set in deep space, but shot there on location. Which is to say, it isn’t merely alienated; it’s actually alien. Speaker-threatening garbled noise lets through sharp bits of haunting organ, then dissolving amid phaser bursts and an overall sense of otherworldly drama.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/corrption.

The Most Rudimentary Conception of a Marionette

It’s been almost exactly a year since I posted one of the brief videos of the artist Zimoun’s tactile, economical, kinetic sculptures, sculptures whose impact — humorous, touching, majestic — is so out of proportion with the modest material from which they are constructed. Here’s a new one, posted today. A short video such as this is how Zimoun announces a newly installed work. Its title, as is generally the case for Zimoun, is little more than a list of the components, here “51 prepared dc-motors, 189 m rope, cardboard sticks 30 cm,” followed by the year of production: “2019.” The footage is a view from the Museum of Contemporary Art MAC, Santiago de Chile. And it’s not even 40 seconds long.

Vimeo, unlike YouTube, doesn’t have an easy way to allow for looped, repeated viewing, but you’ll be drawn in and hitting repeat almost for certain. Watch as the tiny cardboard sticks dance around in circles, suspended like the most rudimentary conception of a marionette. Their balletic footsteps suggest Amazonian rainfall: cardboard drops on a cold concrete floor.

Part of the beauty of Zimoun’s videos is how the sound is and isn’t in sync with what we see. The video cuts from one view to another: a closeup, giving us a sense of the mechanisms, a fuller one to give a sense of scale, a room view for sense of scope. Throughout the cardboard raindrops fall.

Video originally posted at vimeo.com. More from Zimoun, who is based in Bern, Switzerland, at zimoun.net.

Onomatopoeia at Home

On the one hand, the answer to the first clue in today’s New York Times mini-crossword is self-evident. On the other, I do like to think there’s a varied plethora of nuanced onomatopoeia options beyond the one that is expected here.

Quick Social Media Reminders

I post weekdays to Twitter pretty regularly at twitter.com/disquiet, and I take the weekends off, because it’s good for my brain. If you mute assiduously and pace yourself, you can still maintain a pretty good early-Twitter experience. Twitter is, in many ways, my public notebook. I aspire to Disquiet.com being more draft-like, but the immediacy of Twitter better suits, for me, both brief observations and the iterative development of a sequence of thoughts.

I also post to Instagram at instagram.com/dsqt with some regularity.

I’m on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com/disquiet. Frustratingly, SoundCloud caps the number of accounts you can follow at about 2,000 (I’ve managed 2,003 for some reason), so I keep bookmarks of accounts I want to check back on. It remains the hub of the Disquiet Junto music community, though folks do post elsewhere.

I’m on YouTube at youtube.com/disquiet. I don’t post much, but I have a running public playlist of fine live performances of ambient music. Much of my listening takes place on YouTube.

I’m on Bandcamp at bandcamp.com/disquiet. The social listening component of Bandcamp is helpful. It’s no Rdio, but it works pretty well.

The main message board where I participate is Lines, or llllllll.co. It’s music-focused, with an emphasis, for my use, at least, on the intersection of experimentation, open source, hardware, software, composition, and performance.

I’m on GitHub at github.com/disquiet. Since my computer programming stalled a year out of high school, it’s not like I actually post anything, but I follow a lot of cool music-coding projects.

I’m on Reddit at reddit.com/user/dsqt. I’m not particularly active there, but I keep an eye on it, and post occasionally.

I’m on Facebook, but it’s mostly friends/personal, and as with Twitter, I take the weekends off.

And there is a Slack for Disquiet Junto music community participants. Instructions to join appear in each Junto project post, every Thursday.

I think that covers it.

The Coit Tower of Graffiti

There are many great murals across the city of San Francisco. The one dearest to me, by far, is what I think of as the Coit Tower of graffiti. Shown here is but one view of the ongoing communally decorated staircase to the Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street, just up from Sixth Street. Regulars in the local electronic and experimental music communities know the Luggage Store Gallery as the location of the great weekly Luggage Store Creative Music Series (listings: outsound.org), which convenes each Thursday around 8pm. This shot, looking down toward the front entrance, doesn’t do justice to the full surround experience of the festooned and vertiginous staircase. It’s best experienced between the two sets any given Thursday when you’re coming back from one of the nearby markets with a beverage.

Listening Off-screen

At exactly two minutes and two seconds into this short video, there is some motion at the bottom of the screen. Look for it. Don’t dwell on it, but keep an eye out for it. There is other motion throughout, primarily the blinking of lights. Those lights coordinate with the sounds, because the lights emanate from the devices that produce and influence the sounds.

The lights are signals to the musician using the devices, but they can serve a purpose for the listener, as well. For example, look to the upper left, where the word “play,” all caps, appears to the right of a larger-than-average circle. Note how the appearance of that circle being illuminated corresponds with one of the central presences of sound surfacing momentarily. Likewise, look at the tiny horizontal array at the very bottom left, how it serves as a kind of visualization of a certain band of quick and brittle noises.

What’s seen here is a modular synthesizer, more specifically a virtual one. It is a modular synthesizer simulated on a computer. It’s being used by the German musician Johannes Hertrich, who goes by the moniker Unifono, to render what he terms a mix of IDM and glitch. There are, indeed, touches of Autechre’s bracing sonic torques here, but the music is very much Unifono’s. More importantly, the music is generative, or as Unifono puts it, semi-generative (more on the “semi” in a moment). This means that for all the development within the music, all the changes that take place, it is all happening based on a system that Hertrich set up and then sat back and listened to, just as you and I might.

Then there’s that “semi.” This brings us back to the motion two and a half seconds in. There may be other reasons Hertrich considers the music semi-generative, but a sure one is the motion at 2:02. See how the knobs turn a bit, and how the module itself seems to jerk up a little? That’s because even though we can’t see Hertrich’s hands manipulating the software, we can see evidence of it. The knobs turning are one example. The slight motion of the module itself is another. It seems that in touching the module, Hertrich has briefly nudged it out of place. It returns immediately (if you’ve used this software, which is called VCV Rack, you’ll recognize the magnet-like quality the module evidences as it rests quickly back into place).

I realize as I reread this before posting that it could be misconstrued as a critique of the performance. I want to be clear, therefore, that it as meant as nothing of the kind. The audio is great. I played it on repeat for much of the day, and took notes on some of the techniques, the play between modules, by which Hertrich achieved his sonic goals. What I wanted to do in focusing on the motion at 2:02 was to observe the presence of the human touch in a video that is, in essence, a screenshot-in-motion of a machine working automatically, one left, as it were, to its own devices. It’s like an incredibly subtle variant on the Twitch genre of videos, in which viewers watch someone else play a video game live. Except here the software is considerably more obscure, and motion is brief, exceptionally so.

More from Hertich at unifono.bandcamp.com. Try VCV Rack out at vcvrack.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0422: Chapter Cascade

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 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0422: Chapter Cascade
The Assignment: Make a piece of music made up of tiny alternating parts.

Step 1: This week’s project is inspired by the rapid, short chapters of William Gibson’s new novel, Agency, and the micro-compositions of John Zorn’s Naked City. Consider hyper-brevity as a creative pursuit.

Step 2: Compose a piece of music made of up lots of very short bursts. You will have an A line and a B line, which will be tonally and aesthetically distinct from each other. These will alternate back and forth for however long you desire. Consider a length of about a second, or less, for each sliver of sound. And then finally at the very end, have the A and B lines combine.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0422” (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 “disquiet0422” (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-0422-chapter-cascade/

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 3, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0422” 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 422nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Chapter Cascade / The Assignment: Make a piece of music made up of tiny alternating parts — at:

https://disquiet.com/0422/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0422-chapter-cascade/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

The Musical Equivalent of Eavesdropping

This 20-minute live performance video is by Ryan Kunkleman, who goes by the name esc, which is to say the key way over in the upper-left-hand corner of your computer’s keyboard. Like his moniker, the music played here is deliberately lowercase. There is conflict and tension within the sounds, certainly, but they are pitched to a near hush. It’s the musical equivalent of eavesdropping. You know there’s trouble next door, but you need to stoop, push your ear against the wall, and concentrate to get some sense of what’s going on. What’s going on here is, apparently, a single source sound being looped and mangled in real time by a variety of different devices that constitute esc’s synthesizer. You don’t need to know that or, for that matter, think about it to enjoy the subtle shifts, but if you do choose to pay attention, you can appreciate, as well, the divergent variations and their root interconnectedness.

Video originally posted to esc’s YouTube channel. This is the latest video added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music.

Stanched Pads & Crystalline Haze

What seems to be a wind chime made of shells spends more than a minute taking pauses amid a curt little melody that sounds like a fine Angelo Badalementi sketch. Then come stanched pads, brief chords out of a Jon Hassell venture, somehow sharp and muted at once, little stabs of crystalline haze. The track, “Sa – YY” by Saint Petersburg (Russia) musician Sa/Samwell, has the vibe of a horror-movie theme, tension mounting up until the final jab.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/levmas00. More from Sa/Samwell at sasamwel19.bandcamp.com.