Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 253

Voids Your Ear Can Feel

The shifts in sound seem too sudden to be happenstance. The way the audio cuts from left to right to silence to stereo, and alternate wayward transitions within, doesn’t merely shape and direct the sound. It create voids your ear can feel. Don’t put this on headphones. Play it at room temperature on a pair of speakers, your head comfortably in between. Let the found sounds — all white noise and public-address mumble, not to mention echoing high heels and distant whistles — of the field recordings dance around your skull as well as within. This is the 176th entry in Jimmy Kpple’s ongoing Patzr Radio podcast, “noise and a relative or friend can hold,” a great ongoing musique concrète wonder.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/patzr-radio. Get the feed directly at patzrradio.podbean.com. More from Kpple at twitter.com/jmmy_kppl.

Dialing Instructions Inside

This notepaper was on the bedside table. A few sheets were stacked on top of a pleather folio at the hotel where I spent time over the holidays. There were no instructions inside the folio, despite the clearly printed promise. There was, however, a memory of a time when a hotel phone was your primary such connection to the distant world while away from home. You’d share the number and extension upon arrival, and if you traveled regularly, you’d struggle with the slight variations in keypad controls depending on device and manufacturer. Instructions were valued, even if information design hadn’t caught up with the brave new task at hand. You might be greeted, at day’s end, with a welcome light. The light signaled the presence of voicemail, of messages from friends and loved ones. Allowing for time zones, you might never actually speak with these people directly while away; you’d ping-pong audio snapshots of your respective days: recollections, notices, inquiries. Today we’d call such communication “asynchronous,” a term necessary because so much of life has become synchronous, or at least has gained the illusion of synchrony, a synchrony whose acceptance masks, and may even cause, many forms of interpersonal fracture, fractures resulting from the pressures of profound simultaneity. As for those old audio snapshots on hotel phones, they were the preserve solely of the temporary residence’s third-party system, one that would be wiped clean when you settled the bill at the end of your stay. Today, somewhere, there is a surplus of this notepaper, ever so slowly being worked through by visitors who bring their own phones. Maybe they’ll use the bedside phone to ring the front desk to request a pen.

Full Stack

I need to take better advantage of the local library’s cross-cultural holdings.

Granular (Granular Guitar)

All These Wires employs just a few in this video, a purposeful few. Daniel McGinn, the musician behind the All These Wires channel on YouTube, is seen, and heard, enhancing his guitar via a modular synthesizer. Half the sound is the guitar itself, and half is the guitar processed, not once but twice, in succession, by a pair of granular synthesizer modules. The modules echo and smudge the input. Watch McGinn’s hands, and you can trace the cause and effect, the pacing and impact. As has become a performance custom, his synthesizer is tipped forward, so the audience can see what he’s up to. Watch carefully enough, and you might find lights whose on and off align with the music’s internal metronome.

Video originally posted at the All These Wires YouTube channel. This is the latest video added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music. More from McGinn on instagram.com/all_these_wires.

Disquiet Junto Project 0421: Marquee Ghosts

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, January 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 23, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0421: Marquee Ghosts
The Assignment: What sounds haunt a discarded movie theater in the middle of the night?

This week’s project is just one step:

Step 1: What sounds haunt a discarded movie theater in the middle of the night?

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0421” (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 “disquiet0421” (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-0421-marquee-ghosts/

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, January 27, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 23, 2020.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0421” 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 421st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Marquee Ghosts / The Assignment: What sounds haunt a discarded movie theater in the middle of the night? — at:

https://disquiet.com/0421/

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-0421-marquee-ghosts/

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

Field Recordings of Dreams

Sekunder, eoner by Snufmumriko

The atmosphere is so thick on “Kasta loss,” the opening track of the Snufmumriko album Sekunder, eoner, that your ears may not pick up on the emergent rhythm until well after it has set a determined pace for what feels, at its heart, more windblown than metronomic. Blurry, static-dabbled white noise gives birth to EKG pulses and pin-prick hi-hats, and then subsumes them again well before the track is over, at which point vinyl surface abrasions are working in parallel with sustained, woodwind-like drones.

There’s a stately quality to Snufmumriko’s music. Take “Jordeliv,” which has pizzicato strings, redolent of their synthesized origins, alongside aquatic field recordings, and yet the main impression is made by the hush that serves as both the track’s background and foreground, the thick, warm noise that envelops the other sounds. The way field recordings are treated throughout the album is Snufmumriko’s greatest accomplishment. Close your eyes and listen to the closing track, “Drömmens tassemarker,” which doesn’t merely suggest a walk in the forest; it takes you on one, crumpled leaves yielding to echoed, scattered fragments of birdsong. To be clear, this isn’t all hyper-naturalism. The title track, for example, features throaty robospeak before its club beat kicks in. But it is the dreamy, slightly-altered-reality quality that is the album’s greatest accomplishment.

Sekunder, eoner, six tracks in all, was released on the Moscow-based Dronarivm label a little over a month ago, in early December 2019, at dronarivm.bandcamp.com. More from Snufmumriko, aka Ingmar Wennerberg of Gothenburg, Sweden, at soundcloud.com/snufmumriko and twitter.com/snufmumriko.

Chorus of One

Even the most talented musicians can be self-conscious about something. In the case of r beny, the focus of his doubt is, apparently, his voice. Here, for the track “A Path Opens in the Bloom,” he takes a sample of himself vocalizing (“trying to hold a C, I cannot sing”), and then processing it through granular synthesis. What this means is he is taking tiny slivers of the voice and holding them for an extended period, essentially turning a little thing into a whole. Further, he is layering the same sample played at different note values, creating a chorus of one. Without getting too technical, if you’re wondering where that raspy texture comes from, beny is running the audio through the cassette deck seen in the upper left. The deck isn’t merely recording the audio; it is also immediately outputting what it records, so we’re hearing the result of the degradation that the tape impresses upon the source material. Beny writes in more detail about the track’s impetus and his process at his YouTube page. He’s great about not only notating what he does in the text accompanying his videos, but also replying to the comments.

This is the latest video added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music. More from r beny, aka Californian musician Austin Cairns, at rbeny.bandcamp.com.

Yosemite Doorbell

Throughout Yosemite National Park, as in many forests and parks, the garbage pails are locked tight. It takes opposable thumbs, and a reasonable amount of literacy, and an ability to follow instructions in order to get the darn things open, lest bears and other fierce if less mythical creatures become tempted regularly into human habitats. At the entrance to this local hotel, you might think a similar concern about undesired visits was on someone’s mind when the front entrance’s doorbell was installed. You don’t just press the large button to register your presence. You must first flick a separate switch to the “on” position, and then not only press but hold the red button to speak. You must then, as with walkie talkies, release the button in order to listen for a reply. Worth noting is that this hotel has a fairly international clientele, and yet the instructions appear solely in English. (Japanese visitors lacking English skills might feel particularly put off, assuming they recognize the Aiphone intercom device as a product of their own country, all the more so because someone decided the thing required that aftermarket switch hack.) Fortunately for those arriving befuddled in the middle of the night, knocking remains a universal language.

Patricia Wolf, Live

Between glistening notes and processed field recordings, Patricia Wolf’s voice appears as a series of echoing phrases. The live recording was made at the Holocene in Portland, Oregon, on June 19 of last year. Wolf just added it to her SoundCloud page late last month. While she could easily spend more than the piece’s nearly quarter hour exploring these lush, ethereal spaces, Wolf has more in mind for her listeners. In time, surprisingly abrasive tones appear, rubbery and textured and chaotic, and a thorough contrast to what came before. Amid them, Wolf’s voice persists, no longer an element of comforting ease, and instead a durable, yet no less elegant, opposition to the rising forces.

Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music. More from her at instagram.com/patriciawolf_music. The audio was recorded by Glenn Sogge, and the performance photo is by Marcus Fischer.

A Drone Nightmare

I don’t usually write down my dreams in any great detail, but this one was something. If I have trouble sleeping in the middle of the night, I might put on a pair of headphones and listen to a recording to block out the world, and to make my immediate world more insular. I don’t generally experience a lot of trouble sleeping, and so it’s something I’m not particularly adjusted to. People I speak with for whom insomnia is a fact of nightly life have accumulated mechanisms by which they cope, and they’re often eager to share. There’s a whole industry of tools, including audio of people gently speaking you to sleep — somnacasts, as it were. There are also enough apps for white noise and environmental sound to fill your playlist until the heat death of the universe. One friend of mine listens, he tells me, to histories of ancient Rome at a low volume. He swears by it.

A couple nights ago, when sleep suddenly failed me, I tried to listen to some music, specifically a favorite recording that seemed suited for the task, the album Trilogie de la Mort by Eliane Radigue. It’s drone music in the nearly purest sense: thick bands of the sonic equivalent of wool, and one of my favorite ambient albums of all time. To the extent that Radigue’s recording here has a melodic component, it’s your mind’s ear picking out patterns amid what is more likely moiré interference than notated song. The good news is listening to Radigue’s music worked. I did fall asleep. The less good news is the nightmare that ensued.

I’m in a large room, a story and a half in height, packed with people. Tall windows, covered with thin scrims, make up two of the room’s four walls. It’s bright in here, the midday sun softened but by no means weakened by the cream-colored curtains. There’s an event going on, some sort of cultural happening, maybe a concert, or a talk, or an exhibit, or a combination thereof. The specifics are uncertain. (This is a dream.) I’m not sure if I’m participating or just taking it in. The key thing is that I’m wearing a large pair of headphones, bulky black things with hard angles, like castoffs from a Sony production line for the military (I had been reading the latest Lazarus graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark just before bed). As the event unfolds, I notice a deep hum. At first I think it’s the event itself, but that’s not the case. Several people have to stare at me at once for me to realize I am the source of the hum. I edge my way to a wall, pat myself down, and go through my backpack. In classic “last place you look” manner, I realize my headphones are emitting the noise. (You probably saw this coming. You weren’t in the dream.)

Now, for whatever it’s worth, my headphones aren’t on (whatever that means in the dream). They’re not plugged into anything, and to whatever degree they require a battery to function, they are powered down. I hold them in my hands and rotate them, eventually realizing that the people around me are annoyed. I am, too; unlike everyone else, I am also experiencing embarrassment. The drone has gotten louder and more troubling. I step outside the gallery. The light is exceedingly bright. I fiddle with the hard-edged blackness that is my pair of headphones. I no longer hear the droning, and write off the whole incident as a matter of interference, some unfortunate tension between technologies, between what I had on me and what was going on inside the event.

I’m in a house. Clearly I’ve made my way here from the event, but I have no memory of how I traveled. (In the dream this lack of awareness is of no concern. I’ve moved from one scene to the next. It’s a dream, which is to say it functions like a movie.) The house is a suburban residence, and a party is going on. I see some friends, and some people I don’t know. It’s fairly quiet. I feel like the height of the party is over by at least an hour, and the stragglers are enjoying each others’ company. The sun is still high in the sky. And then I hear the drone, quieter but no less insistent.

I sit in the living room and slowly take apart my headphones, at first mechanically, unplugging this and detaching that, but the effort isn’t sufficient to the task. The drone persists. I don’t experience the glances of annoyance from people here like I had at the event, but I feel like I need to sort this out. I need to solve this problem. If the droning hum had gotten to me earlier, now the mysterious cause of the sound is what really bothers me.

I go into the kitchen to borrow some scissors and start cutting the remaining cables off the headphone. I grab a used plastic bag from the counter bearing the red logo of a local supermarket. Eventually the droning stops, and though my headphones have been reduced to a collection of broken parts, I feel relieved. I take some deep breaths, now that this weird phenomena is finally behind me. I stuff the bag with the pieces.

Someone from the party sits next to me on the floor of the kitchen. I try to describe what had happened. As I talk back through the sequence of events, I do my best to explain what the drone sounded like. And as my description comes together, I hear it again. At first I think it’s my memory, but no, it’s the drone. I peer into the plastic bag of broken headphone parts, but there is no sign of life. From the floor, where I’m seated, I can see under the kitchen counter, and there are some wicker baskets on a low shelf, one conspicuously packed with goods, covered with the sort of red and white cloth you’d put on a picnic table. For some reason, I am drawn to it. I lift the cloth, and underneath is an audio recorder. Like the headphones I had been wearing earlier, it’s a bulky thing, with more buttons and functions than I’ve ever seen on consumer products. Most importantly, in this moment, the recorder has one tiny bright red light on. This is more than a light. It is a probing, threatening, sentient presence.

I am frightened, in part because of the insectoid threat of the red light, and in part because this device is emitting the exact same drone my headphones had been making earlier. If the original drone was an inchoate thing, this feels different, somehow. If the original drone felt like a phenomena, this one feels like a purposeful presence. If the original sounded like something happening in real time, this sounds like a recording. Someone has placed this here, and while I don’t know why, I feel like I am its intended audience, its intended victim. My brief relief has been quickly replaced by mounting anxiety. I reach for the device, and as I do so, the shadows of two people appear behind me. They say something to each other, the blasé chatter of people who have been doing whatever their job is for a long time. I don’t understand a word of it, but I understand their intent. They are here for me. This device, with its fierce little red light, has fulfilled its purpose. And as one of the people pulls black fabric over my head, I wake up.