Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 255
January 12, 2020
Synth Learning: “Food and Drone Administration”
This is my second weeklybeats.com/disquiet track of the year. There’s noise in this recording that wasn’t intended, but such is the learning process, especially when you leave the recording to the last minute. Building on last week’s track, I made separate recordings of each of the three notes of two simple chords that shared one note between them. I wanted to have the effect of the piece slowly moving from the first chord to the second and back to the first, where the chords are as much their separate constituent parts as they are functioning chords. The chords are F/D/A and G/D/A#, the D slightly different between the two (I changed with pickup I used). The notes go from my electric guitar into my synth, which captures a grain in the Clouds module (actually the Antumbra Smog), let run for about 20 seconds each. I triggered the granular freeze in Clouds with a foot pedal via my Monome Walk module, which is handy, so to speak, when both hands are on your guitar. Each note is being muffled a bit after it comes out of Clouds. I put it through the Make Noise FXDf (fixed filter) and sent the lowest four bands of the spectrum into my mixer, and one of those is made slightly warbly courtesy of a sine wave from my Xaoc Batumi module that is being squished by my WMD S.P.O. module. I recorded and assembled this in Audacity on my laptop, using noise reduction and volume adjustment as part of the process. Oh, and the guitar goes through a reverb pedal, the Hardwire RV-7, before going into the synth.
Here’s a photo of the patch:
Track originally posted at
weeklybeats.com/disquiet and soundcloud.com/disquiet.
January 11, 2020
A Night in the Dark
I spent two hours in the dark on Friday night listening to records with a hundred or so strangers. It was the first night of the 2020 installment of the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, held in the Victoria Theater in the Mission District. These weren’t records in the traditional sense of the word. They were multi-channel works (“fixed media,” in the curatorial parlance) taking advantage of the 24-speaker sound system installed for the series’ three evenings. And while the recordings were fixed, they weren’t entirely predetermined. For each, either its composer or a festival staff member handled the mixing board, and some of the installments involved more manipulation than others.
Highlights included Maggi Payne’s “Heat Shield” (white noise pushed to the breaking point in the pursuit of interstellar sounds), which she had performed live at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival at the end of last year, as well as Matthew Barnard’s “Wache,” built from field recordings made around London.
Not all the works were contemporary. Reaching back to the origins of the consideration of the recording studio as an instrument unto itself, we heard Pierre Schaeffer’s “Étude aux casseroles [Pathétique],” composed on turntables back in 1948, and “Poem of Change” (1992) by Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros, active in the city’s experimental music scene starting in the late 1950s, co-founded the original San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962. She died a little over three years ago, and it was quite moving to hear her voice, always larger than life, and all the more so after death, fill the hall.
January 10, 2020
Basinksi in Blue Light
Close the work week out with a short segment of William Basinksi performing live at the Empty Bottle, the Chicago venue. Presumably this is from January 3 of this still very new year. Washed in bright blue light that manages to nonetheless get consumed by the club’s natural darkness (a metaphor not inappropriate for Basinski’s brand of quietly foreboding ambient soundscapes), he nudges his tools just out of view. The sound is all arching tones and rumbling crosscurrents and whistle-like flourishes that travel in slow motion, so intimate in combination that the set seems to reshape the whole concept of a concert venue.
Video originally posted at the YouTube channel of Seijin Lee.
January 9, 2020
Disquiet Junto Project 0419: Dischoir
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 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 9, 2020.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0419: Dischoir
The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto.
Step 1: Welcome to a large, asynchronous, distributed choir. The Dischoir consists of 113 samples of held syllables by over 50 participants in the Disquiet Junto. You can access the files at the following URL. Note that a few of them deviate from the initial instructions:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pkuvmzwcdz6dx27/AACUsNclLLqToLp-OJWVkaQXa?dl=0
Step 2: Create a piece of choral music from the provided samples. You are encouraged to make music that feels “human,” that feels like it is simply a lot of people singing at once. However, of course, the end result is up to you; you can and should mix, mash, and create as you please.
Background: This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0419” (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 “disquiet0419” (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-0419-dischoir/
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 13, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, January 9, 2020.
Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0419” 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 419th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dischoir / The Assignment: Make music from 100+ vocal samples of held syllables by members of the Disquiet Junto — at:
This all came about as a result of something Alan Bland mentioned on the Junto Slack. He pointed out that my having misspelled Disquiet as “Disquier” in the December 19, 2019, project title made him think of “Dischoir,” a possible Junto project. Thanks to Alan and to Jason Wehmhoener for helping me think this project through, and to everyone (over 50 contributors) who sent in samples.
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-0419-dischoir/
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 Joe Lencioni, and is used (image cropped, text added) via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 8, 2020
Listen Closely to Cory Ryan
If the sheer, highly detailed sound-design particulate and effortlessly modulated quietude of “states [excerpt]” lure you into the track’s warm embrace, do pay attention to its less comforting undercurrents. Heed the ghostly intonations about 30 seconds in, in addition to the muffled voices later on. Do this in part because by focusing on the discrete elements of Cory Ryan’s recording you’ll gain access to just how much is going on in what, by most objective measurements, is deep, subtle hush. Do so as well because just as the piece is coming to a close its less savory aspects rise to the surface in a burst of possessed-ham-radio noise that will knock your headphones off.
Like the track I wrote about yesterday, Midori Hirano’s “Remembrance,” Ryan’s takes common aspects of experimental sound, namely a stately silence and an attention to minute variations, and puts them in service of a larger, narrative-driven purpose.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/coryryancomposer. More from Ryan, who is based in New York City, at coryryancomposer.com.
January 7, 2020
A Midori Hirano Preview
This track, a preview of Midori Hirano’s forthcoming album, Invisible Island, does crazy things to whatever space I’m in. It’s playing on my laptop, and just as I succumb to its warpy pleasures, it pulls some sort of widescreen magic trick and places sonar pings — half nextgen submarine, half ancient cetacean — as if they’re far far away from me: across the room, down the hall, in another dimension entirely. Twice I have paused this track, titled “Remembrance” (despite the fact that it keeps me moored in the moment, like it’s less something I’m listening to and more the score to me listening to it), so as to check if, in fact, something is making the sound elsewhere, but no, it’s just my laptop, having been hijacked by Hirano and put to her extended binaural purposes.
A Japanese musician based in Berlin, Hirano here explores a deeply filmic proposition. What begins as ambient spaciousness gathers a very slow pulse, the spaciousness gaining structure, and then, thanks to that sonar imaging, it takes on a sudden narrative heft. It’s a very promising first taste of what’s to come when Invisible Island is released.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sonic-pieces. The album is due out February 7 on the Sonic Pieces label. More from Hirano at midorihirano.com and midorihirano.bandcamp.com.
January 6, 2020
Harmonica Clouds
The layering comes quickly in this video from Ryan Kunkleman. A button is pushed and the harmonica disappears off-screen. We hear a few notes, and we expect the playing to complete a phrase, for the player to pause for a breath. This doesn’t occur. Instead, before the original phrase ever ends another one is layered atop it. Looping has been enacted. There will be no pause for breath for the nearly 13 minutes of this piece. What there will be is a steady accumulation and movement between the held tones of the harmonica, chords giving way to phrases giving way to chords, little moments occasionally peeking (and peaking) through the sonorous clouds.
The tools, in addition to the harmonica and microphone, are a recent piece of software called Cheat Codes (github.com/dndrks), running on a Norns, an open-source sound computer from Monome (monome.org).
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video first posted at Kunkelman’s YouTube channel, under the moniker esc.
January 5, 2020
Ezekiel Honig on Listening to Make Music
Finished reading the book Bumping into a Chair While Humming: Sounds of the Everyday, Listening, and the Potential of the Personal, a slim yet rangy 2014 collection of thoughts by the musician Ezekiel Honig. Honig is based in New York City. I bought the book from someone in Boston, only to find that a friend here in San Francisco printed the letterpress cover. It’s a small world.
It’s also a world filled with sonic potential. The way that everyday sounds can become raw material for music is the subject of Honig’s book. The title uses the experience of knocking into something physical, such as a chair, for the happy accident of being struck by sound in a way that registers with you personally. The book is written with musicians in mind, but the concepts are more broadly applicable and accessible. Four things stuck with me on an initial read:
How Honig characterizes an emphasis on the value of listening: “We become so concerned with what is in front of us that we forget about what is around us.” He’s referencing “the degree to which our hearing communicates the contours of our world.” That framing of listening’s geographic, spacial, and temporal qualities is a helpful reminder.
My favorite chapter is the third, “Hidden Expressions of Objects.” In it Honig uses a specific example (sampling paper related to his father, a former professor) to show how the source material that provides audio brings with it contextual information, including personal feelings, anecdotal experience, and history, which is infused into the work, even if at a level of detail that isn’t conscious on the part of the musician or self-evident on the part of the listener.
“It isn’t mimicking a space. It is one.” Tools such as reverb and delay can provide a sense of space, and yet have become so ubiquitous that the space is more conceptual than physical. Honig asserts that using the echoes and other qualities of actual physical spaces, such as hallways and rooms and the outdoors, shouldn’t be neglected.
“To finish is to essentially abandon a relationship that you’ve built up with the work.” There’s a whole section toward the close of the book about, naturally, the difficulty in finishing something. This is a subject I don’t think about a lot in the context of music, in large part because my own music-making is purely exploratory, with no particular intention on my part to perform or record, and because the Disquiet Junto music community is expressly focused on starting things, and on finishing them only in the context of having a deadline, not in the context of the work in any way feeling completed.
Side note: I occasionally misplaced the book while reading it because it has no print on the spine. I realized I have several books with blank spines. I rounded up a few and I’ll start keeping them in one spot on my shelf. Right now this includes, along with Honig’s book, two exhibit catalogs: Bill Beckley: An Accidental Poet (1968) and Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Space.
More on the book at ezekielhonig.com. The physical edition was limited to 300 (I got number 101), but helpfully there’s an ebook version, too.
Synth Learning: “In and Near C”
It’s a new year, and I’m giving weeklybeats.com a go again. I only posted a few tracks two years ago when I last joined in. Unlike many other weekly music communities online, Weekly Beats is quite open-ended: “The objective of Weeklybeats is to encourage musicians to be productive, creative, and have fun,” states its FAQ. By contrast, in the SB Beat Battles, everyone works with the same shared samples. In the Naviar Haiku, everyone works from the same short poem as inspiration. And in the Disquiet Junto, everyone follows the same instructions for a different project.
In my brief Weekly Beats writeup, this is how I described what’s going on: “A drone in and near C for the start of the new year. The source note is from my Arturia MicroBrute. It goes through a reverb pedal, the HardWire RV-7, which then goes into my Eurorack modular synthesizer. Several things happen then: three separate bands of the spectrum (via the MakeNoise FXDf module) are individually combined with snippets being frozen in the Clouds module (triggered by a square wave from an oscillator, the Dixie II), and I’m manually saving and playing loops using the Soundmachines UL1 (recording and playing as triggered by two foot pedals via the Monome Walk module). That’s a broad-strokes description.”
Here’s a photo of the patch in my modular synth:
Just a few more notes: Where it says Clouds above, it’s actually Smog, a smaller version of the Clouds module. There’s some low-level LFO activity going on, as well. Waves from my Batumi, squashed into something less wildly fluctuating by my WMD S.P.O., are influencing the volume of one of the FXDf, and the “position” and “texture” of the Smog audio. One thing I was trying to do throughout was ever so slightly alter the tuning of the audio being replayed by the UL1 looper, the idea being to have something close to C that would create moire/beading with the C itself. I was using a lot of the various options within the MicroBrute to make the C as complex as I could, and I slowly turned all of those knobs down at the very end, until the track was silent. That about covers it.
The track is on both weeklybeats.com and soundcloud.com.
January 4, 2020
Button Down
Riddle me this: When is up down and down up? One answer that I hadn’t previously considered: When someone didn’t take the time to properly sort out the wiring of a pair of doorbells on a small multi-unit residence.
Judging by the relative wear on the metal and the paint overlay seen here, it’s likely that the lower button is the original and that the top button was added during a subdivision at some point. Swapping the natural correlative locations of the buttons certainly wasn’t anyone’s purposeful intention, so the handwritten corrections must have been an afterthought, like the subdivision itself.
It’s interesting that street addresses aren’t provided, just “down” and “up,” not A and B, or two consecutive numbers. Whoever visits this building is expected to know, in advance, who lives on the top floor, and who lives below. Visitors for whom Chinese is their primary language are provided a helpful translation in simplified characters. The simplification keeps the characters singular, but as a non-speaker I am left to wonder if they contain additional meaning. If nothing else, they fit the limited space better than less-simple Chinese would have, and clearly better than does the English, which here has been bent to fit the confines. What I also don’t know is if the Chinese lettering exhibits the limits of constraints that are evident in the English.
Then comes the question of which came first, the Chinese or the English. I like to think the Chinese was there first, and the new inhabitants deciphered the text, realized the benefit of the labels, and added an English translation thereof. Having moved to a predominantly Chinese neighborhood, the new tenants immediately had to learn some of the language. Alternately, perhaps the Chinese inhabitants came later, and were led to imagine that labeling apartments “down” and “up” was just what people here did, and they added their translation so as to follow the perceived local norms.
