Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 263

Transforming the Acoustic

I caught all three sets this past Thursday night at the Center for New Music here in San Francisco: two duets and one solo performance, all of them focused on the same underlying interaction, specifically the electronic transformation of acoustic sounds.

Above are the headliners, Ted Moore (electronics) and Tom Weeks (saxophone). Moore was visiting from Chicago. The remaining four fifths of the evening’s performers were all local to the area. Take a moment to note how Weeks is playing his saxophone. A lot of what Moore seemed to be doing was matching and approximating Weeks’ own playing style: the brash tones, the stop’n’start phrasing, the gritty timbres. What was all wind and saliva from Weeks was scratchy, urgent white noise from Moore.

Here is half the opening act, William Winant, who performed on various pieces of percussion (including his own cartoonishly rubbery cheeks), with Chris Brown offstage doing the processing of Winant’s sounds. When the show began, Winant walked from the audience up to his drum kit, carrying a glass of water. It seemed very casual, an impression reinforced by his shorts and sneakers. However, as quickly became clear after he began playing, the water wasn’t for him. It was used to soften up and make squeaky a small hand drum he had as part of his kit. Brown’s efforts felt especially effective when they didn’t merely echo or exaggerate Winant’s playing, but regenerated it in high fidelity, as if in some other, totally imaginary space, a zone larger and more formidable than the small room in which the concert was actually physically occurring. In a way, the fact that Brown was not in view improved the work, creating more of a procedural void (a gap of cause and effect) between what Winant was enacting and what we were hearing.

And here is the middle act, Alexandra Buschman-Román, who provided both the acoustic element (a quite powerful voice, here sublimated into whispers and quickly muttered phrases) and the electronic (a noise table packed with sonic gadgetry). I don’t have a shot of it, but one thing Buschman-Román did was to amplify yet muddy her voice by putting the microphone in the fleshy part of her neck, where it meets her jaw. The result was highly unfamiliar, and highly memorable.

Concert listing at the Center for New Music’s website, centerfornewmusic.com.

Encountering the Console

Discovering the pleasures of vinyl in Ebony Flowers’ recent book, Hot Comb (Drawn & Quarterly), which collects short, very personal comics. I love how oversized the stereo console is when initially compared with the young girl learning to use it. It’s bigger than her, bigger even than the bed, or so perspective makes it seem. It’s all about perspective, whether geometric or emotional. In Flowers’ depictions, the shapes of everyday objects are just as loose and ever-shifting as are the lines that give form to her all too human characters. There’s a palpable messiness, always tactile, sometimes joyful, often heartbreaking, to the stories she tells.

Disquiet Junto Project 0397: Numbers Racket

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, August 12, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted shortly in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 8, 2019.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0397: Numbers Racket
The Assignment: It’s 808 Day. Do it up.

Step 1: It’s 808 Day today, August 8, the start of the latest Junto project. Let’s make it last through Monday.

Step 2: Make music with or about or somehow in the spirit of the Roland TR-808.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0397” (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 “disquiet0397” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0397-numbers-racket/

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, August 12, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted shortly in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 8, 2019.

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

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0397” 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 397th weekly Disquiet Junto project — The Assignment: It’s 808 Day. Do it up — at:

https://disquiet.com/0397/

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-0397-numbers-racket/

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

Image associated with this project adapted (cropped, colors changed, text added, cut’n’paste) thanks to a Creative Commons license from a photo credited to Brandon Daniel via Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RolandTR-808#/media/File:RolandTR-808_(large).jpg

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Malka Older / Junto Team-Up

I’m very excited to announce that the upcoming 400th consecutive weekly project in the Disquiet Junto music community will be a collaboration with Malka Older, author of the excellent science-fiction trilogy the Centenal Cycle, and who’s now working on Orphan Black: The Next Chapter at Serial Box, for whom she previously created Ninth Step Station. The Junto members will be doing something along the lines of what we did with another novelist, Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim, The Grand Dark), for the 200th Junto project, back in October 2015. It’s going to be great.

The Junto community did a project based on Older’s novel Infomocracy, the first book in the Centenal Cycle, back in December 2017, for the 302nd consecutive Junto. In that project, Junto members tried to imagine what a genre of music might sound like. The genre, “gronkytonk,” was mentioned in passing in Infomocracy. The author graciously thanked the Junto in the third and final Centenal book, State Tectonics, which came out in 2018.

The Disquiet Junto is a group in which musicians respond to weekly, fast-turnaround assignments to compose, record, and share new music. The idea is to use constraints as a springboard for creativity. It has run weekly since January 2012. Project announcements are emailed each Thursday via tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

Hilobrow Action Films

I’ll have a second hilobrow.com piece out later this year. My earlier piece was on a prized object, as part of the site’s Fetish series (“Dummy Jack”). My new one will be about Michael Mann’s first feature film, Thief (he’d previously directed a TV movie, The Jericho Mile), for a series of essays on “action movies of the Seventies (1974-1983).”

Yes, I took a parenthetical moment to note the Tangerine Dream score, but I focus more on the tension between action and inaction. Which is to say, the aesthetics of ambient music are core, even if the subject is broader (and visual, and story-based). Meanwhile, check out the amazing lineup of Hilobrow authors and topics in this series:

Madeline Ashby on BLADE RUNNER | Erik Davis on BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA | Mimi Lipson on CONVOY | Luc Sante on BLACK SUNDAY | Josh Glenn on THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR | Lisa Jane Persky on SORCERER | Devin McKinney on THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE | Adam McGovern on QUINTET | Mandy Keifetz on DEATH RACE 2000 | Peter Doyle on SOUTHERN COMFORT | Jonathan Lethem on STRAIGHT TIME | Heather Kapplow on THE KILLER ELITE | Tom Nealon on EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE | Mark Kingwell on THE EIGER SANCTION | Sherri Wasserman on ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK | Gordon Dahlquist on MARATHON MAN | David Levine on PARALLAX VIEW | Matthew Sharpe on ROLLERBALL | Ramona Lyons on ALIEN | Dan Piepenbring on WHITE LINE FEVER | Marc Weidenbaum on THIEF | Carolyn Kellogg on MAD MAX | Carlo Rotella on KUNG FU | Peggy Nelson on SMOKEY & THE BANDIT | Brian Berger on FRIDAY FOSTER.

The first few are already up, and you can read editor Joshua Glenn’s introduction now.

Technology and Its Discontents

SoundCloud: Why isn’t there an [account]/stream page that can ignore all the reposts? Reposts are great, but some people repost so much it buries everyone’s original posts, including their own.

Also SoundCloud: The maximum number of accounts one can follow has been stuck at 2,000 for years. The number of SoundCloud accounts has gone up. The follow limit should follow suit.

Windows: My laptop often disconnects from my USB audio interface when it comes back from sleep. What’s up with that?

Android: These phones are powerful. I should be able to play music and listen to an audiobook at the same time. My phone can play an audiobook while I receive audio directions from a map app, so clearly simultaneous audio sources does work.

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 4, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.

This Week in Sound: Chakra Con + Sleep App-nea +

A lightly annotated clipping service

As always, if you find sonic news of interest, please share it with me, and (except with the most widespread of news items) I’ll credit you should I mention it here.

Chakra Con?: “For centuries, various cultures, including my own, South Asian,” writes Amitha Kalaichandran in the New York Times, “have used sound as a part of religious ceremonies and prayer, with one goal being to promote and facilitate meditation. In that sense, it’s not terribly different from singing hymns in a church. Most religions and cultures use music and sound for spiritual reasons. … But what about the promise of healing? After all, the use of sound is advertised as an activity that can do many things, including ‘realigning your chakras’ and ‘mind expansion.'” The article explores the growing phenomenon of “sound bath” as a practice and a service. Some scientific studies are providing that show evidence of health benefits, especially for stress and depression.

Mozart Effect: BBC Radio 3, which focuses on classical, jazz, and other non-popular music and audio, has reported an impressive 6% growth since this time last year. Given the increasing prominence of chillout playlists on streaming services like Spotify, it’d be interesting to know if this is an example of listeners also seeking “functional” or background music.

Sleep App-nea: More on music to sleep to. Last week from the New York Times. This week from the Los Angeles Times. That both articles focus specifically on the same app (Calm) in what is actually a wide and diverse field (including Insight Timer, Endel, Headspace, etc.) suggests this cycle of cultural discussion is being led by a line item in a single company’s marketing budget, which is exactly the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

The Business of Music: (1) Reverb.com, the online musical-instrument retailer, was bought by Etsy.com, the DiY marketplace, just a few weeks ago. (2) Now this week, Milan Records, a major force in the soundtracks of movies and, to a lesser degree, television, has been bought by Sony Music. (3) And between those two announcements, the sound branding agency Listen became part of Superfly, which has its own creative agency and produces festivals like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands. These are all situations in which companies that serve(d) sizable niches have become, over night, components of larger, related businesses. These deals get at how the internet has made such niches more substantial. Milan has a sizable catalog of exactly the sort of music that Sony had long defined itself as above, as apart from. Sony has released plenty of movie soundtracks over the years, but the perception to some degree is that Sony releases the major works (or, to borrow its label terminology, Masterworks), leaving the vast remainder to labels like Milan, Lakeshore, and Varèse Sarabande. Now that distinction is muddier, as Sony gets deeper into the field. The question that such deals, especially when occurring in close proximity, raises is: What’s next? Does SoundCloud become part of some other, adjacent streaming business, like YouTube or, who knows, Netflix, which might seek a way to entertain its subscriber base when the audience’s eyes aren’t available? Does the manufacturer Native Instruments join Beats as part of Apple? Does Ikea outright purchase Teenage Engineering, its recent collaborator? Will an app like Calm or Insight Timer become a part of the audiobook service Audible, itself bought by Amazon just over a decade ago? And more importantly, what happens when such businesses become part of a larger organization? Do they reap benefits of a broader audience, or get whittled down due to larger internal forces? We’ll see.

The Key of 3D Flat: Have you ever taken a music-theory course involving a live flames (see below), or giant pits filled with a human-scale mechanical sequencer? Well, if you make it through the Minecraft Conservatory of Music, you’ll be able to answer in the affirmative. That’s the name of a new video series on YouTube by a longtime player of the retro, 3D-block video game, and who also has a master’s degree in music performance (focused on bassoon). The first video explains how “blocks” are employed inside Minecraft for musical expression, with examples including works by Tchaikovsky, Bach, and Gershwin, and a modern classic: Legend of Zelda. Episode two discusses time signatures.

Human Touch: Back in January, Apple put up a large billboard in Las Vegas ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show. Apple historically hasn’t participated in CES, but as a cheeky gesture it did deign to join the conversation this year, speaking in large letters above the Strip. The billboard read, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone,” which was both a play on Las Vegas’ long-running tagline, and a not-so-subtle critique of the role passive surveillance plays in Google’s advertising network, not to mention the broader privacy issues of the Internet of Things. Barely half a year later, Apple is dealing with its own privacy concerns, following revelations about how things dictated by users to Siri are reportedly sometimes overheard by flesh-and-blood contractors. Now Google, Apple, and Amazon are taking action. The latter, whose Alexa service is reportedly on the largest number of internet-connected consumer devices, is providing ways to “let customers disable human review” of their audio.

Phone Bank: You know the saying about how every company is now a technology company? Well, that means that every company has the opportunity for tech-company woes: “A bank has left more than one million audio recordings of phone calls seemingly made by bank employees exposed to the open internet, letting anyone listen in on sensitive conversations, including ones with potential customers.” The exposed folder contained recordings dating back to 2015.

Richter Roll: I’ve been a curious admirer of the 1974 film Earthquake for years, in particular due to the balance of John Williams’ score and the film’s sonic effects. Marke B. (a friend since the mid-1990s) takes a deep dive into the subwoofer for a Red Bull Music Academy article on the equipment constructed for the movie: “When it was time for the theater to quake, the soundtrack played two inaudible ‘control tones.’ These tones would trigger a special Sensurround box, which would use what was called a pseudorandom noise generator to create the low frequency rumble, sending it out to the amplifiers in the specially constructed speakers.”

Rotor Rooters: Helicopters are being normalized as a form of high-flying commute and general-use transportation in the New York City area, leading to complaints about noise pollution, in addition to concerns about safety due to increased air traffic. “Just because somebody’s got a couple hundred bucks to get to the airport,” says a Queens resident, “doesn’t mean they should be doing that to the negative impact of somebody else. They can get to the airport the same way everybody else gets to the airport.” (via Ethan Hein)

Sweet Little Things: “There’s something immensely calming about the turtle dove’s song,” says singer Sam Lee to journalist Patrick Barkham. “It has this low frequency that suddenly appears and disappears. It’s almost the flicker of a film – and such a metaphor for its own situation. The silence around it is as powerful as its presence.” Barkham writes at length about the threat of extinction for the famed migratory bird. (via subtopes)

Song Kraft: In a ruling whose ramifications are still being sorted out, a “nearly 20-year legal battle over the unauthorized sampling of a Kraftwerk song appears to finally be near an end after the European Court of Justice ruled in favor of the pioneering German group.” An initial read of the decision seems to state that artists will need approval from the original artist before recognizably sampling their work. While there are clarifications, this certainly seems troubling. Makes me wonder if I needed to copy that sentence in quotation marks, even though I’m including the link here to the source.

This is lightly adapted from an edition first published in the August 4, 2019, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter This Week in Sound.

Boogie Down

Nothing like living down the road from a great used record store where you walk in, after a tasty dim sum lunch nearby, and the owner says, “Oh, we have some new arrivals you will like.” Not might like. Will. And it’s true. And from that abundance you select a 27-year-old instrumental remix by A Tribe Called Quest of Boogie Down Productions’ “We in There,” off their final album, Sex and Violence. And it turns out the vinyl is a bright, translucent orange. You’re in it for the instrumental, but the color is a plus. “From your eye drops a tear,” indeed.

Listening to and in the Mars Trilogy

I’ve begun re-reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’ve been listening rather than reading: revisiting by having a story I already know read to me. This following chunk of a paragraph stood out, and I hit pause on the audiobook so I could locate the exact words. It’s an insightful depiction of the interaction of two individuals in space-suits (Mars-suits?) as they travel across the planet’s surface:

Michel drove the jeep and listened to Maya talk. Did conversation change when voices were divorced from bodies, planted right in the ears of the listeners by helmet mikes? It was as if one were always on the phone, even when sitting next to the person you were talking to. Or — was this better or worse — as if you were engaged in telepathy.

In case you haven’t read the series, it might help to know that Michel is the lonely French psychologist assigned to the 100-person crew setting up camp on Mars at the start of the first book, and that Maya is a captivating and highly driven Russian member of the international assortment of captivating and highly driven characters who populate the novel and the planet.

A few paragraphs earlier, the narrator set the stage for this depiction — two people next to each other, and also quite isolated from each other — as follows:

Michel asked the questions that a shrink program would have asked, Maya answered in a way that a Maya program would have answered. Their voices right in each other’s ears, the intimacy of an intercom.

The way the technologically mediated conversation assists in dehumanizing the characters, turning each into a “program,” is further emphasized by that verb-less standalone clause that comes immediately after. The impact of the observation is further heightened because just two pages earlier still we were told:

intimacy consisted of talking for hours about what was most important in one’s life.

Robinson (or Stan, as he likes to be called, as I learned when I interviewed him over the course of several conversations a few years ago: “The Man Who Fell for Earth”) always gets deserved credit for the scientific knowledge and imagination he brings to his depiction of how Mars might be terraformed, how it might be made habitable by humans. What makes the novels really work, though, is his awareness of technology at not just an industrial or societal level, but at an interpersonal one as well: how technological change impacts the individuals as much as it does the planet. To remake Mars is to remake ourselves.

Pushing Past Lovely

the horizon kisses you til there's nothing left by Lyndsie Alguire

After releasing her most recent album, The Horizon Kisses You Til There’s Nothing Left, on Bandcamp earlier this year, the musician Lyndsie Alguire selected one of its tracks to post on her SoundCloud account, a form of cross-promotion between the two platforms.

Titled “Demeter Weeping,” the song is essentially much of the working materials, the techniques and sounds, of the broader album condensed into one beautiful, linear summary statement. It opens with layers of her vocals, all shoegazey lushness, hinting at some sort of meaning, yet mumbled and muffled beyond comprehensibility. In time, the textures move beyond some invisible breaking point, and what had been lush transforms from linen to sandpaper, from lovely to something that pushes past lovely, yet that retains a definite if harsh beauty. Just after the midway point, “Demeter Weeping” goes from hushed to triumphant, a sweeping riff threatening to pierce the haze that has built up thus far.

That’s the moment when Alguire’s ambition becomes clear. What came before would have been pretty unto itself, but Alguire isn’t here just for the sweetness. She’s here to challenge. Listen, for example, to the buzzing of “Dustmote” and the heavily reverberating bass notes of “No Future,” both of which make you wonder if your speaker is wired correctly. Listen to the range of sounds cycling through “Nobody’s,” which summons up a deep mess of broken clouds.

Likewise, there’s more to The Horizon Kisses than “Demeter Weeping,” including introspective keyboard work (“Til There’s Nothing Left”), vaguely medieval chamber settings (“Sacrifices”), dense drones (“Dustmote”), and heavily warped audio that suggests a smaller scale take on Gavin Bryars’ Sinking of the Titanic. She could have played it safe with an album of variations on the first half of “Demeter Weeping,” but there’s no playing it safe here.

Album first posted at lyndsiealguire.bandcamp.com. Lyndsie Alguire is based in Montréal, Québec. More from her at lyndsiealguire.ca.