Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 272
March 10, 2019
Guitar + Synth Learning: Ultomaton Software
This is a quick, initial attempt on my part with a new piece of software called Ultomaton. The name is a play on the word “automaton” because the software employs Conway’s Game of Life, the famed “cellular automation” simulation, as a source of triggers and other controls, such as volume and place in the stereo spectrum, for all manner of sonic processes. These effects include stutter, backwards audio, looping, and granular synthesis, several of which are heard in this test run.
What I’m playing on electric guitar as the source audio is the first of the 120 right-hand exercises by composer Mauro Giuliani (1781 – 1829). I’ve been working my way through these exercises for the past few weeks, and sometimes experimenting with ways to make practice even more enjoyable, such as prerecording the chords to supply accompaniment. The real-time processing of Ultomaton provides accompaniment as I play, built from the very things I am playing at that moment. The accompanying screenshot shows the Ultomaton controls as they were set for this recording.
The electric guitar went into the laptop, a Macbook Air (2013), via a Scarlett audio interface. After recorded, the audio was cleaned up in Adobe Audition: volume increased, bit of reverb added, and fade-in/fade-out implemented.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet. The Ultomaton software is the work of Benjamin Van Esser, who is based in Brussels, Belgium. The software is free at github.com/benjaminvanesser. More information at benjaminvanesser.be.
March 8, 2019
25 Years of Selected Ambient Works Volume II
It’s now 25 years and a day since Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II came out. It was released on the Warp Records label following fast on a single, “On,” one that in no way laid the foundation in listeners’ ears — and, before that, two years earlier, had been Selected Ambient Works 85-92, which was far more foregrounded sonically.
There were other releases from Richard D. James in between — notably the full-length Surfing on Sine Waves, under another Aphex pseudonym, Polygon Window — that came closer, but SAWII was and remains its own quiet beast, with little precedent or subsequently in the works of Aphex Twin that approaches its emphasis on atmosphere and the subtle nuances of its rhythmic expression.
When RDJ resurfaced in 2014 after an extended quiet period, he uploaded hundreds of unreleased tracks to a variety of playful SoundCloud accounts, turning a new generation of listeners on to his deepest crates, and many of them into trainspotters. Still, few among those vast outtakes felt of a piece with Selected Ambient Works Volume II. The SoundCloud files confirmed a longstanding rumor of vast archives, and also further identified SAWII as a unique recording.
Another quarter-century gap from, say, 1955 to 1980 can be measured in various ways. From Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” to Queen’s “Queen Crazy Little Thing Called Love” it seems quite proximate — from the McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely” to Kurtis Blow’s self-titled debut, considerably less so. The gap from 1994 to 2019 doesn’t feel as wide to me, but that no doubt has to do with me having been alive and a fully conscious adult for the duration. There may be less music by Aphex Twin that sounds akin to Selected Ambient Works Volume II, but there is considerably more music in general today that does than in 1994, not just music but more broadly a culture that reflects its rich interiority, its minimalist impetus, and its acoustic curiosity — from the sound design of filmed entertainment and video games, to the ubiquitous if rangy field come to be known as sound art, to the increasing personal attention we pay, individually, to our intimate sonic spaces.
In many ways Selected Ambient Works Volume II — building, of course, on its own decades-old influences — laid the groundwork for what sound sounds like in 2019. Here’s to another quarter century.
March 7, 2019
Disquiet Junto Project 0375: Despite Yourself
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, March 11, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted shortly before noon, California time, on Thursday, March 7, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0375: Despite Yourself
The Assignment: Make a piece of music that sounds as unlike you as you can accomplish.
Step 1: There is only one step for this project: Make a piece of music that sounds as unlike you as you can accomplish.
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0375” (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 “disquiet0375” (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-0375-despite-yourself/
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, March 11, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted shortly before noon, California time, on Thursday, March 7, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0375” 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 375th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Despite Yourself / The Assignment: Make a piece of music that sounds as unlike you as you can accomplish — 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-0375-despite-yourself/
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 Heather:
February 28, 2019
Sounds of Brands: Initial Concepts
The course I teach each spring, “Sound of Brands,” passed an early milestone this past Wednesday, February 27. Our fourth weekly class meeting, it marked the end of the first major arc of the syllabus and the start of the second arc.
The first arc is “Listening to Media,” three weeks during which students work on their listening skills. They accomplish this by starting their sound journals, which they are to write in four times per week, and by exploring two primary topics: first, a time line of sound and its relation to the nature of being human; second, a more compact time line of sound and its relation to film (and other media).
This Wednesday began the second arc, which is the core of the curriculum, the six-week stint (out of fifteen three-hour sessions total) from which the course takes its name: “Sounds of Brands.” In this arc we explore how things use sound to express themselves in the media landscape. We’ve already looked, to date, at film and television, and a bit at video games, but now we’re looking at products and services and corporations and so forth. (I use the word “brands” because it provides a broad stroke. That said, I do suggest that if the word “company” works fine in a given situation, then please say “company” instead of “brand.” There’s something uncomfortably anthropomorphic about the term “brand,” and something narcissistic to that particular anthropomorphism. When it’s useful and necessary, use it, certainly. When it’s not, don’t feed the beast.)
To make that shift from the first arc of the course to the second, we paused at the start of class Wednesday to reflect back on concepts we worked through during the first three weeks. This blackboard displays what accumulated during about 45 minutes of discussion that I led. Looking at it now, I realize it’s essentially three things: a lot of neat ideas, and a bunch of super-accomplished thinkers, and Dragnet. The board was getting packed and we needed to shift to the new material, so I should mention one additional concept that should have been on there: “sound design as score,” the TV series Southland, associated with it, much as Dragnet is here associated with “voice over,” which in turn is associated with “non-diegetic.”
And while on the subject of diegetic sound, I should mention something else. Now, “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” are useful, hallowed terms in film studies. In case they are not familiar, “diegetic” refers to sounds that correlate with action happening on screen, in the story as it is unfolding (dialog, sound effects, etc.), while “non-diegetic” refers to sounds that are separate from whatever realism you want to attribute to the filmed image. Classic examples of “non-diegetic” sound include the score and, yes, voice-over narration.
I just want to note some issues with characterizing “voice over” as expressly non-diegetic. I think the diegetic/non-diegetic pairing, while useful, suggests a binary when there’s really more of a continuum. There’s an argument to be made that voice overs are sometimes expressions of thought of a character who is part of the story, not an omniscient narrator, and that thought is sometimes concurrent with what is on screen, and that what is on screen is sometimes out of sync with everyday conceptions of time.
In any case, with that over, we moved on to the origins of the jingle. I’m not doing a week-by-week online summary of the course here this semester, but I am mentioning material on Twitter, and will likely do a few more focused write-ups in the coming months.
Oh, and yes, the classroom I’m teaching in this semester does have an actual blackboard, and I am filthy with white dust at the end of each session. There’s a pencil sharpener hanging on the wall, too.
Live Stream Aphex Twin Discussion March 11 (10am Pacific)
Oh, yes, the 25th anniversary Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II is on March 7 — and on March 11, days later, at 10am Pacific time, I’ll be on Vivian Host’s Peak Time show (on Red Bull Radio) to extol its timeless virtues. You can bookmark this URL for the stream:
https://redbullradio.com/shows/peak-time/episodes/march-11-2019
Here’s Peak Time’s description of the episode:
Music critic and journalist Marc Weidenbaum calls up to discuss this quarter-century anniversary of this seminal release.
Richard D. James AKA Aphex Twin is undeniably one of the most important figures in modern electronic music. His IDM and ambient techno productions of the early 90’s helped shape a new era of music and he continues to influence sounds of today. This year, his sophomore album Selected Ambient Works, Vol II, a record that dazzled critics and fans with its indefinable aesthetic and was touted for reinvigorating ambient music, turns 25. On today’s show, Vivian will speak with a leading expert and the author the 33 1/3 on this album, the music critic Marc Weidenbaum.
Disquiet Junto Project 0374: Glitch Glitch
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, March 4, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 28, 2019.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0374: Glitch Glitch
The Assignment: what happens when you glitch something that’s been glitched?
Step 1: Take a recording. Glitch it.
Step 2: Glitch it a second time, in some different manner, and try to have moments where the initial glitch remains evident and untarnished (well, un-further-tarnished).
Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0374” (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 “disquiet0374” (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-0374-glitch-glitch/
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, March 4, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 28, 2019.
Length: The length is up to you. Short is good.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0374” 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: Please for this project be sure to set 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 374th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Glitch Glitch / The Assignment: what happens when you glitch something that’s been glitched? — 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-0374-glitch-glitch/
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 by Ario:
February 27, 2019
Diva of the Sublime
The Leaving Records label selected the lovely song “Nocturne” as its SoundCloud post to represent the seven tracks that comprise ~~~. That’s the new solo album (and that is, indeed, three tildes in a row) from Ana Roxanne. It’s a beautiful performance, Roxanne’s elevated voice — a mix of choir-schooled, pitch-perfect tonality and casual, approachable, often speech-like intonation — filling the track from start to finish. There is a vaguely Celtic sensibility to Roxanne’s singing at times, but its primary quality is a kind of ethereal affection. There’s a definite solitariness to it, but it is by no means remote or rarefied. Roxanne’s vowels are echoed deeply into the vast distance, sometimes with a pleasingly artificial rigidity to the rippling effect, and all the while a slow, percussive drone undergirds the piece, thrumming at a low level.
Get the full album at anaroxanne.bandcamp.com. It’s available digital, and while the first pressing of 69 cassette tapes sold out, a new run is now available. The website lists March 15 of this year as the release date, but it’s all already streaming in full. More from Roxanne at instagram.com/frincess.
February 26, 2019
The Form of the Longform Abstract
Say what you will about the mix of nostalgia, fossil-fuel products, and subpar sound quality that is employed with some finger-pointing regularity to characterize the resurgence of the tape cassette as a 21st-century conveyance of music from recording artist to listener, one positive service has certainly been accomplished: the rise of long-form compositions.
It seems more common today than it has been since the heights of the progressive rock era for commercially released albums to contain suite-length pieces, symphony-dimensioned (horizontally if not vertically) explorations longer than extended 12″s, longer than medleys, longer than the attention span attributed (malignly) to a generation raised amid screens.
Geneva Skeen’s many-layered collage of a new album, Dream State, is such a recording. It has two sides, each nearing 20 minutes — and far longer if taken into account is the time required to extract oneself from the artfully grim environment in which the music deposits its audience. The tracks amass mumbling tones and field recordings of clammy spaces, industrial noise and angelic singing, interrupted occasionally — or more to the point, layered further — by the barking of dogs. It is music that would make far less sense in the confines of a pop song. It is long enough to get lost in. This is the form of the abstract, a space suggested by throwback technology, and put to work for new purposes.
Timely purposes, truth be told. In a note describing the circumstances in which the music was made, Skeen describes a world “heavier and more opaque” than it was just a few years earlier. She acknowledges circumstances one doesn’t take comfort in waking to. Her music wrestles with this new reality by exploring it for both its real and surreal qualities, its details and its incongruences, its shapes and its shadows.
Album released earlier this month at genevaskeen.bandcamp.com. More from Skeen at twitter.com/geneeves and soundcloud.com/geneeeeves. The work was recorded at a Land and Sea residency in Oakland, California, in 2018.
February 25, 2019
The Happenstance Ambience of Corruption
I went to Japan quite a bit in the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but top of the list for some time now of musicians I would want to locate should/when I go again is Corruption, whose sprawling SoundCloud account — that’s soundcloud.com/corrption, minus the “u” — has accumulated a substantial (630 tracks as of this writing) and enigmatic (in a resolutely plainstated way) mix of messy, broken dubby noise music and snatches of everyday din, and at Corr(u)ption’s best it’s often difficult to tell into which of those two categories a given recording falls.
Take “170620_004lewe,” which surfaced a week and a half ago and plays like the score to a three-minute art film tracking some fleeting mid-morning moments of a dissolute urban life — and to be clear, should that ever need to be translated from English, the description is intended as the highest of compliments.
There are high-pitched noises that are either aliens among us or electrical interference amid an apartment packed with computer equipment, and hard clicks that suggest tape machines being manhandled, and for much of it a droning presence as if we’re listening in on someone else listening to something else the whole time.
There is, indeed, a voyeuristic aspect to Corruption’s work, in part because lacking any photographs of Corruption (the oeuvre comes across as deeply anonymous, at least from this side of the Pacific), everything that Corruption does seems to be from that individual’s point-of-view. This track’s title, resembling the timecode from a digital recorder, does nothing to diminish the impression.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/corrption. More from Corruption at corruption-scrapbook.tumblr.com, though by “more” is meant artfully affect-less city-dweller photography and short videos replete with hissy, happenstance ambience.
February 24, 2019
The Module’s Underbelly
Yesterday I said goodbye to another synthesizer module. I packed it up into a box and now it is on its way to the interior of Japan, where a new owner will nestle it into a new rig and where it will make new sounds in a new context, amid a new set of modules. I bought this module used from Toronto. I don’t know where it was before that.
Many modules will emit some sort of sound on their own if you push them hard enough — well, almost all still need to be connected to a speaker somehow — but almost all modules are intended for use with other modules, as a local network passing audio as well as commands in the form of electricity. When a module is in the rig, its innards go out of view. I often joke I wish I had a Lucite case for my modular synthesizer, so those innards, the close stacks of printed circuit boards (PCBs), were always available to be pored over. Part of the joke is I can’t stand Lucite, but the real impossibility of the joke is that a rack’s power supply, interior wiring, and structural support would occlude even the most transparent of synth boxes. Once a module is installed, its underbelly is disguised by a faceplate, knobs, and jacks.
Some of those synthesizer PCBs are wildly colored and arcanely inscribed, while others are as generic as the materials that allow your microwave to heat popcorn. Much of this is purely aesthetic, but aesthetics mean something. If the utilitarian appearance of one speaks of a company’s goal to reduce costs and perhaps a mission to make widely available what was once lavishly expensive, the filigrees of another’s speak of the whimsy, the fantasy, at the organization’s — often, an individual creator’s — heart. I’ve wondered about the intentionality and readability of these visual characteristics previously (at length — see my article “Is the Printed Circuit Board a Form of Musical Notation” at NewMusicBox) — and the upturned module reminded me of just how much I still have to learn.
This module in my hand is of a fairly homebrew variety. It is from the Ieaskul F. Mobenthey family, designed by the inventive Peter Blasser. Some are made by Blasser himself, while others are built in synth workshops that he runs, like some PCB Johnny Appleseed. The module goes by the name Fourses, because it is designed around a quartet of oscillators, the circuits that produce the frequencies we experience as sound.
Before I mailed off this module, I did what I always do during a sale. I investigated it for any shortcomings. What struck my eye were the paramecium-like formations of this tiny machine’s even tinier components. A chip resembles a little bug under most circumstances, but the asymmetrical, angled gang here have the look of things scurrying intently. Exposing the underbelly of the module felt like pulling a rock from a garden and exposing all sorts of wriggly life. The relative sizes and shapes of these things, how they’re all nestled together as part of coherent integration, suggest the presence an ecosystem. And the lines seen in the green of the board, often committed with rectilinear certainty, here have a topological quality, the squiggles of a mapmaker making sketches of new territory — territory explored subsequently by the people who, over time, invite the module into their sonic world.
