Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 277
December 6, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0362: Operational Surrealism
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, December 10, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, December 6, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0362: Operational Surrealism
The Assignment: Make a piece of music informed by a key text from the art movement.
Just one step this week: Make something as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”
Many thanks to Peggy Nelson for having proposed this project. Here’s some background: This week’s phrase originated in Les Chants de Maldoror, an experimental novel by the Comte de Lautréamont, a French poet from Uruguay who died in 1870 at age 24. In Les Chants, Lautréamont describes a young boy as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,” but when André Breton, the self-styled head of the Surrealist movement, came across Lautréamont’s novel (prose-poem /unbridled rant / giant run-on sentence) in 1918, he seized upon the phrase as the perfect slogan, and drafted it into wider cultural service. Despite being dreamed up in the late 19th century, the phrase’s unnerving and perhaps prescient inclusion of both mechanical and medical metaphors was surely not lost on Breton, who had served in French psychiatric hospitals during the First World War. There have been any number of (re)statements and (mis)translations of the phrase since, but the basic idea remains: none of these things go together, and so, they do.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0362” (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 “disquiet0362” (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-0362-operational-surrealism/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Other Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, December 10, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, December 6, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0362” 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 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).
Context: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 362nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Operational Surrealism / The Assignment: Make a piece of music informed by a key text from the art movement — at:
Thanks to Peggy Nelson, for having proposed this project.
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-0362-operational-surrealism/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Image adapted (cropped, text added, etc.) from a Flickr photo by Audrey Un Riz, thanks to a Creative Commons license:
December 5, 2018
Playing the Quiet at Full Volume
Kent Sparling has long been a master of quiet music. He often explores field recordings as source material, and ekes out small sounds from synthesizers and acoustic instruments alike. That work has reached a new phase with his forthcoming full-length release, two preview tracks of which are currently streaming on his Bandcamp page. The album, Mount Larsen, is due out on December 18. It is both Sparling’s quietest and, in many ways, his loudest album yet.
Sparling’s music has always explored spaciousness, the way sounds suggest scope, scale, and dimensionality, and that work has benefited from his extensive experience in sound for motion pictures (his IMDB page lists to date). On the new album, the only sounds are those that surface as feedback in the closed acoustic system of a Skywalker Sound scoring stage. The results, as heard on the tracks “Gorda Plate” and “Tephra,” are haunting drones and ringing tones, ghostly whistles and soft hums, all left to coagulate and circulate — and to build, as well, occasionally dialed back when they seem likely to pierce the listener’s comfort. That is when Sparling’s music enters a new realm for him — music that has so long explored the fog now plays with fire.
He describes the album’s composition in a note accompanying its release:
Mount Larsen is a record of feedback music, recorded live on a large film scoring stage. Electronic and acoustic sounds were used to “excite” the room, whose natural reverb decay is over 4 seconds; these sounds were picked up by an array of 10 microphones which were fed to a small mixing console and then back out to large speakers the room, the sounds from which were in turn picked up by the original microphones, creating an acoustic feedback loop of rich and evolving tones. The performance of the pieces involved the composer mixing the sounds back into the room live, bringing the system to the edge of collapse, then carving away energy to create hollows of near-silence. The object was music with a wide dynamic range between billowing waves of heavy sound and very, very quiet lingering filaments of clear feedback. The result is both loud and quiet, energetic and relaxing, complicated and simple and pure.
Available for pre-order at jicamasalad.bandcamp.com. More from Sparling, who lives in Berkeley, California, at jicamasalad.net.
November 29, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0361: Zork Diaries
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, December 3, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, November 29, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0361: Zork Diaries
The Assignment: Score a classic interactive fiction.
Step 1: Zork is the title of one of the earliest interactive text adventure games. The complete text of a spoiler-laden full run of the game is at the following URL, housed at Georgia Tech, or the Georgia Institute of Technology:
Step 2: If you’re not familiar with Zork and/or with interactive text adventures, consider reading up. Otherwise, just think of the script as exactly that: the bare-bones narrative of a story.
Step 3: Compose a score (along with, if possible, sound effects) for the first page or so of Zork. It is suggested that you begin with the fifth line of provided text (“West of House”) and end about a page down, where it reads “The door reluctantly opens to reveal a rickety staircase descending into darkness.”
Bonus Alternates: (A) You can, of course, end sooner or later. (B) You can, of course, play the game yourself and score the moves you make. (C) You can, of course, sort out a means to record alternate, forking versions, based on various potential outcomes of different decisions when playing the game. (D) You might open with a brief opening-credits theme.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0361” (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 “disquiet0361” (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-0361-zork-diaries/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Other Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, December 3, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, November 29, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0361” 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 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).
Context: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 361st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Zork Diaries / The Assignment: Score a classic interactive fictio — 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-0361-zork-diaries/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Image adapted (cropped, text added, etc.) from a Wikipedia photo by Marcin Wichary, thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zork_photo.jpg
November 27, 2018
New Pedal at Dusk
This elegant, beautiful video tracks from various angles a test drive by one member of the act Lullatone on a newly acquired reverb pedal. As the sun sets, the pedal is put through its initial paces, segments played on a keyboard and then through the reverb, all set to layer as loops. Those individual layers are barely distinguishable from each other, so peacefully do they accrue as a singular, solitary spaciousness. At times the high notes bring to mind Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ production for U2. Throughout, both the video and the performance it documents are marvels of simplicity.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube channel. More from Lullatone, the duo of Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida, who are based in Japan, at lullatone.com and lullatone.bandcamp.com.
November 22, 2018
The Benefits of Deviations
The cover image to this week’s Disquiet Junto project features more text manipulation than has generally been the case this year. Here’s to further deviations — visual, sonic, and procedural — in 2018.
It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. today, and I want to say thanks to everyone who is part of the Junto — past and present, long-timers and new arrivals. As I say each week in the email newsletter of the Junto, thanks as always for your generosity with your time and creativity.
Disquiet Junto Project 0360: Fishbowl Progressions
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, November 26, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, November 22, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0360: Fishbowl Progressions
The Assignment: Explore spatial sound as a compositional element.
This week’s project: Record a piece of music in which the relative position and movement of sounds are as important to compositional development as are melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0360” (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 “disquiet0360” (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-0360-fishbowl-progressions/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Other Details:
Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, November 26, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, November 22, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0360” 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 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).
Context: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 360th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Fishbowl Progressions / The Assignment: Explore spatial sound as a compositional element — 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-0360-fishbowl-progressions/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Image adapted (cropped, text added, etc.) from a photo by ellenm1, used via Flickr thanks to a non-commercial Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). Many thanks to Mark Lentczner for text manipulation.
November 21, 2018
This Week in Sound: Naughty Gadgets
An annotated clipping service
It’s been far too long since I last hit sent on an email to this list, not since mid-July.
Disconnect Me: Shakespearian actor Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at the age of 90: nytimes.com. This year, 2018, marks the 50th anniversary of the movie’s release.
Naughty List: Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, has created a list (at mozilla.org) of smart devices in an effort to gauge consumers’ sense of their “creepy” factor. The items range from the Nintendo Switch to the Parker Teddy Bear. (Via Next Draft.)
Volume Off: The Free Music Archive is reportedly closing down: theverge.com.
Robot Overload: A few days ago, the British electronic duo Autechre revealed it had uploaded 444 (yes, 444) new (yes, new) videos to YouTube, totally more than 13 (yes, you know the drill) hours of music. The result brings to mind a neural network’s combination of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s horizon-view ocean photography and Brian Eno’s colorful light installations. As is the case with many an internet Easter Egg hunt, the communal scrambling to make sense of the ambiguous material is reminiscent of the mysterious Russian video footage at the heart of William Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition.
This was first published in the November 20, 2018, issue of the free weekly (well, kinda weekly, in a hopeful way) email newsletter This Week in Sound.
November 20, 2018
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s Music for Yoga
Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
The rising synthesizer figure Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has announced a forthcoming album of purpose-composed recordings, Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga. The album is due out on January 11, 2019, and is currently available for pre-order on Smith’s Bandcamp page, where two of its nine tracks are already streaming, a total of nearly 10 minutes of music.
Though the album is new, the music is more than half a decade old, recorded back in 2013 at the request of one of Smith’s parents: “it was commissioned by Smith’s mother to accompany her yoga practice,” says the accompanying liner note. The two tracks, “Tides III” and “Tides IV,” both employ, as does the rest of the album, the Buchla Music Easel instrument, the original of which dates back to 1973, almost a decade and a half before Smith was born.
“Tides III” is a gentle, see-sawing piece, with layers of lulling melodic material. “Tides IV” emerges from a whorl of white noise, and cuts the pace of “Tides III” almost in half. Stepwise melodies trace figures up and down, back and forth, while a looming undercurrent comes in and out of focus. While Smith describes the album as ambient, the music is also often delectably dense and always quite present.
Preorder the album at kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com. More from Smith, who lives in Los Angeles, at kaitlynaureliasmith.com. Found via synthtopia.com.
Red Noise
There is an industrial-strength air purifier running in the back of the house. The machine fills the room and the adjacent spaces with a ceaseless stage whisper. This is not the harsh, bristling whir of white noise, but the more rooted whoosh of its feminized alternate, pink noise. It is noise, nonetheless.
This purifier has sat there for years, retained for the occasional days or even weeks when the neighborhood’s plant allergens are particularly heavy in the air. These days, the air itself is heavy and the purifier is running far more often than usual — once all night by mistake, an industrial-music lullaby on repeat. The air is heavy with particulate fallout from the fires that raged some 175 miles to the northeast of where I live.
Today the particulate level — the environmental DEFCON — is registering as red, having nudged up from orange. The color red signifies merely “unhealthy.” Across the bay it has been “very unhealthy,” signified on maps and in advisory alerts by a deep purple. (Cue “Smoke on the Water.”) One level higher is some sort of maroon, meaning “hazardous.” It was deep purple here a few days ago, causing the schools to close, public transportation to be free, and museums to forgo admission fees. If TV is the opiate of the masses, apparently fine art is its vaccine.
Home for me is in San Francisco, not far from the ocean and quite close to the park. The fires were in the town of Paradise, California — the sort of geographic marker that would induce groans in a fictional film of our current narrative, and yet one that triggers as surreal in, well, what appears, through the smog, to be real life.
. . .
There is a second air purifier, borrowed, at the front of the house in the living room, where the windows are of a more recent vintage, but the smell and taste of smoke lingers still. Those pathogens are of external origin. The low-level noise pollution, by contrast, is self-induced.
The house is empty at the moment except for me — me and the twin air purifiers. An album of ambient music, recently released, is playing in the kitchen on a small counter-top speaker. It is a newly purchased “dumb” speaker, which is to say it lacks any AI functionality. This speaker connects in the simplest ways to the internet, and it is not part of the so-called internet of things. It does not reply when I speak. It does not ask questions. It merely channels audio from various devices.
This is today: We process our air, and we seek out products that lack intelligence, the way we want foods lacking in nitrates, un-tinged by antibiotic overflow, their genetic makeup non-modified — unprocessed, in other words.
. . .
I was in a bookstore across town, a rare venture out during the worst of our current health crisis, and having finished drinking a bottle of water, I crumpled up the bottle, folding it into itself like one would roll up a tube of toothpaste, and then capping it, so the re-sealed vacuum would keep it compacted. One of the store’s clerks rushed around the corner of shelves. She looked at me, and then at my hands, and then at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I heard the crackling of fire.”
I was at the bookstore to attend a mid-day concert by a pair of local electronic musicians whose quiet, abstract work often hovered in the realm of white noise. I wondered later if their music had so settled our ears on a subtle palette, that we became, unintentionally, all the more sensitive to intruding noises.
. . .
The house is full of pink noise, byproduct of air purification. For a moment, I forget music is even playing. This is ambient music, music intended — in Brian Eno’s orienting definition — to be of use both in the background and as the subject of focused attention. The current background, however, is challenging the music’s subtleties — swamping them, frankly.
I turn up the volume on the kitchen speaker. I then move to another room. I go back to the kitchen, and turn the speaker up higher, and the music ceases to be the first category of ambient (i.e., background) and does its best to satisfy the demands of the second category (i.e., subject of attention).
The kitchen speaker at this volume reveals sharp pitches amid the album’s seemingly placid tones, or perhaps the music’s sharp pitches reveal the speaker’s shortcomings. The device is new, keeping opportunity for comparison is limited. This whole scenario is new, by which I mean the broader environmental issues.
Either way, an arms race is underway: the pink noise of domestic infrastructure against the sound design of contemporary popular music.
We’ll need new genres of music in our climate-punk future, genres that can conjoin or deflect the presence of the machines that we’ll employ to save us from what our machines have wrought.
The sad fact is that the pink noise seems like it should signify quiet on its own, and yet a pummeling inner momentum has risen to to the noise’s surface. There is an evident, anxious churn to the pink noise that is in contrast with the two devices’ purr-like quality. Perhaps the emotional tension is more contextually based: the presence of the noise having brought to mind the need for the device in the first place. The pink noise is a byproduct of a device to clean the air of the byproducts of fire. Distant fires are made more proximate by our need to adjust to their impact.
If there is a momentum to the purifiers’ noise, could something offset them? Pink noise, like white noise, serves as a mask for sound. The constant randomness of its myriad scatter-shot audible content — sonic particulate, a parallel to the atmospheric particulate the machines are to cancel out — can reduce the sensed presence of other noises. The churn inherent in the noise has no set tempo, but still implies one. Could something grasp that fungible tempo and render it slower? Could something cancel out further the higher register of the noise, much as pink noise reduces the harsh upper level of white noise? Could something carve music from the pink noise itself?
This cultural question is a tiny vestige of a larger discussion underway, a discussion addressing the caustic cycle: industrialization yields environmental consequences, and adjustments are made to counteract or sublimate those consequences, yielding further consequences. The question, of course, is how far one tunes one’s personal environment in light of the environment — the environment environment? — before one has, in effect, tuned out the environment.
November 19, 2018
Truly Experimental Music
It’s called experimental music, so of course when the musician is truly just experimenting, some of their best sounds might come out — truly experimenting, in that they are fiddling about with newly acquired equipment: pairing devices, exploring signal flows, turning knobs and touching buttons to see what they might hear. That’s the case with Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, who today uploaded to his YouTube channel a case study of two gadgets employed in tandem. What those little things, each barely the size of a human hand, emit in concert with each other is dense clouds of atmospheric intensity.
The main device is a Tetrax from Ciat-Lonbarde, created by the ingenious instrument designer Peter Blasser. It’s being heard through an effects pedal called the Eventide H9. In the comments accompanying the video, Scanner engages with his listeners and talks about coming up to speed on the Tetrax, and mentions that he’s working on a soundtrack.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at YouTube.com. More from Scanner, who is based in London, at scannerdot.com.
