Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 280
October 4, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0353: Warp & Weft
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, October 8, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, October 4, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0353: Warp & Weft
The Assignment: Read loom-woven fabric as a musical composition.
Thanks to Kim Rueger for proposing this project, to John Horigan for allowing us to use this fabric as our source image, and to Mark Lentczner for the photography and for participating in this project’s gestation.
Step 1: Download the following image and look at it closely:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/brauliz2ryvdram/warp%20weave%20full.jpg?dl=0
Step 2: If you’re not familiarize with the terms “warp” and “weft,” understand them as relating to the act of weaving. Per the Wikipedia entry, “The lengthwise or longitudinal warp yarns are held stationary in tension on a frame or loom while the transverse weft (sometimes woof) is drawn through and inserted over-and-under the warp.”
Step 3: Study the image with this concept of “warp and weft” in mind. Consider how the image can be interpreted as a musical composition.
Step 4: Compose a piece of music that, reflecting your thoughts from steps 1 through 3, reads the image as a music score.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0353” (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 “disquiet0353” (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-0353-warp-weft/
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, October 8, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, October 5, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0353” 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 353rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Warp & Weft / The Assignment: Read loom-woven fabric as a musical composition) at:
Thanks to Kim Rueger for proposing this project, to John Horigan for allowing us to use this fabric as our source image, and to Mark Lentczner for the photography and for participating in this project’s gestation.
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-0353-warp-weft/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
October 2, 2018
Jessica Kert in the Frame
A hand comes into view, the nape of a neck, a shoulder, a tattoo, then another. The camera moves continuously, seemingly the musician’s own viewpoint, until it isn’t. The perspective switches back and forth for the video’s nearly six-minute runtime, but its focus does not. The focus is always on a nest of synthesizers, patch cords going in every direction, lights signifying whether they are in or out of sync with the beat. The beat is everything in this performance by Jessica Kert. The beat is heavy and insistent, but also nudged, slightly off the initial cadence, an act of industrial dub.
This video is the precise opposite of the live performance synthesizer video I wrote about yesterday. Where yesterday Alan Dear left his modules to all the work, here Kert is ever coaxing, adjusting. There is a consonance between action and sound. Motion suggests intent and intent is mapped to how the sound alters, how it is altered. The result is formidable.
Video originally posted on Vimeo. More from Kert at instagram.com/jessyandthechords and at soundcloud.com/jessicakert.
October 1, 2018
“Reuma” with a View
Don’t take Alan Dear’s working title for this live performance as a requirement for expert ears, or for music-technology expertise, for that matter. The piece may be titled (“reuma – ambient eurorack w/mutable instruments rings, morphagene and Bastl microgranny”) primarily after the technology employed to make it, but the deluge of that information has no parallel to the sheer, evocative simplicity of what transpires in the track’s duration. It measures just under six minutes, but the time is also meaningless, because you’re almost certainly going to want to set it on loop.
What transpires is sonic dust, frayed bits of noise, all petal crunches and mote sways. It’s expressly gentle, a choreography for shadows and silhouettes. The video itself is a document of automation. What happens is the result of communication between devices. Toward the end, the camera cuts in close to focus the eye, but there is no human present, except behind the lens, and in advance of the performance. Someone set these sounds in motion. Someone — Alan Dear, of course — set the clocks for the filters and effects. Someone foresaw the interaction between elements. But at some point, that someone let go, and let the machines do their thing.
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 Alan Dear at instagram.com/dearalanmusic and, soon, one hopes, at dearalan.bandcamp.com, where Dear’s debut album is due to appear. The YouTube video’s accompanying note says “late 2018” for the album’s release.
September 30, 2018
Stasis Report: Hecker ✚ Sprague ✚ Classic AFX
The latest update to my Stasis Report ambient-music playlist, on Spotify and Google Play Music. The following five tracks were added on Sunday, September 30. Four of the tracks are new, and one is a classic from almost a quarter century ago:
✚ “Synth Two” off the new Emily A. Sprague album, Mount Vision: mlesprg.bandcamp.com. I wrote a bit about its title track during its prerelease. (This album isn’t yet on Google Play Music, so the track isn’t on that version of the playlist currently.)
✚ “Mend,” the closing track from Care, the new album from Klara Lewis and Simon Fisher Turner on Editions Mego: editionsmego.com, soundcloud.com/editionsmego.
✚ “Through the City,” the track by Marcus Fischer on the new Field Works collaborative album, Pogue’s Run: fieldworks.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Is a Rose Petal of the Dying Crimson Light” off the new Tim Hecker album, Konoyo, on the Kranky label: timhecker.bandcamp.com.
✚ As of this installment of the Stasis Report, I’m going to start introducing one archival track most weeks, starting with “Tree,” the 10th track on Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 from Aphex Twin. The album was originally released in 1994, and is the subject of my 2014 book in the 33 1/3 series: aphextwin.warp.net
Some previous Stasis Report tracks were removed to make room for these, keeping the playlist length to roughly two hours. Those retired tracks (by Anna Meredith, Robert Rich, Olafur Arnalds, Simon Stalenhag, Mary Lattimore, Ellen Arkbro, Mark Van Hoen) are now in the Stasis Archives playlist (currently only on Spotify).
Diegetic-Like
The musicality of the HBO series Insecure took a bit of a hit when the character Daniel exited stage left earlier this season, the series’ third. A love interest for Issa, Insecure‘s main protagonist, the aspiring music producer Daniel helped, simply through his presence, to transform the show’s wall-to-wall backing tracks into plot points, whether he was busy at work, or arguing with another musician about the arrangement of a new composition, or seducing Issa from behind his production desk.
With Daniel now gone, we still have composer Raphael Saadiq’s score and Kier Lehman’s music supervision to artfully thread the needle between diegetic and non-diegetic sound, between what’s happening on-screen and what Insecure‘s writers want us to think and feel at any given moment. But this past week’s episode, “Obsessed-Like,” the season’s penultimate, leveled things up during one brief, spectacular moment.
Insecure has always played with Issa’s inner monologues, which often occur when she’s alone in the bathroom. Those moments are tender not just because they are private, but because they show a more forthright and secure Issa than she generally acts in public. They often come in the form of short bursts of fledgling rap lyrics, part poetry slam, part self-aware stand-up comedy. They hint at where Issa the character may be headed. Perhaps — as with the Jerry of Seinfeld — the character Issa will become more like the actress Issa who portrays her.
In the episode “Obsessed-Like,” as its title suggests, Issa is anything but secure. She’s reeling from another recent relationship, with a guy named Nathan, one she didn’t herself choose to conclude. Much of the episode is a battle between her somewhat deranged inner thoughts and what’s happening around her. Many of the scenes are filmed as if through her eyes, to emphasize that she isn’t seeing things clearly. (It’s the first episode of the season written by Insecure showrunner Prentice Penny, who perhaps has the most freedom to push beyond the show’s narrative toolbox.)
At one climactic point we see Issa in Nathan’s bedroom, where she is frantically trying to guess his laptop’s password. Her best friend, Molly, walks in on her, and to signal the way this moment presents an emotional rock bottom, Issa’s inner and public voices finally converge in an expression of utter shame — the “uh” of her internal monologue and the “uh” of her verbal response to a question from Molly harmonize with each other. They’re seen here in captions, the italics having, throughout the episode, signaled when Issa is talking to herself inside her head. Issa hasn’t recovered fully, but the delusions with which the episode opened seem to have been reconciled with — come into harmony with — reality.
This evening, HBO will air the final episode of the third season of Insecure (which has already been renewed for a fourth). It is directed by Regina King, who played a lead character in the series Southland, the rare hour-long TV drama to air, for its full five-season run, without any background score. I wrote previously about the character Daniel’s presence on Insecure as a nuanced secondary figure we see making music.
September 29, 2018
Module Learning: Spectral Swoop
It’s a little-known fact that the low-level drones experienced as much as heard in large office buildings aren’t the result of overlapping signal byproduct from various infrastructural activities — the off-sync relations between HVAC, electrical, and IT, for example — but, instead, are unattributed ambient sound-art installations funded by forward-thinking c-level thought leaders and artistically progressive boards of directors.
Well, no, not really. It is just noise whose happenstance subtle complexity can reward close attention, when it isn’t causing low-level discomfort.
In any case, this recording is a Saturday-morning attempt to combine the rough timbres of one module with the elegant spectrum analysis of another, all in the service of a certain HVAC je ne sais quoi. The main sound is a rich triangle coming from the Ieaskul F. Mobenthey Swoop, sent in turn through the 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator, several bands of which are tweaked thanks to various low-frequency oscillations. The pace is set by the Delptronics Trigger Man, which, throughout, rotates the scale of the 4MS module two steps forward, one step back.
In addition, a bit of pink noise waves in and out, coming from an SSF Quantum Rainbow 2. The interwoven LFO patterns yield a song-like sequence of give and take, if not full on verse and chorus.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
September 28, 2018
5 Recommendations for Bandcamp’s Voting Rights Fundraiser
Bandcamp is donating 100% today (Friday, September 28, “midnight to midnight Pacific Time”) of its share of proceeds from sales on the website to the Voting Rights Project. Often when Bandcamp does these fundraisers, the musicians also chip in their share. If you’re looking for something to buy, given how expansive Bandcamp’s holdings are, here are five recommendations:
Ambient: Mount Vision by Emily A. Sprague.
Hip-Hop: Delve Into Classical Moog by Kev Brown.
Downtempo Beats: Tidy by Ally Mobbs (with piano by ioflow on one track).
Trance: City of Light by Bill Laswell and collaborators Lori Carson, Trilok Gurtu, John Balance and Peter Christopherson (of Coil), and Tetsu Inoue.
Classical: Diary Reworks, on which eight acts rework music from Michael Price’s album Diary. Participants include: Michael A. Muller, Library Tapes, Dmitry Evgrafov, Sophie Hutchings, Madeleine Cocolas, Julia Kent, Akira Kosemura, and Marco Caricola.
September 27, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0352: Layering Permutations
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, October 1, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, September 27, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0352: Layering Permutations
The Assignment: Play something melodic atop two variations.
Step 1: The idea is to have a simple melody of some sort, and to then have two variations on that melody play simultaneous with it. The key word here is “melody.”
Step 2: Come up with a melody, and then come up with means to create variations on it. Think of the variations as permutations of the melody. Try to have the variations not veer too far from the original. As you develop the variations, think about relative balance between the three layers.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music in which the three layers are stacked atop each other. You might perform the layers separately and then combine them, or you might have a means for them to play simultaneously. You might have the balance between the tracks remain static throughout, or you may change relative volume at times.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0352” (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 “disquiet0352” (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-0352-layering-permutations/
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, October 1, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, September 27, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0352” 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 352nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Layering Permutations / The Assignment: Play something melodic atop two variations) 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-0352-layering-permutations/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Image associated with this project is by John Getchel, used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license:
Alvin & Garfunkel
I’m sitting in a railway station different from the one you are in now.
I’ve got a ticket to the resonant frequencies of the room.
On a tour of the room articulated by speech.
And every stop is neatly planned as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.
September 26, 2018
Side-Scrolling Composition
A small collection of dots, connected by fragile lines, triggers a bleep-bloop akin to the handshake signals of satellite communication. Near-parallel white lines, some distance apart across a vast black field, create a centerless drone, the mechanical nature of which is subdued by slight wavering, its sound altering along with the moving image.
One of those lines grows thick, exposing an internal lattice, clusters of supporting frames — a honeycomb by way of an early arcade game, the fractals of Flatland. These images, and many more, make up SYN-Phon, a visual score by composer Candas Sisman, performed by Ensemble d’oscillateurs on their album 4 compositions (Line Imprint). It’s a protagonist-free side-scrolling adventure into the sonic avant-garde.
Ensemble d’oscillateurs, led by Nicolas Bernier, performs entirely on a set of beautiful old oscillators:
As a viewer-listener, you have the benefit in Sisman’s SYN-Phon of seeing in advance what you will soon hear. A thick vertical white line on the horizon, with dense activity coming online after a long expanse of near silence, announces itself as it scrolls in from the right. (The vertical red line, in contrast, signals where you are in the score at any given moment. It’s positioned partially into the frame, so you can also see what has recently occurred.)
Later, as a silence approaches, signaled by a vast black blankness, your ear knows to prepare for the shift, and awaits the ability to focus on the smaller sonic images about to unfold. You also have the option of downloading (as a PDF) the entire score as an extravagantly narrow band of abstract images, a TripTik of where the Ensemble will be traveling.
This image, from the composer’s Flickr page, give a sense of the scale of the score:
All four of the compositions on the 4 compositions album are based on graphic scores. The other composers, in addition to Candas Sisman, are Xavier Ménard, Francisco Meirino, and Kevin Gironnay. In the liner notes to the album, Gironnay describes what is happening in SYN-Phon:
A collective work has been accomplished around the interpretation (literally) of the graphic notation: assigning a line to an oscillator, while some others are shaping the sound of a circle or quickly stepping in to give a sonic life to an array of connected dots.
This video initially appeared at the Vimeo channel of Lines Imprint: vimeo.com. Get the full album at lineimprint.bandcamp.com. More from Ensemble d’oscillateurs at son-matiere.org. For comparison, there is on Sisman’s Vimeo channel another interpretation of the same scrolling graphic score, performed instead on trumpet, cello, and “electronics and objects” rather than a collection of oscillators. The “electronics and objects” are performed by Sisman himself. More details at Sisman’s own website, csismn.com.
