Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 282
September 5, 2018
Dappled by Gadgetry
This 30-minute segment of Nicklas Lundberg shows the musician milking noise from a sizable, jam-packed metal suitcase, opened like the maw of a giant mechanical fish and filled to both its mirror-twin brims with all manner of CD players, keyboards, cellphones, controllers, and countless other gadgets, many of which aren’t immediately associated – and this is sort of the point — with the production of sound. The music those things are summoned to produce is a rolling churn of glittering murk, of vibrating flotsam, random tools recycled into a semi-portable one-person orchestra. It’s a bit like a sonic equivalent to the dappled video projection that washes over Lundberg for the majority of the performance, except at several times the speed. Where the visual dappling is placid, serene, the sonic dappling is madcap, a chaotic flux that has no core pattern and yet provides a sense of continuity in its constant motion.
Video originally posted to the YouTube channel of Powcademy, more from which at instagram.com/powcademy.tv.
September 4, 2018
Clint Mansell Says, “Shhhhh!”
Just three days ago, soundtrack composer Clint Mansell posted these 17 tracks under the collective title Shhhhh!, combined with a “Shushing Face” emoji, to his SoundCloud account. A commenter on the opening track, “Don’t Say a Word,” asks if it’s the score to Ghost in the Shell. However, a quick check of the titles seems to confirm what the collection’s title, in retrospect, suggests — that this is the music from Mute, the film by Dunan Jones that debuted on Netflix earlier this year. There’s a snippet of what is said to be the Mute end-credits score on YouTube from back in February, and it is identical to the “I Would Drive All Night(Slight Reprise)” track here (the final one, number 17). Another clue: the penultimate track includes the name “Leo,” the Mute lead character, played by Alexander Skarsgard (except in flashbacks to him as a young boy). The set was originally posted at soundcloud.com/clint-mansell. He announced it, coyly, on Twitter, and though someone there guessed it as the Mute score, Mansell hasn’t replied as of this writing.
September 3, 2018
The Fractal Heart
“You broke my heart into a million pieces,” sing-says the voice. The voice is itself divided into many pieces, if not a million then certainly hundreds, perhaps approaching thousands. At a macro level it is a fifty-fifty split between sung and spoken. The phrase, however, is splintered further, courtesy of a musician seen seated in this video with her laptop perched on a folding table. The location and date, plus her name, provide the context in the form of the video’s title. It’s Erika Nesse at Firehouse (firehouseworcester.com) in Worcester, Massachusetts, on January 1, 2018, New Year’s Day. (The YouTube channel is that of Samual Hadge, who recently uploaded a slew of live sets from Firehouse, as well as from venues in Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere). Judging by the winter date and the puffy outerwear of the members of the audience, it is also very cold. Nesse is a poet of sonic fractals, of not just splintering sound into little piece but having those piece play out in patterns, systems, and processes, all of which entice the ear’s imagination. If we’re used to pop songs where the chorus takes on new meaning as it is repeated, one verse after another, here the phrase — “You broke my heart into a million pieces” — becomes its own meaning: the more the voice is disturbed by Nesse’s digital intrusions, the closer the listener comes to experiencing its truth.
Video originally posted at Hadge’s youtube.com. More from Erika Nesse at fractalmusicmachine.com and erikanesse.bandcamp.com.
September 2, 2018
Stasis Report: Deru ✚ Machinefabriek ✚ More
The latest update to my Stasis Report ambient-music playlist. It started out just on Spotify. As of two weeks ago, it’s also on Google Play Music. The following six tracks were added on Sunday, September 2. All the tracks are fairly new, with the exception of the Klara Lewis, which is posted in expectation of her upcoming new album.
✚ “Two High” off Engel by Machinefabriek. The self-released album seems to get louder and more insistent as it proceeds. This is the second track. The album is the score to a performance by Marta Alstadsæter and Kim-Jomi Fische: machinefabriek.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Eventually” is off Veriditas by Helios, on Ghostly: ghostly.com.
✚ “Opposite Day” from Invisible Threads by Mark Van Hoen, on Touch: touch333.bandcamp.com.
✚ “No One Cares as Much as You” is from the score to Impulse, by Deru, released by Lakeshore: derusoundtrack.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Unseen” is from FTS002 by Vida Vojic and Chihei Hatakeyama, released on First Terrace: firstterracerecords.bandcamp.com.
✚ “Try” is from Too, the 2016 album by Klara Lewis: klaralewis.bandcamp.com. Lewis has a new album (a collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner) due out later this month: editionsmego.com. Both are on Editions Mego.
Usually some Stasis Report tracks are removed to make room for new tracks, but this week the Stasis Report was expanded to two hours from one and a half. Past tracks are in the Stasis Archives playlist (currently only on Spotify).
August 30, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0348: Hot Mise en Abyme
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, September 3, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 30, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0348: Hot Mise en Abyme
The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by the art-historical term for fractal/recursion.
Step 1: There is a term in art, “mise en abyme.” It refers to instances when a work of art includes a copy of itself, maybe more than one copy. Consider how this term might apply to sound. (Do read up on “mise en abyme,” if it’s not familiar.)
Step 2: Record a short piece of music that applies the term “mise en abyme” to sound, based on your thoughts from Step 1.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0348” (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 “disquiet0348” (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-0348-hot-mise-en-abyme/
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, September 3, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 30, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0348” 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).
Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 348th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Hot Mise en Abyme / The Assignment: Make a piece of music inspired by the art-historical term for fractal/recursion) 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-0347-remix-remodel/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Image associated with this project is by Thomas Cizauskas, used thanks to Flickr and a Creative Commons license:
August 29, 2018
A Collective of Two
The Oxford Ambient Collective is an individual, though here it’s also a duo, working in tandem with Encym. The music of “London Departures” is vast as only a bedroom beatmaker can craft — which is to say unimaginably — though here there are no beats, per se, just a vast, ever-quivering mass of light sounds. It’s full-on cloud mode. A glance at a “types of clouds” STEM page for elementary-school students suggests perhaps the cumulonimbus clouds: massive structures of humidity that form on hot days.
Track oroginally posted at soundcloud.com/oxfordambient. More on the Oxford Ambient Collective, aka David Smith, at oxfordambient.com and youtube.com. More from encym, aka Roland Reinke, at encym.bandcamp.com.
What Sound Looks Like
If you arrive at the farmers market late, you can hear the sound art.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
August 28, 2018
The Coloration of Ambient
Ahnornberg’s “no return” manages an unusual combination. It bears the lightness of classic ambient music — to be distinguished from classical ambient music, which might be taken to mean ambient music with a classical-music affect, like the work of Mary Lattimore, Christina Vantzou, or Nils Frahm — even as its tonality veers into darker territory. Dark ambient is also often dense ambient. That coloration is heard here, especially in its closing minutes, but even so it never loses the fragility of the earlier portions. What does disappear is the misty figment of a melody that initially wafts through.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ahornberg. Ahnornberg is based in Vienna, Austria. More at ahornberg.bandcamp.com.
August 27, 2018
Autechre NTS Sessions 1-4 Listening Diary
Even in our age of distracted listening and an overabundance of inbound music, among so much other readily available culture, an eight-hour box set is a thing apart. You don’t listen, not in the traditional sense of listening, to something like Autechre’s recent NTS Sessions 1-4 releases, comprising eight hours of music over four sets — not so much as you immerse yourself in them. The music may sound fully and purposefully artificial in its distraught scifi effluences, but the experience is no less environmental in its encompassing qualities. It may be proudly unnatural, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t vibrant and alive.
As it turns out, in our age of 360-degree, 24/7 culture, the most singular sonic object may be something that itself aspires to filling our senses past their periphery. This is why NTS Sessions is best appreciated alongside other recent cultural monoliths, like Stephan Mathieu’s Radiance (764 minutes over 12 CDs), Brian Eno’s Music for Installations (6 CDs), and such Important Records collections as the Harry Bertoia Sonambient omnibus (11 CDs), as well as performance corollaries like Max Richter’s night-long Sleep concerts (also available as a box set with 8 CDs and a bonus Blu-ray disc) and the “endless” generative music iOS apps of Peter Chilvers. Fight fire with fire, and overload with overload.
It’s worth noting that all these works, including the Autechre box, are abstract. They are slippery forms of sonic culture, lacking easily identifiable form. Even in brief excerpts, the music evades recollection. Extended over hours, they are in some ways only knowable while they are playing. Hit pause, or stop, and they tend to evaporate.
NTS Sessions isn’t even Autechre’s first monolith. The box is an hour longer than the AE_LIVE series that Autechre uploaded back in 2015, and twice the length of the 2016 elseq series. When elseq came out, I tried to wrestle with it. I started a “listening diary,” but only managed two detailed reflections before getting hooked on a single track, “TBM2,” which I listened to for days and then weeks. I only recently stumbled on words I’d written about “TBM2” (it felt a bit like finding discarded field notes in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach novels). Today, while listening to NTS Sessions, I tidied up those scribbles and belatedly appended my “TBM2” thoughts to the elseq diary.
Now I’m giving the listening diary another run, this time focused on Autechre’s most recent monolith, which is likely not their last. The following document is a work-in-progress, charting my path through and around NTS Sessions 1-4. And while it slowly accumulates, if you’re interested here’s my 1997 interview with the duo: “More Songs About Buildings.”
Track:1:1 “t1q1” (18:39)
[2018.08.27] The album begins like there is a bombing raid in progress, a full minute of overhead onslaught, muffled a bit by thin walls before the rubbery percussion and droid chatter come to formulate a rhythm. The thing chugs along at barely 70bpm. That pace and the track’s length, nearly 19 minutes, signals we’re in, as listeners, for an extended haul. Reserve your energy. The track provides the long and the short: expansive by contemporary electronic music standards, a drop in the ocean by those of this four-session collection.
Track:1:2 “bqbqbq” (11:15)
[2018.08.27] There was a moment, somewhere around the album Confield (2001), maybe as early as LP5 (1998), where for me Autechre went from swamp murk to dry, high land. Whatever boggy fumes had filled the voids in their earlier work gave way to a pristine, brittle present. That’s when my listening to them began to decline. This track, “bqbqbq,” captures that hyperdigital nature, and renders it as something almost light, a bit of melody repeated over and over, slowly adjusted. Where the opening track was an assault, this one is a respite, albeit an 11-minute respite. (When it comes to monolith music, all things are relative.) If the first track on NTS Sessions suggested the destination is way over the horizon, this one makes the journey seem doable.
Listening to le Carré
Surveillance is both a phylum and an order of sound. It is both a context within which sound occurs, and a subset of the way sound functions. We listen intently, and we overhear; we overhear on purpose, and by chance. Our ears are focused by what we want to hear, and by what, as the pristine familiar phrase so succinctly summarizes, catches our ear.
There is very little overt, carefully detailed attention to sound in Our Kind of Traitor, the 2010 thriller by master spy novelist John le Carré — despite the fact that throughout the book, secrets are documented on little tape recorders, and phones are tapped, and everyone with the slightest bit of skin in the game is paying fierce attention at all moments, deciphering words and the tonality in which they are couched. With the exception of a few key moments, that action goes unexamined. However, when le Carré does choose to apply his scalpel of a pen to discerning the act of listening with the same consideration he applies to manners, posture, class, the intersection of international and personal politics, and all things sartorial, he of course excels. Here are five such instances from Our Kind of Traitor:
1. In the Wind:
He could hear the three winds battling round Dima’s glistening bald head. He could see the treetops above him shaking. He could hear the crashes of leaves and a gurgle of water, and he knew it was the same tropical rain that had drenched him in the forests of Colombia. Had Dima made his recording in a single session or in several? Did he have to brace himself with shots of vodka between sessions in order to overcome his vory inhibitions?
The “he” here is a second-tier spy — nth tier in the circles of hellish bureaucracy that define the modern intelligence service, but second in the small crew that make up the book’s team. The spy’s name is Luke. Here he is listening to a tape recording by a would-be defector, a Russian money launderer by name of Dima. We witness Luke’s craft and shortcomings, his perceptive skills and his self-pity, working hand in hand as he listens to, and projects his own experience onto, a recording Dima has made. The recording is Dima’s entreaty to the British spy service. In a way that a written document might not, the sound both provides additional detail about Dima’s situation and transports Luke, momentarily, into his own troubled past. (“Vory” is the term for a Russian crime syndicate of fierce loyalty.)
2. For Ears Only:
“Has Hector been listening to us?”
“I expect so.”
“Watching us?”
“Sometimes it’s better just to listen. Like a radio play.”
The Hector mentioned here is the book’s spymaster. The interlocutors in the bit of dialog are an inquisitive source and the mid-level spy Luke, who is under Hector’s command. Luke reinforces the unique power of sound when taken on its own, devoid of other sensorial data. He also posits a connection between the story being told by le Carré and the concept of the characters experiencing their own lives as if in a scripted drama, touching on matters of fate, and of Luke’s emerging notion of having less control over his own than he would like. (Elsewhere in the book we learn that Luke fails to enjoy the Harry Potter books — an anhedonia that reinforces his separation from his young son. There’s enough fantasy, we’re told, already in his life. There’s something especially British about John le Carré describing a British spy’s inability to appreciate Harry Potter.)
3. For Whom the Bell Tolls:
Perry pressed the bell and at first they heard nothing. The stillness struck Gail as unnatural so she pressed it herself. Perhaps it didn’t work. She gave one long ring then several short ones to hurry everyone up. And it worked after all, because impatient young feet were approaching, bolts were being shot and a lock was turned, and one of Dima’s flaxen-haired sons appeared.
The person who does the listening in this moment is also the one with the least agency of the assembled protagonists. Gail is the girlfriend to Perry. Perry is the book’s initial hero, except in the moments when it lets Luke, Hector, and Gail be the heroes of their own threads of the narrative. Perry and Gail are caught up in Dima’s negotiations with British intelligence. Here, they have gone to collect the family of Dima. Gail’s legal experience often comes into play when she pitches her voice one way or listens to someone else’s. Here her listening skills are brought to bear on her not uninformed paranoia.
4. Go to the Tape:
Then quite suddenly — it was in the evening of the same day — the weather changed, and Hector’s voice rose a notch. Luke’s illicit recorded played the moment back to him.
Luke again here, now in seclusion with Perry, Gail, and Dima’s brood. He has been taping audio late in the book, both his own notes about goings-on, and phone calls with his boss, Hector, who is calling in with updates regarding how he is navigating the halls of power in Dima’s interest. Here, for the first time, Luke revisits a tape, to confirm a suspicion he noticed in the conversation he just had only moments prior. The instance ratchets up Luke’s anxiety, and projects the isolation they all are experiencing.
5. Left in the Cold:
And either there was someone inside to close the door on them or Luke did it for himself: an abrupt sigh of hinges, a double clunk of metal as the door was made fast from inside, and the black hole in the plane’s fuselage disappeared.
That fifth and final sonic moment occurs pages before the book ends. It’s a fateful moment. The book has returned to the point of view with which it originated, the novitiate Perry — Perry, who has learned much as the book has unfolded, including how to listen, and what to listen for. And then it’s a full stop. What happens next is simply, to use one of le Carré’s favored terms, a void. It’s a void for the reader to fill in. The answer may be left to how well the reader has been listening.
