Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 288
June 7, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0336: Open Mic
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, June 11, 2018. This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 7, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0336: Open Mic
Share a piece of music you’re working on in the interest of getting feedback.
Step 1: Choose a track/composition you’re working on that isn’t quite finished. Share the recording on the Lines forum at llllllll.co (see specific URL below).
Step 2: When posting the track, mention that you’re looking for feedback, and if applicable specify some aspects of the recording you might want feedback on.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0336” (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 “disquiet0336” (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-0336-open-mic/
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, June 11, 2018. This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 7, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0336” 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 336th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Disquiet Junto Project 0336: Open Mic / Share a piece of music you’re working on in the interest of getting feedback) 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-0336-open-mic/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
The image associated with this project is by Gabriel Gilder and used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
What Sound Looks Like
This little gadget is the Pisound, which I spent much of yesterday building under the guidance of a far more informed and experienced friend. Its existence is predicated on the Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive bare-bones computer, around $35, that is used widely in education and by tinkerers/makers. The Pisound is a sound card that attaches to the Raspberry Pi and turns it into a full-fledged media device, with an emphasis on high-grade audio processing. The Pisound is capable of serving many purposes, including a networked audio player. What I’m most interested in is its ability to serve as a programmable musical instrument, such as an effects pedal of infinite possibilities. After we got it set up yesterday — the Raspberry Pi organization is based in the U.K., and Pisound arrived from Lithuania — my friend showed me how a single line of code could transform my inbound electric guitar signal into an outbound warble that sounded like we had captured Angelo Badalamenti’s spirit in one tiny little semi-opaque box. Anyhow, yesterday was day one. Actually, the first thing we did, even before the guitar processing, was to drop in one of Fredrik Olofsson’s mini-compositions that come in the form of Twitter-sized bits of SuperCollider code. Makes me want to get a second PiSound and make a music box of generative compositions. I’m looking forward to exploring this thing more as the summer progresses.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 4, 2018
RIYL Streaming
What would make a useful streaming ambient-music playlist format?
I’ve tried in the past on various services, including Spotify, Google Play Music, and Apple’s, and I’ve never felt like I got to something useful. So then I’d stop. By way of contrast, I have in mind the YouTube playlist I maintain of fine live ambient music performances in which the music technology employed is in plain view. That playlist came out of a need and served a purpose. The need was that most of the music technology videos I watched involved music I couldn’t stand, and the purpose was to explore the tension between the near stasis of ambient music and the activity employed to produce it.
With a Spotify/etc. playlist. the main need and purpose are less clear, in that they’re no doubt satisfactorily fulfilled already — by humans, and by algorithms, and by the hybrid thereof. The need and purpose are the same: a collection of regularly updated, recommended ambient music to listen to, presumably while doing something else. Between readily available full-length recordings and algorithmic dispensing of RIYL “discovery,” there’s plenty background music to listen to and to pay attention to if you want to. (I’ll continue to put quotes around music “discovery” until the quotes’ presence is widely presumed.) Which makes me wonder what would make an ambient playlist distinct — because, furthermore, the very nature of streaming services arguably turns all music into, if not ambient music, then certainly background music. Perhaps the answer of the purpose question is largely related to the selection, but it feels like the context of the selection is also part of the purpose, part of the process. It’s not just about a set of items; it’s about their context in the reader’s life, in the music’s life.
I posted a rough draft this thinking on Twitter today to get the thoughts out, to see if anyone had input (which they did). I figure there would be two playlists, not one. There would be a main playlist, defined perhaps by length: 90 minutes or so of peace, for lack of a better word. The main ambient playlist would be time-sensitive — a somewhat ironic concept for music that aims for a genre-defining sense of timelessness. In any case, the main playlist would be recent releases, and music timed to events (birthdays, deaths, milestones, news, anniversaries). The second playlist is where tracks go after they’re no longer timely.
Part of the complexity I’ve faced in doing a Spotify playlist is that I don’t listen to many playlists. I like knowing what I’m listening to, and most playlist functionality is defined by its active dearth of context. (Now, Active Dearth would make an excellent playlist name.) And when I say Spotify, I mean any of the streaming services, more or less, since each has its own plusses and minuses.
Anyhow, yeah, a big part of what led to my development of my YouTube ambient-performances playlist was my having gotten into active — systematic, enjoyable, anticipatory — viewing on YouTube. Rather than YouTube being a thing I ended up on on occasion, I started subscribing to channels and checking my subscription items each morning. In contrast I still use music streaming services mostly as a way to catch up or to fill in a mental blank. Each week I get more music (because I write about music) and buy more music (perhaps merely m-m-my generation’s habits) than I could hear in a week. Streaming, in contrast, has been, for me, a supplement.
Backing up to the “why” of this hypothetical playlist, the answer is fairly simple. Once upon a time as a music critic, you wrote about music and you reached an audience who read it. Today, as a music critic, you can (also) make a playlist and reach people who might never have read what you would have written. That’s why I always liked DJing — in college on WYBC, later on KDVS when I moved to California. (And, yeah, I did a couple podcast episodes and plan to get back to it, but that’s really a separate story from playlist production.) Anyhow, this is what’s on my mind, and thinking it out in public can be productive. If you have thoughts about what would constitute an ambient playlist, it’d be appreciated.
For the time being, the playlist is called the Stasis Report. It launched today with music from Brian Eno and Marcus Fischer, Madeleine Cocolas and r beny, Lisa Gerrard and William Basinski, Emily A. Sprague and Grouper, among others. There is a secondary playlist, to which tracks are moved after they’re out of circulation on the Stasis Report. That playlist is called the Stasis Archives.
May 31, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0335: Alone Time
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, June 4, 2018. This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 31, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0335: Alone Time
Record conference-call hold music — a private limbo of your own making.
Major thanks to Matt Pinto for having proposed this Junto project prompt.
Step 1: Hold music is a ubiquitous fact of modern life. Ask yourself what hold music you’d like to hear while waiting for someone to pick up the other end of the line, or while waiting for a conference call to begin.
Step 2: Record a short piece of hold music that satisfies the scenario you pondered in Step 1. Your finished track should be suitable for looping, since you never know how long you’re going to be on hold.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0335” (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 “disquiet0335” (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: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0335-alone-time/
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, June 4, 2018. This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 31, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you. It should be suitable for looping, since you never know how long you’re going to be on hold.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0335” 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 335th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Disquiet Junto Project 0335: Alone Time / Record conference-call hold music — a private limbo of your own making) at:
Major thanks to Matt Pinto for having proposed this Junto project prompt. Pinto publishes the excellent Caesura newsletter, more on which here:
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-0335-alone-time/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
The image associated with this project is by Tom Magliery and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
May 24, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0334: Mass Branca
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, May 28, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 24, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0334: Mass Branca
Record a massive multi-layered tribute to the legendary guitarist-composer.
Major thanks to James Britt for contributing this Junto project prompt.
Step 1: This project is a tribute to the late avant-garde composer and guitarist Glenn Branca, who died earlier this month. Among Branca’s many musical systems was to have a vast number of musicians, say 100 guitarists for example, perform together. We’re going to explore that mass of sound to produce a mass in Branca’s memory. It will be a Mass Mass.
Step 2: Pick a single sound source, an instrument perhaps, but really anything that makes a specific sound. One thing to aim for is a sound source that is rich in overtones.
Step 3: Use multiple layers (with “multiple” being defined as you see fit — 100 layers would be awesome, but so too would 10, 30, 50, etc.) of this sound source to record a piece of music.
Background: While knowledge of Glenn Branca’s work isn’t necessary to participate, it is recommended to read up and listen a bit.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0334” (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 “disquiet0334” (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: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-...
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 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, May 28, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 24, 2018.
Length: The length of your track is up to you. Massive doesn’t necessarily mean long, but long is certainly welcome.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0334” 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 334th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Disquiet Junto Project 0334: Mass Branca / Record a massive multi-layered tribute to the legendary guitarist-composer) at:
Major thanks to James Britt for contributing this Junto project prompt.
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-...
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this project is from Wikipedia and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlennBranca#/media/File:GlennBranca-2012.jpg
May 23, 2018
I Guested on the Podular Modcast
It was a pleasure this week to have been featured as the guest on the great Podular Modcast, which as its name suggests is a podcast about modular synthesizers. The Podular Modcast is hosted by Tim Held and Ian Price. Price wasn’t available when the episode was recorded, but he does appear early on in the segment, telling a touching story about Aphex Twin, a subject that then leads into Held interviewing me about my Aphex Twin book, Selected Ambient Works Volume II (33 1/3, Bloomsbury), and announcing that it has been licensed for translation and publication in Japan, something I just learned this past week. I spent five years at a manga company bringing Japanese books (comics and novels, and related titles) to America, so it’s nice to send one back.
Held and I then talk about modular synthesizers, how I got into accruing (assembling? agglomerating?) one myself, after witnessing Marcus Fischer perform live in Portland when I did an Aphex Twin reading there back in 2014. We discussed the tactile as well as visual feedback of modular synthesis, and other topics. I had a great time speaking with Held. You can listen with the above embedded audio player, or at podularmodcast.fireside.fm.
May 22, 2018
A Lithuanian Dream
Agnes M is Agne Matuleviciute of Vilnius, Lithuania. “A Window” is a short piece she posted recently on her SoundCloud account, providing little context beyond noting it’s a work for theater. The backbone of it is a steady, generously slumbrous tonal sequence, a sleepy stepwise bass line played out, presumably on a keyboard. That line persists for almost the entire piece, as different things are laid atop it, at first filters and effects and little extra notes here and there, an improvisation in a higher register, a fracture of noise.
As it proceeds, more and more intercedes — the sound effects get more insistent, the variety and artful chaos increase. There is simulated wind, and what might be horses neighing, and much much more. The track itself gets twisted back on itself, that bass line momentarily disappearing below the ratcheted-up phalanx of sounds. Eventually that line reappears, lending a sense of full-circle closure. Much as the variety of noises had held the line at bay, when it returns it in turn suggests those noises as a passing dream.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/aagnesm. More from Matuleviciute at instagram.com/agne._ and YouTube. The track was produced with Martynas Vil (soundcloud.com/martynasvil), who’s based in London.
May 21, 2018
The Fractal Voice
Erika Nesse makes fractal music. She imposes intricate, self-reflexive patterns upon pre-existing material, breaking it like mirror that has shattered, except this shattered mirror has been reformed into a gleaming, spinning, geometrically intricate and fascinating mirror ball. The ball goes round and round, speeding up, slowing down, shifting suddenly, and all the while shooting back tiny sliver segments of the source material that is reflected in it. Well, sonically speaking.
In Nesse’s hands, a simple vocal tone can be turned into a momentous rhythmic figure, shifting endlessly between variations subtle and stark. This piece, “Kyrie (Geometric Clouds),” takes its fractal methodology from the image that serves as the track’s cover art. As Nesse decodes the image in a brief accompanying note: “An audio clip is split into fragments. Up and down represents the location in the clip where the fragment starts. Left to right represents time within the track. Many layers of the fragment starting at different times are stacked together, creating an echo effect.” Listen for the patterns. Then take a deep breath, step back, and listen to it as a multi-movement composition with echoes of Scott Johnson (vocal cutups) and Philip Glass (hyper-charged minimalism).
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks. More from Nesse, who is based in Boston, Massachusetts, at fractalmusicmachine.com and erikanesse.bandcamp.com.
May 20, 2018
Listen to the Stars
This seven-minute performance video by State Azure focuses tight on a few modules in a larger synthesizer rig. There is no mess of spaghetti wires. There is a limited set of blinking lights. There is a single hand adjusting knobs on a single device. The accompanying liner note references some on-screen technical details, some off-screen support equipment, and some minor post-production activity. Otherwise, “Starfall,” as the track is called, is just this: a blissfully thin expanse of near-static time, a live ambient performance in which a seeming hush is nudged into the foreground and left to sway slowly this way and that, to pause for a moment, to let little details linger. It’s the music of a planetarium after hours. The lights are simply from the music equipment, not the stars, and those are more than enough.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted to State Azure’s YouTube channel. More at stateazure.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/state-azure. State Azure is based in the U.K.
May 19, 2018
A Harp Goes Against the Clock
What happens when you bring a harp to a digital-workstation fight? Watch this video of Mary Lattimore in the magazine Fact‘s Against the Clock series to find out.
Fact’s long-running series pits one musician at a time against themselves. In each edition (there are 150 or so as of this writing) of Against the Clock, the featured musician makes a track in one sitting of 10 minutes or under, recorded and presented uncut. The overwhelming majority of videos are from the fields of techno and hip-hop, and related beat-driven music. Even when a seeming outlier such as James McNew, representing his band Yo La Tengo, shows up, as he did in a video last month, the result is beatcraft, not necessarily the indie rock a Yo La Tengo might expect.
Just yesterday, Against the Clock featured the harp player Mary Lattimore, who in ten minutes is seen looping her harp atop itself over and over. What the session yields is a beautiful track, but not until Lattimore, who records for the Ghostly International label, has eked all manner of sounds from the beast of an instrument. Not only does she send cascades of plucked strings against themselves, plotting out deep spaces with varying volume levels — a cathedral made of sonic pixels — but she bangs against it with a metal ring and scrapes the strings, among other techniques, to make the most of her singular tool. At times she puts aside the harp and concentrates directly on the looper in which she is collecting and collating elements of her live playing.
Video originally posted at Fact’s YouTube channel. While the response so far has been largely positive, not every beat-oriented Aginst the Clock watcher was a fan (“i’m not watching this vid series to see someone play the harp for 10min….. jeeez” wrote one commenter). More from Lattimore, who lives in Los Angeles, at marylattimore.net and marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com.
By the way, the only reason this video isn’t included in my ever-expanding YouTube playlist of fine live ambient performances is because toward the very end there is a brief interview with Lattimore. The interview is informative. It’s just that including a video with dialog would break the intended flow of the playlist.
