Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 290
April 12, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
Record a piece of music inspired by a term from painting, in this case “pentimento.” This week in the Disquiet Junto. Details at disquiet.com/0328. Tracks are due by 11:59pm on Monday, April 16. Project inspired by Jon Hassell’s forthcoming album.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Disquiet Junto Project 0328: Sonic Pentimento
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, April 16, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 12, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0328: Sonic Pentimento
Record a piece of music inspired by a term from painting.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project involves recording a piece of music inspired by a term from painting. That word is “pentimento,” which is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist.” Familiarize yourself with the term.
Step 2: Think about how the term “pentimento” can be borrowed from painting and applied to sound.
Step 3: Record a track informed by the thoughts that arose from Steps 1 and 2.
Background: The word “pentimento” is being employed by musician Jon Hassell in the title to his forthcoming album, Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). That word choice on Hassell’s part informed this Junto project. Familiarity with Hassell’s music isn’t required, but it’s certainly recommended.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0328” (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 “disquiet0328” (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, April 16, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 12, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you. Around four minutes seems about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0328” 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 328th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Sonic Pentimento: Record a piece of music inspired by a term from painting) 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-...
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 a detail from a painting by Mark Rushton, who approved its inclusion.
April 11, 2018
Slow Awakening
This lovely video by r beny is a single musical object put to subtle use. The ambient track, bearing one of beny’s trademark naturalist titles, “Western Sycamore,” moves from slowly undulating formless pads to gentle streams of soft percussive tones. The latter are loops of notes rotating through with the momentum of a slow awakening. The note patterns don’t just lend contrast to the track’s longer tones. They give them shape, revealing the pads as akin to a string section that goes at its own pace. Throughout we see, on occasion, sometimes more than others, beny’s hand enter the frame to turn a knob or hit a button, not so much playing an instrument, in the broadly understood sense of the term, as coaxing something along.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at r beny’s YouTube channel. More from r beny, aka San Francisco Bay Area resident Austin Cairns, at rbeny.bandcamp.com, soundcloud.com/rbeny, and twitter.com/_rbeny.
April 10, 2018
New Sounds from the Fourth World
Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) by Jon Hassell
Jon Hassell was the original ambassador to the Fourth World, an aesthetic zone of his own imagination, a placeless place where new technology is put to old uses. It is music that recognizes a tribal instinct that is neither solely ancient nor solely contemporary, but simply inherently human. In pursuit of that commonality, Fourth World music cuts across cultures — north and south, east and west — by combining techniques and instrumentation, tunings and idioms. However, unlike much fusion, Hassell’s music always displays evidence of the effort required. His Fourth World is perpetually glitchy, frayed, bearing the watermarks — digital and otherwise — of the tools that made it possible.
The term gained prominence in the title to Hassell’s 1980 album on the E.G. label, Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, co-produced with Brian Eno, and has been his genre home ever since. Hassell just last week, shortly after turning 81 years of age the month prior, announced a new album, due out on June 8. Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) is to be his first album on his new label, Ndeya, which he describes as being a place for “new work as well as … selected archival releases, including re-presses of classic sides and some astonishing unreleased music.”
The astonishment begins early, with a pre-release glimpse of Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) in the form of its first track, “Dreaming.” This is Hassell in fine form, playing Offworld bossa nova, post-Singularity jazz. It surges against itself in slow motion. You can hear his horn buried amid piano and cymbals and vinyl surface noise, rising out of the mass, and then settling back in. The uneasy beat — less a beat, really, than a pulse — has a rough-hewn quality to it, pushing at the other elements like it’s trying to find its place at the table. Perhaps the standout element is what sounds like a vocal ensemble, who halfway through the piece emerge in a deep hush out of nowhere. Such a rupture is key to Hassell’s approach, an art of grafts that purposefully never fully take.
More from Hassell at jonhassell.com. Track originally posted at jonhassell.bandcamp.com.
April 9, 2018
Ghost Accounts in the Streaming Machine
Doctor M’Hhhhhhhble was apparently a side moniker for an unspecified SoundCloud regular. Eventually the doctor’s account came to a natural end, the individual behind it having decided that managing multiple sonic avatars wasn’t worth the effort. This track, titled “Smoke filled room,” like the rest of the M’Hhhhhhhble account, dates back half a decade. It surfaced recently via a repost by Tuonela, the prolific musician based in Katoomba, Australia. Perhaps Tuonela and M’Hhhhhhhble are one and the same. Perhaps not.
The M’Hhhhhhhble track is the sound design of a wind-rattled tunnel, a mix of airflow and noise, action and echo. It is haunting and peculiarly comforting, the warm embrace of white noise. The central echo is all the more enigmatic because the listener must take into account not only the imagined physical space posited by the audio, but the passage of time since the track was first posted. As online cloud accounts of audio services age, the number of orphaned and untrackable ones increases as well, fogging the database, muddling the archives. The embarrassment of riches that is the universal jukebox becomes all the more unchartable as time proceeds.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/doctor-mhhhhhhhble.
April 6, 2018
RIP, Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
My favorite Cecil Taylor story is secondhand. I used to see him play at the Knitting Factory in the late 1980s when I was fortunate to live a few blocks away. I would often sit in the audience with Irving Stone and his wife, Stephanie. (It’s after Stone that John Zorn named the venue he founded, the Stone.) Taylor was late to a show one night, and Stone told of an epic late appearance by Taylor decades earlier. Taylor had been booked on a boat that would tool around Manhattan while jazz musicians played for a willingly captive audience. Taylor, who was often late for shows, Stone said, was warned not to be late because the ship’s schedule was unforgiving. The night of Taylor’s performance arrived, as did the boat. The audience boarded, along with other scheduled musicians. But no Taylor. They waited briefly, but the schedule had to be kept, and the boat left the dock. And then, of course, arrived Cecil Taylor, running to the end of the dock, unable to reach the boat, his eager audience stranded aboard, watching his figure fade in the distance. Judging by how late he was to the Knitting Factory that night, Taylor had never learned his lesson, though of course his audience, me included, was going nowhere. We waited. He arrived, and blew our minds.
I reviewed a massive Cecil Taylor box set many years ago, and I mentioned to a friend what I’d been working on, and he asked, teasingly, if I had managed to do so without using the word “cluster.” Cecil Taylor is the musician most synonymous with the word “cluster” (often employed by critics to describe his playing), except perhaps for Roedelius, Moebius, Plank, and Eno — and, as someone reminded me on Twitter, Cowell.
The walls of noise of Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton, and Godflesh and Slayer, and Last Exit and Machine Gun, translated at some point, for me, into a model of dense fields with cascading details. That all, in some way, I realize in retrospect, led me to focus on ambient music. Not ambient music as a refuge from noise, but as quiet form whose sublime intensity I had come to appreciate as having a kinship with noise, one of uniform-yet-chaotic pattern-fields best appreciated upon close examination, or upon utter surrender. It’s wrong to reduce Cecil Taylor’s music to its intensity, yet coping with and eventually reveling in its intensity is an important path that Taylor-admirers must walk. Ambient music rewards (if not requires) similar levels of dedication, notably patience and attention-paying. It’s almost certainly easier for someone ear-trained in Cecil Taylor’s piano crucible to find a way into ambient music than the other way around, but ambient listeners will find much reward in the wildly fluctuating systems of Taylor’s recordings if they take the time required.
Anyhow, my favorite Cecil Taylor album is For Olim, released in 1987 on Soul Note. It’s solo, and essential. Seek it out.
RIP, pianist, improviser, genius Cecil Taylor (b. 1929).
April 5, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0327: Time Zoned
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, April 9, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, April 5, 2018.
Tracks will be added to https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0327-time-zoned/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this project was made by Nate Trier for the project.
April 2, 2018
Stained-Glass Butterflies
A guitar can be heard deep in the heart of “Coco” by Michiru Aoyama. It’s a slow strum that alternates back and forth between a pair of chords, neither of them left to fade out entirely before the next one encroaches on its rippling sonic afterimage. The chords are muffled, as if played with wool gloves, as if filtered through a thick canvas scrim. They are overwhelmed, as well, by an entirely other frame of reference, a dense, slow-moving cyclone of brighter sounds, fluttering like stained-glass butterflies sent suddenly aloft, twinkling with the light and each other’s dim reflection. There is no self-evident development to what Aoyama is up to here, except to the extent that the ear might focus on the two patterns and how if at all they might chance to correlate or diverge. If there is change, it is a matter of nuance. It’s an instrumental chant, a singular statement, an environment set to loop.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/michiru-aoyama. Aoyama is based in Kamakura, Japan. More at michiruaoyama.jimdo.com and michiruaoyama.bandcamp.com.
March 29, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0326: Wave Turntable
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, April 2, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 29, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0326: Wave Turntable
In collaboration with composer Danny Clay, make music for his exhibit with artist Jon Fischer using only sine waves and turntable surface noise.
Step 1: Tracks in this project will be played as part of a free event in San Francisco at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts (mcevoyarts.org) on Saturday, April 7, 2018, for an exhibit by composer Danny Clay (dclaymusic.com) and artist Jon Fischer (feather2pixels.com). The project was developed in collaboration with Clay. Before proceeding, consider the sort of music that might be conducive as partially-heard, partially-background music for an art event.
Step 2: Compose a short piece of music using only sine waves and the surface sounds of vinyl played on a turntable. Those two sources are inspirations for the Clay/Fischer exhibit. (The cover image to this project shows some of Fischer’s turntable art.)
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0326” (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 “disquiet0326” (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-0326-wave-turntable/
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, April 2, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 29, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you. Roughly two to four minutes sounds about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0326” 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 326th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Wave Turntable: In collaboration with composer Danny Clay, make music for his exhibit with artist Jon Fischer using only sine waves and turntable surface noise) at:
More on Clay and Fischer at:
http://dclaymusic.com
http://feather2pixels.com
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-0326-wave-turntable/
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 by artist Jon Fischer from his exhibit with Danny Clay.
