Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 292
March 10, 2018
RIP, Russ Solomon (1925-2018)
A little Russ Solomon (RIP) story from my years at Tower Records: I worked as an editor at Pulse!, the magazine published by Tower, full time from 1989 to 1996, and I continued to freelance for Tower after I left to take another job. The Tower corporate offices were in West Sacramento, and during my time as a Tower employee I lived in Sacramento (and briefly Davis), having moved out from Brooklyn for the job in 1989 after writing a few freelance pieces for the magazine. (Those articles’ subjects included electronically mediated cellist Hank Roberts, soul-punk band 24-7 Spyz, and alt-country act Souled American.)
After my first few months at Pulse!, the magazine’s office was moved across the parking lot from the main Tower corporate office building. This move meant a load of improvements: more space, better light, less noise, fewer interruptions. The move also further established what was already a solid editorial separation between the magazine and the company’s retail business.
Pulse!, of course, reflected Tower’s merchandising ethos, in that it covered as wide a range as possible of music. That was the point. We didn’t just cover the pop, rock, r&b, and hip-hop of most music magazines at the time. We had a classical columnist, and a separate opera columnist, and a Christian contemporary columnist, and a variety of jazz columnists, among many others. We kept on retainer reporters in cities around the world to contribute brief local scene reports. These days, having “big ears” — an appreciation for music across genres, with an emphasis on the connections between those genres — is an everyday occurrence, a listening norm, in our post-streaming, niche-market era, but back in the early 1990s the breadth of coverage in Pulse! distinguished it from most other music magazines.
In my time at Tower, the range of its publications expanded. I co-founded its classical magazine, Classical Pulse!, with the opera critic Bob Levine. And then in 1994 I created Tower’s first email publication. That’s what is now called a newsletter. Named epulse (everything back then was e-this and e-that, the way later it was i-this and i-that), the epulse newsletter ran weekly, more or less, for 8 years up until 2002.
Then Pulse! closed down fairly suddenly in 2002, after 19 years of publication. The closure was due to Tower’s financial instability. When in 1996 I left Pulse!, I had stopped editing the epulse newsletter for awhile, but then I picked up the responsibilities again later on. I ended up writing the final cover story for Pulse!, about rapper/producer Missy Elliott, before any of us knew it would be the magazine’s last issue. And when Pulse! shut down in 2002, we shut down epulse, too, naturally.
Or so we thought.
Because the very next week I got a call magazines’ (newly former) publisher. Apparently Russ Solomon had called him and asked why epulse hadn’t come out. Pulse! had been shut due to financial matters, he explained, but epulse was such a low-budget thing that Russ wanted it to continue. And so it did. Editorial coverage of music was core to Russ Solomon’s idea of what Tower was about. Little old epulse kept it going as long as possible. Epulse continued to be published, at his request, for another year or so, until bankruptcy finally shut down Tower for good.
This is lightly adapted from a thread I posted at twitter.com/disquiet the day after Russ Solomon died.
March 9, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
March 8, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0323: Music for Meditation
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, March 12, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 8, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0323: Music for Meditation
Record a piece of music suited to meditation.
Step 1: Consider music appropriate for meditation. Think of the sounds, the tones, the forms that might suit such a thing.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music for meditation. Make your track a set number of minutes (that is, a length divisible by 60 seconds), preferably between 7 minutes and 20 minutes. Whatever length you choose, insert a bell/chime sound precisely one minute after the track begins and precisely one minute before the track comes to an end.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0323” (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 “disquiet0323” (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-0323-music-for-meditation/
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, March 12, 2018. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 8, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you. The instructions suggest 7 minutes and 20 minutes.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0323” 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 323rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Music for Meditation:
Record a piece of music suited to meditation) 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-0323-music-for-meditation/
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 Chris Corrigan and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
March 7, 2018
An Upturned Glass
Joseph Branciforte’s 2018 sound journal is the gift that keeps on giving, a window into his process, an upturned glass against his studio wall. The latest entry, dating from March 6, is a mix of dreamy keyboard tones and bracing textural play. The former is a series of briefly held tones that cluster ever so slightly, like something out of one of Brian Eno’s generative-app collaborations with Peter Chilvers. The latter is a kind of elaborate, rubbery, surface-vinyl effect. It’s pushed to an occasional extreme: an irritant that becomes an element of play. How Branciforte accomplished this all is detailed in the accompanying note, for those who want a sense of the track’s inner workings.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte. More from Branciforte, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at josephbranciforte.com.
March 6, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
When Music Is Balletic
Graciously arranged music can often find itself described as “balletic” — as having an aspect not unlike that of ballet. It’s a useful comparison, except for the fact that there are many types of ballet, some far more fierce than the elegant, epitome-of-grace quality that the term “balletic” is generally employed to suggest.
The track “Undercurrents (On an Optimistic Note)” by Ian Joyce is the lead one off a new four-track album. It’s a slowly growing ambient drone that has within it a host of intertwined elements. There is an underlying pad of soft spaciousness, and a small number of sinusoidal tones, and a sequence of brief moments in which the machine-like quality gives way to something that feels “played,” like there is a person at a keyboard making something happen. That the played element never veers too far from the organic-yet-automated quality is a testament to the composure of which Joyce is capable.
What makes this track balletic, then, is how those varied elements are choreographed. At times it is like watching numerous bodies float in space, and at other times it is like the finely honed sinew evident during exertion by one especially well-contoured limb.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/ikjoyce. Get the full album at ikjoyce.bandcamp.com. More from Joyce at youtube.com.
March 5, 2018
When a Beat Is Temporary
Steady rhythm comes easily in our time of widely available digital music technology. As a result of that ready availability, rhythm’s purpose — its origin, its impetus — is something whose exploration can distinguish a recording. A steady beat can be as comfortable for a musician as for an audience. Pushing at that sense of comfort — questioning it, pondering its power — can lend a sense of intentionality to recordings that they might lack otherwise. For example, while a lot of music takes a 4/4 beat for granted, other music tests its familiar metrics, toying with the ear’s expectations.
In “I Started Wearing Black” by the Cologne-based musician Sonae, three full minutes, nearly half the track, proceed through rumbly white noise scritchy scratch before a proper beat appears. Her track begins, that is, where many close: with the looped-groove crackle at the end of a vinyl record, albeit here expanded into a kind of sonic installation. And then, fairly suddenly, the track pounds its way quickly into the foreground at 120 bpm, and continues for two minutes. Yet even throughout its extended moment, the beat feels formed from the muted noises that preceded it. For all its mathematical certainty, it is still remote, muffled, cautious. And them, just as suddenly, it give way to a mix of ringing tone and vinyl crackle. The beat, usually the undergirding of a recording, is here merely a memory.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/monikaenterprise, the account of Berlin-based Monika Enterprise record label. More from Sonae at sonaemusic.net.
March 4, 2018
Buried in the Depths
This is an asynchronous duet between Sara Callaway, playing violin, and Stephen Vitiello, playing with samples of Callaway’s violin after the fact. At first the emphasis of the recording is simply Callaway’s pizzicato action, all pointilist plucking, and then it is on layers that suggest a small chamber group playing something that is equal parts classical minimalism and rural bluegrass, the artful construction informed by a pop sensibility yet fully eschewing song form.
The major transition occurs approximately halfway through, when there is a shift in the balance of power, when the synthesis overtakes the sample, when dense shimmers and industrial roiling come to the fore. Into the mix then arrives a voice, which Vitiello says he can’t recall the source of (“The voice at the end is someone else, unknown buried in the depths of my hard drive”). It manages to both confirm the pop-like gestures, and, with its ethereal, disembodied sensibility, also confirm the avoidance of allegiance to pop.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More from Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com.
March 3, 2018
Hand-Wound Tape
Tape cassette tapes play an outsize role in contemporary electronic music. They’re an affordable means of distribution in the age of streaming, and they’re a means of production as well. Tape loops provide both an inexpensive, hand-made, old-school approach to what is as easy as a click of a button in modern software, and a textural quality (or lack of quality, in the audiophile sense) as well. In this short video by Nom Nom Chomsky (aka Martin Yam Møller, who is based in Copenhagen, Denmark), a short story told in disparate single words flashed on the screen is accompanied by an improvised ambient score. Chomsky swaps tapes as the piece proceeds, using various effects pedals to distort, expand, and layer the original audio. The familiar warping sound of half-mangled tape is exaggerated as Chomsky takes a finger to one of the spindles, affecting the slack of the tape, and the timbre of the audio. It’s a masterful little performance for a desktop arrangement of tools put to use in ways that were not intended by the makers of those tools.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally published to the YouTube channel of Nom Nom Chomsky. More from Møller/Chomsky at twitter.com/NomNomChomsky.
March 1, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0322: The Wanderer
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, March 5, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 1, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0322: The Wanderer
Make a short piece of music that encourages the the mind’s tendency to wander, based on research by Dr. Liila Taruffi, PhD, and her colleagues.
Step 1: This week we’re making music that encourages the mind’s tendency to wander. The project was developed in coordination with a Dr. Liila Taruffi, PhD, based on a paper she and her colleagues published in Nature Scientific Reports. She writes, by way of explanation: “The idea is to use musical/acoustic features that convey and evoke sadness in the listener, since in our recent study we demonstrate that sad (compared with happy) music enhances mind-wandering levels (shown both behaviourally and with neuroimaging methods).”
Step 2: No, you absolutely don’t need to have read the 10-page research paper or its 60 footnotes to participate in this project. But … in you’re interested, you can find the PDF here:
Step 3: Record a piece of instrumental music (no voices, no words) based on the following constraints. Use samples, simulations, or approximations of the recommended instrumentation if the instruments are not available:
Instrumentation: instruments able to produce very small intervals and
dark timbres (cello, violin, viola, piano, oboe, horn, clarinet)
Instruments number: maximum 3
Speed of music: 30-80 bpm
Key: minor
Length: around 3-5 minutes
Recommended musical/acoustic features: dark and dull timbres, low
pitches, legato articulation, falling pitch contour, narrow pitch range, slow tone attacks, low sound level, little sound level variability, microstructural irregularity
Here’s some additional background from Dr. Taruffi: “Mind-wandering” or “daydreaming” (i.e., our mind’s tendency to engage in thoughts and images that are unrelated to the here and now, are spontaneously evoked, and naturally flow over time) is incredibly omnipresent, reaching up to 50% of our waking mental activity. Mind-wandering is an internally-oriented cognitive state somehow opposite to focused attention on a task or on a specific sensory input. In the study entitled “Effects of Sad and Happy Music on Mind-Wandering and Default Mode Network”, we (Liila Taruffi, Corinna Pehrs, Stavros Skouras & Stefan Koelsch) tested the idea that music, via emotion, can function as a mediator of these inwardly-oriented mental experiences. In three experiments (two in which participants described their mental state immediately after listening to sad-sounding and happy-sounding music, and a third in which other participants’ brains were scanned as they listened to sad and happy music pieces) we found that sad music, compared with happy music, is associated with stronger mind-wandering and greater activity of the nodes of the Default Mode Network (the main brain network responsible for mind-wandering). Thus, our results demonstrate that, when listening to sad music, people withdraw their attention inwards and engage in spontaneous cognitive processes.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0322” (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 “disquiet0322” (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-0322-the-wanderer/
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, March 5, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 1, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you. The instructions suggest roughly three to five minutes.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0322” 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 322nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (The Wanderer: Make a short piece of music that encourages the the mind’s tendency to wander, based on research by Dr. Liila Taruffi, PhD, and her colleagues) at:
More on Taruffi, music, and mind-wandering 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-0322-the-wanderer/
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 Bruno Hotz and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license: