Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 293
February 26, 2018
Excursion into Dust
The Polish multimedia artist Szymon Kaliski is keeping a 2018 studio diary, uploading an entry per week to his SoundCloud account. The latest, “Week 08,” is an excursion into dust. On first listen, it might sound like background noise that lacks a foreground. The experience is akin to entering a dark room — not merely a dark room, but an unfamiliar one — and letting your eyes adjust. You don’t survey such a room in the same way you do a well-lit one. You don’t have the option to take it in as you see fit. You grasp onto what data — visual in the room, sonic in the case of the Kaliksi track — presents itself. Initial elements are disparate, their dimensions unclear. Then you begin to make connections. You get a sense of the place’s scale, of its decor, of the density of its furnishings.
The light never turns on in Kaliski’s “Week 08,” but it is a room, a virtual sonic space, you’ll want to spend a lot of time in. With repeat listens — the track is less than two minutes in length — elements make themselves apparent, like objects making themselves known in the dark. There’s a lush, slow piano line. There is crackling partially akin to vinyl surface noise, but also to flying insects, at times taking on the quality of a drone in both senses of the word. Unlike in the room that provides the extended simile above, scale has no practical boundaries when it comes to Kaliski’s track: it can be both massive and intimate at the same time. It is as vast as a hectic train station heard through thick earmuffs, and as precious as an archaic Victrola given one last spin before retirement.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/szymonkaliski. He’s also collecting the weekly entries into a playlist. More from Kaliski, who is based in Poznań, Poland, at szymonkaliski.com and twitter.com/szymon_k.
February 25, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
Urban neighborhoods that serve as homes to multiple immigrant communities can have a stoic quality to them. This isn’t always the case, but cultures that are vibrant unto themselves can take on more of a remote cast when coming into ongoing mutual contact. There is a level of communication, of connection, that entrenched cultural distance fails to afford. This is true of spoken language and body language alike. In a dense city, such myriad disconnections can result in faces that are doubly blank: failing to read others and resisting being read. You may see a Russian Orthodox priest eating a burrito, or a sushi chef checking out Hollywood blockbusters at the neighborhood library; these individuals are, however, members of groups that live alongside each other and, yet, apart from each other.
This doorbell is from the front gate to a multi-unit apartment building in just such a neighborhood. The doorbell bears the aspect of a place that has more urgent things to be attended to than its outward appearance. The doorbell buttons have long since been bleached by the elements of their associated apartment numbers. Presumably the units run in descending columns from left to right. Presumably as well, the one button that lacks a label was at some point replaced — due to wiring complexities or sufficient landlord laziness, for which there is an admittedly low threshold — by the larger plastic device to the left. It stands there with a simple message for anyone who tries to catch its gaze: “I have things to get done; announce yourself, or move along.”
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 24, 2018
Applied Neologisms
A post shared by Scott Campbell (@scttcmpbll) on Dec 15, 2017 at 2:47pm PST
The myriad peculiar names might be dismissed as goofy gimmicks, but applied neologisms certainly do simplify the act of tracking synthesizer culture. Listening in on what musicians, during our search-enabled era, are making with something called the Bitbox, or the ER301, or, yes, the Morgasmatron, is pretty straightforward, compared to keeping pace with LFOs, VCOs, and VCAs, to list a few of the generic building blocks of a modular synthesizer.
This video is a short Instagram piece by Scott Campbell. Its accompanying hashtags (click through to see) note some of the utilized modules and their manufacturers. This lush sequence of melty xylophone-like tones, atop a foundation of chordal haze, brings to mind a lost Julee Cruise backing track or the loudspeaker music at a particularly well-curated holiday ice-skating park. (Campbell knows something about synth nomenclature himself, having developed the Ondes Magnétique cassette-tape manipulation machine, which I wrote about a couple years ago.)
To click on a hashtag such as #squarppyramid or #morphagene is to enter audio-visual corridors where you can check out what other musicians are doing with same tools as Campbell. And while Instagram’s algorithm leaves much to be desired, the recently introduced ability to track favorite hastags means the tools you’re intrigued by will populate your feed with work by musicians of whom you might not previously been aware.
Video originally posted at to the Instagram account of Scott Campbell, more from whom at scttcmpbll.com, twitter.com/scttcmpbll, and etsy.com. Campbell is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
February 23, 2018
The Visual Jitter
A post shared by Benjamin Mauch (@bennymauch) on Feb 20, 2018 at 11:11am PST
Based in Richmond Virginia, Benjamin Mauch is seen here reworking bits of samples to spectral effect. For even the least technologically informed listener, the blinking lights and the twin displays lend context for what is going on: when a given loop’s seam begins again, what the shape of the sounds’ waveforms are. The sense of sonic jitter is reinforced when those waves frequently swap out as the piece — not a piece, really, not in the sense of a finished work, but a fragment of a recording — proceeds. The visuals remove some of the ambiguity in the audio. When the source audio is new, the visuals confirm it.
Track originally posted to Mauch’s instagram.com account. More from Mauch at sparenoexpanse.bandcamp.com.
February 22, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0321: Let’s Active
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, February 26, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 22, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0321: Let’s Active
Make a short piece of music that decreases 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 decreases 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.
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: banjo, piccolo, xylophone, celeste, glockenspiel,
ukulele, toy piano, baritone saxophone, tambourine
Instruments number: max 6
Speed of music: 130-180 bpm
Key: major
Length: around 2 min
Recommended musical/acoustic features: bright timbres, high pitches, much pitch variability, rising pitch contour, fast tone attacks, medium-high sound level, very little microstructural regularity
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 “disquiet0321” (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 “disquiet0321” (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-0321-lets-active/
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, February 26, 2018. This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, February 22, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you. The instructions suggest roughly two minutes. (Assume your piece can be played on repeat, or as part of a playlist of similar music.)
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0321” 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 321st weekly Disquiet Junto project (Let’s Active: Make a short piece of music that decreases 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-0321-lets-active/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
February 21, 2018
Instagram Improvisations
A post shared by k'in sventa (@kin_sventa) on Feb 21, 2018 at 5:20pm PST
It’s almost redundant for a self-producing musician to employ the word “improvising” when posting a short performance video on Instagram. The Instagram shorts are invariably bedroom setups, or portable-rig excursions, or trial runs of new tools and new techniques. They’re almost all improvisations to one degree or another. These videos feel intimate not just because they’re shot in a personal setting. These videos feel intimate because the musician involved has opened up their world a bit, done something they’ve maybe not done before or that they know full well to be a work in progress. The idea of work in progress excites them, and they’ve invited the listener to check it out — not just the listener, but the viewer, who witnesses the cables and equipment, the hesitation of an extended finger, the imperfection of the framing, the minimal editing and virtual absence of post-production.
In this brief recent Instagram video from the musician k’in sventa, who is based in San Francisco, you hear the clackety keys of the sampler almost as clearly as you do the old piece of vinyl spinning nearby. That sound of the keys is almost — not quite but almost — part of the piece as a whole. In it, a short segment of the vinyl recording is fed into the sampler, and we hear it at the same time as the sampler hears it. Then, with a few key presses, the sample plays back, at first stuttered, then layered, then flourishing into a vibrant array of half-familiar elements, some glitches and others held tones, all as the turntable needle is returned to a resting position. Eventually a proper beat kicks in. If you look closely, the left hand is momentarily doubled as the video splices to later footage with the drums employed. The production of the video is as much an improvisation as the performance itself. That’s part of the pleasure.
Video originally posted to the k’in sventa Instgram page. More at soundcloud.com/kinsventa and trueindigo.bandcamp.com.
February 20, 2018
The Sound of One Sound Glitching
The Japan-based musician who goes by the name Ichion explains the barebones appellation in a brief SoundCloud account bio. By this telling, “ichi” is the Japanese word for “one,” and “on” is the Japanese word for “sound.” All of the music on the Ichion account is extrapolated from a single sound. Well, more than one sound is present on the account. It’s that each individual Ichion track is “made from one sound only.” There are, of course, multiple sounds within each track, because Ichion transforms each seed sound into glitchy, rhythmic treats.
Some of the resulting music is downright club-ready, and some, like “Dada,” is enticingly minimal. “Dada” begins with the sense that something has gone wrong. The beat snaps and repeats like a machine rebooting on instinct. That cycle continues to dominate the track, as darker, more mechanical renditions of the central sound become more pronounced. A low throb and a froggy clip-clop then dominate until all the sonic pieces slowly disappear one at a time. The work is a small triumph of editing, of doing more not just with less but with virtually nothing.
“Dada” is just one track among dozens on Ichion’s account. Dig into the chase-scene momentum of “Erueee,” or the funky industrial music of “Chikara Chikara,” and all the other one-note wonders.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/ichionmusic.
February 19, 2018
The Actions Within
I grew interested in live performance videos of ambient music based on an idea, and perhaps inevitably what came to be of interest to me was in marked contrast with where I started out.
What interested me at the start was the tension between inaction and inaction, between the perceived stasis of much if not most ambient music, and the simple fact that, in live performance, action is taking place. In other words, if ambient music is a balloon floating in air, then performance — that is, live production — is the hands that keep the balloon afloat.
There were other things afoot, too. As someone who writes about technologically mediated sound and to that end fiddles with the technology involved in mediating sound, I was always looking for videos in which the technology was put to use in a manner that was informative. Sometimes this meant tutorials, but often it just meant observing an instrument — a synthesizer module, a foot pedal, the construction of a tape loop — in practice. Problem was, the vast majority of videos employing this equipment usually had music I had no interest in listening to.
So, I started a YouTube playlist, now 79 videos long and growing, by collecting videos of live ambient performance. A regular presence in this playlist is r beny, whose music is richly ambient, and whose videos do nothing to disguise his techniques. Quite the contrary, they are studies in the connection between the action and inaction I was initially interested in. But as time has passed, one of the things I’ve noticed about r beny’s videos in particular, and many other live ambient performances in general, is how much the music comes alive when you pay attention to what’s happening on screen.
On its own, the audio of this video, “The Magnetic Sea,” is a lush conglomeration of sun-dabbled synthesis and warped, sun-damaged tonalities. But when watched live, when attention is paid to what r beny is up to, the interior moments of the piece gain a sense of distinction that was previously hidden beneath the sublime surface (which, if you studied literature in college, is sort of a redundant comment, but more on that another time). You needn’t know what r beny is using in this set, or what the individual controls necessarily do. Much as the lights on the devices give you a sense of interior tempo, his hand actions are synced to shifts and changes within the greater work. “The Magnetic Sea” is a beautiful piece of music to do other things to (read, write, think, sleep), and an all the more beautiful piece to pay utmost attention to — a duality that is at the heart of the definition of ambient music in the first place.
Video originally posted to r beny’s YouTube page. The musician r beny is Austin Cairns, who is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. More from beny/Cairns at soundcloud.com/rbeny and rbeny.bandcamp.com.
February 18, 2018
When a Study Isn’t an Étude
If you listen to experimental music in public, you might be familiar with being helpfully informed that what you’re listening to isn’t actually music. That approbation takes on a different meaning when it comes to another sort of listening, which is when musicians post rough initial takes of new equipment. Take “Tensor 1 02-18-2018,” which is a guitarist running through settings in a new effects pedal. The loping, sinuous tones are sent backwards and forwards, turned into dense guttural utterances and glitching broken figments along the way, but generally resting in a diffuse, reflective zone. The very shape of the depicted waveform makes it clear this isn’t a single work, but a collection of pieces, of attempts: it is broken into distinct segments, each with its own visibly evident start and end. Yet, while this isn’t even an étude, per se, it is an example of study, and there’s a pleasure to be taken in studying the study, to appreciating the sonic transformations afoot as the musician comes up to speed.
Listen to the track at soundcloud.com/roofhare. The audio is by Kees de Goot, based in Rhode Island. More at twitter.com/Groovehare.
February 17, 2018
Music from Instrument Makers
lights are from a window by Meng Qi
The talented synthesizer creator Meng Qi is known for crafting a variety of musical equipment, often one-off projects that mix noise and design, touch and technology toward unique creative ends. Based in Beijing, China, Meng Qi also releases music that combines these instruments as part of larger arrays of equipment. Out this past week is a single, “Lights Are from a Window,” self-released on Bandcamp. The music emerges from a thick hum, filling the void with short-circuit fidgets and a melodic drone that brings to mind mid-period Aphex Twin. At just over three minutes, it ends like it’s just getting started, leaving the listener primed for what comes next.
Track available for one dollar (U.S.) at mengqi.bandcamp.com. More from Meng Qi at mengqimusic.com.
