Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 295
February 6, 2018
An Agent of Transport
Ambient comes in many shapes and sizes, and also in many scales. “2018Project04” by Warmth, aka Agustín Mena of Valencia, Spain, is as vast as it is soft. Tonally, it moves back and forth between warm wool and cool gauze. But the space it travels is significant. Listened to on speakers, it seems to stretch beyond the confines of the room. Listened to on headphones, it is an agent of transport. Some that is movement literal, like the lush surf that churns at times, but most of it is figurative and ambigious, somehow both gentle and cosmic, intimate and expansive. It’s gorgeous stuff.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/w_a_r_m_t_h. Warmth’s latest album is Home, dating from July of last year and available at archivesdubmusic.bandcamp.com. Track found via a repost by soundcloud.com/havdis, based in Nordland, Norway.
February 5, 2018
Orchestral Movements in the Rural Dark
Glenn Sogge calls it a “Night Song.” At 24 minutes in length, it’s closer to a Night Symphony. In addition to that length, the piece’s varying phases suggest orchestral movements in a manner that would do acoustic ecologist and composer R. Murray Schafer proud. What it is is a continuous, nearly half-hour field recording made in Troutdale, Oregon, two days ago, at 11pm on February 3. It is rich with insect noise, dense with layers of oscillating mating calls — or as Sogge calls it, in a brief accompanying note: “Another late winter evening in the country.”
If Sogge’s “Night Song” were in fact a symphony, it would be singled out in the program notes for electronic additions that set it apart from the traditional repertoire. In this case those sounds come in the form of passing cars, at first odd signals barely evident in the mix, but gaining speed and presence over time, and of the gargantuan arrival late in the piece by a jet airplane, the swoop of that massive, singular presence a telling contrast to the sheer mass of insects underfoot.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/glenn-sogge. Sogge notes in his bio: “#Collab and #remix are always welcome. All material is downloadable and covered by a Creative Commons license.” So do have at it.
February 4, 2018
Highlighting Selected Ambient Works Volume 2
My book on Aphex Twin’s landmark album Selected Ambient Works Volume II came out four years ago this month as part of the 33 1/3 series from the publisher Bloomsbury. Some friends and colleagues who’ve published more books than I have suggested that it can be informative to look at the “popular highlights” made possible in the Amazon Kindle app, and so I did just that. These are the passages my Kindle app is telling me have been highlighted most frequently, and some consideration of them as items on which people have focused their thoughts:
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The wind chime is, by most accounts, the original “generative” instrument: it is the original device that serves dual essential purposes, as composition and as tool.
That’s particularly satisfying, as the wind chime is to me, in terms of both the SAW2 track on which it manifests and the instrument itself, a deep well: as a music-making device; as a proto-ambient, pre-electric technology; as a cultural touchstone; as a unique sound unto itself; and as a metaphor and enactment of generative art, among many other things.
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The majority of the record is of a piece with Evening Star, the collaboration between Brian Eno and Robert Fripp that dates from 1975, Eno’s great year — the same year he released Another Green World and Discreet Music.
Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium, which he explained he first heard in the sound art project by Janet Cardiff, who set up 40 speakers to invoke an immersive environment, allowing the listener to navigate the choir as a ghost or a character in The Matrix might. And he recommended Richie Hawtin’s prolific Plastikman moniker.
The intervals between notes bring to mind “Silent Night,” which puts this solidly in the realm of Unsilent Night, composer Phil Kline’s secular year-end music, which manages to be reflective and seasonal without having a sectarian, devout, or otherwise irreconcilably spiritual affect.
A good number of the highlighted entries seem to focus on subsequent listening.
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Hassell introduced the term “Fourth World music” to this sort of endeavor. It is future music, music from a time and place where rituals are brought to bear through unintended uses of new technologies, especially of castaway materials.
Jon Hassell’s music was on a list of potential subjects when I was pondering what album to pitch to 33 1/3. Having failed in a previous round, when I proposed to write about the debut album from the Latin Playboys, I had aimed this time around to push for a more commercially successful and more broadly culturally active subject. Had I not, something by Hassell may very well have made the final cut, and it’s nice to know that he surfaced as a point of interest for readers.
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Raves were less concerts than what has become fashionable to term temporary autonomous zones, and this was especially true in the era before the predominance of the cellphone, when the autonomous aspect had as much to do with being cut off from the world as it did with being part of a self-organizing civic space built with its own internal rules.
Raves were dark, murkily architected, often expansive spaces in which sensory overload and disorientation was a common goal. One could as easily lose touch with one’s friends as with oneself.
Ambient music defines the space in which it is heard, in part simply by making demands on that space, that it be conducive to quietness. Raves are often quite a contrast to ambient, but as sonic environments they have much in common with it.
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[I]t has been proposed that Selected Ambient Works Volume II on CD is intended for both sides to be played at the same time, that the track breaks align, and that parallels are self-evident, each side enhancing the other, a jigsaw puzzle with just two very long complementarily individuated pieces.
It’s good to know the old myths still have life in them.
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The music of Aphex Twin works effectively in the film precisely because it need not come across like music. It sounds like neighboring power stations and internal anxiety.
The film in question is Devil’s Playground, the 2002 documentary by Lucy Walker about Amish rumspringa, a teenage rite of passage. Aphex Twin is frequently quoted as having likened the album to “standing in a power station on acid.” In the able hands of Walker, herself an illbient musician before becoming a filmmaker, that acid experience is slowed down to the emotional turmoil of rumspringa’s most fragile participants.
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And that covers it. Perhaps there will be other frequently highlighted passages as the years pass. The overarching theme of my book is what came of the album after it was released, what listeners, and technology, and other artists did with it, changed how we heard it, even those of us — like me — who heard it when it was first released, before all the anecdotes and myths and knowledge had accumulated around it. It’s nice as my little book now itself gets older to see what bits have stuck.
And if you’re interested in reading more about the book before picking it up, I recommend the interview that Mark Richardson did with me at Pitchfork shortly after the book was released.
February 3, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
A small piece of paper hangs on the wall in a stairwell at an elementary school. The official document lists, in grid form, much like a test or a textbook, a handful of guidelines for students. Several of these rules touch on sound — about receiving and producing sound, about paying attention, and about making noise. A key word, not surprising given the academic setting, is “quiet.” The most interesting of the guidelines is this correlation, not between sound and volume, or instruction, or reception, but a more complicated connection between the sound of active feet and the side effects of that activity. There are stages of learning in elementary school. Double-digit addition comes after single digits. The ratio of pictures to words in books flips as time passes. This concept, that quiet feet will be patient feet and that patient feet will not make dust clouds, is a next-level association. It’s arguably more complex, that is, than the idea that washing your hands will make it less likely you’ll take ill. For very young students, the “quiet feet” line is more likely to be received initially as an axiom than as a causal instruction. For students of sound, however, it’s precisely the kind of secondary connection that we should keep our ears out for.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 2, 2018
A Sketch from Debashis Sinha
The popular failure of SoundCloud’s mainstream streaming service, SoundCloud Go, served primarily to highlight just how much SoundCloud’s strengths rest on the far other end of the production-consumption spectrum. SoundCloud is good for many things, and what it’s particularly good for is sketches, for bits of music recorded and posted as two conjoined halves of a self-contained act of musical self-expression.
Take “Sketch1” by Debashis Sinha, whose awareness of SoundCloud’s utility for fragments and byproducts is evidenced by the final sentence of his account bio: “This soundcloud page hosts exclusive content from projects not available elsewhere.” Sinha has plenty of other elsewheres, including a healthy debsinha.bandcamp.com page, but SoundCloud is where his works-in-progress reside, much as Sinha’s Instagram account currently hosts pictures of his creative space in the theater where he is at work on a production score.
Instagram shows where Sinha is at, and SoundCloud shows what he’s up to. On Instagram, people who post frequently will often take it for granted that their images are being experienced in real time, which is why they might add a #latergram tag if they’ve already moved on to another location, another mood. SoundCloud isn’t quite so timed to the very moment, but the instant works that do appear on the site have a feeling of what the creator’s mind is focused currently. Which means Sinha’s mind is currently focused on downtempo rhythms, light industrial percussion, and deftly deployed string samples, all of which constitute the excellent 47-second “Sketch1” posted earlier today.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/debsinha. More from Sinha, who is based in Toronto, Canada, at debsinha.com and instagram.com/upanisha_ds.
February 1, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0318: Linear Training
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 5, 2018. This project was posted in the late morning, California time, on Thursday, February 1, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0318: Linear Training
Record a piece of music composed of variations on the same held tone.
Step 1: You’ll be making a piece of music based on a single held tone. Before recording that tone, it might help to understand the circumstances under which it will be employed, so read the instructions fully before proceeding.
Step 2: Record the held tone for roughly five to ten seconds.
Step 3: Make variations on that tone by processing it in various ways. The result should yield between roughly five and ten different versions of the original tone from Step 2.
Step 4: Compose a short piece of music that consists solely of the variations that resulted from Step 3. It is also fine to include the “original” tone from Step 2.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0318” (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 “disquiet0318” (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-0318-linear-training/
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 5, 2018. This project was posted in the late morning, California time, on Thursday, February 1, 2018.
Length: The length of your track will be roughly the length of the track to which you are adding something.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0318” 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 318th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Linear Training: Record a piece of music composed of variations on the same held tone) 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-0318-linear-training/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is by koeb on Flickr, and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 31, 2018
Snakes & Oscillators
A post shared by Jon Davies (@jonpauldavies) on Jan 24, 2018 at 2:43am PST
Just to follow up yesterday’s post of an Instagram video depicting a tiny robot band playing artfully arranged instrumental music, here’s another solid example of the miniature musical-technological (a slightly more humane appellation than “music-technology”) wonders found on the social network.
As you listen to the clip, a brief synthesized melody is being modulated in real time, the sound warping at the whim of a controller. The familiar shape of the x/y control pad is viewable in the lower right hand corner of the illuminated grid device. What it controls is this snake, familiar from video games like Centipede, the early-1980s classic. The snake can be aimed at a little stationary reward, whose consumption by the snake ushers in a new phase of the melody, which appears to move up the register a step at a time, or something along those lines.
The rules of this game-composition aren’t entirely clear, but it does appear that while you can aim the snake to hit that reward light right on the schedule that the rhythm suggests, you can also delay doing so, letting the standing melody extend for awhile. It’s nice to imagine how an audience in a live setting would get engaged in such a performance, becoming aware of the process and enjoying the occasions of delayed gratification as the snake takes its time to consume its prey. It’s also interesting to think how the scenario can train a player to keep time, or adeptly veer from it, along the lines of Guitar Hero and other so-called rhythm games.
Video found via a post by Scanner Darkly on the llllllll.co boards. Software by Jon Davies, on whose Instagram account the clip was published. The device is the open-source Monome Grid controller (more at monome.org). Davies says the code will soon be shared publicly, for those who want to play along at home.
January 30, 2018
Let’s Get Physical
A post shared by marcus fischer (@marcusfischer) on Jan 29, 2018 at 10:12pm PST
The notions of YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers are indisputably up for debate. What isn’t is that both sites, along with other social media platforms, are rich with bits of sound and music, art and culture, design ingenuity and technological innovation, that exist primarily on those platforms and that are, for all intents and purposes, in existence because of those platforms. It’s an article for another time that YouTube and SoundCloud and Instagram, among other spots, are where I get the sense that I once upon a time got from crate digging — that’s before I even knew it was called crate digging and I was just a kid in a record store buying specific records because I recognized one name in the liner notes from another record I liked — and then listened to that new (to me) record, listening through it for some element I might find tantalizing, and then following that element to other recorded destinations on my next trip to the record store. That act of tracking took days or weeks to complete a cycle in the pre-internet era, and has long since come to happen so often — so fluidly, so subconsciously — within a few minutes that we don’t even remember what we clicked on that got us eventually to the bit of sound/music/art that has now enraptured us.
Now, that’s all back story, because I know what got me to Marcus Fischer’s test video of a new music-making device. I’ve followed his work for a long time, and gotten to know him, and even worked with him a bit, and I marvel at the subtlety and emotion of his music, and at the visual acuity he brings to how it is presented. This Instagram video is a short segment in which he employs a new device called the Automat, from the company Dadamachines, that allows someone to impact physical objects with the same sort of MIDI data that was designed to sort of go in the opposite direction — MIDI was what let keyboards and other gadgets communicate their instructions (which note, what velocity, how hard, what sequence) to a digital device, as well as for those digital devices to communicate with each other. Here, information on a computer uses MIDI to send instructions via Automat to bang on a drum, or shake a rattle, or wallop a xylophone.
In Fischer’s hands, this isn’t merely a proof of concept. It’s an lovely micro-composition that explores how different devices will respond to the mechanical instructions, and that pushes at the intention of the tools, seeing how rapid-fire triggers will cause elegant chaos. There’s a balance in the finished work that is best exemplified by the way that final bell tone is let to ring out and decay, how this is physical music being played out in human time in the physical world. I’m avoiding the word “real” throughout that previous sentence so as not to get sidetracked by ponderings about hierarchies of experience or expression. What I want to do is draw attention to, and express admiration for, the way this little video presents an artistic pursuit in such an enjoyable, memorable, and artfully encapsulated manner.
Video originally posted at instagram.com More from Marcus Fischer at mapmap.ch. His latest solo album is Loss, which came out on the 12k label last year. He also contributed, in his words, “granular processing + modular synth drones” to the a song, “Dream on Mount Tam,” on the deluxe edition of Calexico’s most recent album, The Thread That Keeps Us. More on the Dadamachines Automat at dadamachines.com and at the kickstarter.com page where it was funded.
January 29, 2018
Lindsay Duncanson’s Looped Vocalese
Much of Lindsay Duncanson’s work up on Soundcloud employs voice as its primary sound source. There are gurgles and drones, thick densities of tone and sudden, glottal explosions among the myriad examples Duncanson has posted. At one moment the voice is a calming presence, and at another it is a fierce, antagonist. In both such situations the lack of actual verbal language serves different purposes, either prelapsarian in its bliss, or suggesting a mental rupture that has short-circuited rational thought.
One standout track of Duncanson’s combines looped bits of mouth noise with that of a brook — accomplished, judging by the accompanying photo and tags, on the popular Loopy app. This is the rare track amid this SoundCloud collection that has no harshness to it, no veering from calm to tension or splutter. Titled “StreamSound,” it combines a sweet melody, the sort of thing one might find oneself having been humming unconsciously, with the delicate, percussive noise of the waterway. The vocal tones build slowly, a held note, like a warm sine wave, underneath childlike snippets. The closest it gets to the harshness of many of the other tracks is when brook’s burbles, toward the end, are emphasized for their thump-like qualities, and then when the voice impersonates a flying insect, darting this way and that.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/productofboy. More from Duncanson, who is based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom, at noizechoir.net (a partnership with Marek Gabrysch) and at productofboy.net.
January 28, 2018
Adding Without Overwhelming
One interesting side effect of the current Disquiet Junto project is an enjoyment of the extreme panning involved. The current project is the third in a sequence. In the majority of the pieces, the initial track was panned hard left, meaning you pretty much only hear it in the left speaker or headphone. The second track, which was added to the first to form a duet, was panned hard right, and then the track that completed the trio — in the third project in the sequence — was placed center.
While not every piece in the projects — there have been about 50 each of the first two weeks — has necessarily followed those precise instructions, the majority have, including this great track by Modus Pony, who has done me the great honor of adding to the piece that Joseph Branciforte did last week, a piece that was itself built upon a bit of slow-poke guitar glitch that I’d posted the first week of this project sequence.
To listen to Modus Pony’s entry is to not only hear a perfectly understated addition (he’s on bass, to my heavily processed electric guitar and Branciforte’s Fender Rhodes) that matches the tone of the first two pieces, both separately and in combination. He managed to add his own voice, and yet maintain what had preceded his arrival. As a result of the stereo separation, you really hear the parts as if the trio of players is right in front of you.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/moduspony. More from Modus Pony, aka Matt Ackerman, who is based in Los Angeles, California, at moduspony.bandcamp.com, twitter.com/moduS_ponY, and moduspony.com.
