Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 297
January 18, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0316: El Segundo
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.
Tracks will be added to the playlist for the duration of the project.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 22, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 18, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0316: El Segundo
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.
Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence that explores and encourages asynchronous collaboration. This week you will be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0315). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Keep this in mind.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are 50 tracks in all to choose from, 49 as part of this playlist:
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0315
And then the 50th was a video by Bassling (aka Jason Richardson), also available as an audio track download here:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0315-first-chair/11022/34?u=disquiet
To select a track, you can listen through all that and choose one, or you can use a random number generator to select a number from 1 to 50, the first 49 being numbered in the above SoundCloud playlist, and 50 being Bassling’s track. (Note: it’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.)
Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, do not alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left. In your finished audio track, your part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.
Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0316” (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 “disquiet0316” (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-0316-el-segundo/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process. Be sure to name the track to which you’ve added music and the name of the musician who recorded it, and include a link to it.
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, January 22, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 18, 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 “disquiet0316” 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 essential for this specific project 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 316th weekly Disquiet Junto project (El Segundo: Record the second third of a trio, adding to a pre-existing track.) 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-0316-el-segundo/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is adapted from a photo by Martin Kenny and is used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 17, 2018
Maximal Ambient
According to Google Translate, the title of Michiru Aoyama’s new track means “To Become Distant,” a fitting phrase to associate with something that sounds like the swan song of some giant ship disappearing over the horizon. It is an orchestra of orchestras tuning up. It is the sonification of birds migrating in vast numbers. It is a dense, magnificent font of activity, slowing occasionally to catch its breath, or to let the listener do so. This is maximal ambient music, the tools and textures of quiet music — the suggestion of stasis, the emphasis on layers, the fractal tonality — put into effect for boisterous rather than sedate purposes.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/michiru-aoyama. Aoyama is based in Kamakura, Japan. More at michiruaoyama.jimdo.com and michiruaoyama.bandcamp.com.
January 16, 2018
Ann Annie Makes Tape Loops Blossom
If you follow Ann Annie’s music, then you may recognize the little tape cassette to the left of the deck in the new performance video “Blossom.” Just over a week ago, a couple dismembered Maxell tape cassettes — also pink in accent color — were visible in one of Annie’s Instagram photos, with a “feelin loopy” caption. Today the music that resulted has appeared.
A post shared by ann annie (@annnannie) on Jan 7, 2018 at 10:50am PST
The product of that whimsy is now evident in this footage, almost seven minutes of exceptional sonic transformation, as the tape loop is mixed with dense oscillations, all of which is shifted, looped, glitched, and warped. There are terse bell tones and effluent white noise, lens-flare grace notes and ecstatic birdsong to “Blossom,” which true to its name expands as it proceeds — what starts as loose and gentle gets more chaotic and rambunctious as time passes. The beauty of the video isn’t merely the color and framing, but how active Annie’s left hand is, adjusting settings on various synthesizer modules, tweaking the balance of the tape deck, and lending a conductor-like visual narration to the piece.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted on Ann Annie’s YouTube channel. More from Ann Annie at instagram.com/annnannie, facebook.com/modularanne, and annannie.bandcamp.com.
January 15, 2018
The Color of a Sequence
This short droning synthesizer piece from Andreas Tilliander, aka Repeatle, is largely autonomous, much like the video I shared a few days ago. Early on in it, you see a hand come into sight and click a couple switches on the Buchla synthesizer interface, but after that it’s entirely the Buchla’s show, up until the very end when the hand returns. We have a knob’s eye view for the length of the composition, all rows of faders, banks of switches, and distant cables.
The thing about synthesizer autonomy is that all the activity is happening underneath the hood, as oscillators and filters and other facets of the collective instrument collectively make the drones and pulses, textures and tones, come to life. The primary external signal comes in the form of a few colored lights, in different colors, which align with aspects of the patch as the piece unfolds. On first listen, you might just take in the shuddering noise machinations, but upon repeat it’s worth keeping an eye on those lights and sensing how their pace and strength, how that coordination or lack thereof, can be mapped to shifts in the overarching sound.
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Tilliander/Repeatle, who is based in Stockholm, Sweden, at repeatle.com, soundcloud.com/tilliander, and twitter.com/tilliander. And here’s an interview I did with him back in 2002: “Click It”.
January 5, 2018
What Sound Looks Like
Whoever wrote this had various options. The word “Broken” certainly does the job, though “Please knock” would have provided some welcome advice to a first-time visitor, and “Fix me” might have served as a snarky plea for help. If you focus in on the bell itself, you can see that this installation isn’t original to the structure. The paint reveals a previous arrangement, perhaps even a subsequent fix-it job: the missing screw in the upper left suggests failed attempts to address the situation. There’s an immediacy to the writing, to the recognizable heft of the Sharpie, and to the way it follows the contours of the textured exterior wall. Indeed, there’s a finality to “Broken” that makes the word perhaps the most fitting choice. It is poised above the button where, in an alternate universe, or at least a block over, you might find the number of an apartment, or the family name of its dweller. Here there is only the voluminous silence that exists when such a simple device rests longing to be repaired. Some visitor might even ever so briefly ponder if “Broken” is someone’s name, rather than immediately sense it to be both a practical statement about the object and a caption for the underlying emotional state of urban tenancy.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
A Dozen Years in the Dragon’s Eye
Steel: Dragon's Eye Twelfth Anniversary by Various Artists
The great record label Dragon’s Eye celebrated its 12th anniversary with a name-your-price, nine-track collection last month. The album is titled Steel and it consists of outtakes and rarities from various members of the Dragon’s Eye roster. If you need one track recommended as a point of entry, start with the lengthy “Deface VIII” by Marc Kate. It’s like the sonic equivalent of a black-gel lava lamp let to run in a bright, empty room. The sound is as if one thick substance is heard to transform in detail as the piece proceeds, a globular instance of shimmer, a hum made present with the sheer suggestive physicality of its undulating resonance. For the most part it is a voluminous thing, many faceted yet singular. At times it momentarily branches into soft estuaries, yet even then they work in parallel, not individual forces but parts of a collective whole.
The entire album is recommended, from the throbbing noise of Geneva Skeen’s “In the night mind of the night world,” to the tornado of coruscation with which Jake Muir’s “Untitled” gets going, to the dense deep bass of “Ride It Out” by the label’s creative director, Yann Novak.
Also featured on Steel are pieces by Steve Pacheco, Tobias Hellkvist, Robert Crouch, wndfrm, and Fabio Perletta. The album is online at dragonseyerecordings.bandcamp.com. More from Dragon’s Eye at dragonseyerecordings.com.
January 4, 2018
Disquiet Junto Project 0314: Cold Start
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, January 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 2018.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0314: Cold Start
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.
Welcome to a new year. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one sentence:
Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the seventh (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: If your hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0314” (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.
Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.
Step 3: Please consider posting your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-...
Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, January 8, 2018. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 4, 2018.
Length: The length is up to you.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0314” 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 314th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Cold Start: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it) 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-0314-cold-start/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is adapted from a photo by Erik and is used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 3, 2018
Colleen, Revisited on Richard Houghten’s Guitar
All Guitars 2 by Richard Houghten
Richard Houghten plays guitar and has a way with covers of electronic tracks. His mid-2017 album, All Guitars 2, included two Aphex Twin pieces (“Vordhosbn,” off Drukqs, and “On,” the single whose release was Aphex Twin’s first on the Warp label) rendered with a mix of often heavily processed guitar and seemingly automated rhythm tracks, as well as pieces by Orbital, Bonobo, David Lynch, DJ Krush, and others, plus some originals.
That was preceded by the 2014 All Guitars, which had covers of Squarepusher, Flying Lotus, Grimes, Burial, and Nosaj Thing, as well as another pair of Aphex Twin pieces: “Jynweythek Ylow,” also from Drukqs, and “Girl/Boy,” off the 1996 EP of the same name and the Richard D. James Album, which followed that same year. (The latter is the one album I got to interview Aphex Twin for.) The “Girl/Boy” rendition popped up today on Houghten’s YouTube channel:
Listening to that on repeat brought me to the full album, and then to the more recent set, which includes an interesting point of comparison. Much of Houghten’s cover work involves taking electronic sounds — melodies, beats, and textures — and rendering them with guitar. However, in the case of the track by Colleen (aka Cécile Schott), “Geometría del Universo,” off her 2013 album, The Weighing of the Heart, Houghten is actually playing on guitar a piece of music that originated on another string instrument.
In Houghten’s version, the intense rhythms of the original remain, but they’ve seen the more visceral aspects softened. Houghten isn’t a replicator, much as his transcriptions bear the imprint of dedication and affection to the source material. He brings his own sensibility to his covers, and in the case of Colleen that involves invoking an aesthetic that the original was somewhat in opposition to. Where Colleen’s had the beating heart of a flamenco outburst, the Houghten is more quietly minimalist — the same patterns, rendered with a silken palette.
For comparison’s sake, here is Colleen’s original version of “Geometría del Universo”:
The Weighing of the Heart by Colleen
More from Houghten, who is based in Los Angeles, at twitter.com/HoughtenRichard. The full album All Guitars 2 is at bloomypetal.bandcamp.com
January 2, 2018
The Water Memory of Emily A. Sprague
Water Memory by Emily A. Sprague
Released at the tail end of 2017, three quarters of the way through December, long after most best-of lists had been filed, published, and amended online with reader comments, the New York-based musician Emily A. Sprague released Water Memory, a cassette/digital release of original synthesizer pieces. At the bottom of the album’s Bandcamp page she lists the technology with which it was composed and performed, but knowledge of the boutique manufacturers — Monome, Mannequins, and Xaoc among them — isn’t necessary for an appreciation of the seesawing, nature-infused, artfully somber music the album contains.
From the morphing glisten of “A Lake” to the muted glitches of “Your Pond,” the album’s five tracks share a form that is genteel and economical and, yet, richly emotional. The album’s title is appropriate. There is something seemingly humid about the music, in the way the various elements congeal and amass, how the separations between parts get foggy, how the whole thing unfolds in a manner that suggests the presence of an environment: not just organic — the term employed frequently to suggest machines losing their machine-ness — but prone to the consequences of organic: irreversible decay and unforeseen growth.
Get the full album at mlesprg.bandcamp.com. More from Sprague at mlesprg.info. I wrote here about her work previously when she was a guest of the excellent Sound + Process podcast.
January 1, 2018
A Spy’s Fractured Recollections
This is the latest video I’ve added to my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music.
It’s quite likely that the slow piano line at the heart of this track, “Growing Backwards” by Hainbach, would suggest the music of Erik Satie even if it weren’t being processed by myriad small electronic devices that extracted all the nostalgic intensity possible. The reduced pace, the elegiac intonation, the gentle minimalism — all those things in combination would have likely brought to mind the composer whose life straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, and whose music sounds more current in the 21st than perhaps ever before.
Here, though, that familiar, celebrated mode is reinforced with techniques that emphasize a reflexively backwards-minded affect. The warping of the melody and the shimmer of adjacent chords lend an ethereal quality, and the snippets of voices suggest half-remembered conversations. (According the musician, the theme comes from the score he composed to a play about “spies, family, memories and dementia.” He confirms that the voices are intended to suggest past occurrences bleeding into the present: “words that sound sound like flickering memories.”)
As with many of Hainbach’s recordings, the video is a full live performance, allowing the listener to watch as his hands move from gadget to gadget, from knob to knob, coaxing sounds and effects as he proceeds.
Video originally posted at Hainbach’s YouTube page. Hainbach is Berlin-based composer Stefan Paul Goetsch. More from Hainbach at hainbach.bandcamp.com and instagram.com/hainbach101.
