Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 302

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0299-10bpm-waltz/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Build A Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall by Andrew Weathers Ensemble

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Published on September 21, 2017 06:33

Andrew Weathers’ Psychedelic Amalgams

With a guitar-driven album that at times echoes such minimalist composers as Terry Riley (in its tonal psychedelia) and Steve Reich (in its percussive patterning), the Texas-based musician Andrew Weathers continues to build a body of work that mixes rigor and wandering, exactitude and ease, ambition and intimacy, grandeur and isolation.

The album is Build a Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall, credited to the Andrew Weathers Ensemble and released on his Bandcamp page. Weathers has a composer’s desire for concerted expression and a seer’s hunger for wisdom. His homespun vocals reach full force amid evocative, densely orchestrated settings. Sometimes the music is rhythmically momentous, like “We Already Exist Forever (We Will Eat),” while at others it drones as an extrapolation of Indian raga, for example “The Light Pulse Earth Grid is a Channel.” The result is an amalgam, in the sense of a rich composite, the parts inseparably intertwined but still recognizable. It’s music that, and this is meant as a compliment, suggests signifiant effort, the effort of making something vital, something not just new but trenchant and meaningful.

The songs on Build a Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall, per Weathers’ description, took as their origin point material from The Industrial Workers of the World Little Red Songbook. That period mix of progressive fervor and community action finds an outlet here in the sheer ecstasy of a track like “Astral Swords (Seven – A Past That Folds Over),” in which his voice is just one rough-textured element among many.

And then for one brief ambient track, texture is given its momentary, quiet primacy. The piece is “The Dream Body Does Carve (Green Grave).” In it a dense sine wave of a guitar line undulates between threadbare piano playing and tiny little glitches of synthesizer whimsy. It brings to mind the gestural rural atmospherics of the great Scott Tuma. The association makes particular sense, in that at times Weathers’ voice suggest favorably the vocals of Scott Tuma’s former Souled American bandmates, Joe Adducci and Chris Grigoroff. If the idea of Souled American regrouping in order to record an album of Steve Reich covers sounds appealing, then Build a Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall is the album for you.

As for the Andrew Weathers Ensemble, it isn’t precisely a band, except perhaps in the Steely Dan sense of the word: nearly 20 musicians are listed in the credits, including Kyle Bruckmann on oboe, Brendan Landis on electric guitar, and Erik Schoster on Pippi computer (that’s Schoster’s music-making software coded in the language Python), just to name a few.

You know that joke in The Blues Brothers movie where Elwood asks the bartender, “What kind of music do you usually have hear?” and she replies, “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country and western”? Well, Weathers only has western — it’s a useful descriptor for how he draws from aspects of rock and folk, bypassing country almost entirely, as he heads out toward vast hypothetical expanses.

Get the full album at andrewweathers.bandcamp.com. More on Weathers, who is from North Carolina and lived and was educated (at Mills College) in Oakland, California, before recently relocating to Littlefield, Texas, at andrewweathers.com.

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Published on September 20, 2017 20:08

Disquiet Junto Project 0298: Dungeons & Drum Machines

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, September 18, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, September 14, 2017.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0298: Dungeons & Drum Machines
Make a track with two rolls of a 20-sided die.

Major thanks to Jason Wehmhoener for initiating this project, and for plotting it with me.

Step 1: Download the chart at this URL: https://goo.gl/Gew88N

Step 2: Note that there are two columns: one for melodic segments, another for rhythmic segments.

Step 3: Roll a 20-sided die once to be assigned a series of pitches. Roll the die again once to be assigned a series of beats.

Step 4: You will play each pitch for the duration represented by the corresponding beat. When you run out of beats or pitches, you wrap around to the beginning. In this way, while both pitches and beats are looping, the phrase itself takes longer to repeat.

Step 5: Use the result of Step 4 as the foundation for a track. This might mean one of several things. (A) This might mean employing it as an underlying foundation and improvising on top of it. (B) This might mean using it for part of a track, and alternating it with other material. (C) This might mean combining a programmed and live rendition atop each other. (D) This might mean inserting slight variations to introduce phasing and patterning. (E) This might even simply mean letting it play for awhile unto itself. (E) Or you might have some other take on it.

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 “disquiet0298” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://disquiet.com/0298/

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, September 18, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, September 14, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0298” 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 298th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Dungeons & Drum Machines: Make a track with two rolls of a 20-sided die — at:

Major thanks to Jason Wehmhoener for initiating this project, and for co-plotting it.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

Subscribe to project announcements here:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image used thanks to a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Konstantin Lazorkin:

flic.kr/p/4TvmQb

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Published on September 14, 2017 10:28

What Sound Looks Like

A post shared by Marc Weidenbaum (@dsqt) on Sep 11, 2017 at 8:45pm PDT

Playing with the new virtual modular synth from vcvrack.com. It’s a free, open source program with modules based on ones from such companies as Mutable Instruments and Belfaco. So far it’s a lot of fun.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

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Published on September 11, 2017 21:23

What Sound Looks Like

Dog politics is not a subject I’m particularly fluent in. I once almost moved to a place where dog rights, or perhaps better stated the rights of dog owners/guardians, were a particularly heated subject of discussion. I don’t think the fierce, antagonistic, and divisive language on either side of the debates necessarily turned me off the neighborhood. Then again, I can’t say it didn’t. In my neighborhood when I see dog droppings, I tend to guess it is due to a stray in the night, not a negligent human. My comfort only goes so far. Ferocious barking on a public sidewalk is not something I’ve yet to appreciate, rationalize, or otherwise acclimate to, especially when the barker is, shall we say, untethered. As I was reminded in the neighborhood I mentioned earlier, barking isn’t solely a chosen outlet of dogs; it’s also employed by their benefactors and their detractors. Matters of tone remind us that even the most well-reasoned arguments can suffer depending on how they are delivered. But arguments and how they’re delivered are just part of a debate, especially when that debate extends over a long period of time. In such cases, the victor may be the one who subtly shapes and shifts the vocabulary employed by both sides. Whoever, for example, sorted out that the opposite of “on leash” isn’t “unleashed” but, instead, “voice control” has arguably nudged the debate in the favor of the the canine crowd. Where “unleashed” suggests something out of control, “voice control” suggests that control is not merely the province of leashes. The term effortlessly dispenses with a binary. On the one hand, this specialized use “voice control” might seem like a tough sell in 2017, as voice control is becoming a common term related to gadgets that contain at least some modicum of artificial intelligence. Or perhaps those very robot tools are in the canine crowd’s favor. Maybe the phrase “voice control” today seems more powerful — more of a suggestion of conscious awareness and programmed response, more of a leash — than ever.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

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Published on September 11, 2017 13:58

Disquiet Junto Project 0297: Domestic Chorus

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on Monday, September 11, 2017. This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, September 7, 2017.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0297: Domestic Chorus
Make music from all the alarms, buzzer, and other alerts in your home.

Step 1: You’ll be making a sonic portrait of where you live, using only the sounds that are made by the domestic appliances in your home: your doorbell, your alarms, the alert on your dish washer or clothes dryer, should you have them, and so forth. Chart the sonic landscape of your home.

Step 2: Record samples of all the sounds that you listed in Step 1. Don’t be surprised if in the process of recording these sounds you think of additional sound sources in your home. Just add them to the list, and record them as well.

Step 3: Imagine a mood for your home: relaxed on a weekend morning, elated during a party, frenzied when its inhabitants’ calendars collide, mischievous when none of those inhabitants are present, etc.

Step 4: Record a short piece of music that (A) matches the mood in Step 3, (B) utilizes all the samples your recorded in Step 2, and (2) changes those sampes as little as possible in the process.

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 “disquiet0297” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://disquiet.com/0297/

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 11, 2017. This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, September 7, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0297” 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 297th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Domestic Chorus: Make music from all the alarms, buzzers, and other alerts in your home — at:

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

Subscribe to project announcements here:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image used thanks to a Creative Commons license by Flickr user Ethan:

flic.kr/p/a81KGD

A Future In Commons: A Tribute To Bassel Khartabil by Various Artists

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Published on September 07, 2017 11:57

A Future in Commons: A Tribute to Bassel Khartabil

This is a wonderful thing. Longtime Disquiet Junto participant Rupert Lally gathered tracks from 30-plus musicians to create a tribute album, A Future in Commons: A Tribute to Bassel Khartabil, for the late open-source coder. I think the strength of a community can be gauged to some extent by what occurs when the community’s lead moderator is not involved, and this is an example of such a thing. Aside from putting Rupert in touch, at his request, with the people I know who have been keeping Bassel’s flame lit (Niki Korth, Jon Phillips, Barry Threw), I only wrote this liner note essay. It was Rupert who proposed this compilation album, and it was Rupert who made it happen. I’m very proud of the many Disquiet Junto projects we have done over the years to spread Bassel’s story by finding music in his life and work. I’m hopeful this compilation on Bandcamp will spread that story even further, and help raise funds for the Bassel Khartabil Memorial Fund (more at creativecommons.org).

He was held in a small cell, from which he could view a small patch of sky for a small part of the day. That was after nine months he spent in a cell with no light at all. Before he was imprisoned (detained, held — the words have varying shades of truth and meaning, emphasis and appropriateness, detail and futility), he made three-dimensional CGI renderings of an ancient city. In his old life he created these virtual spaces to help us remember what the world once looked like. Perhaps those powers of imagination helped him envision a world beyond his cell once a cell became his world.

His name was Bassel Khartabil. He was a coder and open-source advocate born in Syria, the same country that would later imprison him and execute him. During his incarceration, and during the extended period when his death was presumed but not yet confirmed, his story became a rallying point around the world. His plight inspired essays, and conference sessions, and political statements. And it inspired music. All the tracks in this collection are sourced from different projects undertaken by members of the Disquiet Junto music community to keep Bassel’s story alive.

The Disquiet Junto is an open community of musicians who respond weekly to shared compositional prompts. Facets of Bassel’s life provided several such prompts over the years. We created soundscapes to bring a new dimension to his CGI renderings. We sampled his voice and turned it into music. We created VR scores, and we tried to extrapolate sound from the poetic language of his correspondence. In the end, what we tried to do was spread word of his plight, to keep his story alive even after he was no longer.

The “commons” is an essential metaphor that inspires open source activity. It is in the Creative Commons that people can build on each other’s work, to freely create things that neither party would have imagined possible separately. We often speak of the commons through related words, such as “community” and “communal.” We speak of the open-source community, and of communal effort. Through the Disquiet Junto projects, we’ve tried to connect with Bassel in yet another way — to commune with his spirit.

More on Bassel Khartabil at freebassel.org.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1l9r1uncsmos0u0/primecountsmay2017.csv?dl=0

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Published on September 05, 2017 09:49

Disquiet Junto Project 0296: Clustered Primes

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 4, 2017. This project was posted in evening, California time, on Thursday, August 31, 2017.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0296: Clustered Primes
Make music inspired by a prime-number query initiated by novelist Robin Sloan.

Step 1: The source material for this week’s project is a list of prime numbers. The list is the result of a contest that novelist Robin Sloan ran recently. In advance of the release of his new novel, Sourdough, which will be published on September 5, Sloan asked readers of his email newsletter to compete for an advance copy by submitting a prime number. The people who submitted the lowest prime numbers — and this next bit is important — that no one else submitted won a copy of the book. With that in mind, take a gander at the resulting CSV file of prime numbers here:

Step 2: Note that the CSV file has two columns of numbers. The column on the left shows the prime number. The column on the right shows the number of people who submitted the prime number on the left. Thus, 17 people submitted the number 2, 10 people submitted the number 3, and so on. The lowest prime number submitted by one person was 409, then several numbers were submitted by multiple people until you get to 467, and then two more were multiple submissions, but then you get three single submissions in a row: 491, 499, and 503. Just spend some time looking at the numbers for patterns — not just the patterns suggested by the primes, but the patterns in the social context, the clusters of submissions and what they say about people’s sense of the competition.

Step 3: Make a piece of music that somehow draws inspiration from the CSV file and from your perception of patterns.

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 “disquiet0296” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0296-clustered-primes/

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 4, 2017. This project was posted in early evening, California time, on Thursday, August 31, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you. Bonus points, of course, if the minutes and seconds of the finished work read as a prime number.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0296” 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 296th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Clustered Primes: Make music inspired by a prime-number query initiated by novelist Robin Sloan — at:

https://disquiet.com/0296/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0295: Disregard Echoes

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.

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 28, 2017. This project was posted in early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 24, 2017.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0295: Disregard Echoes
Make music inspired by a haiku, reflecting on Australian history.

This week’s project is a collaboration with Naviar Records and Western Riverina Arts, spearheaded by longtime Junto participant Jason Richardson. The results will contribute to an exhibition in the town of Narrandera during October that incorporates haiku describing local scenes.

Step 1: Consider the following haiku:

Poisoned Waterhole:
Violent disregard echoes.
Keenly felt today.

Step 2: Write a piece of music inspired by that haiku, which was written by Peita Vincent.

Background: This project is the brainchild of Jason Richardson. He has encouraged members of the community to write haiku describing local scenes. Those haiku have been turned into music as part of Naviar Records’ weekly Naviar Haiku series. The resulting recordings will join the haiku, photography and a textile exhibition Slow Book Haiku by Kelly Leonard Weaving and Greg Pritchard. There are also plans for Naviar Records to develop a CD featuring a selection of recordings. While the image of a poisoned waterhole speaks to many environmental concerns, the location earned its name during the “Frontier Wars” of the early 19th Century when the indigenous Wiradjuri people resisted European settlement. In the 1830s, several groups of Aboriginal families used to camp by the waterhole. Annoyed and eager to get rid of them, the local homestead owner poured drums of poison into the waterhole, killing many of them. This discussion comes as contemporary Australia reconciles colonial history.

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 “disquiet0295” (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: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

https://disquiet.com/0295/

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 wherever you are on Monday, August 28, 2017. This project was posted in early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 24, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0295” 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 295th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Disregard Echoes: Make music inspired by a haiku, reflecting on Australian history — at:

Thanks to Jason Richardson, who proposed the project; Naviar Records, which is collaborating with Richardson on a series of haiku, as part of the ongoing Naviar Haiku community; Peita Vincent, who wrote this haiku; and Western Riverina Arts, which is hosting an exhibit that will include music from the haiku series.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

Subscribe to project announcements here:

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Photo associated with this project is by Jason Richardson.

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Published on August 24, 2017 14:13

Synthesizer Etudes

Eric Kuehnl has released a second collection of short modular synthesizer pieces. It’s titled Modular Etudes — Volume 2 and contains five pieces, ranging from gurgling drones that unfold into what suggests pizzicato strings, to escapades in sound design for what might be a rough draft of a claustrophobic science fiction tale. One hallmark of the pieces is their range of sounds. Most of them contain clearly contrasting elements, like the varied percussion in “Mod_06.11.17” (presumably the titles are dates) and the mix of percussion and an alarm-like presence in “Mod_06.20.17.” Even the set’s most sedate piece, “Mod_07.20.17,” the one that earns the #ambient tag that Kuehnl affixed to the SoundCloud upload, is still quite sonically diverse, a little aural terrarium packed with life forms.

Get the full collection at soundcloud.com/erickuehnl. More from Kuehnl, who is based in Berkeley, California, at erickuehnl.com.