Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 312
February 6, 2017
Beats from Old-School NYC, via Japan
Takara Digital is a new, Japan-based record label releasing out of print and otherwise rare hip-hop. Takara was founded in 2016 by Yuzuru Kishi, and has already published albums from late greats including J Dilla and Big L, as well as still-kicking figures like Pete Rock and MF Doom. As of this writing, there are already 10 albums in the Takara catalog. One recent highlight is The Nineteen Ninety Eight Split EP, which is half the Speedknots and half N.Y. Confidential. Of the EP’s 16 tracks, four are instrumentals (my primary focus as a hip-hop listener). According to the brief accompanying liner note, the two halves of the EP were originally released separately. These are collectors’ items. On Discogs.com, the Speedknots vinyl has sold for as much as $300, and the N.Y. Confidential for close to two thirds of that amount. All the productions are seriously old-school, emphasizing instrumental samples, found sounds, and surface noise. A standout is the slow-paced, loose-limbed “Knotz Landin (Instrumental).” The vocal has a wacky delivery, part Beastie Boys, part Basehead. The instrumental is pure atmosphere, a little organ snippet on repeat above a rim-shot beat, some syncopation provided by what sounds like a broken speaker pushed past its comfort level. The whole thing has a slightly ominous, circus-after-midnight vibe.
The Nineteen Ninety Eight Split EP by The Speedknots & N.Y. Confidential
Album originally posted at takaradigital.bandcamp.com. There doesn’t appear to be a website for Takara Digital, just the Bandcamp page.
February 5, 2017
The (Other) Helicopter Quartet
This Helicopter Quartet isn’t four Stockhausen-annointed violinists in their own individual whirlybirds. This Helicopter Quartet is two musicians — Chrissie Caulfield on violin and Michael Capstick on guitar, and he appears to play a theremin app on a smartphone toward the end of this video — along with a floor full of guitar pedals. The pedals more than fill out the billing, though the duo together strive to eke out as subtle a space as possible. This piece is called “Quiet,” appropriate for a work that for all its myriad constituent parts sounds like one person working alone with a limited toolset, if not a limited palette. It’s all slow, arching tones, looped and layered, the seesaw of a slow lapping of water against a pier, the mood as calm as the deepest recesses of the night.
“Quiet” is a trial run toward a track from the Helicopter Quartet’s forthcoming album. Video originally posted at Chrissie Caulfield’s YouTube channel. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” More from Caulfield at chrissieviolin.info. More from the Helicopter Quartet at helicopterquartet.bandcamp.com.
February 4, 2017
Hear the Refurbished 1970s Bell Labs Alles Machine Synthesizer
Oberlin’s TIMARA school has exactly one video on its YouTube page, and it was uploaded this past week. What it shows is the early synthesizer the Alles Machine, named for Hal Alles, who built the instrument while at Bell Labs in the 1970s. Computer music pioneer Max Matthews also contributed to the Alles Machine’s development. The video is a performance from 2016 by TIMARA undergraduate Judy Jackson.
The Alles Machine has been in TIMARA’s collection since the early 1980s. This is from a TIMARA blog post on January 30, 2017: “[T]he instrument was donated to the TIMARA Department, although it was barely functioning and lay dormant till recently. TIMARA engineer, John Talbert, has repurposed the machine for future generations of TIMARA composers.” Talbert is one of the half dozen faculty at TIMARA, which stands for Technology in Music and Related Arts, and counts among its alumni the classical critic and composer Kyle Gann, electronic musician Bob Ostertag, and playful digital-media artist Cory Arcangel.
The original deployment of the Alles Machine involved a Digital Equipment Corporation’s LSI-11, a sibling of the PDP-11. An article from a 1983 publication of the International Computer Music Association by Talbert and his TIMARA colleague Gary Nelson describes (see: umich.edu) how Max Matthews visited Oberlin during the 1979-1980 school year, and that led to the TIMARA acquisition of the Alles Machine. Nelson and Talbert traveled to Bell Labs in June 1980: “After several weeks of asking questions and taking notes,” they write, “we gathered up technical documentation, circuit diagrams, and the machine itself and headed back to Ohio to begin a challenging but rewarding period of what the seal of Oberlin College calls ‘learning and labor.'” (And if you want to go wayback, here’s a PDF of the 1979 PDP-11 Processor Handbook.)
It’s unclear when and for how long the Alles was mothballed, presumably decades, but a 2016 document from Talbert, linked to from the TIMARA site, details how the Alles Machine was recently disconnected from the antiquated LSI-11 and now functions thanks to a Mac Mini (“loaded with programs such such as the MPIDE Programming Environment, Max/MSP and Steim’s junXion”). Here’s a shot of the Max/MSP interface:
Jackson is a senior at Oberlin, where she is pursuing dual majors, one of them in computer science, the other at TIMARA. Her performance with the refurbished Alles Machine opens with brittle static, the white noise of a failing radio signal from which slowly emerges random, more softly tonal elements, which in turn give way to a warping sing wave. Jackson proceeds to work with these elements, eventually ushering in ever more raucous waveforms. It may be my imagination, but she appears to have opted for an outfit that resembles the one worn by Laurie Spiegel in this widely viewed video of a 1977 Alles Machine performance:
The Judy Jackson performance on the Alles Machine also appears on TIMARA’s Vimeo channel. More on TIMARA at timara.oberlin.edu. More from Jackson at soundcloud.com/judy-jackson118.
February 2, 2017
This Week in Sound: Sonic Civil Rights +
A lightly annotated clipping service.
Sonic Defense: There’s a lawsuit underway in New York City bringing to the fore the legality of sound weapons, in particular the Long Range Acoustical Device (see lradx.com) and whether it is a threat to civil rights. John Riley’s Newsday article appears at (policeone.com), reporting on bystander complaints and the city’s argument in favor of the technology.
Natal Communication: Further evidence appears in Nature’s Scientific Reports of universal commonality of non-verbal vocal sounds among human infants. This study is focused on the interpretations of infant sounds by adult parents and non-parents from varied geographic and cultural backgrounds. The research is by Verena Kersken, Klaus Zuberbühler, and Juan-Carlos Gomez.
Doorbell Bubble: Ring — formerly known as Doorbot — has raised over $100 million in new funding to further its next generation doorbell technology. In unrelated news, I’m typing this on a computer connected to the Internet via my cellphone because the ISP that provides Internet access to my home is currently experiencing an on and off DDoS attack. (Via Jared Smith.)
Home Front: Meanwhile, at reuters.com, Stephen Nellis reports on domestic fault lines in the competition between Amazon and Apple in particular for “smart home” technology dominance. The philosophical differences between the companies shouldn’t be much of a surprise: “Amazon is pursuing an open-systems approach that allows quick development of many features, while Apple is taking a slower route, asserting more control over the technology in order to assure security and ease-of-use.” According to Nellis, there are roughly 250 devices “certified to work” with Amazon’s Alexa, and less than half that for Apple.
To Surveil Man: David Beer at medium.com uses The Conversation to push discussion of prevailing forms of everyday surveillance, touching on familiar aspects like social-network snooping and always-listening consumer product devices, and reporting on this: worker badges that, in a story from Chris Weller last year in businessinsider.com, “watch and listen to their every move.” (Via George Kelly.)
What “HNOP” Means: As I’ve mentioned recently, no English-prevalent country seems to have more conspicuous concerns about noise pollution than does India. Someone at Uber took note of this, and is using noise activism to promote the company’s “ridesharing” service, reports
dnaindia.com: “Uber India has tied up with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)’s youth wing, Yi, to promote anti-honking.” This is part of HNOP, which stands for “Horn Not OK Please.” January 25 was HNOP Day across India.
Tune Beyond: Forgive me if this is the “microdosing” straw post that breaks your newsfeed back, but Amy Maxmen reports on LSD studies at Nature, with an emphasis on how participants respond to music. Perhaps the best sentence: “Free jazz elicited substantial emotions only in those who had taken LSD without ketanserin.”
More Eno(ugh): This may devolve into he said, he said between the producer and his interviewer, but Eno has clarified his comments, mentioned here last week, in a Guardian interview. Less reported were statements Eno made to flaunt.com the week prior. Eno made his Guardian comment on his facebook.com page. … Reggie Ugqu at buzzfeed.com shined a spotlight on the music favored by young fascists — feel free to Google it if you want (found via Robin James). … And Josh King, who was the White House director of production for presidential events from 1993 to 1997, reports in detail at theverge.com on the sizable new microphone that employed by the newly sitting U.S. president: “On Inauguration Day, another transition was complete. The trusty, time-honored two-mic rig of Shure SM57s on the presidential lectern was out. The Long Neck Era had begun.” … Bandcamp is donating 100% of its share of sales on February 3 (“starting at 12:01am Pacific Time”) to the American Civil Liberties Union. It’s also highlighting music from countries at the center of current U.S. presidential action regarding travel and immigration, including Mexico, Somalia, and Yemen (bandcamp.com).
Download Lowdown: Keith Helt is doing research into the culture of netlabels, which are online labels that generally release their music for free download, with the permission and participation of the musicians they release. His Netlabel Interview Project is collecting the perspectives of the proprietors of various netlabels, including the superb Absence of Wax, Dusted Wax Kingdom, Impulsive Habitat, Vuzh Music, and Webbed Hand.
How the Turntable Turns: The vinyl revival means the revival of turntable technology. The most prominent recent addition to home consoles is the new Technics 1200. Now there is Yves Béhar’s “intelligent turntable,” which looks like the sort of thing your grandmother used to use to pull crumbs off the table after dinner, and connects your vinyl collection with your phone — via designboom.com. What this means, among other things, is that the object can deduce how many tracks are on an album and let you move between them. … In related news, a company called Viryl Technologies is introducing a new manner of vinyl pressing, reports Jon Fingas at engadget.com.
Listen to Many: Iain Emsley and David De Roure at jtei.revues.org describe how to apply sonification techniques to literature, using Hamlet as their focus — in particular to highlight variations between texts: “Playing a synchronized audio stream per text in each ear helps the listener’s brain to hear any subtle differences between two versions through use of binaural transmission.”
# Doorbell Tale: Ghost Button
Below is a lightly edited email I received about a home doorbell. I received this via email from an old friend, Daniel Miller, whom I’ve known since junior high school. His home on Long Island, outside New York City, was significantly upgraded over the past year. I posted a photo of his home’s side doorbell 27 weeks ago, according to Instagram, when it was still under construction. At the time, he told me he’d report back when the doorbell work was completed.
Marc,
You asked me to let you know what was happening with my doorbell. I thought I’d wait until this was resolved and give you a complete report. However that still hasn’t happened. I am sorry I have left you hanging for so long. I’ll start from the beginning. The doorbell wasn’t working. A doorbell consists of a button that is wired to a chime. We were told we had to buy a new chime as our old one was destroyed during demolition. We bought a lovely unit that can be hardwired or can work wirelessly. It still didn’t work. The contractor said we had bought a 120v unit and that a low-voltage unit was required. A little (very little) research was done and not only did we have a low-voltage unit, but there is no other kind. Basically what happened was they forgot to keep the doorbell wiring in the wall during construction, and now that everything is sealed up and insulation is in the walls, reinstalling it is out of the question. So by stealing a part from the doorbell button we bought for the side door, they were able to get our front doorbell working wirelessly. However it sometimes chimes for apparently no reason. It happened often enough that we noticed that there was a reason: The neighbor across the street opening the trunk of her car. The saga continues.
Daniel
If you have a doorbell story, or photo, to share with me, please do. I won’t share it further without your permission.
# Fade Out
Recent deaths of note.
RIP, drummer Butch Trucks (b. 1947), founding member of the Allman Brothers Band
RIP, Black Sabbath keyboardist Geoff Nicholls (b. 1948)
RIP, Henry-Louis de La Grange (b. 1924), Mahler scholar
RIP, reggae singer Ronnie Davis (b. 1950), member of the Tennors and the Itals
RIP, Chuck Stewart (1927), prolific photographer for jazz album covers
RIP, Gil Ray (b. 1956), of Game Theory and the Loud Family
RIP, early electronic music composer Richard Allan (or is it Allen?) “Dick” Robinson (93)
RIP, composer Philip Cannon (b. 1929)
RIP, film sound figure Richard Portman (b. 1934), worked on Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Paper Moon
RIP, Kraken leader and Columbian rock musician Elkin Ramírez (54)
RIP, video artist and Miami Beach arts figure Charles Recher (66)
RIP, John Wetton (b. 1949), singer for Asia, King Crimson
RIP, Masaya Nakamura (b. 1925), founder of Namco (Pac Man, Galaxian, Tekken)
RIP, James Laurence (27), half of hip-hop production duo Friendzone
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 1, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Disquiet Junto Project 0266: Vocal Cuts
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, February 6, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, February 2, 2017.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0266: Vocal Cuts
Use segments of your own held vowel to make music.
Step 1: Set up a recording device to properly capture in detail your singing — more specifically, you holding a single vowel for an extended period of time.
Step 2: Practice holding a vowel for a long time, until your voice starts to give a little and the vowel disintegrates. Try “ah” and “oo” and “uh,” in particular. Maybe avoid “ee,” as it can be harsh. Don’t hurt yourself, don’t stress the end — just let it fade out naturally. This isn’t about pushing it until you have to breathe. It’s just about holding it until the vowel comes to a sense of closure.
Step 3: Listen back to the recording. Think about distinct segments within it, moments with differing qualities.
Step 4: Extract those segments and label them accordingly.
Step 5: Record a short piece of music consisting only of the segments from Step 4. You can cut and paste them, and certainly layer them. Try to not do anything to them — filters, effects, etc. — other than occasionally altering volume, as need be. A mono recording is best, too — no stereoscopic play.
Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: If you hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0266″ (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:
http://llllllll.co/t/vocal-cuts-disqu...
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, February 6, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, February 2, 2017.
Length: The length is up to you, but two to three minutes sounds about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0266″ 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 266th weekly Disquiet Junto project, “Vocal Cuts: Use segments of your own held vowel to make music”:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/vocal-cuts-disquiet-jun...
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this track is by Dean Shareski and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
February 1, 2017
Brackets Frame the Sound
The brackets frame the sound. The brackets appear in subtitles to online videos. You select the subtitle option because you have no knowledge of Japanese or of Persian or of Polish, or because the actors’ British accents are simply too thick for your American ears, even in contemporary police dramas devoid of period linguistic idiosyncrasies, or because you’re keeping the volume down so as not to antagonize the neighbors.
Bracketed sounds can be diegetic or non-diegetic. That is to say, they can be on-screen sounds, like the squeak of a car’s break, or they can be apart from the scene’s physical activity, like the score’s musical theme associated with the entrance of a threatening anti-hero. Either way, bracketed sounds are not dialogue. Dialogue appears unadorned by brackets. Dialogue appears simply as text on the screen, occasionally preceded by a character’s name and a colon to provide narrative guidance. The only dialogue that gets bracketed is dialogue that serves a purely non-verbal purpose, dialogue that cannot be comprehended, dialogue that isn’t dialogue but is, instead, emotive sound: [mumbling], [whispers], [unintelligible sobbing].
Brackets tell you what the director is saying, not what the characters are saying. Brackets, however, are not decoder rings. They only go so far as to what they divulge. The brackets don’t explain the British class system to you. There’s no reference for an American viewer when the cut-glass enunciation is meant to signify a specific upbringing, or when regional utterances, from Cornwall to Glasgow, easily set the British viewer’s imagination while leaving unknown voids for those of us who haven’t lived in the culturally prolific island kingdom, or in one of its more longstanding colonies.
So much happens in a given moment of video, even a “silent” one, which is to say: a moment free of human speech but still intruded upon by sound. Only so much can be detailed between brackets. What’s left out is worth taking note of.
These two screenshots, by way of example, are from different episodes from the TV show Travelers, a solid time-travel series newly streaming on Netflix and created by Brad Wright. (If you are a fan of time travel stories, as I am, Travelers is at least as recommended as Continuum, with which it shares actors if not a timeline, and 12 Monkeys.) In both shots birds are, we’re told, chirping. It may or may not be meaningful that both shots focus on the same character, named Trevor, who, at the risk of giving too much plot away, is something of an old soul. Both shots are at the start of a new scene. In the first, Trevor is riding his bicycle home. In the second he is teaching meditation to its mostly unlikely novitiate, his mean-girl girlfriend. In the first, what’s missing from the bracket is the score’s drone, the sense of dread infused into the scene with just a few threatening sine waves. Perhaps the meditation scene, which appears later in the series, intends to reference the earlier one by presenting the birds free of their droning encumbrance. The hearing-impaired viewer will never know the difference, and the everyday viewer is left to wonder.
There is, true, only so much room on the bottom of the screen. More than a line of text is inelegant, and reading time might surpass a given sound’s appearance if the text’s overseer is inattentive to the chores at hand. Still, editorial decision-making only goes so far as an excuse for contextual excision.
What both sets of chirping birds have in common is that they are almost certainly sonic elements added from a library of recordings to flesh out the given scene during post-production. In other words, one might surmise, the bracketed sounds in a film or TV show aren’t what are “in” the scene so much as what was added to the scene.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 31, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
January 31, 2017
Beat Down(load)
How It Should Sound Volume 1 & 2 by Damu The Fudgemunk
Damu the Fudgemunk is a remarkable hip-hop producer, his cuts balancing 4/4 listenability with tasty confections of off-kilter grace beats and textural expressivity. Now the Redefinition Records label has collected 27 Damu cuts from the 2000s to create How It Should Sound Volume 1 & 2, a two-LP (and downloadable) collection. Much of the music predates Damu’s 2007 debut album, Travel at Your Own Pace. The earliest piece, “Gestation,” from 2003, puts a loping beat below melting horns and a low-slung bass guitar. Like DJ Premier, Damu favors jazz samples truncated for head-nodding loops. Listening to him at his best is to appreciate the malleability of the source material, both in its unintended reutilization and the way the transformations bear the imprint of the appropriating creator.
It’s available at damuthefudgemunk.bandcamp.com.
January 30, 2017
Your Own Personal Tape Music Festival
ragged claws silent seas by Amanda Chaudhary
Burred saw waves zig left and zag right and then zig left again through the stereo spectrum. Distant bells clang and then evacuate. Electric piano chords suggest a mood-setting mid-1960s film scenario. There is whirring sci fi noise and the deep dark clang of a gong and, later, the pitter patter of a cymbal meeting a brush head on. The cymbal seems to hover over your heard why the brush does its magic, attacking at numerous angles. This assemblage, of which those are merely a few of the constituent parts, is “ragged claws silent seas,” which Amanda Chaudhary committed to fixed recording as a submission to the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival. Judging by the playbill posted at sfsound.org, Chaudhary nearly six-minute piece didn’t make the final cut, but it is available as a download for your own personal tape-music experience. What makes this “tape music” rather than, say, simply a collage, or simply a composition is less a matter of strict genre distinctions and more about a mix of literature and sensibility. Tape music is music that dispenses with both live performance and traditional instrumentation in favor of something that explores the experiential, spatial potential inherent in recorded sound.
Track originally posted at amandachaudhary.bandcamp.com. More from Chaudhary at amandachaudhary.com and catsynth.com. Chaudhary is based in San Francisco, California.
What Sound Looks Like
What fireworks look like, after the fact. Lunar New Year celebrations here in San Francisco have their share of noise, from bursts of fireworks at random moments day and night, to the loud drumming of Chinese New Year dragons. The dragons, actually small crews of men and women in a lengthy collective outfit, bring wishes of good fortune to neighborhood businesses, and provide teachable performances about diversity at elementary schools. The fireworks sound is itself generic, a modest martial ratatatat that suggests a confined gun battle. What marks the fireworks culturally is the detritus, the red paper strewn on sidewalks a visual echo of the annual clamor.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
