Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 313
January 30, 2017
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.
January 29, 2017
The Vocal Layers of Sea Beau
This short burst of vocal simultaneity by the Toronto-based musician Sea Beau dates back a year, but I heard it for the first time this weekend while tracking various Canadian (and Detroit-based) performers and composers on SoundCloud. I go in and out of use of various streaming services. The past six months I’ve been much deeper in YouTube, in a way I never have before, for example, and Bandcamp has nudged up as well. One point of frustration with both YouTube and Bandcamp is they don’t foreground as well as SoundCloud does the musical connections of the posting account. Somehow these two services seem to think that we want to know what our fellow listeners listen to, but on YouTube we’re left to largely automated, algorithm-driven recommendations in terms of what the source audio might connect us to, and Bandcamp doesn’t even invest that many computing cycles.
On SoundCloud every account has a clearly marked list each of following and followers, which can make for a fluid series of forking discovery paths. (That’s “discovery” in the active sense of looking around, not the passive sense of “look what the music conveyor belt served up.”) With BandCamp, my “feed” tells me what the listeners I follow have purchased lately, and any individual album lists who it is “supported by,” but the service doesn’t allow, in the manner SoundCloud does, that the person who posted music might themselves listen to music. Some YouTube accounts show their subscriptions, but it isn’t consistent.
In any case, this piece by Sea Beau is an absolutely gorgeous, endlessly loopable polyphonic series of vocal intonations. It is all non-verbal, feather-light vowels produced as closely knit strata. The tones are alternately heavenly and nasal, in chordal harmony at one moment and set in deliciously sour contrast with each other the next.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sea-beau. More from Sea Beau, who is based in Toronto, Canada, at twitter.com/seeseabeau.
January 26, 2017
Disquiet Junto Project 0265: Kitchen Music
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, January 30, 2017. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 26, 2017.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0265: Kitchen Music
Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer.
Step 1: Choose one drawer or cabinet shelf in your kitchen. If you don’t have a kitchen, then choose a drawer or cabinet shelf elsewhere in your home.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music using only materials from Step 1.
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 “disquiet0265″ (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/kitchen-music-di...
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, January 30, 2017. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 26, 2017.
Length: The length is up to you, but two to three minutes sounds about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0265″ 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 265th weekly Disquiet Junto project, “Kitchen Music: Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer”:
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/kitchen-music-disquiet-...
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 Lyn Lomasi and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 25, 2017
IDM and Its Discontents
Pitchfork has published a list of “The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time.” I participated in the voting, and wrote up three of the albums: Mira Calix’s One on One, which came it at 47; Plaid’s Not for Threes, 36; and Aphex Twin’s … I Care Because You Do, 13. Aphex Twin also topped the list, with Selected Ambient Works 85-92 coming in at number 1. These are my first Pitchfork bylines, though I’ve been written about on the site twice: Mark Richardson generously interviewed me about my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book, and my book was included in the site’s list of the 33 best books in the 33 1/3 series, as compiled by Stephen M. Deusner. I can’t link directly to the individual “IDM 50” reviews, but the Calix is on the first page, the Plaid on the second page, and the Aphex Twin on the penultimate page.
IDM is shorthand for “intelligent dance music,” and it played an influential role in my life. It’s on the IDM discussion boards that I made friends and participated during the early, proto-Internet 1990s in discussion of music that the music press often was unaware of, and I say that as someone who was at the time a full-time employee of the music press, working as an editor at Pulse! magazine, published by Tower Records. (It’s on an IDM discussion board that Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II’s tracks got their titles, as I recount in my book.)
I was delighted to be asked by Pitchfork to participate, and I should also note that I was conflicted. For one thing, I don’t give much credence to genre. Genre was a somewhat useful tool in the age of brick and mortar record stores, back when someone had to decide where to put Nina Simone (pop, jazz, jazz vocals, oldies). In our hypertextual present, genre is at best a flavor, one among many. A recording today can and should be tagged: situated at the nexus of an associative Venn diagram, not stuck in a genre box. Boxhead Ensemble’s Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back is country and it is ambient; Mason Bates’ The B-Sides is classical and it is electronic. I can count on one hand the number of musicians outside of hip-hop I’ve interviewed who expressed firm alignment with any specific genre. We should follow the musicians’ lead. I’m also not a big list-maker. I know people who make lists of everything, favorite films and favorite books and so forth, but that’s just not how my brain works. All of which said, it’s not a coincidence that after several years of not feeling inclined to produce top 10 lists at the end of the year I suddenly this past December made several such lists. It was, indeed, my participation in the email discussion for the Pitchfork IDM list that convinced me that, in essence, if you don’t make lists, someone else will.
The way the Pitchfork process worked was that a bunch of invited critics were asked to help flesh out a sizable collection IDM albums for consideration. We discussed these via email. Then we filled out our own ballots, selecting a subset of the complete set (we were allowed to list up to 50 albums, and mine felt complete at 33). Math and the Pitchfork editors’ inclinations produced the final 50.
I think my ballot was probably among the more conservative submitted. One wise participant described IDM as more of a period than a genre. After I flirted with a far wider aesthetic net, certain constraints got me to 33 entries. I stuck in the end to a working definition I posted to the discussion list: IDM: A genre of electronic music that foregrounds beats in the exploration of the arrhythmic, abstract potential of hardware and software, often but not exclusively tools originally designed with dance music in mind. Touchstones include chaos, entropy, digital decay, and technological intentionality.
As I thought through the material, I kept coming back around to the distinction between “bebop” and “hard bop,” between music that was explicitly challenging to its audience, and music that built on the codified understanding of bebop and then layered in something more soulful, more r&b, more, for lack of a better word, “pop.” A “best bebop” list isn’t going to include hard bop, even hard bop by people who earlier on recorded bebop, and my “best IDM” list didn’t include whatever the equivalent of “IDM hard bop” is, or “IDM pop” for that matter. That explains in part the absence of more contemporary acts.
In addition, there were a lot of albums tossed around that sound like techno or dub (or dub techno, or minimal techno) or microsound to me. If it sounded prominently and consistently like those, all I could think was, “Well if there’s going to be a best techno or best dub or best microsound list someday, why include this here?” Same for trip-hop, and for (instrumental) hip-hop. I’d love to have included early Kit Clayton, but in the end it sounds like great dub techno to me, as does so much Monolake, and even a lot of Sun Electric for that matter. I love Prefuse 73, but he’s somewhere in the post-trip-hop/proto-EDM realm, like Flying Lotus, with a lot of instrumental hip-hop in there. Even Prefuse’s One Word Extinguisher doesn’t strike me as IDM. (Note that I was considerably outvoted: Both One Word Extinguisher and Flying Lotus’ Los Angeles made the final top 50.)
As the discussion proceeded, we all added records to the pool. Among others I added Mouse on Mars’ Iaora Tahiti, Bedouin Ascent’s Science, Art, and Ritual, Matmos’ Matmos, Blectum from Blechdom’s’ De Snaunted Haus, Bogdan Raczynski’s Boku Mo Wakaran, and Greg Davis’ Arbor. I’m disappointed in particular that Arbor didn’t make the final top 50.
There was a lot of music on the collective list — some of which made the final list — that I love, including records that effectively shaped the course of my life, in particular Wagon Christ’s Throbbing Pouch (truly a landmark recording), but that I didn’t include in my ballot because they lack the chaos and entropy that I see as inherent in IDM (the slurry quality of Throbbing Pouch has the entropy, but there’s zero chaos). I mean, if I included Throbbing Pouch, then why not Kid Koala, and Funki Porcini, and DJ Krush, and Pierre Bastien? They’re all of a piece, along with Prefuse 73 and Flying Lotus: politely swaggery, introspectively soulful, hip-hop-informed, cautiously dramatic. They’re funky wallflower music. But they’re not, to my narrow mind, IDM.
Instrumental hip-hop was a subject of discussion. Why not include the more experimental realms of that beatcraft, the logic went. I was thinking about the production of some earlier Destiny’s Child singles, the scattershot (in a good way) beats in particular of “Say My Name” and, syncopation heaven, “Bills Bills Bills.” I wasn’t sure how to fold into the IDM list-making the producers largely associated with hip-hop and r&b whom I’ve followed (er, collected) for their rhythmic invention (the 45 King, Just Blaze, Alchemist, Kev Brown, and of course Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Neptunes, DJ Muggs, and so forth). Various realms of more dance-oriented electronic music also popped up, and when someone mentioned Larry Heard’s Alien I responded that it feels more Tangerine Dreamy when it ventures out. I was also not enticed to include Björk’s Vespertine because of the remarkable scope of the album. There’s a lot of non-IDM on Vespertine, like “Undo” and “Sun in My Mouth,” among others. (And I declined as a guy who had an e.e. cummings quote in the high school yearbook.) I was disinclined to include Photek in the mix, as to me it’s simply great drum’n’bass — and in fact to think of it as IDM is to, in essence, accept drum’n’bass as being not particularly explorative. Likewise, I was utterly flummoxed on how to characterize Amon Tobin, very much to his credit, though tellingly he didn’t make the final 50.
While doing research for the project, I looked back on my recent employment of the term and recognized that I often say “IDM-ish,” seeing it as a flavor, not a constraint, or use it to characterize an earlier period in music production. In any case, the discussion ended, the ballots have been cast, and the full list is at pitchfork.com. The process was highly enjoyable, and I hope people enjoy the result.
This first appeared, in slightly different form (e.g., no streaming videos), in the January 24, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
January 24, 2017
Plaid and IDM Circa 2017
Perhaps the early IDM act Plaid got advance word that Pitchfork.com was about to post (today) a list of “The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time,” but either way the duo of Ed Handley and Andy Turner (they generally list themselves in the opposite order, but alphabetization gets the best of me) surfaced this past week with a free two-track released. It’s streaming at soundcloud.com/plaid and available as a gratis download at warp.net. Both tracks, “Bet” and “Nat,” are beat-heavy exercises in syncopation, off-kilter time signatures, and dodgy atmospheres. In other words, pure Plaid. (Oh, and I wrote about Plaid’s Not for Threes as part of that Pitchfork top-50 effort.)
January 23, 2017
Marcus Fischer Live in His Home Studio
Marcus Fischer is currently participating in an artist residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island off the Florida coast. His Instagram feed is filling up with images and brief videos captured during his time there: Sugimoto-like pictures of the sea and a studio as white as a Rauschenberg painting. He’s suspending tape loops from the ceiling and quoting his fellow residents about the changes afoot in American politics.
A photo posted by marcus fischer (@marcusfischer) on Jan 13, 2017 at 4:38pm PST
The Instagram materials constitute beautiful slivers of his goings-on, but fortunately Datachoir is filling the void with a 17-minute video of Fischer alone in his Portland, Oregon, home studio — one continuous solo performance for electric guitar, synthesizer, pine cones, and other tools. The constituent parts are far more than the sum total of the sounds. He takes near-silent textures and generates light dustings from them. He strokes the guitar once, and then transforms the chord into something muted yet majestic. And while he plays, the videographer tours his studio, focusing in on his instruments, on a matrix routers and additional guitars, on cabling and boxes of spare parts.
I’ve worked on several projects with Fischer myself, and I recall an instance where someone we were newly working with asked what his primary instrument is. I struggled to explain there wasn’t a single focus of his music-making imagination. That studio is his instrument, and watching him employ it at length is a true pleasure.
It’s on the Datachoir Sounds YouTube channel. I’ve added it to my playlist of longform ambient performances. More from Fischer at mapmap.ch and marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com. Previous Datachoir videos have featured Summer Mastous, Nate Dalton, and Jeremiah Green, among others.
Marcus Fischer Live in His Home studio
Marcus Fischer is currently participating in an artist residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island off the Florida coast. His Instagram feed is filling up with images and brief videos captured during his time there: Sugimoto-like pictures of the sea and a studio as white as a Rauschenberg painting. He’s suspending tape loops from the ceiling and quoting his fellow residents about the changes afoot in American politics.
A photo posted by marcus fischer (@marcusfischer) on Jan 13, 2017 at 4:38pm PST
The Instagram materials constitute beautiful slivers of his goings-on, but fortunately Datachoir is filling the void with a 17-minute video of Fischer alone in his Portland, Oregon, home studio — one continuous solo performance for electric guitar, synthesizer, pine cones, and other tools. The constituent parts are far more than the sum total of the sounds. He takes near-silent textures and generates light dustings from them. He strokes the guitar once, and then transforms the chord into something muted yet majestic. And while he plays, the videographer tours his studio, focusing in on his instruments, on a matrix routers and additional guitars, on cabling and boxes of spare parts.
I’ve worked on several projects with Fischer myself, and I recall an instance where someone we were newly working with asked what his primary instrument is. I struggled to explain there wasn’t a single focus of his music-making imagination. That studio is his instrument, and watching him employ it at length is a true pleasure.
It’s on the Datachoir Sounds YouTube channel. I’ve added it to my playlist of longform ambient performances. More from Fischer at mapmap.ch and marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com. Previous Datachoir videos have featured Summer Mastous, Nate Dalton, and Jeremiah Green, among others.
January 22, 2017
“Avril 14th” from Above
Back on January 14 I wrote about the Australian pianist Josh Cohen’s fantastic cover of Aphex Twin’s “Aisatasana,” the quiet closing track from the 2014 album Syro. Cohen captured not only the understated melody, but the way distinct silences frame and bisect that melody. Now he has put his nimble hands to a far more famous Aphex Twin piano work, “Avril 14th.” It’s a beautiful rendition, paced appropriately, to neither bliss it out nor rev it up. Cohen’s version hints at Erik Satie’s proto-minimalism as much as it does at mid-century (that is, mid-1900s) popular music. It’s parlor music: nostalgic, personal, touching. The real pleasure of the performance is the presentation. Like all of Cohen’s videos, it’s shot from above, his hands in full view, each of them playing its distinct part, the left doing its routinized duty while the right edges at various roles.
Video originally posted at Cohen’s YouTube page. More from him at joshcohenmusic.com. Cohen lives in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
January 21, 2017
Snowfall in Kyoto
Norihito Suda’s “Light Snowfall” is ten minutes of soft pads. There are organ-like notes that take forever to fade, and gentle vocal-oid choral effects throughout, and strums that bring to mind an acoustic guitar, though the mental image of the latter lasts longer than does the sound’s actual presence. At times there’s a tremulous quality, when the inner functions of a waveform briefly let slip a quiet fury of activity. There’s no structure to “Light Snowfall,” nor structural give and take, just a fade in and a fade out and the steady stream in between. But don’t mistake it for a drone; it’s more of a composite than a drone, more an assemblage than a singularity. At ten minutes it’s also anything but fleeting. It seems to hold time in place, a suggestion reinforced by an occasional sense of a light ticking, like a clock is being turned back on itself, pushing for time to resume.
Track originally published at soundcloud.com/norihitosuda. More from Suda, who is based in Kyoto, Japan, at norihitosuda.bandcamp.com.
January 20, 2017
The Radiant Explosion of W. Zabarkas
The Origin of Dreams by W. Zabarkas
There’s a radiant explosion at the heart of W. Zabarkas’ The Origin of Dreams, a recent release on the Glistening Examples label. Much of it has an overwhelming industrial churn, even if you don’t make good on Zabarkas’ liner-note appeal: “The artist requests that you listen to this album at maximum volume,” it reads. Each of the tracks — “Autumn Invades the House,” “FOREST-91,” “2 0 9 4,” “Whereof One Сannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent” — opens with an expansive, hyperactive static. For the most part they also see that massiveness, that ebullient chaos, through to the end. “Whereof One Сannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent” closes on a long fade. “2 0 9 4,” after peaking with something akin to a post-rock band’s third-encore climax, also fades at the end. “Autumn Invades the House,” the opening track, fades as well, if fairly quickly by the standard set by the others. Only “FOREST-91” gives way to something else, something elegant, something other than the sense of a knob dutifully, patiently rotated to cold zero; it’s a few notes on repeat, the world’s slowest arpeggio, It’s so apart from the rest of the album that its quietness has the opposite effect: it ends up perhaps the main thing, other than the overall sense of being caught in a cyclone, that the listener may remember. It’s hard to tell what’s buried in that noise. There may be ritual chanting amid “FOREST-91,” or it’s a trick of the ear, human presence imagined as a pattern in the vast randomness. Zabarkas’ suggested patterns are rousing, powerful, fully mechanical, yet charged with purpose and momentum.
More from Glistening Examples at glisteningexamples.com. More from Zabarkas at soundcloud.com/wzabarkas and vk.com/zabarkas.
