Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 314
January 19, 2017
Disquiet Junto Project 0264: Time Travel
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 23, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 19, 2017.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0264: Time Travel
Record a piece of music that plays with the perception of time.
Step 1: Recorded music is, generally speaking, a fixed object. It’s a document. It proceeds linearly, over time. It is, in the terminology of fine art, “time-based.” That said, music has the power to change one’s perception of time. Slowing and speeding tempo alone can alter a listener’s understanding of what is happening. Backward masking, sublimated hints of themes yet to come, the sound of a tape in fast forward mode — those are just a few ways that a composer can suggest that time is not moving linearly. Now, consider for a moment the tools available to give an impression of time doing things other than proceeding in a steady forward motion.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music that takes time travel as its theme, using ideas that resulted from the consideration in 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 “disquiet0264″ (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/music-for-time-t...
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 23, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 19, 2017.
Length: The length is up to you, but two to three minutes sounds about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0264″ 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 264th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Time Travel:
Record a piece of music that plays with the perception of time”:
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/music-for-time-traveler...
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 Heather and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
January 18, 2017
Bell Increments
Until yesterday evening I had never uploaded audio before to Bandcamp.com, despite being a longtime user, and despite investigations of the service playing a role in the course I teach on the role of sound in media landscape.
Anyhow, I recently added a new module to my modular synthesizer, and in the process of testing it out, I thought I would go and post some of the results. Those results became the collection, two and a half minutes total — five tracks of modulated bell tones. Below is the embedded sound and the information from the disquieteditions.bandcamp.com page:
This is a collection of five variations on the same bell sound. The bell is being run through a modular synthesizer, with an emphasis on a module called the ADDAC601. The ADDAC601 is a filter bank. It divides the inbound audio into eight bands across the audio spectrum, and then allows those bands to be worked upon by any manner of inputs. In this case the inputs are a variety of LFOs, or low frequency oscillators, often working in combination. Sine waves and triangle waves and saw-toothed waves consort and, in turn, exaggerate the source audio. The LFOs put the overtones into overdrive. These five tracks, each more complex than the previous, are excerpts from a larger collection that accumulated after I added the ADDAC601 to my small modular synth rig. They explore incremental changes as LFOs pile up and the variations take on more internal complexity. Because they were recorded in sequence without pause, each retains echoing, refracted elements of the previous track.
The source audio is a bell recorded by Freesound.org participant Sarana and uploaded for communal reuse on October 14, 2009. The source audio was pitched down a bit before being worked upon by the modular synth, and it also is run through a digital delay before hitting the ADDAC601. Here is the source audio, for comparison:
www.freesound.org/people/sarana/sounds/81832/
The track is licensed under this Creative Commons license:
January 17, 2017
Natalie Braginsky’s Noise Vexations
Natalie Braginsky uploaded some serious noise about two weeks ago, two tracks of digital vexations. There “.linexp,” five minutes of brief shots of razor-edged pixel disturbances, and “total emotional collapse number four,” which embraces a thick screen of randomness. The latter focuses on the sort of sounds that often suggest the roiling sea but here seem more like an avalanche on — to borrow and bend a phrase from Godflesh — looped repeat. It takes awhile to get underway, opening with short bursts of fireworks that eventually fill the sky, the whole thing running for four-plus minutes. It’s “.linexp” that presents itself as ready for more general consumption. The noise miniatures bring to mind road-side snapshots of robotic collisions and sad-toned circuits failing in public.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/nataliebraginsky. More from Braginsky, who is based in New York City, at
twitter.com/ntkvby and
instagram.com/ntkvby.
January 16, 2017
The Ecstatic Ambient of Nuun
There are many ambient sounds and musics, from the everyday soundscape to the barely-background of ambient techno. Somewhere amidst all that is what I’ve come to think of as “ecstatic ambient.” Ecstatic ambient amplifies the pulses inherent in tones and maximizes the surface textures, and in turn it yields what could be mistaken for one of Terry Riley’s electric ragas or one of Philip Glass’ early solo organ riffs. Such is “Expanding Universe” from Nuun. In just under two and a half minutes, it shreds the air, pushing saw-toothed waveforms and jittering static, and breaking it up with glitching beat-like demarcations. In a sense it’s noise music, but it’s entirely absent anything like a negative impulse. If it’s noise, it’s a joyful one.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nuunnuun.
What Sound Looks Like
There are nine buttons at the front gate of this multi-unit building. All but two are unidentified. Of the sole two with addresses labeled, one displays the unit information three times (look on the underside), perhaps for emphasis, perhaps to make up for the way you can convince yourself you accidentally wrote a four when you meant to write a nine, the top bit of connective typographical tissue ambiguous in regard to its solidity. The buttons here come in two sets, one of four, the other of five. Presumably the five came first, as they are built into the gate’s metal structure. They’re organized in a manner that may correlate with the layout of the building, or they are defaulting to some semblance of symmetry. The set of four is plastic, set atop wood, which is then bolted on: plastic on wood on metal, a Ponzi scheme of relative material strength. Whether there is overlap between the two sets of buttons is unclear. A call to the locksmith’s latest phone number (note evidence of at least two earlier ones) might yield answers.
When I shot this photo a woman was stepping out of an adjacent doorway. “What are you doing?” she asked me. “I take pictures of doorbells,” I said. Her tone shifted in an instant from accusatory to bemused: “Oh, that’s a first.”
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 14, 2017
An Aphex Twin Syro Cover on Piano
Perhaps Aphex Twin will follow Brian Eno’s recent lead and, as with Eno’s Reflection album, revisit if momentarily the art of long-form ambient recording. Since returning to action in 2014 with a birthday blimp, a well-received full-length (Syro), a live DJ set in the U.S., and a massive SoundCloud presence, among other activities, Aphex Twin hasn’t released much ambient music. On the recent Cheetah EP (2016), there were two short tracks, 27 and 37 seconds each, “CHEETA1b ms800” and “CHEETA2 ms800,” both segments of synthesizer drones that seemed like test runs of film-score sound design. Syro ended with “aisatasana [102],” a beautiful, plaintive solo piano piece that in its hushed quietude balanced the often frenetic beatcraft of the rest of the record. That’s about it.
Josh Cohen has built something of a YouTube following for his piano covers, and now he’s brought his powers to bear on the Syro closer. The song is lovely in its initial form, and unlike Cohen’s other covers (of Radiohead in particular, but also Beck and Father John Misty, among others), what he’s covering is essentially the original, rather than an 88-key reduction of the original. It’s an appropriately sensitive rendition, gentle and considered, reflective and tentative. You can see it in his hands in the video, how they pause between segments. I’m reminded of videos of instrumental hip-hop production on the Akai MPC, where you can see people crafting beats and tapping or, in their muscles, counting out the moments they want to leave silent. In the Aphex Twin piece as in those beats, the silence is part of the beauty; in the videos, the inaction is part of the performance. (The main thing the Cohen cover dispenses with is the sonic capaciousness of the original, how the recordings seems to take place in a large room, and how that dimensionality renders Aphex Twin’s playing softer than it might have sounded otherwise.)
There’s a telling back and forth in the video’s running comments. One individual, who appears to be the person who requested the cover in the first place, says, “The pacing on this song seems difficult to master. I imagine it’s tempting to rush through many of the long rests.” Cohen replies: “This is true. It’s very tempting to play the next phrase, however I’m actually counting in between phrases – it’s not just random silence. For some reason, I find the rests really challenging.”
Video originally posted at Cohen’s YouTube page. More from him at joshcohenmusic.com. Found via the We Are the Music Makers message board. Cohen lives in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
January 12, 2017
Disquiet Junto Project 0263: Overture Edit
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 16, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 12, 2017.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0263: Overture Edit
The Assignment: Produce an overture to an existing album.
Step 1: Download the seven tracks from Hixory’s album Lovegraphy, which was released under a Creative Commons license allowing for non-commercial adaptation by Nenormalizm Records in late 2016. You can access the audio here:
https://archive.org/details/Hixory
Step 2: Cull a representative segment from each of the tracks.
Step 3: Create an overture to the album by combining those segments into one standalone piece of music.
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 “disquiet0263″ (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/overture-edit-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 16, 2017. This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 12, 2017.
Length: The length is up to you, but two to three minutes sounds about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0263” 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 263rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Overture Edit: Produce an overture to an existing album”:
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/overture-edit-disquiet-...
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
January 11, 2017
Real World in Real Time
The track is an excerpt from a longer performance. It’s work, we’re informed, for real-world sounds transformed in real time. The brief accompanying note reads as follows: “Excerpt from a new live set, featuring some live looping and manipulation of field recordings.” The result is a flapping, rapid-fire, quick-draw series of percussive elements, shuddering noises and speedy pitter patter, nearly sub-aural thudding and erratic static. It’s bracing stuff, flush with urgency.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/theatlasroom. More from the Atlas Room, aka Ezekiel Kigbo of Melbourne, Australia, at theatlasroom.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/theatlasroom.
This Week in Sound: Dementia + FM’s Dead End +
A lightly annotated clipping service
Concrete Asylum: News that researchers had connected urban noise pollution to dementia spread widely this week. “Those living within 50 metres of a busy road had a 7% higher risk in developing dementia,” reports Hannah Devlin in the Guardian of the findings, also quoting skeptical voices: “The analyses are exceedingly complex … and this always leads to concerns that the analytic complexity is hiding confounding factors in the analytic pipeline” (theguardian.com, citylab.com).
FRB ≠ BFF: Weird interstellar radio bursts, known as fast radio bursts, or FRBs, have reached a milestone: the first repeating, unidentified signal. Writes Maddie Stone at Gizmodo, the source is three billion light years away.
Little Brother: The big news on the “always listening” front out of CES was the ubiquity of Amazon’s Alexa. But ubiquity isn’t the same as a monopoly. Mattel has employed Microsoft’s Bing/Cortana for its kid-oriented AI device. Writes Laurie Sullivan at MediaPost, regarding privacy issues, “It uses the same guidelines as hospitals.”
End of the Dial: Just last week I mentioned how electric cars don’t play well with AM radio frequencies. FM, apparently, isn’t immune to technological obsolescence. Reporting from Oslo, Reuters (via the Guardian) notes that “Norway will next week become the first nation to start switching off its FM radio network.” This despite overwhelming support for FM. The switch happens tomorrow.
Audio Borg: Google has acquired Limes Audio, based in Umeå, Sweden, to improve the sound quality of online conversations (or calls, or whatever we call them). Via Google.
Tone Man: Pharrell Williams lost a lawsuit last year due to what many consider a ludicrous judicial ruling regarding similarities between a song he produced and the work of Marvin Gaye. Interestingly, tone — sounds that reflect an era — is precisely his emphasis in this article on his role in the score for the film Hidden Figures (nytimes.com).
Game Tunes: While I managed time for best-of-2016 lists about apps, music, and film scores, I didn’t include several lists I’d like to be knowledgeable enough to attend to, among them video game soundtracks. Fortunately, the folks at originalsoundversion.com provide their analysis of exactly that. Visit to see (and hear) to the opinions of Ryan Paquet, Michael Hoffmann, Shawn Sackenheim, and Brenna Wilkes. (Found via Simon Carless’ excellent Video Game Deep Cuts email newsletter.)
Wah Wah: Del Casher, born Delton Kacher, is the father of the wah-wah guitar pedal, writes Jonny Whiteside at LA Weekly, and the pedal turns 50 this year. “I played it for James Brown and he really liked my playing, but he didn’t understand the wah-wah at all. He said, ‘Why the fuck would anyone want a guitar to do that?’” (Via Ethan Hein.)
Philly Sound (Art): Museums often have firsts, as they adjust to changing times and aesthetics. The Barnes Foundation takes firsts with extra consideration. This is the institution that faced legal challenges when its relocation was in the works. Now it is hosting its first sound art installation, titled Unbounded Histories. It’s by Philadelphia artist Andrea Hornick, and it functions as “a string of poems responding to specific works in the Barnes collection.” Visitors to the museum access the audio through “web-enabled phone.” It opened on January 6 and runs through February 19 (philly.com, barnesfoundation.org).
Fade Out
Recent notable deaths
RIP, Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan, sitar star (b. 1929).
RIP, Serbian composer Vlastimir Trajković (b. 1947)
RIP, French conductor Georges Prêtre (b. 1924)
RIP, jazz critic Nat Hentoff (b. 1925)
RIP, composer Karel Husa (b. 1921)
RIP, singer Sylvester Potts (78) of the Contours (“Do You Love Me,” “Can You Jerk Like Me”)
RIP, Hawaiian musician Eddie Kamae (b. 1927)
RIP, British singer-songwriter Peter Sarstedt (b. 1941; “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?”)
RIP, hip-hop producer DJ Crazy Toones (45).
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 10, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
January 9, 2017
Beats from Typeface
Typeface – Default 0009-01 by Typeface
Tis the season for annual resolutions, such as the beginning of year-long series of creative works. The label SM-LL, based in London, is up to such an endeavor with its monthly Typeface digital releases, which are being posted on Bandcamp, along with a limited-release set of 10″ pressings. Typeface is a project of Martin J Thompson, who “takes inspiration from various practices and ideas around his interest in typography.” That’s according to the brief note that accompanied a 2014 release by Thompson on the SM-LL label, Default 0004. That two-track release took kerning, the adjustment of spaces between letters, as its subject and inspiration. The first of the 2017 Typeface releases has no such stated thematic source or inspiration. What it is is two tracks, the first (title: “01-24”) kinetic and minimal, occasionally shifting, but in a manner that serves to reinforce the sense of permanence of the major theme. The second (“02-24”) is more rubbery and bouncy, with that elastic sound that suggests early IDM, and snare-like accents that are delightfully synthetic. To the extent that the B-side has variations, they are in very slight adjustments of a secondary, quieter accent below the main rhythm. They’re more evident when you move back and forth amid the track to check individual instances than they are recognizable as the track unfolds in glacial realtime. It’s likely that the overall Typeface series will unfold this year as a sequence of slight variations. Something to look forward to.
Originally posted at sm-ll.bandcamp.com. More from SM-LL at sm-ll.com. Thompson/Typeface co-runs SM-LL with his wife, Lucia H Chung, whose work has been featured on Disquiet.com recently. They are based in London.
