Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 323
September 18, 2016
The Sonic Signatures of the Modular Synthesizer
I first came into contact with Hannes Pasqualini, the Italy-based artist and designer, back in 2010. He contributed a small illustration for a Disquiet series about sonic visualization called Sketches of Sound. He drew a beautiful, detailed, psychedelic rendering of a tree sprouting musical parts. These days Hannes develops designs for actual musical instruments (see his papernoise.net portfolio) and writes about modular synthesizers (at horizontalpitch.com). He’s a very sensible, curious person, and he was intrigued recently by an offhand comment about a new instrument sounding “very modular” — that is, as in “reminiscent of a modular synthesizer.” Hannes dove into the question about whether modular synths have a sonic signature, asking folks like Enrico Cosimi, Joseph Fraioli (aka Datach’i), Olivier Gillet, Tim Prebble, Robin Rimbaud, Ben “DivKid” Wilson, and the guy who made the “very modular” comment in the first place, Richard Devine. I was pleased to be asked by Hannes to weigh in, which I did as follows:
Big picture I’d say my hope is you can’t always recognize a modular synthesizer when listening, because it is so varied in what it can accomplish. Modular synths are so rich with potential, it feels weird to use a word like “it” to encapsulate them. Especially when you get all those digital modules going — not just digital oscillators, but more complicated units like sequencers and so forth — it might arguably be indistinguishable from music you’d make on an iPad or a laptop. In addition, some of the most interesting work done with modulars sees them as part of a larger whole, combining them with software CV and with virtual modules, with Monomes, and serving as processing units for guitar, voice, and other external sources. Anyhow, to get back around to your question — and putting aside obvious things like specific modules with recognizable sonic signatures — I’d say that modular synths lend themselves particularly to a kind of exploratory, less-controlled experimental approach. This sort of approach reveals itself while the performance is going on: you start off in one place and end up in another. When I hear a hint of the weird that develops within the flow of a piece, it pricks up my ear and makes me wonder: modular?
His full piece, with everyone else’s far more informed comments, is at horizontalpitch.com.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the September 16, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
What Sound Looks Like
Because nothing says Farmers Market like what seems to be the b-side of an Einstürzende Neubauten single. There were a half dozen of these within a block of each other.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
September 16, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Once upon a time, when the Earth rotated at 33 1/3, or 45, or 78, messages were regularly hidden in the inner circles of record albums. Little phrases — bits of wordplay, shoutouts, cryptic mantras — were scratched into the masters of vinyl releases, in between where the last track on a given side ended and where the adhered paper label’s outer edge began. (It’s still the case now, perhaps even more common as a matter of percentages, but that’s out of a far smaller amount of vinyl being produced each year.) These messages on the vinyl had an intimacy, a peculiarity, that made them something apart from commentary. Liner notes, in contrast, sought to lend meaning to a record album — sometimes full essays, like the ones on the back of jazz covers, and sometimes just tiny-type references to session players and equipment. Not quite packaging, not quite lyric, the inner-groove messages were only there if you looked for them. In the pre-Internet days, it might take weeks, or a chance encounter with a super fan, to decode what they meant. This message, a wonderfully terrible joke about the Energizer Bunny, appears on the internal circuitry of a synthesizer module. The other side of the module is where the patch cables go in and out. This side is the works, the soldered PCB board where information is encoded, and the information is about how sound and signal are processed. The bunny joke is the only part of this side of the device that’s human-readable.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
September 15, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Gift from a friend just back from a vacation in France.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Disquiet Junto Project 0246: Double, Quadruple, Sextuple
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required. There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, September 15, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 19, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0246: Double, Quadruple, Sextuple
Compose a piece of music that increases speed in stages as it proceeds.
Please pay particular attention to all the instructions below, in light of SoundCloud having closed down its Groups functionality.
Big picture: One thing arising from the end of the Groups functionality is a broad goal, in which an account on SoundCloud is not necessary for Disquiet Junto project participation. We’ll continue to use SoundCloud, but it isn’t required to use SoundCloud. The aspiration is for the Junto to become “platform-agnostic,” which is why using a message forum, such as llllllll.co, as a central place for each project can work well.
And now, on to this week’s project.
Project Steps:
Step 1: Per this week’s project number, 0246, the focus is on a sequence of increasing ratios: from doubling (2), to quadrupling (4), to sextupling (6).
Step 2: Record a simple, rhythmic piece of music increases speed as it proceeds. First it will double, then it will quadruple, and then it will sextuple. (It can do this once, or it can do it in repeating cycles.)
Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0246” (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: This is a fairly new step, if you’ve done a Junto project previously. In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co post your track:
http://llllllll.co/t/double-quadruple...
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 was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, September 15, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 19, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you. Three minutes seems like a good maximum.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0246” 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 246th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music that increases speed in stages as it proceeds.” — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/double-quadruple...
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is by Oliver Gouldthorpe and is used thanks to Flicker and a Creative Commons license:
September 13, 2016
Devo / Aphex Twin (33 1/3) Yap/Reading in SF on 11/16
Hi, Bay Area folks. I’ll be doing a reading with my fellow 33 1/3 author Evie Nagy on November 16th, a Wednesday, at Adobe Books in San Francisco, with a discussion moderated by the awesome Marc Kate. The event (free!) runs from 7 to 10. Evie wrote about Devo’s Freedom of Choice. I wrote about Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It’ll be fun. More details to follow. There’s an event listing on the Adobe Books facebook.com page.
September 12, 2016
(Fairly) New Scott Tuma Single
Ragged Hollow by Nevada Greene / Scott Tuma
There’s a new, or at least fairly new, Scott Tuma release available on Bandcamp. It’s a dual release, a split. It’s half Tuma and half Nevada Greene, both tracks coming in at over 12 minutes each. Tuma is billed solo, so presumably the instruments that appear on his characteristically musty, droning ambient country music is him alone in the studio summoning ghosts one thin, subtle, artfully frayed layer at a time. The track isn’t titled “All the Ragged Glory” for no reason.
Nevada Greene’s music is like a slightly more in-focus version of Tuma’s, as if someone turned the lights on and opened the windows, banged the rugs against the wall, and let the dust out. In Tuma’s music, the dust is the thing; in Greene’s, it’s about clarity. In both it’s about a gentility, shades of John Fahey, that gracefully navigates melodies so they sound like songs but never fully reconcile themselves with anything remotely close to an earworm. It all may bring to mind the romance of Johnny Cash, but aside from its modest scope it’s closer to the majesty of Aaron Copland. Greene is a quartet, though at times, especially a third of the way through its track here (“Earthquake Hollow”), it sounds like a full chamber ensemble, the combination of folk and quasi-classical arrangements reminiscent of the production on Billy Bragg’s 1990s Elektra Records releases.
A bit about the new-ness of this release, since much of the time I write about Bandcamp I find myself thinking about this term “discovery” that gets tossed around a lot: It was released almost two months back, on July 16. If you follow Scott Tuma on Bandcamp (at scotttuma.bandcamp.com), you might not have known about this split release. I didn’t. I found out because a friend I follow bought it, and so it popped up in my Bandcamp feed page. This news vacuum is the result of how releases are selectively labeled on the service. Ragged Hollow is hosted not by Tuma’s account, or by Greene’s (nevadagreene.bandcamp.com), but by that of the releasing label, Dismal Niche Records (dismalnichetapes.bandcamp.com).
Sometimes dual albums appear on an individual artist’s page, and sometimes, since these accounts are fairly easy to set up, a dual-artist page is created, as in the case of the recent Schaum from Masayoshi Fujiita and Jan Jelinek. Their page, masayoshifujiitajanjelinek.bandcamp.com, features just that album. Maybe the existence of that page will encourage them to collaborate again in the future. In the meanwhile, it’d be great if Bandcamp could coax all these flailing discographical tentacles into something that better alerts admirers of the musicians to the existence of their music. I found out about Schaum today, three days after its release, thanks to a mention on Facebook by the musician Greg Davis.
More from Dismal Niche at cargocollective.com/dismalniche.
September 11, 2016
Autechre elseq 1-5 Listening Diary
It’s coming up on 20 years since I interviewed Autechre, back in 1997 (“More Songs About Buildings”). Their music was then no less self-assured than it is now, but they were. Told their Chiastic Slide was due to be listed as the number one electronic album of the year in the magazine where I’d recently stopped being an editor, Tower Records’ Pulse!, the duo’s Sean Booth replied “What? That’s fucking ridiculous.”
This reaction had, perhaps, more to do with the venue, Tower Records, than with the music, but decades later the point is moot. The behemoth music retailers are gone, major record labels are struggling, and smaller labels face their own hurdles. However the deck seemed to have been stacked in the mid-1990s, it’s Warp Records — the label where Autechre has long maintained a home with Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, among others — that’s still kicking.
And as the record industry strains to find a path forward, Autechre strains the definition of a recording. Its most recent release is five releases in one, elseq 1–5: 21 tracks, roughly four hours of music, the individual parts ranging in length from about five minutes to just under thirty. This massive set, released back in May, follows on something larger still: last fall’s AE_LIVE, which consisted of nine hour-long performances. Only in contrast to AE_LIVE can elseq 1–5 be seen to deserve its lowercase title treatment.
The dimensions suit the subject matter. Autechre’s music can be all-consuming. It often lacks reference points other than the duo’s own fervidly brittle catalog. In the context of their releases, names of actual cities and dates of concerts — “AE_LIVE_KREMS_020515,” “AE_LIVE_DOUR_180715, “AE_LIVE_KATOWICE_210815” — on the live collection read less like places and timestamps and more like the fragmented, coded syllables and numerals that have long served as placeholders for their ecstatically broken beats (Envane and Cichlisuite, “Characi” and “Pen Expers,” “PIOBmx19” and “777”).
AE_LIVE used its oversized scale to announce the arrival of a dedicated Autechre store, autechre.ws, which is really front end for Warp’s venture bleepstores.com, and a window into Bleep Dispatch, a physical distribution organization. Autechre’s music may sound like willfully broken music machines, but it is the harbinger of an aspiringly efficient cultural machine.
Now, elseq 1–5 may be modest in comparison to the live collection, and a record that’s four hours long and is subdivided twice — into sets and tracks — doesn’t necessarily evade reviewing, but its capacious nature invites alternate approaches. It’s one thing to review a book, another thing entirely to review a library. To that end, what follows are listening notes, references and thoughts as I make my travel through the collection and back again. I hope to update it on occasion, as I find my way. I’ve listened many many times now, and will continue to as long as it continues to hold interest. For now, there’s no sign of the interest fading.
I’ve had the first two entries in this listening diary — on the first track of set 3 and the second track of set 4 — in the can for a while, and I had planned on having a third track written up before first publishing this, but I figure to just set this rolling and see where it goes.
Track: elseq 3 001 “eastre” (22:15)
September 10, 2016: The track is one phrase on repeat, a brief riff — about 12 seconds long, give or take — played over and over, a sequence of dependable modulations tweaked in utterly undependable manners. The theme is dramatic, with a portent not out of place in a Hollywood thriller. It sounds a bit like the duo is offering itself up to score, if not actually provide the theme song to, the next James Bond film. The tweaks are drastic, warping and quavering the riff, despite which the riff itself proceeds unaltered. It’s all about torque, all about the sound being submitted to a sequence of experimental stressors to witness how it responds. The repeated theme is so brief, it brings to mind the experience of playing a video game and being stuck on a level for so long that the music, a brief cue, plays over and over, adorned and filtered only by other on-screen sounds, by your relative position, and by the status of other players’ fates elsewhere in the game. Except here the level is designed for just such an experience. It’s a locked box, and you must settle in for the unsettling 22-minute ride.
Track: elseq 4 002 “foldfree casual” (09:50)
September 10, 2016: Among the earliest places to hear Autechre was the Artificial Intelligence series from Warp Records. Autechre was one of three acts to have two tracks on the first Artificial Intelligence compilation (10 tracks total), back in 1992, and their first proper album, Incunabula, was part of the Artificial Intelligence series a year later. The term “AI” served largely as a touchstone for trippy science-fiction daydreams at the time, but with Autechre’s intricate, digital productions it became an inspiration for generative systems of music making — systems that despite not being alive achieve a lifelike quality. In other words, what sounds “broken” in Autechre’s music isn’t really broken; it’s expertly engineered — it just reflects a metric logic, an internal clock, that has more in common with an organism than with a machine. What makes Autechre’s music thrilling is how that organic quality plays out in machine noises. At first “foldfree casual,” with its opening vapory horn-like yet blithely synthetic intonations, sounds like their bid to score the forthcoming sequel to Blade Runner, another AI touchstone. Those lines give way to this prismatic noise that has a randomness closer to speech than to melody, fragments that suggest a generative process at heart, noises reacting to some interior, software-based narrative, rather than to mere filter processing or traditional compositional intent. They gather heft, and as vocaloid music will do, bring to mind John Williams’ first-contact music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The phrases are increasingly near-verbal as they proceed, and even more so they’re deeply emotive (not exactly a realm Autechre is often associated with). The track “foldfree casual” is akin to witnessing to an artificial intelligence gain sentience in less time than it takes to get a pot of water to boil. With sentience comes an instinct for self-preservation, and more insistent, militantly rhythmic percussion kicks in around the six-minute mark; my mind pictures something struggling in captivity. Whether the next shift is due to external sedation or internal meditation, the urgency gives way to calm in the closing minutes. Eventually it’s back to those opening, hazy chords: The android dreams.
September 10, 2016
This Week in Sound: Mics and Jacks
A lightly annotated clipping service (some of these go back quite a bit further back than last week):
Neural NeTTS: I’ve long wondered why the CGI in movies keeps getting better, allowing for more realistic human (and humanoid) characters, but they still use human voice actors. This piece at deepmind.com on WaveNet (“a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms”) shows how neural-networks are rapidly improving test-to-speech (TTS) technology. (Found via Kyle McDonald & George Kelly.)
Ears Only: Sony is introducing something called the Xperia, which looks like one of those Bluetooth in-ear devices that don’t work like you want them to, but does far much more: androidpolice.com.
Who Says I Don’t Read the Sports Pages?: In a key example of unintended consequences, the addition (via nytimes.com) of a roof to Arthur Ashe Stadium has “created an echo chamber and a much louder experience for everyone.”
Mic Off: Bloomberg.com has an interesting piece on the slow pace of microphone innovation. (The link was broken in the This Week in Sound email newsletter. Sorry.)
Mic On: But … the future of hearing aids (and microphones) may benefit from insect studies: singularityhub.com.
Quiet Fireworks: They exist (via nytimes.com). This is a good thing. “Today, quiet fireworks are part of everybody’s inventory,” says one professional.
Sonic Demilitarization: The Pentagon is downsizing its bands. The U.S. military “fields more than 130 military bands worldwide, made up of about 6,500 musicians” at an estimated annual cost of $437 million: nytimes.com.
Train, Train: A “fleet of the future” here in San Francisco may make commuting less of a threat to hearing: wired.com.
Sound Social Science: Apparently playing upbeat music in the office “fosters cooperation” — though maybe not in an office where people write about maudlin ambient music: washingtonpost.com.
Apple Did Something: In case you’ve been living under a rock-shaped outdoor speaker, you know that Apple has removed the headphone jack from its latest iPhone. Jonathan Sterne, author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format, talks about planned obsolescence: theglobeandmail.com.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the September 16, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
September 9, 2016
The Two Minimalisms
There are many minimalisms. In electronic music, two key ones are the capital-m Minimalism, a movement/school of classical music whose founders include such composers as Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, and the lower-case minimalism, an approach employed by musicians like Taylor Deupree, Steve Roden, and others. The capital-m school has, over time, become a genre, and now counts folks like Max Richter in its ranks. The lower-case one is more of an aesthetic, one felt in ambient music, techno, film scores, and various other realms. There’s significant overlap between the two minimalisms, which are both marked by an attention to rudimentary elements and repetition, and Loscil, aka the Vancouver-based Scott Morgan, merges them formally on the forthcoming Monument Builders, due out in early November on the Kranky label. The title track was posted this week as an advance listen, and it’s a satisfying work in which orchestral instrumentation, notably a horn section around the three-minute mark and a choral part earlier on, emerge from an underlying glitchy drone.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kranky. More from Loscil at loscil.ca.
