Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 328
August 17, 2016
Rural and Feral
Topographies / Surface Noise by Seth Chrisman & Nathan McLaughlin
This split release of half-hour tracks from Seth Chrisman and Nathan McLaughlin pairs elegant, rural electronics with a slightly noisier, certainly more feral counterpart. It’s a mix of field recordings, substantively muffled instrumentation, and thorough filtering by the like-minded if not entirely similar musicians. Chrisman’s piece, “Topographies,” is the musical equivalent of the sound of a forest floor that you’re walking alone. It combines motoric textures and light bits of string tension. McLaughlin’s, “Surface Noise,” eventually resolves to something close to Chrisman’s, but it starts with a jolt that it never quite shakes. It adds a sense of threat to the proceedings. If Chrisman’s is a walk in the great outdoors, then McLaughlin’s suggests that the listener may also be the prey.
Album originally posted at fet-press.com. It’s the latest release from FET, which is led by Joe Houpert and McLaughlin.vMore from Chrisman, who’s based in Hudson Valley, New York, at sethchrisman.com. More from McLaughlin, also from Hudson Valley, at nathanmclaughlin.info.
Listening to Yesterday: A Datum Reverberation
its absence
I didn’t hear the Tuesday noon siren yesterday in San Francisco. I was, however, on the receiving end of a digital echo of the siren — a signal relay, a datum reverberation.
I was driving north at the time from the South Bay, where I’d had an early-morning meeting in Palo Alto on a project. Of course, I knew it was Tuesday, and I knew that since it was Tuesday the noon siren would be going off on schedule some 40 miles north, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that on Tuesday at noon I thought, “Oh, somewhere you can hear the siren right now.”
The Tuesday noon siren is many sirens, over a hundred spread around San Francisco, all part of the Outdoor Public Warning System. First there is the siren itself, and then a spoken explanation that begins, “This a test. This is only a test.” You rarely hear just one siren. Either you are between two or three of them, or you hear one and its echo, its echoes, bouncing off buildings and traveling down corridors. At times you don’t know if the “secondary” siren you hear is an echo, or another siren the sound of which has traveled a further distance, thus delaying its reception. The echo of the Tuesday noon siren is as much a part of its received sound as is the siren itself.
At 14 minutes after the hour, I was made aware of the weekly siren event having occurred when a tiny little icon (a bold, capitalized “IF”) appeared at the top of my phone, which runs on the “stock” Android operating system. I use a popular service called IFTTT (“if this, then that” — the name brings me back to my teen years spent programming in BASIC) to do a lot of micro-tasks, like backing up my tweets to a Google document, and alerting me on the increasingly rare occasion that rain might fall from the sky, and auto-posting my Instagram images to my own website.
Among these IFTTT-enabled tasks, I have an automated tweet set for Tuesday at noon. At that moment each week, IFTTT triggers on Twitter a link to a SoundCloud recording that I made several years ago of a fairly low-fidelity recording of the siren. This sound-tweet isn’t annoying to people; it doesn’t automatically play a sound in their Twitter feed: They need to click on it to hear the siren.
Yesterday at a quarter past the hour, as I drove north on Interstate 280, my phone was displaying a map of the route home. I know the route by heart, but use a map service to alert me to delays due to accidents and, in this rapidly metastasizing region, construction. A little vibration told me that something had occurred. I glanced at my phone, and saw the little “IF” along the top bar (note to iPhone users: this is where Android notifications appear). I didn’t need to click on anything to know what it meant. Also, I was driving, so I wasn’t about to click on anything. With one exception in addition to that rain alert, every IFTTT trigger I’ve programmed results from something I have, myself, just done in person. Tweets are auto-archived right after I tweet them. Instagram photos are syndicated right after I post them. In those cases, the little “IF” is less an alert than an annoyance, telling me something I already know. The exception is the automatic tweet of the Tuesday noon siren. I was reminded at that moment, driving up 280, that it was Tuesday, and that the siren had rung. I looked at the time. The clock read 12:14.
I experienced the siren at a time delay, because IFTTT doesn’t happen automatically — well, it happens automatically, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously. So it was that a quarter after the hour, the news of the siren finally got to me, as I was driving north, about halfway back to San Francisco from Palo Alto. The sound itself had long since evaporated over the distance. The sound never would have reached me, at that point some 20 miles sound of San Francisco. The subtlest of recording devices could not likely have heard the siren from where I was. But I like to think that the siren had faded from sound into data, and that it finally reached me as a tiny little signal on my phone. The fidelity was non-existent, but the arrival of the signal was a simulation of the delay effect that is inherent to the actual Tuesday noon siren’s municipal charm.
August 16, 2016
Listening to Yesterday: The Imagined Playground
quiet music
imagined playground
The public school system started its new year yesterday in San Francisco. It’s another two weeks before public school starts in the East Bay, and private schools in the area are all getting going according to their own internal rhythms.
I rent a small office next to a private school that hasn’t begun its new year yet. The school is connected to a church whose bells ring every hour, ensuring that if I’m ever late for a phone meeting it’s only by a minute. When the bells ring, my brain automatically acknowledges the passing of the hour, even if it’s of no calendrical consequence. The start of the school year is of no small consequence, because I have a little kid in school. Yesterday in particular, the first day of the academic year, school was very much on my mind — new teacher, new subjects, new schedule, new rules.
The school adjacent to my office has a chaotic playground life. When school is not in session, it is a lot easier for me to listen to quiet music — which is to say, to much of the music I am predisposed to listen to. The school noise can force much of my playlist to the background. During the academic year it can sound more like a World War I trench battle than a place of education, what with the dozens upon dozens of kids yelling and playing and screaming and singing. Yesterday the church schoolyard was empty, but my knowing that our own school had begun caused a trick of the ear.
Yesterday I found myself listening for the church school noises, and even though they weren’t there, my head was at times filled with memories of last year’s recess sonics, and also with an imagined sense of what my own kid might be up to. Soon enough — in a little over a week — the church school’s year will start, and the imagined playground will give way to a real one.
Bratislava Beatcraft
“Questions Forever” is a piece of delicate, arid beatcraftsmanship. It’s made from snare drums and magnified pin drops, mallet wallops and steam exhaust, anxious chatter and whirligig resonance. There are tonal aspects, musty bits of harmonic effluence that begin to fill in the substantial gaps, but that’s ethereal stuff, not a melody, not a song. The meat of this piece is its bones, a stuttery but steady bit of downtempo rhythm play. Toward the end it veers into psychedelia, the warpy background sounds echoing into a frayed, uneasy spaciousness, but the underlying grid work is where it’s at. “Questions Forever” is all infrastructure, all girding and planning, pacing and metrics.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jojoblue. Jojo Blue is based in Bratislava, Slovakia.
August 15, 2016
Amanda Feery’s Cello + Electronics
“Stray Sods,” as heard here, is a rough take of a piece for cello and electronics by Amanda Feery, the Dublin-based composer. The first thing you hear in the piece isn’t the cello, at least not in recognizable form, but a pulsing, filmic, beading field of percussion. The effect of these tiny percussive tones is caught somewhere between a tossed snow globe and the sound design of a particularly heightened moment in a contemporary thriller. A cello enters that zone and saws long, held notes. It fills the space between the many pointillist dots. At first the cello is halting, cautious, and then it gains melodic complexity. This isn’t a whisper-to-a-scream composition, however. Pauses come at appropriate increments, and the percussion fades back and forth between modes in a manner that suggests time shifts and tectonic adjustments. There have been times when I’ve let the nearly seven minutes of “Stray Sods” play on repeat for hours, and I recommend doing so.
As a bonus, here’s a video excerpt of “Stray Sods” performed by cellist Amanda Gookin. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/vanessaparody. More on Feery, who is completing a PhD in Compositon at Princeton, at amandafeery.com.
Listening to Yesterday: Two Bells
a bird landing
the piano that isn’t in another room
an elbow popping
At the start of yoga yesterday, the instructor rang two bells. The action was functional as well as ritual. That is, the salvo of her practice was functional beyond the function of ritual. There was a plan, an approach, a hidden curriculum. In an effort to direct people toward silence, it can be counterproductive to employ anything too verbal, too explicit, too overt — that is, anything other than silence.
The two bells hung at the ends of a single string. She rang them to draw the collective attention of the class. Then she directed us into a proper seated position: legs crossed, back high, face forward, arms at rest. Then she initiated a few minutes of silence. Just before the silence began she instructed us to listen to the silence. At the end of the silent period she passed the bells around the room. Each person rang the bells in turn and named, at the instructor’s request, something we’d heard in the silence. One person mentioned a bird landing. I’d heard it, too: large wings flapping in a strong breeze. Another person mentioned her belly grumbling. Another mentioned the piano. I’d heard the piano, too, but not the grumbling.
The piano was prerecorded. Earlier, just as the class was about to start, the instructor had turned down a CD of classical music, and as we took our seats an orchestral track gave way to this solo piano piece. The change in volume, the change between tracks, and the change in the room, which had quickly gone from chatty to quiet upon the instructor’s entrance, nearly convinced me that the piano was playing from another room entirely.
When the two bells on a string had run the full circle, when everyone had spoken about what they’d heard when the room had been silent, they were returned to the instructor. She explained that the listening exercise had several purposes, one of them quite practical. She wanted us to listen to our bodies as we proceeded. The instructor wanted to us to listen for if and when our bodies — a crack in the back, a pop in the elbow, a more nuanced signal somewhere else — asked us to be cautious. We had exercised external listening to focus the mind toward internal listening. If she had told us this point from the start, it wouldn’t have been half as effective.
August 14, 2016
Donnacha Costello’s Inviting Austerity
The Dublin, Ireland–based musician Donnacha Costello’s Mono No Aware is an extended suite of tracks that are austere as they are inviting. Each piece, from the lightly punctuated “Mountain” to the more sedate and transient “Saudades” to the ecstatic pixelation of “At Sea,” depicts a pristine sonic moment. Many, like those three, are widescreen, white-noise vistas caught during a digital sunset. Others, like the opening track, “Yōkoso,” and the piano-tinged “Slowly, Through Fog,” introduce more traditionally musical elements, and yet achieve a similarly austere, sedate affect. They speak of Costello’s patience, and they reward patient listening. Every track on the album is the accumulation of subtle shifts that yield a sizable aesthetic impact. On “Slowly, Through Fog,” for example, there’s an increasing sense of echo that consumes what came before; even as the slow pace proceeds, the sense of scope expands significantly. The same could be said of the album as a whole.
Mono No Aware by Donnacha Costello
As a bonus, just a few days before releasing Mono No Aware, Costello uploaded a decade-old track, “Modul.Stress,” which he’d recorded in 2005 for a giveaway CD in a publication of the Raster-Noton label. “Modul.Stress” is a marvel of hyper-minimalist techo. An incredibly spare beat, a split of white noise trimmed to a truncated plosive, sets the initial pace. It plays out for nearly a minute like the pulse of some high-end, surgical-grade equipment. From there the piece expands in small steps, additional tiny beats here, little pneumatic blasts there, and occasional held tones syncopated and timed for maximum mood.
Modul.Stress by Donnacha Costello
Tracks originally posted at donnachacostello.bandcamp.com. More from Costello at soundcloud.com/donnachacostello and twitter.com/donnachatweets.
What Sound Looks Like
There’s no doorbell at this address, just a lock and a sign, the sign superimposed on a previous sign whose directions apparently weren’t sufficient. The newer sign — which is by no means new, the black words nearly merging with the blue tape on which they were written by hand — reads “Knock On Roll-Up Door.” The roll-up door is the door to the right of this door. It’s massive, double wide and double high. Even in a light breeze, the roll-up door’s corrugated metal façade bangs against the rollers and tracks. Presumably if you live or work here, you can tell nature’s knock from that of a visitor.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
August 12, 2016
Where Piano and Tape Meld
The syrupy, slurpy, melty place that Danny Clay and Greg Gorlen map in intimate, elegiac detail on “marigolds i” makes for an enticing sonic cul-de-sac, a turnaround in which to get pleasingly disoriented, happily stuck. Time, genre, and technology loop back on themselves and on each other.
The piece appears to be a duet for piano and tape cassette, the latter as much a medium for the former as it is a source of sounds itself. Every form of media lends some quality to that which it documents, and the dissolving, warping aspect of the tape here blurs the place between the piano and the droney, nostalgic sonic space the two musicians seek to produce.
The piano, just a few keys hit in slow procession, creates tones that get stretched in static-laced loops, the brittle little seams heard as tiny crunchy footsteps. The tape bends and frays at times, making the piano come in and out of focus as if it’s a landscape seen through a window dotted with clingy raindrops. Occasionally it is quite clear but misshapen, and other times it returns to its proper dimensions but is tantalizingly difficult to fully make out.
This is apparently a track from a longer forthcoming album-length work. Something to look forward to, for certain.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nocturnalsignal. More from Gorlen at cascadingfragments.tumblr.com and Danny Clay at dclaymusic.com. Both Clay and Gorlen are based in San Francisco.
August 11, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0241: Foreground Effect
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at disquiet.com/junto, 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. 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 was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0241: Foreground Effect
The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing.
Please pay particular attention to all the instructions below, in light of SoundCloud closing 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 may work well.
And now, on to this week’s project.
Project Steps:
Step 1: Consider the following. New music can often involve flipping a perceived hierarchy: between rhythm and melody, between harmonic and melodic development, and between background and foreground, for example. This project involves flipping another perceived hierarchy: between the effect employed and the source audio on which it is employed (for example, between a flanger and a rhythm guitar line, or a gate and a drum kit, or between a filter and a complex waveform).
Step 2: Create an original piece of music in which the effect is the prominent thing heard throughout, while the source audio changes frequently between varied materials. The compositional goal is that the piece still hangs together as a considered whole unto itself.
Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0241” 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 new task, if you’ve done a Junto project previously. In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co post your track:
http://llllllll.co/t/foreground-effec...
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 around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you. Between two and four minutes seems about right.
Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0241” 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 241st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing” — 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/foreground-effec...
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
The image associated with this project is by Nadar, and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
