Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 329
August 9, 2016
Flirting with Entropy
The track “FMMMOPm” by sunhil runs for under two minutes. The transformation processes within it unfold in a manner that works well on repeat. The piece brings to mind aspects of the recent Autechre album, elseq — there’s a short riff that replays itself over and over, each turn tweaked this way and that by various effects, and the shifting of effects doesn’t directly parallel the ebb and flow of the loop.
The emphasis is on a rich, compact squelch, and on a distortion field that never fully encompasses the source material. Interference and static, sonic moirés and signal chiaroscuro are all in effect at various moments, but under the full, strong control of sunhil (aka Jeffrey Paul Shell of Salt Lake City, Utah). The piece flirts with entropy but never succumbs completely.
Presumably this short Instagram video, captioned “Saturday FM” on instagram.com and at his Twitter account, is from the sessions that yielded this track:
A video posted by Jeffrey Shell (@aodl) on Aug 6, 2016 at 8:26am PDT
The video shows the screen of a Teenage Engineering OP-1, whose FM synthesis is half of the toolset in the brief liner note accompanying the track:”FM operations between OP-1 and Monomachine. OP-1 FM synth being sequenced and processed by Monomachine, accompanied by a pair of MM’s FM-PAR machines.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sunhil. More from Sunhil at euc.cx, sunhill.bandcamp.com, and twitter.com/jshell.
What Sound Looks Like
This retail proposition isn’t exactly what Philip K. Dick meant by “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” but a visit to Amoeba Music on Haight Street does combine sense memory, nostalgia, media technology, and culture in a heady manner. I really wanted that Son of Bazerk tape, which is in pristine condition, but I knew that buying one archival cassette was the beginning of a habit I don’t need. 12″s are enough of a habit.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
August 7, 2016
Aphex Twin Turns on the #Learning Spout
Aphex Twin’s user18081971 account was once home to some 250 or so tracks of artifact audio, partial takes and rough sketches from a quarter century or so of music making. It felt like a snowstorm at first, a thick, heavy blanket of material. But it was more like one of those tropical rainstorms that comes on heavy, reduces to a trickle, fakes you out with a blue sky, and then rains down again. He’d put up all or most of the tracks, and then take them down, teasing and pleasing his audience in turns. (Given that the upload dates are retained, it’s more like he turned them on and off.)
It’s been blue sky — which is to say, blank or virtually blank — on the user18081971 account for many months. As of yesterday there were just six tracks up, all many months old. But then today, just two hours ago as of this typing, three seconds arrived of new audio arrived, under the title “Inventions & ideas” and tagged #Learning. It’s a warbling, speedy sample of what sounds like computer speech synthesis. If the spoken message is garbled, the accompanying text is notably clear in its intent:
This is a place to share hardware and software inventions, I was going to publish a book of my own but im going to start slowly putting them up here instead, it’s too much work hassling people to do these things, so putting them here will hopefully reach the right people. Will start with the more simple ideas first. If you want to work with me on any of the ideas PM me with IDEAS in the subject, no person or company too big or small. If you want to make it a commercial product then talk to me but im just as happy to work on it together and release it for free. If it’s someone elses idea just PM them, no need to tell me about that if you don’t want to , although be interesting to know if I helped a hookup along the way. Discussion and refinement of all ideas very welcome, in fact thats the main idea of this space. Bring it on!
It looks like after flooding SoundCloud with archival material, largely leaving annotation up to his fans (here’s a communal spreadsheet of track details), he’s now going to be posting details about how he gets the sounds he gets.
This three-second track includes detailed, time-coded information about its creation, like this:
[[[REsonant Tuning table EQ/vocoder]]] Import of Scala tuning tables to EQ frequency amounts, so each EQ frequency band would correspond to an entry in the imported tuning table. User definable number of EQ bands. Each band should have varying resonance options AND separate built in variable delay with adjustable feedback. Live input of either fundamental with slew/portamento or chord entry for immediate multiple band selection, so you can play in your resonances in real time. Sequence mode, allows cycling through the resonant bands, amount of bands active selectable, syncable, backwards/forwards/random etc, slew/lag/transition adjustment, wraparound. Create custom tuning table from audio analysis, whereby the amount of prominent resonances of the input audio can utilised to create a custom tuning table which can then be used within the EQ and also exported to a Scala file, use audio to create tuning tables!
And when a given comment isn’t detailed enough, Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, replies to himself in greater detail:
@user18081971: Order of tuning table should be selectable, so pitches don’t always have to ascend or descend, they can be arranged/sequenced in any order. Pitch shifter must have user definable delay with sync within the feedback loop.
We’ll see what comes of Aphex Twin’s latest foray into self-publishing of his sonic experiments. It could be the beginning of his own Well-Tempered Synthesizer … or it could all disappear into the same void where the earlier 250+ tracks went. Rabbit hole or black hole, it promises to be interesting.
August 6, 2016
10 Seconds of Salvation
Like his earlier reworking of Tony Robbins self-help tapes, Amulets’ New World Translation repurposes a piece of spoken word audio on cassette and transforms it into something that fits into the contemporary world of experimental cassette music — not just music released on cassette, but music in which the cassette is the instrument.
This recording is a 10-second tone set on loop, playing (per his youtube.com video) on a four-track recorder. The loop is a snatch of symphonic white noise, an orchestral drone, like a string section in a deep cistern holding a note until, collectively, they mark the loop’s repeat with a momentary swell.
When Brian Eno wrote that “repetition is a form of change,” part of what he was getting at is how the ear hears new things when subjected to the same sound over and over. In the hands of Amulets’, that change is more practical, but no less evocative. As he write in a note accompanying the video: “the endless tape loop flutters, fluctuates, and slowly degrades over time.”
Here’s the excerpt on YouTube. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.”
And the full 50-minute version:
Video originally posted at Amulets’ youtube.com channel. It’s available for purchase as physical cassette and download at amulets.bandcamp.com. The flipside of each cassette is the unmolested original audio from a series of Jehovah’s Witness Bible tapes. The length of the A-side depends on the length of the individual tape, ranging from 30 to 45 minutes. More from Amulets at amuletsmusic.com. Amulets is Randall Taylor of Austin, Texas.
August 5, 2016
On the Far Side of Whether
Much non-label work on SoundCloud can, thankfully, have the feel of a sketch to it. That’s sketch, not sketchy. There is a lot of work on SoundCloud that is posted mid-state, when it is truly a work in progress, when what is heard is a snapshot of a piece between when it was begun and whether it will be finished. Which is why a track that feels fully complete can carry such momentum, such weight, even when it is itself light as a feather.
“A Magnificent Gray” by Slow Meadow is a slow, neo-classical composition of graceful, gently evolving scope. It begins in a semi-mechanical state, drones and gears and gadget-like clicking, joined at the half-minute mark by the sort of piano that, in the hands of Nils Frahm and others, has brought minimalism, and classical, and ambient into a single spot in many listeners’ imagination.
From there it builds, so slowly you don’t realize it until you listen through again. Strings expand its depth and its sensibility, but what really changes is the number of voices. What began solo becomes a conversation among parts. And then it fades in a slightly backward-masked tonal collapse. The piece is fully considered, fully composed, entirely self-contained. Gorgeous stuff.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/slow-meadow. Slow Meadow is Matt Kidd of Houston, Texas. Found via a SoundCloud repost by ivan87-4. More from Kidd at slowmeadow.com and twitter.com/slowmeadow.
The Forum as Playlist
This is excerpted from a note I sent out last night to the Disquiet Junto project email list:
From lemons -> lemonade.
From a software company shuttering a service -> a platform-agnostic undertaking.
For longtime Junto participants especially, there’s been an occasional refrain that it’d be nice for the Junto not to be bound to one platform. Many people at SoundCloud have been very supportive of the Junto since the first project, back in January 2012. The end of the Groups functionality could be seen as a need for a quick fix. I’m trying to see it as an opportunity for change — specifically, to a means in which folks who would rather post music to YouTube or Archive.org or their own URLs or anywhere can do so, and still be part of the overall community. This process will not necessarily yield something as tidy as a SoundCloud playlist, but the tidiness that the SoundCloud playlist provided was also a reflection of how bonded the Junto was to SoundCloud. Anyhow, the discussions at llllllll.co, which is closely associated with the development of the Monome grid interface, has been very supportive of the Junto for several months, and I’m hopeful that this week’s Junto experiment in forum-as-playlist will work out well.
August 4, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0240: Emerging from a Drone
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 in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 4, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 8, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0240: Emerging from a Drone
The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which a drone slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic and/or melodic.
Please note the new instructions below, in light of SoundCloud closing down its Groups functionality.
Big picture: One thing arising from the loss of the Groups functionality is the goal that an account on SoundCloud is not necessary for Disquiet Junto project participation. The aspiration is for the Junto to become platform-agnostic.
Project Steps:
Step 1: Record a short drone, something that suggests stasis, timelessness, something that could play forever and feel like it never substantially changes.
Step 2: Create a piece of music that slowly emerges from that drone. More to the point, create a piece of music for which the drone is the beginning — a drone that slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic or melodic or both.
Six More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done :
Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include “disquiet0240” in the name of your track.
Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track. It is also helpful that you are a member of the discussion boards at llllllll.co.
Step 3: Add your track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud (this specific task will continue until the August 22 sunsetting of that service). The group is here:
https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquie...
Step 4: 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/music-that-emerg...
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted in the evening, California time, on Thursday, August 4, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 8, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you. Between one and four minutes seems about right.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0240.” Also use “disquiet0240” as a tag for your track.
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 240th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which a drone slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic and/or melodic” — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on llllllll.co and on a Junto Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion).
The image associated with this project is by Michel Banabila, and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
August 3, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
What isn’t shown in this photo is how the cabling that rises from the mess of wires continues two floors up and then hangs over, onto the roof, like a massive wet ponytail on the shoulder of an early morning commuter. Or how the cable on the left continues astride the building’s exterior like an errant thought. Or how the whole batch is in plain view alongside an unguarded, 24-hour parking lot. This is the not uncharacteristic communication hub for a small mixed-use building of apartments and businesses. It fails as grammar, as design, as security, as instruction, as map, as anything other than its core functionality. Despite all those shortcomings, all of them secondary to the cause at hand, through the hub flows sound and image and code, signals for humans and machines to receive and respond to. What are the primary functions of those signals? How much do their secondary traits fail, and do those failures impede the intended communication?
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
August 1, 2016
Lucia H Chung and the Mixer
Lucia H Chung’s instrument of choice is a no-input mixer. This process involves producing feedback that results from feeding a mixer back into itself, taking the non-silent aspects of the device and enlarging them until they become audible — not just audible but, in Chung’s hands, enveloping.
This track, “Inner Geography (Preview),” is a short excerpt from a forthcoming album on the Arell label, based in England. It’s a series of rich swells, each threatening to burst, swells that eventually give way to an antic ticking. The full release, under Chung’s en creux moniker, will be a single, 25-minute performance.
The swells have a shuddering, thunderous appearance on first listen, a sharp static trailed by a bell-like drone. Upon repeated listens, each swell reveals its distinct character: saw waves of varying shard-like shapes and sizes, white noise that pulses, and filigrees of harsh, darting sounds. Most notably there is Chung’s attention to attack and release, which lends drama to the sequence of isolated events.
Presumably the full release proceeds from where this track ends, and the swells are, collectively, themselves a subset of a larger, even more varied episodic sequence.
Inner Geography (Preview) by en creux
Album originally posted at arell.bandcamp.com. More from Chung at luciahchung.com. Together with her husband, Martin J Thompson, who mastered the recording, she runs the label SM-LL, which is based in London (sm-ll.com).
July 28, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0239: Code Requiem
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 in the morning, California time, on Thursday, July 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 1, 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 0239: Code Requiem
The Assignment: Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software.
Please note the instructions below, in light of SoundCloud closing down its Groups functionality.
Project Steps:
Step 1: Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software.
Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done :
Step 1: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud (this task will continue until the August 22 sunsetting of that service). It’s here:
https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquie...
Step 2: This is a new task, if you’ve done a Junto project previously. In the comment field to the track mention @disquiet. This will ping me to add the track to a playlist.
Step 3: Per the instructions below, be sure to tag your track #disquiet0239
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, July 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 1, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you. Between one and three minutes seems about right.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, 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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0239.” Also use “disquiet0239” as a tag for your track.
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, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 239th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software” — at:
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on a Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for inclusion) and at this URL:
