Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 333
June 20, 2016
RIP, Other Music
This white board shows the top 100 albums sold at the excellent record retailer Other Music in its 20 years of existence in downtown Manhattan. The store shuts this week, on June 25, and the board was posted commemoratively at the website brooklynvegan.com yesterday with some light annotation. I first saw the picture when Amon Tobin tweeted about it, saying, “Peace out Other Music. There will never be another store that can move over 1000 copies of an Amon Tobin record.” There’s only one Aphex Twin record on the board, and while the photo cuts off, it appears to be Selected Ambient Works Volume 2. All it says is “Ambient” with what looks like the “2” truncated mid-numeral (a reading confirmed by that Brooklyn Vegan post).
When Bloomsbury published my 33 1/3 book on Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 in 2014, one bit of feedback that confused me was from people who couldn’t understand why I hadn’t written instead about the earlier Selected Ambient Works, or the album titled Richard D. James Album, or another of his releases. My response was usually along the lines of “I wrote about this record because it’s the record that captured my imagination.” What interested me about the Other Music board is that no other Aphex Twin record made the list — not only did Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 appear on the top 100, it was the only Aphex record to make that cutoff. As the discussion at Brooklyn Vegan makes clear, Other Music had its own take on culture (“OM was more DJ Shadow or … J. Dilla than the Beasties,” writes Bill Pearis). While consumers were free to buy what they wanted at the store, the store in various ways shaped the tastes of the people who shopped there.
The store was also, in turn, shaped by time. Other Music’s history closely parallels Disquiet.com’s. It launched in 1995, a year before Disquiet.com did, and it was right around the corner from Tower Records. I was still an editor at the Pulse! music magazines published by Tower in 1995 — I joined the company in 1989 and left in 1996, a decision that led me to start Disquiet.com, which turns 20 on December 13, 2016. Tower was based in West Sacramento, and I lived alternately in Davis and Sacramento during my tenure. I’d moved to California from Brooklyn in 1989 to take the job. Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 was released in 1994, a year before Other Music opened.
The culture of a record store, the way you learn about music, is something that online retailers (including streaming services) have failed so far to emulate particularly well. Rdio probably came closest among the streaming companies, and it still went out of business. When you are in a physical record store, you learn from the room, watching what others buy, conversing with clerks, reading short reviews, listening to what’s playing and asking about it. Other Music was a valuable one-room schoolhouse, as record-learning goes. Up until Tower Records closed down, whenever I went back to New York to attend a Bang on a Can festival or interview a musician, or meet with record labels, Other Music was always a stop. It felt a bit like cheating to walk across the street from Tower, but the cheating was always in service of the magazines’ coverage.
June 18, 2016
Slacking About Remixing
This past week I opened up a discussion group on Slack (slack.com), the popular messaging and collaboration platform. I remain more wedded to forum-style discussion, but I am also aware that preference may simply be me, and that Slack’s success may indeed relate to a more contemporary, fluid, less structured format.
In any case, as I’d hoped, discussion about specific projects while the projects are still happening has been solid. This week’s Junto project involves a remix of three unrelated tracks. I share a brief bit of that conversation below. (And if you’re part of the Junto Slack discussion, you can view the full thread here.)
mtnviewmark [7:36 AM]
I might suggest that we don’t post our tracks here. I think this channel would be better for discussion than as another rolling list of submissions, which can be found on SoundCloud as is.
So…
In the past Disquiet submissions I did the assignments in the void: I didn’t even load up the SC list until after I finished my submission. I didn’t want to hear others’ work and be influenced by them. That seems silly in the face of the premise of this week’s assignment: remix! Also, want to see if having a live discussion during the assignment helps.
So…
I’m looking at first two tracks – rhythmic / arrythmic – and rather than remix them directly, I’m working on swapping the rhythms between them…. so far, this is slow going.
Also, if it helps anyone, the first track is at 128.41bpm by my measure….
marc.weidenbaum [9:21 AM]
It does feel a bit redundant. On occasion may be good for reference during conversation. Look forward to what you make of it.
joemcmahon [9:45 AM]
@mtnviewmark: Yeah, I prefer it that way too; if I let myself hear what others have done, sometimes I just say, “well, that’s better than I could do it” and skip it. :slightly_smiling_face:
audio_obscura [3:57 AM]
Its true what others say in that I often here junto submissions and think I could never better that, in fact I think I have 4 tracks I did and never submitted as they just weren’t any good. But this weeks challenge is a good one as the variety of posts from the same sources is really different. Just my opinion but I like to hear the elements from the source material in the remixes – some people twist the sources so much you can’t really hear any of the original. I think with mine you can still distinctly hear the three referenced works
marc.weidenbaum [5:41 AM]
@audio_obscura: That hearing the originals in the remix gives me great pleasure. Have you ever checked out the Stonesthrow Beat Battles? I love listening in each week and checking out how everyone’s redone the shared sample.
audio_obscura [6:34 AM]
@marc.weidenbaum: I think next’s weeks Junto should be to take 3 of this weeks remixes, download them and take the 1st 30 seconds of the tracks and remix them – basically repeating this weeks challenge but taking it another step down the road!
audiodays [6:55 AM]
Really enjoyed the challenge again this week. some weeks I know straight away what I’m going to do, but this week.s took a bit of thinking time and some experiments. I agree with that has been said about hearing the source material and I think I’ve ‘just’ about go away with it this week. But as I said in my notes on SC, I struggled finding a a way of bringing HNY and Pepper Jelly together without it sounding too much like a car crash.
I rarely, if ever, listen to other contributions until I’ve uploaded my own, and settling down to hear how other have interpreted the brief is just as joyous as the Disquiet Junto email dropping on a Thursday evening (UK time).
June 16, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0233: Netlabel (NND Remix)
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 late morning, California time, on Thursday, June 16, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 20, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0233: Netlabel (NND Remix)
The Assignment: Make one track from three different netlabels, courtesy of a Creative Commons license.
Seeing the “ND” tag on a netlabel release is a major buzzkill. The “ND” tag denotes a Creative Commons license that rules out creating derivative work. Fortunately lots of netlabels do allow for creative reuse, and this occasional series of collaborative remixes seeks to celebrate that activity, and encourage other netlabels to switch off the ND tag. Take “NND” to mean “not no derivatives.”
Step 1: Download the three tracks that will provide source audio for this remix:
Use the first 30 seconds of “HNY” off the album Wormbole by ʞık (Karl & Karlik) on the Bump Foot netlabel:
http://www.bumpfoot.net/bump207.html
Use the first 30 seconds of “Pepper Jelly” off the album Recombinations by Andre Darius and Riley Theodore on the Haze netlabel:
https://hazenetlabel.bandcamp.com/alb...
Use the first 30 seconds of “Autista 3” off the album Autista by Pablo Reche on the Impulsive Habitat netlabel:
http://www.impulsivehabitat.com/relea...
Step 2: Create an original piece of work including that source material.
Step 3: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
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 late morning, California time, on Thursday, June 16, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 20, 2016.
Length: Length is up to you, though between two 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 “disquiet0233.” Also use “disquiet0233” as a tag for your track.
Download: It is necessary that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing and attribution, per the Creative Commons license of the source audio.
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 233rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Make one track from three different netlabels, courtesy of a Creative Commons license” — 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:
Image associated with this project is by Jet Lee and it is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
June 15, 2016
Now on Slack.com: Disquiet Junto Discussion
There is now a Slack team set up (at disquietjunto.slack.com) for Disquiet Junto discussion.
If you want to participate, send me your email address. I’m at marc@disquiet.com. Apparently Slack is invitation-based, so I need to send you an invite to join in.
The general idea for the Junto Slack is it’s a replacement for the discussion boards that were once quite active on SoundCloud, before the service mothballed them, and it’s a complement (or temporary stand-in) for the disquiet.com/forums, which are running on a somewhat antiquated platform (Vanilla Forums). The disquiet.com/forums will likely be upgraded at some point later this year to a better platform, but for now the Slack team is where Junto conversation will be focused — of course, there will still be plenty of talk on Twitter, which is where many of the initial core group of Junto participants first (virtually) met up, and elsewhere.
As of this moment there are 26 members of the Slack Junto, and there are 8 channels underway, pictured up top. We’ve been (re)introducing ourselves, talking about playlist curation as cultural participation, comparing physical and software modular synthesizers, and sharing videos of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Taylor Deupree, and others.
June 14, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
It’s not every day that one of these doorbell images gets a sequel. Fact is, it’s not all that often that I come upon the same doorbell twice. I don’t keep track of their locations, and while I have a good sense of where some of them are, many are lost in my wandering. This one originally, weeks back, only had that A label in the upper left (see here), and at the time I pondered whether the remaining apartments would be labeled up/down or left/right, or in a circular pattern for that matter. As it turns out, it’s up/down, though there’s always the chance that these apartment-button associations aren’t official. Maybe the new lettering is an act of banal, site-specific graffiti vandalism.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Space Age Surveillance Thrills
There’s much to recommend the new Sonologyst album, starting off with its evocative title, Silencers – the conspiracy theory dossiers. That colorful language may set a high bar for sonic surveillance thrills, but the album delivers, especially with its final track, “NASA Secret Tapes.”
Barely two minutes in length, “NASA Secret Tapes” loops snippets of space-age chatter with sonar swells. It’s a testament to those swells — which ring like massive bells pitched high, their tones extending unnaturally relative to their frigid timbre — that the track would be just as effective minus the “This is Houston. Say again?” dialogue, flavorful as it is in its retro flourish. Those tones are endlessly listenable. Sonologyst artfully tweaks them, turning the background ambience into something with subtle rhythmic purpose.
The “NASA Secret Tapes” track is up top, and here’s the full album:
Silencers – the conspiracy theory dossiers by Sonologyst
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sonologyst. Full album at sonologyst.bandcamp.com. More from Sonologyst, who’s based in Italy, at twitter.com/sonologyst.
June 13, 2016
Playing a Keyboard with a Phone Book
Just how little action can one take and still be considered a performer? If yesterday’s featured video nudged at the inherent idea of a “live” performance by showing generative software mid-process (no human required), then today’s video re-introduces human physical interaction but in a very simple way.
The video, titled “Yellow Pages Tone Cluster,” begins with a humorous touch worthy of John Cage: A few seconds in, the artist Peter Speer places a massive phone book, its front cover ripped off, atop an electric keyboard, and thus sets in motion a broad, dense uber-chord that plays for nearly 11 minutes straight.
“Motion” may not be the right word. What the phone book creates on the keyboard is a multi-octave held chord, quite the opposite of motion. That chord changes only due to the ear’s sensitivity to overtones and waveforms, and Speer’s subsequent small changes. He alters the chord as it proceeds. Specifics aren’t laid out at the video link (the only text is “The lost art of playing a keyboard with a book”), but as it goes the organ tone takes on beading and phase-shifting, glitch wonderment and reduction to a sheer shimmer. And at then end Speer removes the phone book. The ceremonial bow is implied.
One side note: This video is a good example of how the very thing that can make computer music a tough sell in a concert setting works exceptionally well on streaming services like YouTube and Vimeo, where the audience has such GoPro-style proximity (“goproximity”?) to the sort of small gestures that are lost with a live audience. The only way something like this would register in front of a group of people is if there were an effort made to include a properly framed live video projection during the performance — of course, while the scale would make the performer’s movements legible in concert, it would also potentially overstate their gravitas. (I should mention, I’ve seen plenty of shows where this sort of projection occurs but it’s usually for more flamboyant playing styles and often isn’t framed particularly well.)
Unfortunately I can’t add this to my “Ambient Performances” playlist because the playlist is on YouTube and this video is on vimeo.com. More from Peter Speer, who’s based in Chicago, Illinois, at diode-ring.com. Video found in a discussion about minimal physical mixing consoles at llllllll.co.
June 12, 2016
In the Key of G(enerative)
“System has decided to generate in G.” G is the key, and generative is the mode. That line is one of the many captions that illuminate the software patch in action in this video. You don’t have to fully comprehend, or even read, the text to appreciate the correlation between the virtual patch (signal flows, triggers, and such) and the sounds that emerge as the piece proceeds.
The text and patch, both by Siegfried Mueller, depict the inner workings of GenAura, Mueller’s “Generative Ambient System.” The video is almost half a decade old at this point, and the interface of the toolset, Max/MSP, in which the software was coded has come a long way since then, but the music remains nuanced and entrancing, and Mueller’s concise distillation of process is a great example of how watching a generative tool enact its own decision-making is a form of live performance.
The word “indeterminate” is often associated with generative music because chance is a key factor in many generative systems. The thing to keep in mind is that when it comes to GenAura it can be said that the music is determined — it’s just determined by the decision-making of the software itself, which of course extrapolates decisions built into the DNA of its code by Mueller.
It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” Video originally posted five years ago on YouTube by Siegfried Mueller, who developed the software.
June 9, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Generally speaking the word “doorbell” relates to a device, usually electric but occasionally purely mechanical, that mediates human interaction by providing an inhabitant with news of the arrival of a visitor, and the option to ignore it. There is another type of doorbell, like this set that dangles from inside the unlocked front gate of a friend’s home. When they ring, the door already has been opened. They are, in effect, a doorbell after the fact.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
