Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 334
June 9, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0232: No Input
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.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 9, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 13, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0232: No Input
The Assignment: Record a piece of music exploring the concept of “no-input mixing.”
This week’s project explores the concept of no-input mixing. For background, including a tutorial, this Synthtopia article, summarizing more detailed coverage by the Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M, might prove useful:
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/201...
Step 1: Read up, if it’s not already familiar, on the concept of “no-input mixing,” which involves creating feedback by taking the output of a mixer and plugging it into the input of the same mixer, thus exposing and building on inherent (i.e., noisy) sonic properties of the device.
Step 2: Experiment with no-input mixing.
Step 3: Record a short piece of no-input mixing music.
Step 4: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 9, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 13, 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 “disquiet0232.” Also use “disquiet0232” 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 232nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Record a piece of music exploring the concept of ‘no-input mixing.'” — 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 at:
Image associated with this project is by Andy Piper and it is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
June 7, 2016
One Synthesizer, Multiple Voices
Different musicians have different audiences. The thing that distinguishes SoundCloud from most music services is how people use it to post half-done pieces, sometimes with their “listener” audience in mind, often with their “peer” audience, the latter meaning other musicians, who are, of course, often listeners themselves. On video sites, “unboxing” and intro “tutorial” or “overview” clips let new owners share some of their consumerist energy, and occasionally even some tips. On SoundCloud, the closest comparison might be “first try” or “first take” audio, when musicians post a very early attempt to use a new piece of equipment. That subset of audio is followed by instrument-centric recordings, like this piece by Fastus, in which the equipment may not necessarily be new, but it still has the spotlight. “Isolation,” as it’s called, is a modular synthesizer piece that, per the very brief (eight-word) liner note, is based around a single item of equipment, the Telharmonic (from the company Make Noise), which came out a little under a year ago. It’s a remarkable recording, multiple voices moving throughout, cycling and echoing each other, built largely from organ-like tones and a rhythm that sounds like steam pipes opening and closing.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/fastus. Fastus is Ian O’Brien of Jersey City, New Jersey. More from him at twitter.com/FastusMusic.
June 6, 2016
Query for Junto Participants
Were there a Slack channel for the Disquiet Junto, would you find it useful/enjoyable to participate?
— Marc Weidenbaum (@disquiet) June 6, 2016
I sent an email out to the Disquiet Junto announcement list. The tl;dr version of this email is:
Would you participate in a Slack channel for Junto members, or are there other places you’d find useful for member communication?
The main uses for communication I’ve seen are:
• project-specific chatter (current, future)
• compositional/productivity tips
• gear/technique tips
• Junto satellite operations (concerts, albums, etc.)
• long-distance, asynchronous camaraderie (varied, naturally)
A Massive Yet Nearly Invisible Music Machine
The video posted yesterday by the Lab, the experimental San Francisco arts and performance space, of Ellen Fullman focused on her Long String Instrument’s central quality: its tonal richness. A 50-plus-foot series of parallel strings, Fullman’s creation puts the musician — and to some extent the live audience — inside a massive yet nearly invisible music machine. As a result of dimensions, construction, and situation, the Long String Instrument excels at tonal material that balances harmonic complexity with an aesthetic sparsity.
In yesterday’s video, an excerpt of the piece “Harbors,” Fullman’s instrument was complemented by Theresa Wong’s cello, both live and repurposed thanks to a laptop. In the video posted today, which like yesterday’s is sourced from a month-long residency by Fullman at the Lab at the start of 2016, the music is more song-like, less ethereal, more earthy. This association is less because of the number of additional strings (she plays with four members of the makeshift Box Bow Ensemble, which was assembled specifically for the event), and more to do with the folk-like pacing of the piece.
The first half the video (an excerpt of a longer performance titled “Past the Angels”) rolls along at about 89 beats per minute, slowly varying the same central collaborative musical phrase, like each member is strumming the strings of some gargantuan autoharp. And then it begins to dissolve. One member of the ensemble, Crystal Pascucci, breaks from her Box Bow and strums the Long String Instrument and, later, both her own Box Bow and another. The group plays against each other, taking on a more phase-like scenario, in which the phrase is shifting, the downbeat uncertain, the cyclic nature more hallucinatory.
This description is from a note at the Lab site:
“Past the Angels” is a work for an ensemble of four performing on Fullman’s Long String Instrument using the Box Bow, a hand-held wooden tool used to strike the strings in a percussive manner. Seasoned Bay Area composer/performers Mark Clifford, David Douglas, Ryan Jobes and Crystal Pascucci will play the hocketed box bow parts. In this work, Fullman brings together the ethereal and the folk-inspired possibilities of her instrument.
The video was first posted on the Lab’s YouTube channel. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” More from Fullman at ellenfullman.com.
June 5, 2016
The Long String Instrument Adds More Strings
This video doesn’t quite do justice to the structural, installation-scale, architectural beauty that is Ellen Fullman’s 50-plus-foot Long String Instrument in person. But the recording, made on January 31, 2016, at the Lab in San Francisco, certainly captures the music of the spheres — make that music of the parallel linearities — that is Fullman in concert. And there are four bonus strings, in the form of Theresa Wong’s accompanying cello — actually more than four, because Wong is also working with material captured on her laptop. Fullman’s singular instrument, which she’s been at for decades, fills the room both materially and sonically with overtones amid overtones, all those strings sympathetically beading and droning, influencing each other, seeking a common tonal ground. Wong’s cello lends a through line of gently sawed grounding. The piece is titled “Harbors,” and it was part of a month-long residency that Fullman had at the Lab at the start of 2015. A note at the Lab site sets the stage for the performance:
“Harbors”, is a collaboration with composer and cellist Theresa Wong. Pitch material used in the piece is generated from the harmonic series of each of the open strings of the cello and the tones resulting from pressing a string at a harmonic nodal point. Wong and Fullman researched and mapped this palette, selecting subsets as tonal areas of focus for each movement of the piece. A recurring motif is a simple two-note cello phrase: harmonic, then pressed. Wong captures material using Ableton Live! which she can then play as another instrument, layering harmonic possibilities. “Harbors” draws inspiration from the soundscapes as well as the stories and atmospheres that manifest around such bodies of water that propagate exchange.
The video was first posted on the Lab’s YouTube channel. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” More from Fullman at ellenfullman.com. More from Theresa Wong at theresawong.org.
June 3, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
That bright yellow metal sunflower seen at the bottom of the photo is a welcome presence in playgrounds around the city. It is both microphone and speaker. You can talk to someone on the other end, another metal sunflower buried deep (can you find it?) in the play structure. Doing so requires learning not only sleuthing but social coordination. You need to sense when to switch from listening to speaking and back again. It’s too bad the city’s recreation department does not also provide links between playgrounds. Then again it’s quite hot right now in Northern California, which means it’s quite foggy and cold in San Francisco’s Richmond District. At 7:15 this morning you could barely see two blocks ahead. At that moment this felt like the only playground in the city, a playground in the clouds.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 2, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
First visit to the newly, vastly expanded SFMoMA. So much sound in this massive space, this collection of massive and intimate spaces. Way up on the top floor I was happy to see this large-scale triptych from 2007 by Dave Muller (whom I knew when we both lived in Davis, California, in the early 1990s). Titled “cassettestack (A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You),” it’s a collection of detailed acrylic-on-paper magnifications of much-loved tapes. Like his depictions of the spines of vinyl record albums, these paintings emphasize wear, specifically the wear that comes with repeat use. This doesn’t smack of thrift-store detritus. There may be some nostalgia, but there’s no received affection. You can’t hear the recordings, but you know they were heard, and heard often. The tapes range widely in style, fittingly topped by a set from John Cage, who had his own personal take on reworking pre-existing tape to express ideas about the materiality of sound. Of course, Cage worked hands-on with the tape itself.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Disquiet Junto Project 0231: Field Complement
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.
Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of project 0213:
This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 2, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 6, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0231: Field Complement
The Assignment: Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound.
This week’s project’s theme involves how composing relates to memory. It is recommended that you read through all the steps in the project before proceeding to attempt to execute it.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Find a place, preferably outdoors, where you can sit for 5 to 15 minutes without being disturbed. This place should have a fair amount of inherent noise to it, and that noise should be variable, not static — i.e., not the long held drone of an overwhelmingly loud HVAC system, but the bustle of a street corner, or of a playground, or, if weather or other circumstances keep you indoors, perhaps of a busy cafe.
Step 2: Bring with you a portable recording device as well as something on which you can quietly take a small number of written (or typed) notes. You may wish to do a test recording to be certain that your note-taking isn’t part of the audio recording.
Step 3: Settle into the space and get a sense of its sounds. Listening closely.
Step 4: Make a field recording of one full minute, or a little longer, of continuous sound in this place. While recording the sound, use time codes to make note of any memorable sonic instances. Keep track not only of when a sonic instance begins, but also of its duration.
Step 5: Trim the field recording to exactly 60 seconds.
Step 6: Without listening back to the field recording, compose and record a 60-second piece intended to complement it. Refer back to your time-code notes to align composed instances with those real-world instances that you recall having distinguished your field recording. You can use whatever instrumentation you like, but it is recommended that you use no more than one or two instruments. You should not employ any field recordings in your composed piece. Sonically, the “composed” material should be distinct from the field audio.
Step 7: When your composed piece is completed, layer the two tracks together into one new 60-second work. They should be played back at equal volume, more or less. You can adjust a little to achieve the impression of balance between the field recording and the composed work. The only editing you can do is to fade in and out, if that is so desired.
Step 8: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 9: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 10: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Background: Longtime Junto participants/listeners may recognize this as a light revision of a project from back in March 2013.
Deadline: This project was posted in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, June 2, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 6, 2016.
Length: The length of the finished piece should be about 60 seconds.
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 “disquiet0231.” Also use “disquiet0231” 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 231st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound” — 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 at:
Image associated with this project is by Anthony Easton and it is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
June 1, 2016
To Evoke a Sense of Timelessness
Uploaded in 2010, this is something of an artifact, but it’s a beautiful performance, and with barely 5,000 views on YouTube it deserves a broader audience. What it depicts is Copenhagen-based musician Fejld performing three and a half minutes of almost entirely tonal ambient music. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” Part of what makes this notion of ambient performance so interesting is ambient’s popular association with the idea of stasis, of music that is apart from time rather than something that evidences progression or change over time. Now, affect and action aren’t necessarily directly correlated. It can take effort to achieve a semblance of a lack of effort. In each of the live performances in this ever-growing YouTube playlist, various instruments and techniques are employed to evoke a sense of timelessness: to create an illusion of stasis. In this particular video, Fejld is working on the Monome, a grid instrument that’s the work of musicians Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree. As in several other videos noted here recently, only part of the musician’s equipment, however, is on screen. Much as Midera’s work on a dance-oriented Korg gadget belied the essential presence of a reverb unit, and two different guitar pieces focused (literally) on roughly half of the guitar/pedal divide, Fejld’s video emphasizes the Monome but doesn’t feature the item the Monome is mediating, a keyboard synthesizer (the Nord Modular G2) whose sine waves are being adjusted live in the performance. In this case that makes sense, because the Monome is doing all the realtime work. The keyboard is simply sitting still somewhere off camera, receiving and emitting signals.
Video originally posted on YouTube. More from Fejld at soundcloud.com/kuf-records. Fejld’s home page fejld.com is static and the facebook.com/fejld hasn’t been updated since 2014. Fejld is/was Rasmus Nyåker of Copenhagen, Denmark.
May 31, 2016
Space Music for Dance Machines
The latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances” is a six-minute video of ambient music on an instrument not largely associated with ambient music: the Korg Electribe EMX1. The EMX1’s combination of drum machine, sequencer, and synthesizer has made it a dance-music favorite. Midera, instead, does away with beats and processes the EMX1’s tones and textures significantly with another instrument, the Eventide Space, a reverb effects unit. In the video, it’s the EMX1 being handled by Midera throughout, though the Eventide, offscreen, is arguably doing much of the heavy lifting — or, in this aesthetic realm, the light lifting. “It’s all in the Eventide Space,” Midera tells one commenter on YouTube, but clarifies in response to another: “The Space is doing a lot of the work, but the simplicity of the EMX makes it fun to write tracks like this.” It’s a flowing performance, threadbare wave forms ebbing from one to another, Midera occasionally adding a bit of drama with some modulation here or a touch of glitchy flare there, all of which has rightly earned the track several comparisons to Vangelis’ Blade Runner score.
Track posted at the YouTube channel of Midera, aka Michael Dennis Raleigh of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Found via synthtopia.com. More from Midera/Raleigh at soundcloud.com/midera, twitter.com/acemonvw, michaelraleigh.bandcamp.com, and midera.bandcamp.com.
