Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 336
May 20, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Saw this on a car bumper this morning, sticker for a radio station where I used to DJ.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
May 19, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0229: Fourth Worldizing
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 shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, May 19, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 23, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0229: Fourth Worldizing
Use a favorite trick of legendary sound designer Walter Murch.
Background: At 2:14 in the following YouTube clip of an interview about the concept of “worldizing” with sound-design legend Walter Murch he plays a bit of a movie, THX-1138, and then describes the process of recording something to get an exaggerated sense of the space in which it was recorded: “If you are in an ordinary sized room and play the voice at four times speed … and you record it on the other tape recorder, also running at this very fast speed, then when you play the other recorder back at normal speed you get the original sound but you get the space of the room as if it was four times larger than it really is.” (Just to expand the idea a bit, the project’s title, “Fourth Worldizing,” is a nod to musician Jon Hassell.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_py6j...
These are the steps for the project:
Step 1: Using the trick Murch has provided, make something of it.
Step 2: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 3: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 4: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted in shortly after noon, California time, on Thursday, May 19, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 23, 2016
Length: The length is up to you, though between one and three minutes feels 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 “disquiet0229.” Also use “disquiet0229” 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 229th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Fourth Worldizing: Use a favorite trick of legendary sound designer Walter Murch”) at:
Thanks to Steve Ashby (ashbysounds.com) and Jakob Thiesen (jakobthiesen.flavors.me) for beta testing it.
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 from the film THX-1138.
May 18, 2016
A Click Here, a Tone There
Joshua Saddler, who records as ioflow, takes delicate sounds in this short, eminently loopable track, and from them ekes out plaintive, elegant mixes of texture and tone, of gentle percussives and subdued tension. The piece is titled “Clouds and Wind, Shifting,” and it very much has an elemental feel to it. It follows a pace of sorts, but there’s nothing trenchant about the beat or pulse of it. It just proceeds, a click here, a tone there, sometimes overlapping, sometimes left on their own, preceded by silence or followed by a sudden, yet still quite intimate and fragile, convergence.
Saddler recently expanded his instrument collection with the start of a modular synthesizer, and this track is his first ever recording with that equipment. The full list of equipment is: lap harp, ebow, field recordings, pedals, and modular effects. He employed what he described as a “‘blind’ recording process,” which involves recording several tracks separately and only hearing them back in unison when they’re all complete.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ioflow. More from ioflow/Saddler, who is based in San Diego, California, at ioflow.bandcamp.com, twitter.com/ioflow, vimeo.com/ioflow, and instagram.com/ioflow.
May 17, 2016
Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree of Monome (Live Video)
It’s not common to post the same audio here twice, but I’m making an exception for the half-hour concert by Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree, developers of the Monome grid music interface. Back in March I linked to the SoundCloud file of the live performance (“What the Creators of the Monome Sound Like as Live Performers”), and updated that page in April when a higher grade recording went up. But now there’s full, affectionately edited video of the set. It’s at vimeo.com. I attended the concert, which was held at a small shop, Better, out on Balboa Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District, and in the review I mention in particular this social component of Crabtree’s employment of handheld shakers: “He’d shake one for awhile, and then pass it to someone in the audience to continue the pattern. Each person became an extension of what Crabtree had started, but then altered it a little, whether through the conscious decision to contribute a musical idea, or simply because their sense of rhythm differed from his.” That occurs about two minutes into this footage.
The video was shot by the Mill Valley, California–based duo Fabián Aguirre and Maya Pisciotto, who go by theunderstory.co. More on Better at betterforliving.co. More on the Monome, Cain, and Crabtree at monome.org.
May 16, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
It’s almost certain that the lower-right button is D, but as for B and C, that’s something of a guessing game. The orientation of buttons on doorbells can be confusing. For example, often in two-level buildings the lower-number address is on the bottom, so the numbers align with the vertical hierarchy of the living quarters. Sometimes the buttons in a four-spot setup like this one will run top/bottom, sometimes left side/right side. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them run clockwise or counterclockwise, but such a scenario is likely out there, given how haphazard many urban-apartment doorbells are. That is all presuming there are actually B, C, and D apartments in the building anymore. Maybe the whole place was taken over and turned into a mini-mansion: living large while hiding in plain, determinedly indistinct sight.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Alvin Curran Finds His (Dad’s) Trombone
Alvin Curran, the composer (b. 1938), lost his dad’s trombone, only to have it relocated decades later. In a New York Times essay this past weekend, “The Trombone Comes Home,” Curran tells the story of the instrument’s role in his childhood education and activities, before he switched to piano and, later still, composition. He also tells the story of its reappearance. The discovery provides an emotional end to the tale:
I let it sit for a few days to acclimatize. The with my wife, Susan, snapping pictures I carefully removed the layers of wrappings one at a time with a kitchen knife — and then opened the latches to reveal an unpolished silent brass corpse inside, smelling exactly the same as it did when I surreptitiously opened that case for the first time some 70 years earlier in Providence.
Included alongside the essay is a nearly two-minute composition by Curran, “The Lost Trombone.” It’s described, succinctly, as follows:
A composition built on a single B flat note played on the recovered trombone by the author, electronically processed and produced with Angelo-Maria Farro.
For unclear reasons the essay itself makes no direct connection to the piece, and in no way gets into its existence, let alone its composition and recording process. It’s a riveting miniature of repetition, the threadbare note echoed and layered, its held tone circling round and round, building if not to an orchestral impact, then at least that of a sizable chamber ensemble. You enter into the weathered tone, much as Curran himself was taken by its accrued meaning and experience:
For me, it was the essence of unabashed musical Americana, its mouthpiece an amalgam of chopped liver, Mom’s tuna salad, kosher hot dogs, kasha and planetary garlic breath fused with silver and steel and a century of house mold.
The audio isn’t embeddable, so you’ll need to click through to the nytimes.com site to listen in full. More from Curran at alvincurran.com.
May 15, 2016
Feedback Loops from a Cork, Ireland, Print Shop
Claire Guerin of Cork, Ireland, participated in an eight-hour sound performance called Feedback Loops last month. She’s posted a short (five-minute) snapshot of the proceedings. It’s a brooding, percussion-and-drone segment that is, toward the close, intruded upon by dastardly vocalizing, the dark foreboding utterances of a demonic presence. The event took place on April 17 at the Cork Community Print Shop. There’s additional video and documentation at the event’s Facebook page.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/claire-guerin. More from Guerin at claireguerin.wordpress.com. More on the Guesthouse (“a visual artist-led initiative whose objective is to create a place for production, meeting and cross-practice peer exchange that includes various forms of public discourse and encounter” that she helped found) at theguesthouse.ie. Guerin is part of Queef with Laney Mannion.
May 14, 2016
Ambient Forged on Hip-hop Pads
The MPC series, from the electronics manufacturer Akai, is best known for its employment in hip-hop, but tools have purposes beyond their initial intention, even beyond their general use. In the hands of Sander van Dijck, of the Netherlands, the beat machine becomes a trigger system for percolating ambient music. This is a performance video not a tutorial, so it doesn’t begin to document the preparation that went into the sounds we hear. The guitar and keyboard in the background hint at some of the origin points, and in addition there are snatches of spoken information that balance the music’s dreaminess with a certain amount of portent. The beauty of a performance video like this is correlating the movement with the sound. So much is happening in the service of such a placid affect, the individual cues eventually lost in the full mix of activity. The track is credited to van Dijck’s Casilofi moniker, and is titled “SNDSKP” (that is, “soundscape”).
It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” Entries in the Disquiet Downstream post series are usually of recent vintage but as I’ve been fleshing out the Ambient Performances material I’ve let the time restriction relax; this video is dated almost four years ago, to July 14, 2016, though the image filter suggests it’s from the 1970s.
Video originally posted on youtube.com. More from Sander van Dijck at soundcloud.com/casilofi and casilofi.bandcamp.com.
The Politics of Doorbells
A friend asked: Has anybody caught you taking pics of their door buzzer? And if you do get caught, how would you explain yourself?
I answered: One person has. I was taking the photo one morning of the buzzer at a generic, undistinguished apartment building. Someone was backing their car out of the multi-tenant garage. The person for some reason got out of their car before it was fully backed out, I think maybe to see if anyone was walking on the sidewalk, and then saw me. Instantly I was asked, quite anxiously, “What do you think you’re doing?” The person was upset. I looked back and said, “I’m taking a picture of the doorbell.” The person instantly calmed and said, “Oh, OK. Thanks. Have a good day.” I have some rules about the doorbells I photograph, and among them are anonymity — not only do I never post photos that show clearly evident names, I don’t even take photos of doorbells that have identifiable names clearly on them. The second rule is addresses. If the full address is on it, I don’t take the picture. Those two rules alone keep at bay a lot of the interpersonal weirdness (the perceived invasion of privacy in taking a picture of something that by definition is fully public). I’m also pretty careful that no one is watching when I do it. That morning when the driver got upset with me was a bad call on my part. The garage door was already open. I should have seen that coming.
May 13, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
This is the doorbell at the entrance to a 1959 San Francisco residence by architect William Wurster currently for sale for $7.5 million. Presumably the tiny little black circle that isn’t an exposed screw and is nestled right above the off-the-shelf plastic addition is the original button, which at some point ceased functioning.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
