Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 338
May 7, 2016
Disquiet Mix for Resonance FM (Free Lab Radio)
That waveform below is the shape of an hour-long set I produced for the great Resonance arts broadcast network (home page: resonancefm.com), specifically for its Free Lab Radio program, which is presented by Fari Bradley, who graciously invited me to construct the mix. There’s a post about it at freelabradio.blogspot.com.
I’ll embed the audio once it’s online, but if you’re hanging out today (May 7, 2016), it’s streaming at 11pm London time at resonancefm.com.
The description below is transcribed from the intro I recorded, and below that is the track list with time codes.
This is mix of afternoon music that can be listened to at any time of the day — the work played here, 22 tracks in all by 14 artists, is generally ambient and electronic in nature, and yet it’s fairly rhythmic at the same time, some of the tracks more explicitly so than others. There are fractal algorithms from Erika Nesse, and refrigerator drones by Nystada. There’s elegantly layered sameness by Marcus Fischer and fourth-world blues by Yasuo Akai. Several of the recordings heard here are drawn from the music community called the Disquiet Junto, which I’ve moderated since 2012. The hour starts off with some brief dank techno miniatures by Vladimir Conch. Conch’s pieces are so brief, between 23 and 38 seconds each, that I’ve chosen to repeat a few of them, turning the five short original tracks into a suite of nine that ends where it begins.
00:00
intro
00:48 Vladimir Conch suite
Vladimir Conch: “bit1”
Vladimir Conch: “bit2"
Vladimir Conch: “bit1"
Vladimir Conch: “bit3"
Vladimir Conch: “bit2"
Vladimir Conch: “bit4"
Vladimir Conch: “bit2"
Vladimir Conch: “bit5"
Vladimir Conch: “bit1"
04:21
Cullen Miller: "Euclidean Tropism" (off Simulateur)
06:19
Erika Nesse: "Floating"
08:21
Julsy: "Win"
09:59
Marcus Fischer: "Layerd Sameness - disquiet0223-layeredsameness"
12:14
Stabilo (Speaker Gain Teardrop): "Endurance" (off Ebb and Flow)
21:59
North Americans: "Quinn (Dreams of Germany)"
30:13
Yasuo Akai: "Slow Blues"
38:58
nystada: "Brrrr (disquiet0224-coldembrace)"
41:12
Bassling: "Lashings [disquiet0223-layeredsameness]"
43:32
William Boldenreck: "Idiot Layers (disquiet0223-layeredsameness)"
44:32
Scanner Darkly: "melt and flow [disquiet0223-layeredsameness]"
46:10
Toàn: "अरोड़ा"
52:22
R Beny's "Wildrose Canyon"
55:33
outro
55:46
end
For easy sharing, a direct link to this post is at disquiet.com/resonance1604. More from Resonance’s Free Lab Radio and its presenter, Fari Bradley, at freelabradio.blogspot.com, twitter.com/FariBrad, facebook.com/FreeLabRadio, and mixcloud.com/Resonance.
May 6, 2016
One Chord and the Truth
This is the second one-chord piece of music this week on Disquiet.com, the third and counting if you include the week’s Junto project. What’s going on in this orchestrally grand, yet intimately performed piece, is that guitarist Andy Othling is passing a single chord — as identified in the title, “Sketch #44 – Drone in B Major (05.05.16)” — through an array of effects and in the process producing a gorgeous, shimmery dawn-break flood of atmospheric splendor. What’s great about a performance video like this one is you can observe the thinking process, the gestures that lead to the exaggerated sound, the manner in which small touches yield vast expanses. In the video, long stretches pass during which Othling barely touches his guitar at all, and he probably touches the guitar and his effects in equal amounts. He is, in a manner, as much the audience for the work as he is the producer of the work.
Video originally published at youtube.com. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine “Ambient Performances.” More from Othling, who is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at music.lowercasenoises.com.
May 5, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0227: Treated Chord
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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 5, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 9, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0227: Treated Chord
Record a piece of music in which what changes is the treatment of the notes that comprise a single chord.
Step 1: Choose a chord, any chord.
Step 2: Make a list of the notes that the chord is comprised of.
Step 3: Record each of the notes of the chord as a separate track.
Step 4: Create a piece of music in which each of those tracks plays from start to finish, and that as they play those tracks are manipulated individually (echo, texture, effects, relative volume, etc.).
Background: This project is inspired by the tape-cassette music of Amulets, aka Randall Taylor of Austin, Texas.
Deadline: This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 5, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 9, 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 “disquiet0227.” Also use “disquiet0227” 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 227th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record a piece of music in which what changes is the treatment of the notes that comprise a single chord”) 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 adopted from a photo by Dan Barbus, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
May 2, 2016
A Chord Made of Cassette Tape
This weekend I introduced a new playlist on YouTube. Titled “Ambient Performances,” it’s slowly amassing a collection of videos of people playing ambient music live. There’s an interesting tension there — several tensions, really. The main one, perhaps, is that ambient music often supposes stasis, while performance suggests activity. The videos I’m focusing the playlist on explore the activity required to achieve a semblance of stasis — the motion necessary to give the effect of immobility, you might say. Now, all music takes place over time, so it’s false to suggest ambient music is truly still. What ambient music is is more still than other forms of sonic expression.
This piece, by the Austin, Texas–based Amulets, is a great example of what the “Ambient Performances” playlist is all about. To begin with, it adheres to the two main rules of the playlist:
Rule #1: I’m only including recordings I’d listen to without video.
Rule #2: I’m only including recordings where the video gives some sense of a correlation between what the musician is doing and what the listener is hearing.
What Amulets is up to in the piece is engaging, even as the music being produced provides a sense of disengagement. As described in the brief text accompanying the video, what Amulets has done is record four notes that make up a chord, each note assigned to a different track on the four-track recorder. He then effects change on each of those notes separately as the tape plays. The result is, as he puts it, “a droning, evolving, ambient soundscape.” I recommend using the listenonrepeat.com service to, indeed, play it on repeat.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Amulets, aka Randall Taylor of Austin, Texas, at amulets.bandcamp.com, synthhacker.blogspot.com, and soundcloud.com/amulets.
May 1, 2016
Watching Lee Ranaldo Loop Live
This video shows Lee Ranaldo, of the late Sonic Youth, earlier this year performing a short, two-minute improvisation for looping pedals. It’s a test run of a piece of equipment, a hardware looper made by the company TC Electronic, and I was watching it to consider including the clip in the video playlist of ambient performances I started yesterday. The playlist grew out of my increasing attention to YouTube videos over the past year or so. That attention coincided with my getting into making music, into learning more about the tools and techniques employed by the musicians I write about and increasingly, through the Junto and my projects as a music supervisor, work with.
I spend a lot of time watching video tutorials. Often the music in these tutorials — for hardware and software — isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t remotely what I’m interested in myself trying to play. Given much the equipment I’ve been exploring (the OP-1, a small DJ console, a Monome, and a modular synthesizer rig, for example), it’s often glossy EDM or strict-meter techno that I find myself required to listen to while learning what a given knob on a piece of equipment does. Guitar pedal videos in particular are given over to arpeggio-crazed pop-metal and roots rock. (I have the lowest-cost version of the looper Ranaldo is testing in the video.) Occasionally, though, you’ll find someone like Ranaldo, an outsider to rote pop techniques, in the YouTube feed.
The “ambient performances” playlist began as me working backwards — rather than locating ethereal/ambient/experimental videos in the channels of equipment companies, I would instead look at live performance videos of ethereal/ambient/experimental musicians and pay attention to what equipment they’re using (often enough the comments to a given video will surface such factoids — the Ranaldo video comments, for example, unpack other equipment at his feet). I’m not sure the Ranaldo clip will make the Ambient Performances playlist, as it gets a little raucous toward the end, but no matter. It’s enticing to watch him develop the piece one layer at a time.
Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Ranaldo at leeranaldo.com, twitter.com/leeranaldo, and instagram.com/leeranaldo.
April 30, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
The hook on this doorbell marks it as a unicorn. Many building entryways evidence telltale technological change, such as the addition of a gate, the replacement of a knob, the widening of a passage. In this case the doorbell retains the vestigial communication appendage on which once hung a mouthpiece. Several generations have passed since it would have been in use. Minus that hook (which I tried to photograph at an angle), the circle above it would be mistaken for a two-way speaker/microphone, whereas it was only ever used for the former.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
A YouTube Playlist of Ambient Performances
This “Ambient Performances” set is a playlist-in-progress of live performance videos on YouTube of ambient music by a wide variety of musicians using a wide variety of equipment.
Rule #1: I’m only including recordings I’d listen to without video.
Rule #2: I’m only including recordings where the video gives some sense of a correlation between what the musician is doing and what the listener is hearing.
Rule #3: By and large, the new additions to the playlist will simply be, reverse-chronologically, the most recent tracks added, but I’ll be careful to front-load a few choice items at the beginning.
YouTube proved frustrating the past day. I tried again and again to paste the URL for the “Ambient Performances” playlist into Twitter, and every time I did it broke. That is, the link in the resulting tweet wouldn’t work. Eventually a Twitter-friend suggested I share Twitter’s own shorthand URL, so if you’re interested in sharing the list, try this: bit.ly/1rHFC9l.
As a side note, for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, I have two different URLs for the same account. Perhaps it’s early-adopter blues:
April 29, 2016
This Week in Sound: Mapping Silence
A lightly annotated clipping service (fairly brief edition this week):
RJDJ Return: This video is just a tease, but it’s a promising one. The makers of the RJDJ augmented-reality audio app have a new app in the works, named Hear, that processes everyday sounds through filters. There’s been much talk of an “Instagram for sound.” This has a sense of that wish being fulfilled. Video found via Ashley Elsdon’s palmsounds.net. (Post-script: since this note first appeared in the This Week in Sound email newsletter, the app has gone live on iTunes’s App Store. Unfortunately the app is not, for the time being, compatible with my fifth-generation iPod Touch, so I haven’t had a chance to use it yet.)
Sound Studies: Geeta Dayal interviewed Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, who is teaching a course at MIT called “Introduction to Sound Creations.” Says St. Werner, “I think it’s great that the visual-art world has embraced sound more, but there is the risk of that becoming a novelty. There’s also a great chance for sound, to see it as its own art form. It doesn’t need anything that makes it agreeable. That’s the great opportunity we see at the moment.”
Mapping Silence: At the Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham writes about a map commissioned last year by the National Park Service “of what the United States would sound like if you were to remove all traces of human activity from the picture,” pictured above. (Via Steve Ashby)
Wainwright Syndrome: Slightly removed from sound, though as always sound is vibration so buzzing is sound, and phones buzzing are doubly sound since the buzz is a stand-in for a ring(tone): at nymag.com, Cari Romm writes about phantom phone vibrations: “These imagined sounds and sensations are examples of pareidolia, the phenomenon of perceiving a pattern within randomness where no pattern exists (seeing the man on the moon, for example, or hearing satanic messages in a record played backwards). For this particular pareidolia, there are a few things that make some people more susceptible than others.”
Always On: As someone who is rarely a foot from his phone, I still find the voice activation aspect of phones alarming in a privacy sense, but Google keeps upping the ante: “Google Announces Voice Access Beta—Control Your Phone Completely by Voice” (androidpolice.com).
Pre-Acoustic: If you’re near University of Copenhagen, there’s an interesting symposium happening there in two days, on April 21: “The field of sound studies often gets restricted to sound practices, listening experiences and auditory dispositives after the advent of modern acoustics, established as an academic subdiscipline of physics in the 19th century. Yet unsurprisingly, auditory knowledge was present and impactful in cultures of the middle ages, the renaissance, and early enlightenment”: soundstudieslab.org.
Spotify Protip: Since I’ve been on and off tracking my use of Spotify (following the demise of the Rdio service), here’s a Spotify protip. If you’re having issues with the offline sync (which lets you store tracks or albums on a device, as I do on my iPod Touch, which is the primary way I use Spotify), the issue may be that you have too many devices associated with your account. I had four. Once I reduced it to three everything worked fine.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the April 19, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Sarah Davachi on Old Synthesizers and New Ways of Listening
So, on Monday I wrote about the drones of Valiska. On Tuesday I wrote about the old-school synthesizer explorations of Sarah Davachi, focusing on her new album, Dominions. After posting that piece, I came to learn that the two musicians, coincidentally, know each other and are, in fact, playing a show together on May 5. On Wednesday I (purposefully) wrote about one of the musicians also playing a set on that same bill. And on Thursday I learned that Davachi is the guest on the latest edition, #36, of the Why We Listen podcast — furthering the coincidence factor, because I was the guest on #35.
The podcast is hosted by musician Marc Kate, who listens to and discusses three (or so) pieces of music with each guest. It’s a genius format to focus the podcast listener’s attention on Kate’s subject, because we listen to him listen. Davachi brought with her Dennis Wilson’s “Mexico,” James Tenney’s “Critical Band,” and John Frusciante’s “Untitled #11” and “Untitled #12.” In addition to talking about the pieces, Davachi talks about her own performance and compositional work. Subjects include moving from piano to synthesizer, working at a musical instrument museum, and bringing her “fidelity standards” down. There’s a great moment when she talks about how ambient music makes listeners uncomfortable because they don’t know — lost in the timeless-ness of it, in contrast with the attention-deficit nature of much pop culture — “what to do with their hands.”
The podcast is available at whywelisten.wordpress.com and on iTunes at apple.com. This link goes to the MP3 for direct download. More from Sarah Davachi, who is based in Montréal, Québec, at sarahdavachi.com.
April 28, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0226: Bucky Ball
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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 2, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0226: Bucky Ball
Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller.
This week’s project is based on an imaginary scenario. The electronic music of legendary
architect, inventor, and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller is being compiled. You will make music for that compilation — music you imagine Buckminster Fuller might himself have composed. Thanks to C. Reider (actually, a dream that Reider had) for inspiring the project.
Step 1: Imagine there will be a collection of the electronic music of legendary
architect, inventor, and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller.
Step 2: Compose and record a piece of music that you imagine Fuller might have created.
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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 28, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 2, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you, though between two and five 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 “disquiet0226.” Also use “disquiet0226” 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 226th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller”) 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:
Project inspired by a dream that C. Reider of Vuzh Music had:
Image of album cover created for this project is by Brian Scott of Boon Design:
