Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 339

The Blur of Music Discovery

I’ve written a bit about my confusion regarding the continued fortitude of the word “discovery” as it relates to automated, generally algorithm-derived music recommendations on streaming services. My sense is that the primary beneficiary of “discovery” is less the individuals that hear the music than the companies vying for those individuals’ attention, and not so much for their attention as, far more neutrally, their presence on the given service. There’s a difference between attention and competitive benefit. Apple Music doesn’t really care much if you’re really listening closely; it just cares that you’re using Apple Music and not using Spotify or Deezer or Google Play Music or another service.

There’s a long-running quip about how “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” but in fact writing about music is, as it relates to many people’s listening habits, more like writing about wallpaper, or writing about perfume, or writing about lighting, or writing about something else that describes a largely inattentive, passive presence in one’s life, something more akin to casual cultural affinity than to strong feelings, let alone to matters of art.

In any case, this comes to mind because yesterday I wrote about Dominions, the phenomenal new album of synthesis by Sarah Davachi, and the day prior I wrote about “Loop1,” a track of restrained drones by Valiska (aka Krzysztof Sujata). What I didn’t realize until after I posted the Davachi write-up is that Davachi and Valiska know each other — and in fact are playing a concert together on May 5 at a place called Good Luck Bar in Calgary, Canada. Now, I know for a fact that the Davachi has been in my to-write-about bookmark folder for awhile, so it wasn’t simply a matter of having written about “Loop1” by Valiska, I then happened upon Davachi. And I’ve written about Valiksa, a longtime Junto participant, at least as long ago as 2012, so neither was it a matter of my Davachi listening having introduced me to him. In any case, I have no idea how this coincidence occurred, but the blur gets, innocently, at the myriad ways that musicians connect with each other and with audiences, leading to awareness that can be difficult to trace back, even if your browser’s cache and history remain intact. The pair’s music has little in common, and yet there is this association.

Perhaps the two posts in a row simply is a coincidence, but today’s post isn’t. When I mentioned the pairing on Twitter I got a reply from the third act on the Good Luck Bar bill, a duo called SH-2000, which consists of Barnaby Bennett and Patrick Whitten. It was Bennet who wrote to me (“maybe you can write about us in SH-2000 to round out the bill coverage? ;)”). They have a recent album out, Shhh (2015) that’s available for stream and purchase. Be sure, as well, to check out this video, titled “Oblique Quantumization,” by Bennett (and M. Geddes Gengras). It randomly plays through a variety of brief combinations of blippy synthesis and test-pattern visuals. The combination is quite hallucinogenic, at times disturbing, in a Saturday-morning pre-cartoon surveillance-state sort of way, and at other times quite elegant and entrancing:

More on the video at barnabybennett.snack.ws. More from Bennett at soundcloud.com/barnaby-bennett.

The Synthesis of Sarah Davachi

Sarah Davachi’s phenomenal new album, Dominions, was recorded largely on old-model synthesizers and something known as the Orchestron, an instrument from the 1970s that plays from a library of sounds that are stored as an optical recording. The album’s five tracks explore various territories, among the more sedate being the churchly “Ordinal,” in which held chords shift to an indeterminate meter as various notes are introduce and removed. “Burgundy” begins in a similar space, its burgeoning atmospheric drone resembling early Terry Riley or La Monte Young, but as it proceeds it gets more and more busy, coming to sound like a symphony of car horns. It’s as if the listener first hears it from afar, several blocks away, and then slowly approaches, and by approaching comes to understand the chaos that was mistaken, from a distance, as calm.

Dominions by Sarah Davachi

The opening piece, “Feeler,” has the sound of truncated vocal snippets, the extended vowel given texture by the endless tiny appearances of a seam where the end of the sample meets with the start of it replaying. Beneath this is a layer of texture, maybe tape, maybe vinyl, maybe just the room in which it was recorded. Like “Burgundy” it gains mass and detail as it moves forward. Those are just three of the tracks of Dominion’s five. The whole thing is quite strong.

Album available at sarahdavachi.bandcamp.com. More from Sarah Davachi, who is based in Montréal, Québec, at sarahdavachi.com.

The Sonic Artifacts of Threshold Breach

Valiska is Krzysztof Sujata of Calgary, Canada, and “Loop1” is a gentle, restrained drone. It is part synthesizer, and seemingly part vocalized, and it grows with intensity until it risks being shattered. It ends where it starts, a floating whir, not unlike one of Robert Fripp’s tape loops filigrees, but in between it goes from gentle to lush to dense to the point where the tension frays the sounds themselves. At around three and a half minutes into the nearly six-minute run the repeated melodic line is superimposed with static, with noisy scintillate, with strong feedback. It’s as if the loop tools have been pushed passed their capacity, and we experience that threshold breach as a series of sonic artifacts. The noise subsides in time for the gentle aspect of the loop to re-emerge, but it sounds different now, the noise having receded but its memory coloring how the subsequent the quietness is experienced.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/valiska. More from Valiska at valiska.com and twitter.com/TheValiska.

The Pure Data of Svetlana Maraš

You have to click through to the blog of Svetlana Maraš to hear her recent piece “Nymphae,” but don’t mistake that non-embeddable scenario for the work of someone who’s overly concerned about proprietorship. Maras, who is based in Belgrade, Serbia, has more than one SoundCloud page, and posts audio frequently. For “Nymphae,” not only has she uploaded the entrancing, minute-long sample of fractured glistening to stream, she’s also posted for free download the underlying tools anyone can use to accomplish the same sonic ends. Well, anyone with a copy of Pd (Pure data, a “real-time graphical dataflow programming environment,” itself freely downloadable), and the skills to employ it. The tools come in the form of a patch, which looks like this:

She describes the project as follows:

Nymphaea is one in a set of 7 works made under the title Ethereal Information. These works are Pure data patches, and they are generative sound works functioning by the rules of partially fixed algorithms. Each of the patches leaves the space for user’s input that will influence certain aspects of the work. Patches can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution license, as part of other works, in installations, galleries, public spaces or wherever you find them suitable. These works are highly minimalistic. They praise the simplicity of production and effectiveness of realization. They are to be appreciated for their audible but as well visual content that is in this case the structural element of the work that reveals work’s internal characteristics.

More from Maraš at svetlanamaras.com. I wrote about her work previously in February 2015, regarding sound design she’d been working on for a film that never saw completion. That audio is still online. The image up top is from an interview with Maraš by Theresa Beyer, published in 2014 at norient.com. Pure data is available at puredata.info.

The Intention of Pace

The question of whether or not ambient music can include beats obscures an arguably deeper question about effect. That question: Can music that sets one’s heart pacing, even if the sounds themselves are largely beat-less, still be considered ambient? On a track titled “Tourbillon,” Suss Müsik tests those circumscriptions, at least for the first minute or so, which is pure haze, but a sheer haze that is pitched high and given an intense sense of forward motion — a suggested motion that is confirmed soon after, when a pulsing, phasing piano line takes over. It’s blissful as the clouds, certainly, but those clouds pass in quick succession. You’re aloft, true, but will you ever come down? Then again, would you even want to, if this is the experience? The title of the track, which comes from clockmaking, is the French word for whirlwind.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/suss-musik. More from Suss Müsik at sussmusik.com.

What Sound Looks Like

There are hokey antiquated signs one buys at in-name-only nickel/dime (ye olde) shoppes in historic districts, and there are, you know, actual old things that are defined as old because they linger well past their own era and deep into the alien present. The rust on the wiring here marks the sign as something that may have been hokey once upon a time but that has at least begun to earn the right to be thought of as, itself, old. (Those doorbells, yellow like the teeth of a life-long if not long-lived smoker, further testify to the passing of time.) That is to say, it carries some prohibitive weight. The admonition against not only “peddlers” but the more ambiguous “agents” and the now fairly obscure “solicitors” is enough to make all but the most self-confident of visitors second guess themselves before daring to push one of those buzzers.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

The Close Parenthesis of Doom

Thanks at least in part to Sunn O))) the close parenthesis has come to typographically symbolize, to visualize, the sound of a deep, rumbling, eschatological drone. Daniel Lechner and Robert Axthammer know this well, which is why their doom drone duo act is called not simply Deep but .(((DEEP))). “Breath,” the third track on the pair’s SoundCloud page, is 15 minutes of intensely quavering doom drones, layered for much of the middle third with the sort of broken-glottal vocalese associated with orc mating rituals and the blackest of black metal. It’s an impressive feat. The orcs return later, but only after a short glimpse of the ethereal, thanks to a more angelic if still deeply subsumed choral part. This is dense stuff. It also has an impressively extended fade, not just the drone volume being pitched down, but amid that toxic denouement new fears arise, crackling and churning. Turn off the lights, play it loud, and let it seep into the carpet and into your skin.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/deep-doom. The band .(((DEEP))). is based on Traunstein, Germany. Track found via a repost by the soundcloud.com/anarchy4bits account.

Disquiet Junto Project 0225: Serial Composition

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 21, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 25, 2016.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0225: Serial Composition
Sight read a late-1940s painting by Argentine artist Lidy Prati as a graphically notated score.

This week’s project takes as its subject a painting recently posted by art critic Blake Gopnik. Seen here, it dates from around 1948, he writes, and is by the Argentine artist Lidy Prati (1921-2008). In his description, Gopnik references Piet Mondrian, whose music is often associated with musical scores. Both the grid-like structure of Prati’s piece and its title, “Serial Composition,” suggest it as the subject of sonic investigation. Gopnik connects the piece to computers: “[I]t speaks of a system that can generate them. Computers and their algorithms seem on this painting’s mind, at a moment when computers still filled entire rooms with vacuum tubes.” (Note that as I was researching this project I came across work by Marcelo Gutman, who has created colorful score tributes to Prati.)

These are the steps for this week’s project.

Step 1: View the circa-1948 painting “Serial Composition” by Lidy Prati at this URL:

http://blakegopnik.com/post/142806762364

Step 2: Consider it as a musical score. Think about the sort of musical composition that “Serial Composition” might be.

Step 3: Record yourself performing “Serial Composition” as a graphically notated musical score.

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, April 21, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 25, 2016.

Length: The length is up to you, though between two 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 “disquiet0225-serialcomposition.” Also use “disquiet0225-serialcomposition” 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 225th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Sight read a late-1940s painting by Argentine artist Lidy Prati as a graphically notated score”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0225/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

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:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Image originally posted (and viewable in larger scale) at

http://blakegopnik.com/post/142806762364

What Sound Looks Like

If you’re visiting this apartment building, you may wonder what sets apart apartment #4. Did the button for #4 simply die in the main interface, requiring this makeshift, unit-specific alteration? Was there a dramatic, gossip-ridden falling out with the neighbors, to such an extent that the dwellers of #4 felt the need to extricate themselves entirely from the hardwired entryway expression of their building’s community? Or was the separate button an attempt, on the part of the landlord, during a real-estate dry spell when #4 was long vacant, to promote it as a special unit, perhaps not with its own elevator playing Satie, but with its own distinct doorbell and accompanying signage?

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

What Sound Looks Like

Got to see the movie I did music supervision and sound design for on a real screen tonight, the San Francisco premier, a packed house at the Clay. Wish my partners in sound crime (Marcus Fischer, composer and fellow sound designer; Ted Laderas, featured cellist; and Paula Daunt, remixer) could have been there.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.