Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 340
April 20, 2016
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.
“Midnight Frames”
This is a minute of sound recorded just past midnight and then subsequently reworked digitally:
The audio plays on three separate channels, the source tracks slightly out of sync, each channel being muted at random, with a little live, real-time human interaction on my part to nudge the listenability and sense of overall composition. That is, “human interaction” distinct from the human interaction involved in the process of setting up the whole random-mute system.
It’s an experiment in making something just using the iPad. The mixer is the iOS app AUM and the mute is being triggered in an iPad app called Xynthesizr. There is a bit of effects being implemented on the three channels. One is being lent an echoing depth, thanks to the Dahlia Delay app. One is getting lightly distorted, thanks to the Saffron Saturator app. And one is being lightly tweaked with some filters internal to the AUM app.
I have a lot to learn about all these apps. This began as me trying to get the AUM muting triggered by the Fugue Machine app, but that inter-app functionality evaded me for more than one channel. The Xynthesizr worked fairly smoothly, largely because someone introduced me to the MIDI Wrench app, which let me figure out the note values of what’s being emitted by Xynthesizr, so I could assign them directly to be interpreted as on/off signals by AUM. All of which said, I’m still fumbling about with the tools, finding my way. The image accompanying this track is a screenshot of the AUM app with the three channels in view:
This is a reworking of a single minute of audio recorded by Forelight. The original track is titled “Midnight {disquiet0160-oneminutepastmidnight}.” It was part of the 160th weekly Disquiet Junto project. That 160th project was the first in an ongoing series, collectively titled One Minute Past Midnight, that explore nocturnal ambience.
The original source track by Forelight is at soundcloud.com/forelight.
More on the One Minute Past Midnight series here: oneminutepastmidnight.com.
April 19, 2016
Maria Chavez’s Turntables in Houson
The talented avant-turntablist Maria Chavez performed recently at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, which has uploaded a nearly seven-minute video of her playing. She has a one-turntable setup, in which she samples the records — 7″s and 12″s, one of the latter beautifully transparent — in realtime and layers and mixes the material as she proceeds, with an emphasis on broken beats and surface noise. Video posted at the museum’s youtube.com channel. It was recorded on March 17, 2016. Chavez is from Houston originally, having been born in Lima, Peru, and now lives in New York City. More from her at soundcloud.com/maria-chavez, mariachavez.org,
twitter.com/chavezsayz, and
instagram.com/chavezsayz.
What Sound Looks Like
This is one of those haphazard urban residential fixes that, once you get over marveling at the, shall we say, low-rent implementation, begs a whole new layer of questioning. First some answers. There is, sadly, no mysterious Xth floor where a neighborhood superhero hones vigilante skills and bones up on all the local spoken languages. There is no designation “X” in cutting-edge real-estate jargon for a premium flat that is neither basement nor penthouse. No, it’s simply a matter of the 5 buzzer having died and been moved to the bottom of the interface. Now the questions. Does the (non-superheroic) inhabitant of apartment 5 warn visiting friends about the confusing entrance situation? Was it really too difficult to take a wire from a lower button and extend it to where the 5 button was formerly situated? Did the landlord know in advance that this might happen, and for that reason purchase a doorbell system with more bells than the building has dwellings? Or, perhaps, was it bought broken at a discount and installed this way from the very start?
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
April 18, 2016
The App Developer Prepares a Performance
Chris Carlson has a performance coming up. This is of note because Carlson is the developer of an iOS app called Borderlands Granular. Carlson’s app allows for a gestural, elegant, detailed exploration of the sounds within sounds. He has posted pre-performance test runs of his approach (the track’s title is “Pigment Library”), which in this case involves guitar chords as the source audio. The result is at times more orchestral than it is rock, more the jubilant yet anxious chaos of strings tuning up than the strumming, however fierce, of a six-string. You can hear moments of guitar-like presence, like the touching of fingers to taut metal, the bending of the wires. But more often than not Carlson is deep inside the guitar, the cloud-like structures of his Borderlands app unfolding the source material, laying bare and layering its inherent textures.
Below is an image of what a Borderlands looks like in action:
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/cloudveins. More from Carlson at cloudveins.bandcamp.com, modulationindex.com, and borderlands-granular.com.
April 16, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Three apartments, one buzzer. Perhaps only the center home gets access to the doorbell. Perhaps all three share it, sort of like the party lines of old, where you picked up the building phone either to request a line out from the operator, or to overhear a neighbor’s conversation without the hassle of holding an empty glass up to the adjoining wall.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
April 15, 2016
Michel Banabila’s Early Works
I was asked by Rotterdam-based musician Michael Banabila to write liner notes for his forthcoming release of archival material, Early Works / Things Popping Up from the Past, which is due out on June 3 (vinyl, CD, digital) via Bureau B / Tapete Records. Four tracks of its eleven total are already available for streaming as part of the pre-order page on Bandcamp:
Early works / Things popping up from the past – CD & vinyl LP by Michel Banabila
Here is my essay:
“Michel Banabila’s Early Works”
Numerous threads run through the music of Michel Banabila, whose contemporary work ranges from adventurous electronic cross-breeding of chamber instrumentation, to industrial rhythmic sampling, to outward-bound modular synthesis, to deeply elegiac drones.
What is remarkable about this collection of early pieces is just how many of Banabila’s ongoing fascinations had already taken root, when he was barely half his current age. The child apparently is not merely the father to the man; he is also his music tutor. In particular, there are extended sequences of neoclassical loveliness and dense patches of Fourth World exploration that, matters of specific equipment aside, could have been recorded yesterday. Except that they weren’t.
The classical activity heard here constitutes a romantic attachment to the Old World, filtered through a contemporary sense of proportion. Banabila’s piano, its atmospheric gestures bringing to mind the proto-minimalism of Erik Satie, echoes with a disarming simplicity. The sweetness of the tune masks his determined compositional focus on loop-like repetitions, on the ever so slight variations between pulses, on training the listener’s ear to hear inside the notes, between the notes, to be receptive to matters that are more tactile than tonal. The melody could easily be an additional hundred years old — except for fact that the refined patterning is something that likely only could have been pursued in light of the music of Michael Nyman and Philip Glass. Similarly, a solo harmonium performance circles around a song that could be a maudlin street-corner serenade in a benighted district of a nameless Eastern European city — and yet it has a self-consciousness of the instrument’s breath-like quality that marks it, however subtly, as modern music.
And, of course, this isn’t modern music. This is music several decades after the fact. It is no longer of our time. The equipment on which it was made, notably an early sampler, was limited in various ways, key among them the relatively circumspect set of capabilities, especially in terms of memory storage, and the lack of received performance techniques. The equipment was simple and it was new, and neither factor limited Banabila’s ambition; to the contrary, the tools concentrated his imagination.
If the classical pieces represent the Old World as framed by the new, then the more recognizably “electronic” work here is likewise most at home in a fictional place, an idealized zone. That zone is a quiet neighborhood in the Fourth World, to borrow Jon Hassell’s terminology, one in which digital tools render something that is, for all its technological dependency, ultimately a form of folk music — an otherworldly folk music for another time. At that time and in that place, a percussive guitar figure lends momentum to ethereal synthesized choral vocals. Fidgety percussion plays amid a fierce but restrained guitar line (there are echoes of Laurie Anderson and Adrian Belew). An ambiguous and elongated drone, thick with subliminal activity, beautiful in its toxic anxiety, suggests dire activity on the horizon.
And yet the horizon wasn’t dire. Quite the contrary, what was ahead for Banabila was a long string of releases, a healthy and well-documented career in which so many of these individual threads have been provided time and space to have entire records dedicated to their pursuit. This album of archival works is a document, and what it documents is the continuity inherent in Banabila’s music. It is a map in musical form, and the path it traces is one that crisscrosses back and forth between the Old World and the Next.
April 14, 2016
This Week in Sound: The Hum
A lightly annotated clipping service (fairly brief edition this week):
The Hum: To say that Colin Dickey’s essay in The New Republic on the perception of persistent hums connects existential concern about industrialization with the ineffable trauma of tinnitus would be to understate the historical range of the study, which moves from the “aeolian sound” reported by an 1828 traveler in the Pyrenees to contemporary Facebook support groups. And it’s thick with interviews, including one with Glen MacPherson, a teacher who founded the World Hum Map and Database Project. Writes Dickey at one point, “As I listened to MacPherson’s story of a mysterious noise, I couldn’t help but notice a sign tacked to the wall behind him, written in the big, gentle hand of a kindergarten teacher: ‘Be kind, be safe, be listening.’” (Via Drew Daniel and Dominic Pettman.) For further reading, I suggest the work on aelectrosonics by Douglas Kahn, as well as field recordist Gordon Hempton’s depiction of electric-grid hums as “the American mantra.”
Ne Plus Ultra: And in tangential news, “New research from the University of Southampton indicates that the public are being exposed, without their knowledge, to airborne ultrasound” (sonicstudies.org).
Warning Warning: Photo by itinerant (sound) artist Jeff Kolar near Stinson Beach, in Marin County, during a visit from Chicago. It’s a visual warning sign in advance of a sonic warning:
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the April 12, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Disquiet Junto Project 0224: Cold Embrace
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 14, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 18, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0224: Cold Embrace
Make music with the sound of a refrigerator as its foundation.
This week’s project was inspired, in part, by an April 13, 2016, talk that the artist Jeff Kolar gave to students in the class on sound that I teach.
Step 1: Record the sound of a refrigerator, preferably the one in your own kitchen.
Step 2: Listen to the recording to get a sense of the hum, the tonality, and the rhythm or rhythms inherent in that audio.
Step 3: Create an original piece of music augmenting that tonality and rhythm. It’s preferable you simple add material to the field recording, but you can also use the field recording as source material.
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 14, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 18, 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 “disquiet0224-coldembrace.” Also use “disquiet0224-coldembrace” 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 224th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Make music with the sound of a refrigerator as its foundation.”) 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:
The image associated with this project is by Timothy Allen and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
April 13, 2016
A Sweet Affectlessness
The word “ambient” means different things to different people in different contexts. Even though the elegant “Refound Theme” by Jonathan Brodsky is built around rhythmic material, in particular a semi-randomly plucked thumb piano, those cycles of percussion become almost fog-like as they proceed. There’s no certain beat to the beat, as it were. It’s a slender constellation that’s ever shifting, albeit slightly, gently, never drawing attention to itself — a quality that is at the essence of ambient.
The metal and wood produce sounds that suggest bell tones and bicycles, caged birds and archaic gears. There’s the thumb piano, and glockenspiel, and as it makes its way Brodsky adds a through line of tremulous, ever so remote clarinet. The piece has a sweet affectlessness that makes it loopable, that softens the percussion, that suggests it as background music.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jonbro. Brodsky is based in Seattle, Washington.
