Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 341
April 11, 2016
Aural Potpourri of Lingering Anxiety
Following a deep, shuddering, glottal opening — a few terse notes sawed in sequence — the remainder of “Gunners Pool” by Martin Colborn provides a brief sense of a sonic miasma, alternately haunting and enchanting. It’s a low-volume atmosphere of sour notes, playing in semi-unison. Colborn’s very brief liner note (five words: “Ebow and stark scratchy sounds”) singles out a device that lets the strings of an instrument vibrate endlessly (or at least until the EBow’s battery wears out). Play this in one room and then go read in another. It is the aural potpourri of lingering anxiety, of restrained fear.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/martin-colborn. Set it on repeat. I played it about 50 times in a row today. I previously wrote about a Colborn track late last month: “All the More Beautiful for That Absence.” He’s based in Durham, England.
April 9, 2016
The Gentle Percussion of Brian Crabtree
I don’t usually single out Disquiet Junto tracks for separate mention as daily Downstream mentions, but this week, the 223rd in the project series, is an exception. Not only did Brian Crabtree, who developed (with Kelli Cain) the ingenious Monome instrument (the lit-up one shown above), devise the idea for this week’s Junto compositional prompt, he also did the project himself.
The week’s project idea, titled “Layered Sameness,” is to record multiple versions of the same solo piece and to then hear them played back all at the same time. The solo piece is, itself, intended to be a series of loops, all played by hand. Thus there are multiple levels of variation on theme, among them the variation between loops and the variation between each overall take. The result is center-less, often quite blissful, as in Crabtree’s (his SoundCloud moniker is Tehn), which is a gentle percussion pattern, like a gamelan built of champagne glasses:
More on the Monome at monome.org. More from Crabtree at nnnnnnnn.org. Listen to the full set of musical responses to the project, 25 as of this post, at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
The Gengle Percussion of Brian Crabtree
I don’t usually single out Disquiet Junto tracks for separate mention as daily Downstream mentions, but this week, the 223rd in the project series, is an exception. Not only did Brian Crabtree, who developed (with Kelli Cain) the ingenious Monome instrument (the lit-up one shown above), devise the idea for this week’s Junto compositional prompt, he also did the project himself.
The week’s project idea, titled “Layered Sameness,” is to record multiple versions of the same solo piece and to then hear them played back all at the same time. The solo piece is, itself, intended to be a series of loops, all played by hand. Thus there are multiple levels of variation on theme, among them the variation between loops and the variation between each overall take. The result is center-less, often quite blissful, as in Crabtree’s (his SoundCloud moniker is Tehn), which is a gentle percussion pattern, like a gamelan built of champagne glasses:
More on the Monome at monome.org. More from Crabtree at nnnnnnnn.org. Listen to the full set of musical responses to the project, 25 as of this post, at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
April 7, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0223: Layered Sameness
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 0223:
This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, April 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 11, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0223: Layered Sameness
Record multiple, slightly varying takes on the same looped composition in this project by Monome’s Brian Crabtree.
This week’s project was developed by Brian Crabtree, who along with Kelli Cain makes the Monome, the adventurous grid music interface.
The project is an exploration in repeatability, phasing, and density.
Step 1: Compose a relatively simple, short(ish), performable moment to be repeated as a loop, such as notes on a guitar, or clapping, or vocalizing, or some other live performance technique.
Step 2: Choose how many times you’ll play the loop in a row. Aim for a total duration of a minute or two, but feel free to deviate from this suggestion.
Step 3: Record yourself performing this loop, without a metronome.
Step 4: On a new track, record yourself again performing the same number of loops for roughly the same amount of time without listening to the previous take(s) or to a metronome.
Step 5: Repeat step 4 between 4 and 40 times.
Step 6: Adjust master levels. If desired, pan each track randomly.
Step 7: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 8: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 9: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, April 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 11, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you, though between one and two 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 “disquiet0223-layeredsameness.” Also use “disquiet0223-layeredsameness” 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 223rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record multiple, slightly varying takes on the same looped composition in this project by Monome’s Brian Crabtree”) 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 Teresa Alexander-Arab and is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
April 6, 2016
This Week in Sound: 3D Crimes + Posthuman Postrock
A lightly annotated clipping service:
3D Crimes: The hum of a refrigerator may not be enough to allow identification of its make and model, and the electric car may have let us to make our engines sound like something else entirely (see the SoundRacer), but more consequentially the rumblings of a 3D printer may contain sufficient detail for the someone “to reverse-engineer and re-create 3D printed objects based off of nothing more than a smartphone audio recording”: 3ders.org, via Barry Threw.
Posthuman Postrock: There is now a “wearable third arm” for drummers, which brings to mind both the opportunities for posthuman postrock, and the kit developed for Rick Allen of Def Leppard after he lost an arm in the mid-1980s. Above photo shows Tyler White accompanied by Gil Weinberg: gizmag.com, via twitter.com/showcaseJase.
[Heavy Breathing]: Last year, Sean Zdenek published Reading Sounds, a book about captions, about how the audio of filmed entertainment (dialog, diegetic sound like a passing car, and non-diegetic sound like a score) is represented with words superimposed on images. Now there’s a two-day “virtual conference” on captions (Caption Studies) scheduled for August 1 and 2 of this year. If you’re the sort of person, like me, who thrills to “[dramatic music]” and “[ninjas panting],” then I’ll see you there. Well, that is, we’ll be online simultaneously: captionstudies.wou.edu.
!@#$ Patents: This sounded like an April Fools joke, but it appeared on Business Insider on March 31, and appears to be the case: Apple has technology that automatically removes the curse words from songs. Filed in 2014, the patent is titled “Management, Replacement and Removal of Explicit Lyrics during Audio Playback.” Keep in mind that two years prior to that, in 2012, the Apple Match service — which adds to your cloud the albums you already own, saving you the perceived hassle of ripping and uploading them — accidentally replaced people’s NSFW versions with the “clean” edits that play in fast-food restaurants and on cautious radio stations — via factmag.com, Scanner, and King Britt
Google BPM: Well, Google the word “metronome” and you’ll be provided a functioning metronome that allows you to select an integer between 40 and 208 and hear what that click track sounds like: androidpolice.com.
iClassical Pro: Alan Pierson, of the adventurous chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound, has uploaded to Medium an article first published two years ago on the group’s blog, but it’s new to me. It’s Pierson talking about how he moved from using paper scores to digital scores when conducting. His take: “And while conducting off tablet is safer in many ways, it’s almost certainly more prone to catastrophe on any particular gig than working off of paper scores: a PC crash is probably more likely than music falling off a stand or out of a binder and harder to recover from. But the plusses seem to far outweigh the minuses.” At least now Google can help with the BPM.
Ear on the Apocalypse: “Seismologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Volcano Network have developed a refined set of methods that allows them to detect and locate the airwaves generated by a volcanic explosion on distant seismic networks.” That is to say, scientists are listening for earthquakes: “This study shows how we can expand the use of seismic data by looking at the acoustic waves from volcanic explosions that are recorded on seismometers”: uaf.edu.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the April 5, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Is the Static You Are Looking For
The noises are slight and tenuous, frail and mobile. They slither around headspace, veering left and right as they sag and flourish, as they alternately whither, sputter, and, unexpectedly, rise. This is tinnitus as composition, everyday irritant as strange attractor. It’s three quarters of an hour of Peter Courtemanche, who works under the name Absolute Value of Noise and focuses his activities on field recordings of engineered noise, cataloging all manner of sonic fissures. It’s episode 72 of Jeff Kolar’s invaluable audio series, Radius. The accompanying text provides context:
Some of the motors are recorded from afar with his large bicycle wheel antenna (this is an antenna system that he uses in performances); some are recorded up close using smaller wheel antennas (1 foot) while some have coils wrapped around the motors themselves.
Click through (to theradius.us) as well for details on the various sound sources and recording scenarios, such as this diary entry:
(3) Number 25 Bus (August 2008 / May 2015): sitting at the back of the bus recording acceleration and deceleration. This is a diesel bus that runs past his house. The engine is at the back under the floor-boards. He imagines that the antenna is picking up the firing of the spark-plugs and whatever other electronic signals are flying about when the bus pulls away from the stop.
Originally posted at soundcloud.com/theradius. More from Courtemanche, who’s based in Vancouver, at absolutevalueofnoise.ca.
April 5, 2016
The Sixteen-Millimeter Fractal
I wrote about Erika Nesse’s fractal music about a month ago (“A Nautilus of Percussive Expressivity”), and she just posted this week another example that’s well worth a listen. Titled “You Can Wish It All Away,” the short piece, not even two full minutes in length, takes tiny snippets of source audio, in this case a woman speaking, and renders from them a slowly evolving rhythmic flurry. Slivers of syllables — not whole verbal sounds but mere bits of them, so even the softest vowel can serve as a plosive thanks to a hard truncation — become an ever-changing fantasy of computer-generated beatcraft.
Two moments seem to suggest that the piece isn’t directly the result of a computer using fractals to break and reformat the source, but that Nesse herself plays a role in the work’s composition — that she is using the fractal algorithm as a source for musical development, much as the algorithm itself is using the original source audio. The first of these moments appears at about the one-minute mark, when the previously furious mix of layered sounds gives way to a harshly minimalist, staccato metric. The second is at the end, when the original sample audio is heard in full, revealing itself as a line from an early episode of The Twilight Zone: “If I wish hard enough, I can wish it all away.” That’s the main character, a former film star, speaking in the episode titled “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks. More from Nesse, who’s based in Boston, at conversationswithrocks.tumblr.com and erikanesse.bandcamp.com. Film clip screenshot via youtu.be.
April 4, 2016
A Mix of Meditative and Present, Drone and Texture
The opening track of Hummingbird’s tremendous new album, Glade, is airy and dense at the same time. The bellows-like audio has a deep, engrossing, maximal-minimalist quality that brings to mind the work of Terry Riley. Titled “Himalayah” it’s a muted raga, an ecstatic pause, a rusty halo. It builds as it goes, gaining mass yet remaining clouded. It’s the first of 14 tracks on Glade, which proceeds through variations on this trance-inducing, pastoral ambience.
Much of the record is built on drones that emphasize enchantment over anxiety. This sort of thing can become treacly in the wrong hands, but that’s not the case here. What grounds the work is the drones often engage with textural material, like the audible shaker in “Three Empires,” or what appears to be creaking wood beneath the echoing piano in “Six Points of Tabligh” and a similar creaking combined with a sandpaper burr amid the otherwise entirely winsome “Fragment of a Discourse.” Glade’s approach to drones gets orchestral on “Lesson Nine,” where the instrumentation goes in and out of phase in a way that suggests it’s being warped in real time, the fabric of some recording messed with this way and that, gently but perceptibly. The entire album is flush with this sense of heightened everydayness, a mix of meditative and present, drone and texture, placid and grounded.
This idea of “discovery” has been on my mind a lot lately, so I wanted to mention that I found Glade via Bandcamp, thanks to one other person than myself having publicly acknowledged on our Bandcamp user feeds that’d we’d purchased another album, Dual Concentric by Nature Program, which I wrote about yesterday. I clicked through to that person’s list of Bandcamp purchases, and then listened to several of them. My first experience to Glade was as an accidental overlay to Dual Concentric. They pair well.
The album is available at facture.bandcamp.com, though the fac-ture.co.uk website (whose first release was another Hummingbird album, Our Fearful Symmetry Remixes) doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2013, and the Discogs.com site attributes Glade to Fluid, whose site offers some glimpses of the packaging of the limited-edition physical release:
April 3, 2016
It’s Unfortunate Bandcamp Lacks Playlist Functionality
Dual Concentric by Nature Program
This is the wonderfully textured yet ethereal track “Supine Anchor” off the album Dual Concentric by Brooklyn-based Nature Program. Nature Program appears to be the recording moniker of the individual who made the HC-TT, a device I wrote about yesterday. The HC-TT allows a musician to manipulate a standard tape cassette in real time, to edge the music forward and backward thanks to a large circular knob.
The website for the HC-TT, hc-tt.com, on its Letters page includes a link to the Bandcamp page of Nature Program, where there is currently one album: Dual Concentric. Elsewhere on the HC-TT site there’s a “Why” page — the sort of thing more makers might consider. (That is, if the why isn’t justifiable, maybe there’s a better problem out there for you to solve.) The Why for the HC-TT is compelling, even if you haven’t heard the super cool sound samples associated with it. The site makes a clear case for the cassette’s unique sonic properties and the HC-TT’s potential as part of an electronic musician’s kit. Also, it’s written from the perspective of a curious, exploratory musician:
This device was made for a fairly selfish reason: For years, I’ve wanted to have a compact, organized device that mirrors the compact, organized cassette medium. It’s an obsessive-compulsive dream to create your own library of tape loops which stay safely packaged and organized inside individual cassettes.
“Supine Anchor” is among the most relaxed of the tracks on Dual Concentric. It is a sequence of layered loops whose texture and warped quality suggest they originated on physical tape, perhaps even involved the HC-TT in their production. There’s a lush voice, a falsetto, that brings to mind Brian Eno’s, and it appears about midway through the piece, after the initial bout of fractured minimalist abstract beatcraft melts into something ever more echoing and lush. There’s a lot more to the record than “Supine Anchor” might suggest: techno, light gamecore, electro, instrumental proto-hip-hop. But within that expansive coverage, 20 tracks in all, are about a half dozen or so with a more ambient quality to them.
It’s unfortunate that Bandcamp doesn’t have a playlist function. Unlike services from Spotify to SoundCloud, Bandcamp lacks the ability for listeners to serve as collators. You can learn a lot from following and looking into the acquisitions of fellow Bandcamp users, but you can’t do much more than that. You speak through your wallet (and your wishlist) on Bandcamp. If you buy something, it’s associated with your account (mine is at bandcamp.com/disquiet), but you can’t, for example, create an ersatz hits collection for an artist with multiple albums, or, as I was drawn to do with Dual Concentric, whittle 20 tracks down to their background-music essentials.
Fortunately there are other services, such as playmoss.com, which do allow for collecting material found elsewhere on the web. I can’t embed it, but I’ve made a playlist at playmoss.com that collects seven key tracks off of Dual Concentric, the ones that largely do away with rhythm in favor of something more murky and enticing. The tracks are, in order of appearance, “Sources Say,” “Nature Program – Breathers,” “Supine Anchor,” “Flourishings,” “Inclement,” “Fulfillment Center” and “Understand.”
The full album is available at tonewheel.bandcamp.com. More on the HC-TT at hc-tt.com.
What Sound Looks Like
My favorite street sign near my parents’ place in Florida.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
