Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 344

Rimbaud Scores Ryman

As mentioned here back in early February, upon the death of Denise Duval, the electronic musician Scanner is an especially apt choice for scoring radio dramas. Much of his early electronic music involved lending scores to real-life conversations plucked — well, sampled, really — from the ether. Commissioned scores allow him to apply that experience and those techniques to more formalized narratives. That February entry was about Scanner’s take on the Cocteau play La Voix Humaine, the opera of which starred Duval in its first incarnation. More recently, Scanner provided the score to a BBC Radio 4 story by science fiction author Geoff Ryman. The Ryman story, “No Point Talking,” isn’t currently online (bbc.co.uk), but Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) has posted nearly 11 minutes of the score, a cooly atmospheric outing, with plenty of echoing synthesizers, though the main thread is a sequence of what sounds like electric guitar. Around the seven-minute mark, unintelligible voices intrude, passing as if by the window of the studio where Scanner is recording. The voices play an interesting third-party role. They are neither speaking parts from Ryman’s story, nor are they score. They are human presence as score, voices as sound design. And after they fade, the guitar proceeds forward, bending until it comes to resemble another voice of sorts: the call of seagulls.

Here’s the BBC’s description of Ryman’s tale:

Award-winning sci-fi writer Geoff Ryman’s new story for the BBC, imagining a future world where California has been split in two, each half with very different political outlooks.

His conservative hero finds himself in a place he doesn’t like or understand, where everything he holds dear is challenged: relations between men and women, and even the very definitions of ‘he’ and ‘her’.

This story was written as Geoff was investigating the portrayal of gender in utopian science fiction, as part of BBC Radio 4’s Utopia season. That documentary which accompanies ‘No Point Talking’ is called ‘Herland’.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/scanner. More from Scanner, who is based in London, at scannerdot.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0219: Breath Dance

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 the project:

This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 10, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 14, 2016.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0219: Breath Dance
The Assignment: Working with artist Paolo Salvagione, create the audio backdrop for a piece of choreography utilizing only the sound of soft breaths.

The artist and engineer Paolo Salvagione is currently working on an extended piece of choreography. This Junto project is the first of likely several that might serve as sonic backdrops for the dance performance, and also as a form of research into the materials and ideas being explored by Salvagione and the dancers. (Audio produced for this Junto project will not be used by Salvagione without its composer’s permission.)

Step 1: You will be creating a short, roughly five-minute piece of quiet music. First, take into consideration the setting. Visualize that the piece would be performed by a young solo female dancer. She is dancing in a large space. The sounds of this Junto are the only sounds accompanying her movement. The sounds should be quiet — they should suggest quietness, peace — yet also work, when amplified, at a volume loud enough to fill the space.

Step 2: Using the sound of soft breaths, make a piece of sound/music roughly five minutes long that meets the criteria of Step 1.

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 at noon, California time, on Thursday, March 10, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 14, 2016.

Length: The length should be roughly five minutes.

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 “disquiet0219-breathdance.” Also use “disquiet0219-breathdance” 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 219th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Working with artist Paolo Salvagione, create the audio backdrop for a piece of choreography utilizing only the sound of soft breaths”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0219/

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/

The photo associated with this Junto is by dancer Kristen Bell, who is part of this Salvagione project.

A Nautilus of Percussive Expressivity

Erika Nesse makes fractal music. She codes the music — “coding” being a term that has as much application these days as do “writing” and “composition” to the production of sound. This following playlist collects over a dozen examples of her algorithms set to work on a variety of audio sources. Listen as sounds ranging from white noise (“Fifty One”) to verbalization (“One two three”) to gentle bleeps (“It goes bop”) cycle through patterns within patterns, coming back around to familiar riffs even as they expand continuously outward, a nautilus of percussive expressivity.

For context, Nesse, who’s based in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote the following about the process behind What the Machine Replied, a five-track EP of her fractal music:

This album was generated entirely with fractals, nesting beats within beats to create a self-similar system. I give a small seed pattern of a couple of notes to the machine, and it goes deep into the tree of recursion and echoes back a dizzying track minutes long. Thus, “what the machine replied”.

What the Machine Replied by Erika Nesse

Here’s a video visualization that aligns the sounds with images, helping the mind trace the patterns:

SoundCloud set originally posted at soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks. Keep an eye on Nesse’s fledgling fractalmusicmachine.com website.

RIP, Naná Vasconcelos (1944-2016)

The percussionist Naná Vasconcelos has passed away at the age of 71. He pretty much defined “discovery” for me, before that word came to mean the need of streaming companies to keep you adhered to the digital teat. His name was one I traced through so much pre-Internet crate digging, and led me to so much amazing music. From Arto Lindsay to Jon Hassell (for one, he’s on Possible Musics, Hassell’s 1980 collaboration with Brian Eno) to Peter Scherer to so many others, Vasconcelos was the connective tissue my mind focused on as I consumed all this disparate music. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mark Helias, Jan Garbarek — Vasconcelos, born in Brazil in 1944, was ubiquitous. And that’s not to mention all the native bossa nova greats he worked with.

There’s something proprietary about discovering musicians. Paul Simon had Tony Levin in his band long before I discovered King Crimson, but by the time Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints came out with Naná Vasconcelos on it, I was like, “Oh, man, welcome to the discography party.” I bought many records simply because Vasconcelos’ name was listed in the credits. Some were astounding. Some were simply not my thing. And of course, on his passing, I find myself back with Ginger Baker’s Horses and Trees on repeat. RIP, Vasconcelos — you are my record collection.

Julianna Barwick’s Machine-Woman Interface

Will by Julianna Barwick

Part of the pleasure of the first track to be (pre)released from Julianna Barwick’s forthcoming album, Will, is how her voice merges with the synthesized sounds that accompany it. The piece opens with this slow mix of drone and scale. The drone pulses and the scale, tracing the shape of the pulse by moving up and down on repeat, puts soft pads against something even softer still. (According to NPR it’s a Moog synthesizer, the Mother-32.) And then comes her voice — her voices, really. Barwick’s breathy intonations come and go in looping layers, a folktronic canon. These echoes proceed for the length of the piece, which is titled “Nebula,” tracing the vast contours of an imagined cavern. It’s one of nine tracks on Will, and while “Nebula” is solo, the album features a range of guests: singer Thomas Arsenault (aka Mas Ysa), cellist Maarten Vos, and percussionist from Jamie Ingalls (Chairlift, Tanlines, Beverly). There’s also a video for “Nebula,” directed by Derrick Belcham and shot at Philip Johnson’s historic Glass House:

The album has a pre-release page at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More from Barwick, who is based in Brooklyn, at juliannabarwick.com.

Remixing the Chamber Ambient Music of Christina Vantzou

Christina Vantzou’s first three solo albums of chamber ambient music are numbered, like Led Zeppelin’s before hers. There is Nº1, Nº2, and Nº3, the most recent of which was released late last year. Naturally the collection of remixes is seen as an iteration, not a release unto itself. Its title: 3.5. She’s assembled a great crew to rework the originals, and the first track, Steve Hauschildt’s take on her “Sterepscope,” was posted a few days ago as a promotion. Other participants in 3.5 include Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (aka Lichens), Loscil, John Also Bennett, Tara Jane O’Neil, the Sight Below, CORIN, and Francesco Donadello. Bennett played all the synthesizers on Nº3, Vantzou told me when I interviewed her last year (“The Bell Jar Filter”). Bennett and Loscil also contributed to the Nº2 Remixes collection, and Loscil was also on the Nº1 Remixes album. If the original “Stereoscope” was quiet and unassuming, with a glitchy undercurrent that suggested rain on a living-room window, then Hauschildt’s rendition is full-on orchestral. (You can stream the original at youtube.com for comparison.)

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/platform. The album will be available as of March 18 at christinavantzou.bandcamp.com. More from Vantzou at christinavantzou.com.

Tastes of the Sync 01 and Moog Concerts

This weekend was a pretty tremendous one in San Francisco for modular synthesis. There were not one but two expos. A series of workshops capped by a concert was sponsored by Moog as part of its Dial-tones regional spinoff of Moogfest, and a dozen manufacturers plus four performers gathered under the aegis of Sync 01, an event plotted by Chris Randall of Audio Damage. I posted a few photos from the evening, and interviewed both Ciani and Randall in advance for 48hills.org. If you missed the shows, here’s a taste:

I caught the Sync 01 performances as well as the Dial-tones headliner, Suzanne Ciani (the elder statesperson of the crew), who did a concert-length piece on Buchla. This video shows her working with Moog equipment and unlike her Dial-tones event it isn’t in quadraphonic, but it gets at her rhythms-as-texture mastery:

The Sync 01 performers included Neybuu, who mixed her tabla through a pair of Elektron tools, the Octatrack and Rytm. Neybuu, who lives in Portland, spent a decade in India learning to play tabla. She produced the Total Tabla sample set for Elektron (elektron.se). More from her in an interview at elektronauts.com. Here’s a video that’s close to (arguably an improvement on, as there were feedback issues last night) what she sounded like at Sync 01:

The highlight of all the weekend’s performances was arguably Bana Haffar. (I’ve written about her once previously, back in January.) Part of this has to do with her set being the most difficult to describe. There were echoes of Tangerine Dream and mellow Underworld in some of the other performances, and classic modular quadrophonic rhythms in Ciani’s, while Reybuu quite clearly was porting an old tradition through a new one — all of which led to interesting results. But Haffar’s was something apart, a through-performed work that mixed drones and pulsing and low-level hints of vocals into a fully formed work. This recent live set of hers, nearly 18 minutes in length and recorded in late February, feels more subdued than last night’s performance, but it gets at the sinuous, exploratory nature of her work:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/banahaffarmusic. Haffar, who plays bass professionally, lives in Los Angeles.

What Sound Looks Like

Suzanne Ciani at Dial-tones at Gray Area on March 5, 2016, in San Francisco

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

What Sound Looks Like

Neybuu at Sync 01 on March 5, 2016, in San Francisco

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

Remixing the Radiophonic Workshop

What better source of raw sound materials than a nearly 20-year-old documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the legendary brain trust of electronic-music ingenuity? Chris McAvoy goes to town on samples from the 1979 production The New Sound of Music, transforming the Radiophonic’s own transformations, taking an old lampshade and an empty tin can and from them generating beats and textures, just as the workshop itself did. “Anything … could be doctored with the tape recorder,” says the narrator, before his voice itself is warped just shy of recognizability. It’s a testament to McAvoy’s activities that you can’t tell if the self-reflecting, hall-of-mirrors echoes imposed humorously on the following phrase were his own, or in the documentary: “Whatever this microphone picks up is being fed to this loudspeaker back to this microphone … round and round.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/chris-mcavoy. More from McAvoy, who’s based in Boulder, Colorado, at twitter.com/chmcavoy.