Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 346
February 22, 2016
Two Rhythms Neither in Sync Nor at Odds
While not quite a duet for kalimba and birdsong, this little piece, “Midday Walk, Local Birds” by Ioflow, makes those the central elements. You can also hear feet hitting the ground at the opening, and throughout there’s a thin veneer of synthesized glue that keeps the whole thing together. The footsteps give way to the kalimba, which constitutes the track’s beat, and the birdsong has its own natural pace — neither in sync nor at odds with the thumb piano. At the end, as if we’re coming out of a reverie, the sound of walking returns, a little crunch underfoot. At barely a minute in length, this would be barely a step outside one’s front door in real life, but somehow the slow, persistent pace, intoned with metal on wood, suggests something far longer, something apart from everyday events. Put it on repeat.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ioflow. More from ioflow, aka Josh Saddler, at ioflow.bandcamp.com, twitter.com/ioflow, and instagram.com/ioflow. (The track is part of the Weekly Beats series of projects, more on which at weeklybeats.com. The Weekly Beats series has no restrictions or conventions. There are no specific project assignments. From the FAQ: Q: “What style of music should I write?” A: “Any style you want! This is a challenge for you to be productive and creative, it has nothing to do with style, don’t be afraid to experiment. The most important thing is to have fun and maybe learn a thing or two along the way.”)
February 21, 2016
When the Looped Is to Be Looped
The track is titled “Looping,” and looping it contains, what sounds like a brief guitar sequence, a brief trace of notes, above a waft of synthesis, the series set on repeat, their paths overlapping in varying ways. A note can be heard, here and there, to stray, to be pulled at length, extended from the sequence. It stretches from its original place and becomes part of the waft. It’s just gorgeous how it unfolds. It’s titled “Looping” because that is what it contains, but it is also to be set on loop itself.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/an-imaginal-space. More at animaginalspace.com.
February 20, 2016
Drones That Aspire to Sound Design
In space no one can hear you scream, but plenty of sounds bring space to mind nonetheless. The sounds we’ve heard from space in recent years, between the Einstein chirps and the plasma songs, were beyond our hearing initially, the frequencies shifted after the fact so we could experience the original waveforms in a manner that we’d more naturally categorize as audio.
Still, a century of film, not to mention television and radio drama, has provided a sonic signature to space, a sonic context for extra-planetary exploration. This is what one might make of “Iris Study,” a drone-like two-minute sketch in audio by William Boldenweck. There is much drone music, in particular on SoundCloud, and much of it aspires to a compositional state. Such drone music can be heard as a descendant of Olivier Messiaen and Mortan Feldman, traversing Eduard Artemyev and La Monte Young toward an aesthetic of stasis.
What Boldenweck has recorded here is apart from that. “Iris Study” sounds like it transpires not in musical time but in narrative time. It’s less a composition than it is the sound of a deep-space ship being walked late in the non-night/non-day of interplanetary travel. It captures the echo and contours of physical space, of systems humming with a vast vacuum just outside the door. Then again, this could be program music, the program being the footsteps of an astronaut pacing, the drone matching the protagonist’s emotional arc as well as the physical map of the stroll.
More likely Boldenweck has some other story entirely, some other design and structure, in mind, but the piece’s inherent absence leaves plenty of beautiful space for the mind to fill.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/boldenweck. More from him at baseltrash.tumblr.com.
February 19, 2016
Processing Music as if It Were a Field Recording
Taylor Deupree’s is not a name one immediately associates with remixes. The founder of 12k Records, he has a singular vision that manifests itself in solo records and occasional collaborations and, through 12k, his support of like-minded musicians. But hearing his take on Kodomo’s “Endless Waves,” the correlation between his own work and remixing makes perfect sense. So much of Deupree’s music released under his own name is about processing something pre-existing, source material, often field recordings and the pure tones of standalone acoustic instruments making their way through his equipment, ultimately yielding something more akin to erasure than accrual. That is exactly what he does with the Kodomo piece, etching away the pop-infused original until what we hear are small bits echoed and looped, frayed and otherwise dissected.
And here, for reference, is the original version of Kodomo’s “Endless Waves,” a pulsing, droning piece that wavers between arpeggio momentum and film-score synthesizer atmospherics. The track is from Kodomo’s 2014 album, Patterns & Light. It can be informative to locate the source moments of a remix in the original, a bit like solving a puzzle, and it can be all the more so to locate the source aesthetic — how the first version inspired the approach of the second. Here, at 1:35 into the 2:07-long track, there’s a fleeting moment, a final swell experiencing an elegant torque, just before the piece’s long fade. It has in it a touch of Deupree’s own favor for gently warped wisps.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kodomo. More from Kodomo, aka Chris Child of Brooklyn, New York, at kodomomusic.com. There are two other remixes in the series, by Kodacrome and Allies for Everyone.
February 18, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0216: Thin Layers
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 at noon, California time, on Thursday, February 18, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 22, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0216: Thin Layers
The Assignment: Add a thin foundational bed to beats of pin-prick audio.
Step 1: For this project you’ll be adding sounds to a pre-existing track of your choosing. Select one track from the previous Junto project, in which beats were made with five tiny, pin-prick sounds:
Step 2: Confirm the track you selected in Step 1 is available for creative reuse. If you’re not sure, correspond with the musician. If you’re short on time, select a different track.
Step 3: Create a new track by adding a thin layer, or several thin layers, of an ambient foundational bed to the pre-existing track. Don’t alter the pre-existing track significantly. Maintain its original length.
Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process — identify the source track and include a link to its SoundCloud page.
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, February 18, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 22, 2016.
Length: The length of your track should be the same as that of the source track.
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 “disquiet0216-thinlayers.” Also use “disquiet0216-thinlayers” 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 216th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Add a thin foundational bed to beats of pin-prick audio”) 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 Evelyn Flint, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
This Week in Sound: The Chirp Heard ‘Round the Universe
A lightly annotated clipping service — and as with last week’s this is going to be a bit more rangy and a bit more cursory. Then again, maybe it should be more rangy and cursory in the first place:
Little Bang: The big news this week, the chirp heard ’round the universe, was scientists announcing that they had recorded sonic evidence of two black holes colliding, confirming something that Albert Einstein predicted before anyone reading this had been born. More at from Dennis Overbye at nytimes.com and Nicola Twilley at newyorker.com.
Tea Stream: A heated showdown ended in Oregon, where the armed occupiers of federal land live-broadcast their final hours before handing themselves over to the FBI. The full audio of the ongoing process was streamed live at the YouTube channel of an activist. It was quite bizarre — both distancing and intimate — to listen in on the conversations, not surreptitiously through a police scanner but actively because one of the parties had decided to make the full event public. The main memory I have is of someone asking for a pizza. Details at oregonlive.com and nytimes.com.
Blast from the Past: Ernie Smith at tedium.com unpacks the origins of personal computers making music, dating it to the 1989 introduction of the Sound Blaster from the Singapore company Creative Technology: “he PC peripheral that helped turn the modern computer into a multimedia powerhouse.” (Via Micah Stupak-Hahn.)
Drone Drones: Kev Bales and Wolfgang Buttress are using a beehive to make a symphony, reports theguardian.com. “The first time you lift them out there’s this incredible, visceral hum. I thought it might just be an irritating bzzzzzz sound, but it’s so low it just kind of gets you,” says Buttress. (Via Christian Bok.)
Cloudy Forecast: News broke of SoundCloud’s financial misfortunes. There’s no clear sense of where this is headed (factmag.com).
Wrist Amplitude: Apple has filed a patent (image up top) that “depicts an Apple Watch automatically adjusting an iPhone’s audio volume or other alert characteristics based on ambient sound samples”(macrumors.com).
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Miéville’s Ear
I finished reading the excellent recent collection of China Miéville’s short stories. It’s an ice cream sundae made of climate dread and narrative ellipses. It’s titled Three Moments of an Explosion, and much of the work is new to the book. Among the new pieces is a series of scripts for movie trailers, each one treating the form of a trailer much as Miéville does the form of a short story, as a cloudy mason jar filled with ambiguous portent: You know something’s in there, but you don’t know quite what it is.
“Listen to Birds” is the third and final of those trailer-stories. In it a person identified as P records birds, and his interlocutor, D, prods him on the undertaking. Eventually the act of recording the birds seems to trigger something in the birds. There may be cross-species contagion. Simple technology may itself be reshaping reality, or at least P’s perception of reality. The result, fractured and deliberate, mundane and otherworldly, comes across like a muted tone poem by Shane Carruth or a willfully bad trip from Terrence Davies.
Here’s one snippet:
P in a café, talking to a young woman. We hear the noise around them. P’s words sound distorted. They are not in synch with his lips.
He says, “There’s a problem with playback.”
Here’s another:
P walking down a crowded city street.
Voice-over, P: “There’s a signal and I can’t tell if it’s going out or coming in.”
Unseen by P, one person, then two people behind him raise their heads and open their mouths skyward as if shrieking. They make no sound.
The whole things lasts under a minute and 20 seconds. It’s a little surprising that a search on YouTube doesn’t yet bring up a fan film version of it.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Sound Course, Week 2 of 15
Each week I summarize the lecture and discussion from my course on the role of sound in the media landscape. In cases where I’ve already documented the discussion fairly thoroughly, as with week two, I’ll link to the full summary, and do a more concise one here.
The second week of sound class is the first full lecture, the first week of sound class having been a combination of an extensive overview of the syllabus and a compacted run through the use of music in the work of JJ Abrams, from the “un-theme” of Lost’s opening credits to the highly “originalist” (“ur-theme”) adherence to John Williams’ modus operandi in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
The second week’s lecture takes a long view. Titled A Brief History of Listening, it covers in less than three hours about 200,000 some odd years of human development, physiologically (the development of hearing and speech), technologically (from homing pigeons to moveable type to recorded sound), and culturally. The latter bit, the cultural facet, focuses on two subjects. The first discussion is about how Socrates’s anxiety regarding the move from oral to written culture can be mapped to contemporary concerns about transitioning into a digital world. The second discussion is on John Cage’s 4’33”, about the work’s conception and reception, about the idea of an anechoic chamber, and about the way Cage connects, in his book Silence, the ideas inherent in 4’33” beyond music to architecture and sculpture.
As I state occasionally in the early weeks of this course, I’m not trying to convert students to work in sound full time. I don’t need a single student ever to decide to go into sound design or sound engineering to feel that I’ve accomplished something. Quite the contrary, I’m trying to develop sleeper agents who will bring a creative conscientiousness in regard to sound to whatever field they choose to pursue — art direction, design, and so forth.
The big challenge early on in the course is shepherding the students’ off-site work, specifically in the sound journals they’re required to maintain, four days a week, for the full length of the course. For the first entries I ask that they simply list the sounds around them. Inevitably these come back not as sounds but as sources of sounds: door, not door creaking; fan, not fan whirring; baby, not baby cooing. Moving from source to sound, from sound to description, from description to meaning is where we’re headed. It can be painstaking, but learning about sound is like learning a language or achieving a significant improvement in an athletic pursuit. It’s all about dedication and persistence. It’s about practice.
Today’s class (week 3, more on which in next week’s This Week in Sound newsletter) narrowed the scope: last week was 200,000 years; this week was just about 100 years, as the subject was the role of sound in film and television. The timing of today’s class may have been fairly timely, because I was just approached by an organization to give a talk about the past and future of sound in film, and I’m now piecing together an approach for the talk. Here’s a first-draft summary:
Eyes are forgiving, ears less so. Eyes want to be seduced. Ears are sensitive to incongruity, discontinuity, artifice. How can sound reinforce narrative? How can sound be narrative? How can sound design serve as score? We’ll explore the past and the technologically enabled promise of film sound.
And, yeah, when I say “promise” I’m using alliteration as a way to get out of saying “future.” More on this as it comes together.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
February 17, 2016
disquiet.com/ambientalist
I’ve tried this before, on Spotify and on SoundCloud, and again I’m giving a go at putting together a regularly updated public playlist. This is resulting from three things: (1) my switch to Spotify after Rdio’s shutdown (and after a recognition that neither Google Play and Apple Music has a functioning social component), (2) my endlessly delayed plans to get a proper podcast together, and (3) my desire to investigate the (apparent) popularity of playlists (and of Spotify) by working in the form. (For all this Spotify activity, the vast majority of my listening is still SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and promotional copies I receive. One thing I’m repeatedly struck by is how little of the music I listen to on SoundCloud appears on Spotify — in fact, how few of the musicians I listen to on SoundCloud appear on Spotify.)
For me, context is everything. I don’t like listening without having access — not necessarily for immediate, but for eventual, consumption — to more of a sense of what I’m listening to, which generally means written context. I’m likely in the minority in this regard, or so the streaming services seem to believe. Then again, I listen to refrigerators hum for pleasure and get turned down for sound design projects because my RFP feedback begins “you really don’t need to add music.” Spotify provides little more information than Apple or Google. It’s a little frustrating that Spotify’s playlists don’t allow for unique cover art (as a podcast might have) or even liner notes, but I’ve done a low-rent hack by titling the podcast with a URL (disquiet.com/ambientalist) that might invite individuals to click through and read more.
The first edition is 41 minutes and features tracks from Kid606, Nonkeen (a new trio including Nils Frahm), Taylor Deupree in a duet with Marcus Fischer, Lisa Gerrard (from her score to Jane Got a Gun, recorded with Marcello De Francisci), Scott Tuma (off Eyrie, which I thought I’d written about when it first came out, around the time I initiated an interview with him, but I can’t find any mention), Grouper, Marina Rosenfeld, DJ Krush, Lesley Flanigan, and Stephen Mathieu.
The playlist is at this inelegant URL, if you have a Spotify account:
https://open.spotify.com/user/dsqt/playlist/2W8PS8cf2aHe72vZDRdN8Y
I’m not sure how this is going to develop, whether I’ll switch out all the tracks, or just add over time so the thing gets entirely out of control, length-wise. I do know the current plan is to stick to current work. Everything here was released (or re-released) in 2015 or 2016, with the exception of those artists who have nothing that recent in the Spotify database. In those cases I’ve selected something from their most recent release that Spotify does provide access to.
What Sound Looks Like
Photos don’t necessarily depict scale well, or context for that matter. This doorbell, set as it is inside a small brass frame (brass or some near equivalent disguising itself conspicuously as gold), which is then set inside a second, much larger frame of the same material, is one of two at the entrance to an otherwise modest, two-family home. It is also well over a foot tall. A duplicate doorbell, equally well tended to, burnished and cleaned, faces this one. Neither doorbell is labeled. It’s understood that each doorbell correlates with the door to which it is placed perpendicular. The visual overkill is, perhaps, an attempt to cover up some sizable hole in the wall. More likely it is, quite simply, an attempt at opulence, a bold declaration — bringing to mind one of those pricey designer, logo-emblazoned, leather cases that cost more than the tablet computer they contain. In our age of Internet-connected homes — of doorbells that double as security consultants, of thermostats that aspire to butler status, of audio-controlled centerpieces that consider themselves concierges on the cusp of sentience — this doorbell is the quartz watch of entryway technology. It’s a large expensive block with one technical function, and a simple function at that. It may not do much, but it brings with it some not insignificant authority. Simplicity is not austerity. The owner of this home may not have a state-of-the-art security camera out front, but it quite likely has serious security just inside that front door.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
