Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 347
February 17, 2016
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.
February 16, 2016
The Utterly Digital Joy of Hideyuki Kuromiya’s “Sinedance”
Listening to the blippy, partially random, utterly digital joy of Hideyuki Kuromiya’s “Sinedance” is a kind of puzzle. Trying to make sense of its internal play is a bit like watching the lights flicker on and off in a distant office building after night falls, and wondering what the patterns might mean: is it a shift in staff schedules, the arrival of a clean-up crew, an active emergency, the filter of a thick mist passing in the middle-ground? After a deliriously chaotic opening, the piece falls into place as a sequence of ever so slightly shifting tweaks on a melodic pattern, the pixelated melody varying as if the results are being plucked from a nanoscale bingo cage.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kuromiya-hideyuki. Kuromiya’s album Tokyo Noisescape came out last September. It’s at
manyfeetunder.bandcamp.com
February 15, 2016
A Drone Primer
The dense, fluid, constantly shifting tone of the Bell Mechanical’s “Dystorphia” is sort of a drone primer. It has the expected white noise frission of something that is defined as a drone, yet were you to drop the (proverbial) needle at any random points the wide variety of sounds comprising the track would become immediately evident. It feels singular, but on repeat listens reveals multiple layers of activity: clouds and pulses and momentary signals. And it presents itself as static, and yet it has, in fact, an internal combustion that is quite active, even rapid. The track highlights numerous ways in which seeming stasis is anything but still.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com. More from the Bell Mechanical, based in Salem, Massachusetts, at thebellmechanical.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/the_mjl.
February 14, 2016
Nils Frahm Out of the Solo Spotlight
Some things are best slightly out of context. I often prefer Cory Doctorow’s young adult novels, as if the (relative) absence of sex and the more compact scope serve to clip his more effusive tendencies. I generally prefer, with a few exceptions, Grant Morrison’s work-for-hire comics, sensing that the internal corporate-publishing politics of continuity management rein in an imagination that can veer toward the profligate. I think Lily Tomlin’s best performance in years was her role on Damages, a legal thriller where all her expert comic timing was forced into a claustrophobic, often bitter dramatic role.
And I think Nils Frahm responds particularly well to the challenge of working with others. He’s best known as an improvising, neo-classical, ambient-piano solo artist, but between last year’s Loon, a spectacularly refined EP of glitchy atmospherics he made with Ólafur Arnalds for the Erased Tapes label, and a new recording as part of the trio Nonkeen, he’s showing that he’s far more than a soloist. Nonkeen teems him with two longtime friends, Frederic Gmeiner and Sebastian Singwald, with support from percussionist Andrea Belfi. The album is titled The Gamble, and after an opening track of synthesized orchestral grandeur it lingers in a kind of offworld exotica, a mix of light electronic textures and high-tone lounge-ready jazz touches.
One highlight is the track “Saddest Continent on Earth,” which mixes taut, melancholic electric guitar with a droning haze of a sonic foundation, Frahm’s electric piano little more than a series of elegiac chords. The guitar is so compressed that it sounds at times like it’s cutting in and out, flickering like a neon sign. The guitar and the keyboard merge perfectly, meeting halfway with a sad, sharp, sour tone. Throughout is the thick whir of a field recording, grounding their ethereal practice in the everyday.
More from Nonkeen at nonkeen.com. The album was released by R&S Records (randsrecords.com).
(Side note: I think this is the first time I’ve ever used a Spotify embed in post on Disquiet.com. If the embed doesn’t work for you, the track is also on YouTube.)
This Week in Sound: Exposed Speakers + Paramusical Ensemble
A lightly annotated clipping service — and because I was prepping for the second week of class, this week’s This Week in Sound is a bit more rangy and a bit more cursory. Then again, maybe it should be more rangy and cursory in the first place:
Brain Tunes: The New York Times reports on MIT research that seeks to codify the human experience of music: “By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music.” As C. Reider noted on Twitter, the definition of music in the research is peculiarly limited. Reider points to this section of the piece: “When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response. … Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.” Alex Temple put it well: “If people are still saying this over 100 years after Russolo’s ‘The Art of Noise,’ they’re probably never going to stop.” And Nick Sowers: “Sorry NY Times, my musical circuits are also moved by dog barks and car skids. Maybe not toilet flushes tho.”
Paramusic Union: The feel-good music-tech story of the week must be that of Rosemary Johnson (telegraph.co.uk), a violinist whose career was stopped short due to a car crash that left her severely disabled, unable to speak or even move. But after a decade of effort at Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, Johnson is now producing music through technology that lets her control computer equipment with her brain. The photo above shows Johnson and three other disabled individuals who, along with the Bergersen String Quartet, form what they call the Paramusical Ensemble.
Umbrella Stands: The fact is every week I could feature one or another new work of sound art whose visual impact results from a preponderance of speakers — and I probably will. This week’s, above, is of an installation, Re-Rain, created by Kouichi Okamoto and on display at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art in Shizuoka City, Japan. Each speaker emits the sound of rain, which is reflected off the inside of the umbrellas: thecreatorsproject.vice.com.
Lagos Sonics: Speaking of exposed speakers, above is a shot from the washingtonpost.com site on Emeka Ogboh’s “Market Symphony,” a new work displayed at the National Museum of African Art. The speakers, which play sounds from Balogun Market in Lagos, and elsewhere in Nigeria, are installed on “colorful enamelware trays” of the sort found in the market. It’s the museum’s first sound installation. (I may be in D.C. at some point in the next few weeks, and if I get there I hope to check out this exhibit.)
Muting Istanbul: Imagine being able to mute or amplify individual elements from what constitute a city’s soundscape. Ateş Erkoç has produced such an installation in Istanbul as part of the exhibit Everyday Sounds: Exploring Sound Through Daily Life: dailysabah.com.
AM Unplugged: Apparently the mechanics of electrical cars don’t go well with AM radio, reports music3point0.blogspot.com: “cars like the Tesla Model X or BMW i3 don’t install them since the AM reception is impossible due to the internal electrical noise of the car” — via motherboard.vice.com, twitter.com/jeffkolar.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 9, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
February 13, 2016
Abstract Beats from a Master
The fine, Los Angeles–based abstract beatmaker (until very recently of Philadelphia) Arckatron (aka Shawn Kelly) uploaded two tracks from his forthcoming, 21-song album, Subtle Busyness, at the start of the year: the blissfully steady-going “Lunar” and the wonderfully meter-defying “Aerofloat,” which warped this way and that as its rhythm ebbed and flowed. Those first popped up on the SoundCloud account of the label releasing Subtle Busyness, Twin Springs Tapes. (I wrote about them at the time.)
Subtle Busyness by ARCKATRON
Now four more tracks, along with “Lunar” again, have been uploaded to the Twin Springs Bandcamp page: the surreal opening cut (“Cosmicrust”), a piano-against-percussion piece titled “Power (Handz Up…),” a funky video-game gambit titled “Toow,” and a track titled “VariaTRON” that plays pinball in your head with intense stereoscopic, microscopic beats.
And there’s a lovely video for “Lunar,” sort of an animated lava lamp with a subtle hint at Arckatron’s logo, on YouTube:
The album is up for pre-order for a mere $6, including the cassette (and including shipping in the U.S.) at twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com. The official release date is February 23. The cassette edition is limited to 100.
More from Arcka at arckatron.us. More from the Twin Springs label at twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com and facebook.com/twinspringstapes. And here’s an interview I did with Arcka/Kelly back in 2009: “Young Communicator.”
Harding’s Hearing
I just finished reading Cortney Harding’s book, How We Listen Now: Essays and Conversations About Music and Technology. Harding is, I think, one of the most actively curious observers of where popular music is headed. I first read her on Medium, where she was writing in detail about aspects of the music industry that befuddle me — like me, she wonders why “discovery” is presumed to be a thing for which there is any significant economic value or cultural demand — and, better yet, things that never occurred to me, like the role of messaging apps in music consumption or why musicians aren’t making more regular use of Twitch, the video-game streaming service.
Too much online writing is people trying to be first or loudest on a popular topic. Harding, to the contrary, spends at least half her time on things few people are even aware of, and what roots her work is that she connects her extrapolations back to popular music. Her book is a collection of such posts (the “essays” part of the title) and transcriptions of interviews and podcasts (the “conversations” part). This means a lot of it is out of date, but that’s not a knock, because the work was quite timely when it was first posted. Its timeliness is its strength. It’s also not a knock because Harding is entirely up front about predictions that don’t pan out and about her own interests, both cultural (she acknowledges that she can’t admonish a streaming service for not having music she discovered on a South African awards ceremony) and professional (she has worked and consulted for various tech companies, in addition to having worked at Billboard). It’s also worth noting that Harding self-published the book (through createspace.com), which ties in nicely with her occasional consideration of a “post-label” world in which musicians do what they need to get their music out there. More from Harding at twitter.com/cortneyharding.
This first appeared in the February 9, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Sound Course, Week 1 (of 15)
February 3 was the first class meeting for the new semester of the course I’ve been teaching for several years now about the role of sound in the media landscape. Taking off last semester turned out to be unfortunate timing, due to the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. See, my opening lecture each semester has focused in some detail on the role of music in the films and television of J.J. Abrams, from the various tweaks on Fringe‘s theme, to the virtual non-theme of Lost’s opening credits, to his decision to employ a new theme for Star Trek, to his teasing extenuation of the Mission: Impossible theme in the film in that franchise he directed.
Abrams is so prolific in his directing and his producing that there has, each semester, been a new project to tag onto the sequence, sometimes to even include as homework viewing. After Abrams was announced as the head of the new, Disney-era Star Wars films, my lectures began to speculate what Abrams’ take on John Williams’ score would be. We now know, of course, that like the film itself, he has opted for an originalist scenario, going back to the first trilogy (that is, the “Luke trilogy” not the “Anakin trilogy”) and building on that framework.
There’s some notable sound design in the new film. The intense daymare experienced by Rey in the forest on Takodana has gotten a lot of attention for how, among other things, it manages to include the late Alec Guinness saying the character’s name by snipping a syllable from another word — all the more potently, the word “Rey” was culled from is “afraid,” very much Rey’s state of mind in that sequence. More impressive, or at least less fleeting, was the audible breath of Darth Vader heard when the camera shows that his grandson, Kylo Ren, maintains a shrine of Vader’s melted mask.
The class will proceed weekly through May 18, aside from spring break on March 23. I won’t be summing up all the early lectures each week, because I’ve already documented them fairly well, but I’ll link to the previous summaries here (week one), and make note of any new developments. I have been lining up some great guests, including a technology lead from a major streaming service and a curator at a major art institution.
This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 9, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
February 12, 2016
The Franz Liszt of Drone Guitar
Though it’s a noisy, brash, swollen, meditative guitar solo, “Queen of Swords” brings to mind Franz Liszt. Not for its romanticism, though its vision of someone alone in a deeply sonorous room long past midnight has more than its share. No, because much as Liszt transcribed all of Beethoven’s symphonies for solo piano, “Queen of Swords” sounds like one of Glenn Branca’s massive, tentacled guitar orchestras siphoned down to one single instrument — well, one single instrument and a fair amount of guitar pedals and an amp that is being pushed to its limit.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/radiofreeul-quoma. Radio Free Ul-quoma is Andrew Gladstone-Heighton of Gateshead, England.
February 11, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0215: Tiny Rhythms
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 shortly at noon, California time, on Thursday, February 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 15, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0215: Tiny Rhythms
The Assignment: Make a short track with just pin-prick audio.
Step 1: This project will require you to have five super tiny sounds, the sonic equivalent of a pin dropping. Create, find, or record those five sounds.
Step 2: Create a short, rhythmic piece of music using only those five sounds. Don’t change the sounds at all. Just use them as they are. At the start of the track have each sound play once in succession, so the listener is aware of the sounds individually before the music proceeds.
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, February 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 15, 2016.
Length: The length is up to you, though between 1 minute and 2 minutes is recommended.
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 “disquiet0215-tinyrhythms.” Also use “disquiet0215-tinyrhythms” 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 215th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Make a short track with just 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 Philippa Willitts, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
