Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 348
February 10, 2016
The Experience of the Day
There is absolutely nothing explicitly natural about “Snow on North Linn,” and yet it feels real in its own way. It has sublimated melodic material that couldn’t be mistaken for the wind, and yet it feels like a breeze passing. It has piercing moments that suggest the sun breaking through a cloud, but that couldn’t be the case since, of course, the sun doesn’t make a peep. Recorded by Charlie Broderick, who goes by the Ambiguity, it is a lush, welcoming, reflective piece that captures not the actual documentary sound of the day, but the emotional experience of the day.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/the-ambiguity. Found via a repost by soundcloud.com/murkok. More from Broderick, who is based in Iowa City, Iowa, at theambiguity.bandcamp.com.
What Sound Looks Like
This is a sound-art installation in the basement level of MoCA, the contemporary art museum in Los Angeles. It’s a readymade installation with no specific credited author. It’s a bank of what apparently used to be public phones. Now it is a shiny, burnished metal sculpture that could be mistaken for a work by Tristan Perich or Alva Noto. It’s a wall hanging that serves as a monument to a distant form of communication, to a time when we were, like the work itself is, tethered.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
February 9, 2016
French Duo Hovers Between Real and Surreal
Avallon is the French duo of Aurélie Barbé and Benoît Rocco. Their combination, respectively, of electronic harp and vibraphone make for a genteel ambience. In “Une Autre Rive,” a third element enters the flow, a field recording of lapping water. Their instruments hover between the real and the surreal, between the documentary audio and a pervasive digital processing that snags pitches, tones, and textures and pushes the work beyond traditional notions of musicianship and into a realm of sonic experimentation.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/avallonmusic. More from Barbé at soundcloud.com/aureharp. The above picture of the duo is from the Avallon Facebook page, facebook.com/avallonmusic. Avallon is based in Paris, France.
February 8, 2016
A Brief Arc of Narrative-Laced Noise
“In the Eye of the Storm” is a brief arc of narrative-laced noise. It transitions through states, through stages, pausing on occasion, each new phase of static and tone surfacing from what preceded it. It originates with a foment of rapidly shifting chaos. A slowly pulsing drone emerges while the short-circuit flare subsides. Henceforth there are many short-term shifts, from slightly more rhythmic material, like a mallet instrument heard in a white-noise rain, to more fractured scenes, in which the ear struggles momentarily for a modicum of foundation. Throughout the randomness is never tantamount to confusion. The piece is grounded with that mallet-like pulse, and even those shifts occur with an orderliness that provides an underlying sense of orientation — comfort in the storm.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/forelight. More from Forelight at forelight.bandcamp.com.
February 7, 2016
A Moment of Reflective Calm Before All Hell Breaks Loose
Suss Müsik refers to his music as “Post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports,” which seems about right. The track “Melting Square” is a flowing amalgam of overlaid guitar patterning: strumming electric beneath louche waveforms amid spaced-out echoes. It’s like the midpoint music from a Michael Mann film, a moment of reflective calm before all hell breaks loose. The track, which teams Suss Müsik with musician Marc Manning, itself gets calmer as it proceeds, the strumming eventually fading out entirely in favor of the voluminous echo, that echo then fracturing into a quietly intense, psychedelic field of ghostly twinkling.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/suss-musik. There’s no active external links on his SoundCloud page, but the easily Google-able sussmusik.com has a promising “Website coming soon / We’re on it” dated February 3 of this year.
February 6, 2016
What Sound Looks Like
Spotted on a walk to the ocean, this is a marvel of truly mediocre upgrades. The added plastic buttons make you wonder if the individual tenants were left by an absentee landlord with the responsibility to replace faulty equipment themselves, and to ponder just how ragged the original hardware was that it made sense not to rewire it. Then again, perhaps the buttons are assigned to unlabeled sublets for mothers-in-law, or even for small businesses. Maybe what appears to be lazy is in fact a hasty badge of entrepreneurial zeal.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
An Enticing Sonic Interiority
“Modderlaars” is the sort of track that is quiet enough to draw you in and dense enough to then creep up and surround you. By all rights, the minimal materials should seem tattered and light. And yet they accumulate with an unmistakable hardness, like thick musty glass, acknowledging the world but still blocking it out. Throughout is a steady pulsing that has a blood-in-the-ear intensity, especially on headphones. But much as the sounds are thin yet strong, the pulse is pounding yet slow. The result is an enticing sonic interiority. You can luxuriate in it, but you also cannot escape.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kozepz. More from Kozepz, of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, at kozepz.bandcamp.com.
February 5, 2016
It’s Not a “Drone” in the Military Sense
“That’s Not Me” feels like the sound design for the opening credits to a thriller — maybe a video game, likely a film, but in any case a very good thriller, indeed, packed with septuple agents and all matter of styling, technologically mediated skullduggery. The underlying pulse of the piece is a slow, methodical burr that rises up and cuts off. It’s like a contained flare, or an especially militant drone. The track, recorded by Adam Fielding, sets the pace for a growing assembly of careful additions. There’s a secondary beat that eventually arrives, the echo treateed as a rhythmic shadow, and then vaporous percussion and thick atmosphere synthesis fill in the space between those pulses.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/adfielding. It’s part of a Bandcamp subscriber release, Apparitions, at adamfielding.bandcamp.com. More from Adam Fielding, who’s based in Huddersfield, England, at www.adamfielding.com and twitter.com/misterfielding.
This Week in Sound: Swan Speakers + X-Files Music
A lightly annotated clipping service:
The Uncanny Lake: This whimsical image is of inverted satellite dishes (with added speakers) whose design and deployment are intended to refer back to the silhouette and motion of swans. The work is an outdoor installation by Berlin-based artist Marco Barotti. So often the exposed speaker is intended to be ignored in sound art. Kudos to Barotti for making something of the form. There’s video at creativeboom.com, which provides additional information: “Two layers of sound design consisting of bass frequencies and human breath passing through brass instruments provide them with voice and motion. Eight individual audio channels are used to transport the sound through the swans, bringing them to life and remodelling the landscape.”
Cellphone Home: We’re now halfway through the reunion of The X-Files, and the third episode is, in my opinion, easily one of the best told and most enjoyably self-conscious episodes in the history of the show. This six-episode miniseries is clearly about the midlife crisis of Agent Mulder, whose long-held desire to believe has to, now, make due in the age of snopes.com. That scenario is a little disappointing because it leaves Agent Scully playing second fiddle, but Mulder’s self-doubt is more than enough to carry the show, and Scully makes a great foil for his crisis of xenobiological faith. This third episode, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” casts two fine comedians, Rhys Darby (the band manager from Flight of the Conchords) and Kumail Nanjiani (one of the main programmers on Silicon Valley), in roles the least said about the better, except that the duo, along with Mulder, give Scully plenty of opportunity to marvel as the sheer ridiculousness of what life as an X-Files agent involves. Scully can get sanguine, even giggly, while Mulder seems maudlin. At one point he wakes up in a cemetery with a freshly minted hangover. His cellphone is ringing. It’s playing, of course, the theme music from The X-Files. How this meta-congruity fits into the mythology of the series is unclear, but what I really wants to know is if this ringtone is reserved only for Scully. There are three more episodes to go. Perhaps all will be revealed. What’s for sure is that the ringtone works well within the overarching self-awareness of the episode (which features Darby wearing the same hat and clothing as the hero of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which was as much a premonition of The X-Files as The X-Files was of Fringe). The score-within-the-show cellphone moment is a reassuring reminder that, like Mulder himself is advised, the audience needs to take a deep breath and stop trying to connect the dots. At least until next week.
Basin Blues: That is a map of the Mediterranean. Despite the colors, it is not pretty. The colorful pixels are not recreational spots but locations of especially high noise density. Then again, maybe they are recreational spots as well. More importantly, the map is reportedly the first full map of “underwater noise sources” in the Mediterranean basin, the work of researchers in France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. The primary activity appears to be four sources: harbors, offshore activity (not just oil and gas drilling but also wind farms), seismic surveys, and military exercises. These closely map to cetacean habitats, hence the concern on the part of the researchers. The news was released as part of one of several oceancare.org campaigns to raise awareness. (Found via sonicstudies.org.) … In related news, the Telegraph reports that the noise of ocean-going ships may keep orca whales from communicating with each other.
Sonic Weapons: Via gizmodo.com, sometimes that man-made quake sensation isn’t from fracking down below, but from something on high: “Tremors felt by residents of New Jersey Shore and Long Island today prompted speculation that an earthquake had occurred—but the US Geological Survey confirmed that the rumbling sensations were caused by a sonic boom.” Measurements over at earthquake.usgs.gov.
This first appeared in the February 2, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: Swan Speakers + X-Files Music +
A lightly annotated clipping service:
The Uncanny Lake: This whimsical image is of inverted satellite dishes (with added speakers) whose design and deployment are intended to refer back to the silhouette and motion of swans. The work is an outdoor installation by Berlin-based artist Marco Barotti. So often the exposed speaker is intended to be ignored in sound art. Kudos to Barotti for making something of the form. There’s video at creativeboom.com, which provides additional information: “Two layers of sound design consisting of bass frequencies and human breath passing through brass instruments provide them with voice and motion. Eight individual audio channels are used to transport the sound through the swans, bringing them to life and remodelling the landscape.”
Cellphone Home: We’re now halfway through the reunion of The X-Files, and the third episode is, in my opinion, easily one of the best told and most enjoyably self-conscious episodes in the history of the show. This six-episode miniseries is clearly about the midlife crisis of Agent Mulder, whose long-held desire to believe has to, now, make due in the age of snopes.com. That scenario is a little disappointing because it leaves Agent Scully playing second fiddle, but Mulder’s self-doubt is more than enough to carry the show, and Scully makes a great foil for his crisis of xenobiological faith. This third episode, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” casts two fine comedians, Rhys Darby (the band manager from Flight of the Conchords) and Kumail Nanjiani (one of the main programmers on Silicon Valley), in roles the least said about the better, except that the duo, along with Mulder, give Scully plenty of opportunity to marvel as the sheer ridiculousness of what life as an X-Files agent involves. Scully can get sanguine, even giggly, while Mulder seems maudlin. At one point he wakes up in a cemetery with a freshly minted hangover. His cellphone is ringing. It’s playing, of course, the theme music from The X-Files. How this meta-congruity fits into the mythology of the series is unclear, but what I really wants to know is if this ringtone is reserved only for Scully. There are three more episodes to go. Perhaps all will be revealed. What’s for sure is that the ringtone works well within the overarching self-awareness of the episode (which features Darby wearing the same hat and clothing as the hero of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which was as much a premonition of The X-Files as The X-Files was of Fringe). The score-within-the-show cellphone moment is a reassuring reminder that, like Mulder himself is advised, the audience needs to take a deep breath and stop trying to connect the dots. At least until next week.
Basin Blues: That is a map of the Mediterranean. Despite the colors, it is not pretty. The colorful pixels are not recreational spots but locations of especially high noise density. Then again, maybe they are recreational spots as well. More importantly, the map is reportedly the first full map of “underwater noise sources” in the Mediterranean basin, the work of researchers in France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States. The primary activity appears to be four sources: harbors, offshore activity (not just oil and gas drilling but also wind farms), seismic surveys, and military exercises. These closely map to cetacean habitats, hence the concern on the part of the researchers. The news was released as part of one of several oceancare.org campaigns to raise awareness. (Found via sonicstudies.org.) … In related news, the Telegraph reports that the noise of ocean-going ships may keep orca whales from communicating with each other.
Sonic Weapons: Via gizmodo.com, sometimes that man-made quake sensation isn’t from fracking down below, but from something on high: “Tremors felt by residents of New Jersey Shore and Long Island today prompted speculation that an earthquake had occurred—but the US Geological Survey confirmed that the rumbling sensations were caused by a sonic boom.” Measurements over at earthquake.usgs.gov.
This first appeared in the February 2, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
