Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 351
January 20, 2016
Layering a Sonic Environment onto a Pre-exisiting Environment
The Touch Radio series’ 120th free download (MP3) is a quarter-hour live performance by Thierry Charollais. It moves through deep, murky spaces. Hovering tones barely begin to mask just how far down other sonic impulses flow. It’s exploratory music, not simply in the sense of being apart from any ingrained tradition of melodic development, but also because it sounds like — reads like — the semi-improvised score to some restless endeavor, a dark-night journey into an unmapped cavern.
The piece was, in fact, recorded last summer in broad daylight on August 29, 2015, at the Botanical Garden in Bern Switzerland. A short statement explains: “The purpose was to give to the audience a sonic environment which contrasts with the quietness of Bern’s Botanic Garden.” That purpose was achieved, and then some.
Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More from Charollais, who is based in Geneva, Switzerand, at
soundcloud.com/thierrycharollais and twitter.com/tcharollais. There are some photos of the Bern concert, part of the festival Les Digitales, but they have all rights reserved, so click over to Pascal Greuter’s Flickr account for a view. The above photo, by Cécilia Kapitz, accompanied the track’s post at touchradio.org.uk.
January 19, 2016
Computer Artifacts as Muses
Monolake (aka Robert Henke) has a new, two-track 12″ due this month as part of his Imbalance Computer Music series. Samples are up at the website of the distributor, Hard Wax. “Cray” was presumably named for the old computer company, and “Glypnir” for the computer language. Full of blissfully broken beats and caustic atmospheres. Streaming and downloadable segments here:
hardwax.com and roberthenke.com.
January 18, 2016
How Erik Satie Foresaw Brendan Landis’ Excavation of His “Gymnopedie No. 1”
There are influences, and there are precedents. Influences are generally things that one senses as having helped shaped one’s world view. Precedents are often recognized afterward as having foretold, to some small or great degree, efforts that came later. Precedents can serve as akin to influences when their scope is such that even if the influenced isn’t ever directly aware of the original work, that work resulted in a cascade such that a chain of influence is essentially undoubtable, even if it’s only evident in retrospect. There’s plenty of illustrated work, for example, that resembles Rube Goldberg’s complex drawings of unnecessarily complicated inventions designed to achieve a specific end result, yet was done by artists who might only have ever witnessed Goldberg’s specific kind of genius thirdhand. In a way, discussion of influence and precedent is its own Rube Goldberg apparatus: a complicated means by which to say, simply, “This has happened before.”
Satie is often credited as a strong precursor — a precedent — of ambient music due to his exploration of stasis and repetition. This is to say that Brendan Landis’ “Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1,” which has experienced a flurry of attention this past week, can trace its existence back to early Satie works. This parallel distinguishes Landis’ effort — which overlays reportedly 60 different takes of “Gymnopedie 1” end to end — from many other supercut-style pop-culture reworkings. In other words, we might learn something about the form of every Star Wars film played simultaneously or every episode of the TV series MAS*H played simultaneously, but it’s a stretch to suggest that the mashup treatment is intrinsic to those two subjects’ original aesthetic.
Landis, to the contrary, can point to the ambient legacy of “Gymnopedie 1,” to the egoless quality of Satie’s famous “Musique d’Ameublement” (music intended to merge with, to disappear into, the expected sounds of a dinner party), and especially to the composer’s “Vexations,” in which a single musical phrase is repeated 840 times. Landis’ technologically enabled reworking of Satie might take “Vexations” as its strongest precedent: Satie played one thing many times to hear the differences; Landis played many versions of one thing at the same time to hear the differences.
Here, for reference, is a complete performance, almost 10 hours in length, of Nicolas Horvath performing “Vexations” live at the Conservatoire de Musique in Lagny-sur-Marne, France, on June 26, 2011:
Here is Landis’ versions(s) of “Gymnopedie 1.” It had about 2,000 or so listens when I first wrote about it, on January 15. As of this writing it has just shy of 30,000 listens:
Just a day before the Horvath “Vexations” performance, a show closed by coincidence halfway across the world at the Fitzroy Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibit, 21st Century Dub Dub, which was up for almost two months, showcased the artist Sean Dack, who is based in New York. There was only one piece in 21st Century Dub Dub, but as Walt Whitman wrote, it contained multitudes. Titled “Version/Variation,” the piece took 26 different takes on the same Satie piece as Landis, “Gymnopedie 1,” and played them simultaneously. One key difference is that Dack opted to play them not at their original speed but slowed down significantly, so each was just over 70 minutes long — “the total length of a commercially available compact disc,” as described in a program note at the gallery’s website, fitzroygallery.com. In a nod to Janet Cardiff’s monumental “The Forty-Part Motet,” in which each vocal line is played on its own freestanding speaker, the Dack Satie piece has each individual recording playing on a different speaker, thus allowing the listener to walk around and amid the piece, to experience it as frozen music, an architecture of sound.
Here, for reference, is footage of a Cardiff/Motet installation:
The Dack video (shown up at the top of this post) has been online for over a year, since September 10, 2014, but as of today still has fewer than 50 views. It deserves to be more widely heard, though it goes without saying that its strongest effect would be in person, in full multi-speaker surround sound. I want to thank a commenter to my previous piece on Landis (who records and performs under the name Hey Exit), “Every* Recording of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopedie 1’ Played at the Same Time,” for having brought the earlier Dack Satie piece to my attention.
The video of “Version/Variation” originally posted at youtube.com. More from Sean Dack at seandack.net. This May 17 will mark the 150th anniversary of Erik Satie’s birth. Perhaps an exhibit this year will show both the Landis and the Dack, and other work inspired by Satie.
January 17, 2016
When a Song’s Development Is a Matter of Distance
As “Arboretum” begins, it is sweet and light, what might be piano heard as filtered through a billowy scrim of synthesized zithers. It’s the chamber music of the spheres, and diverting spheres they are.
As the piece proceeds, those core elements don’t necessarily change very much. As recorded by Tag Cloud, the listener’s perspective simply recedes, one stage at a time, as if we’re pulled denser into a storm — a digital storm, all white-noise rain and sawtooth lightning — the original becoming distant with each step.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/tag-cloud. Tag Cloud is Chris Videll, who is based in Washington, D.C. He has two releases on the Zero Moon label (zeromoon.com).
January 16, 2016
Listening for Patterns in Slowly Building, Slow-Motion Chaos
“Shhh” is just a gentle, two-dimensional field of echoing little padded sonic objects. It’s composed of small, soft sound trinkets that bound off of each other, sometimes on their lonesome, at other times in small groups. It’s like hearing a xylophone being played by snowflakes. The musician who recorded “Shhh” is hi.mo, aka Aimo Scampa of Torreano, Italy. You listen in “Shhh” for the patterns in the echoes and repeats, for which tones actually result in other tones, and to what extent the seeming slow-motion chaos is less a matter of interaction and more a matter of casually accumulating density.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/hi-mo-2. More from hi.mo at himo.bandcamp.com and facebook.com.
January 15, 2016
Every* Recording of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie 1″ Played at the Same Time
Minimalism can be luxurious, an opulence of absence. Brendan Landis, who records as Hey Exit, has found an opulent minimalism by taking some of the most spare music ever, Erik Satie’s classic “Gymnopedie 1,” and maximizing its presence through simultaneous repetition. What he’s done is taken multiple renditions of the piece (“Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1” is the reworking’s title) and layered them atop one another. There’s a joke about being hit by either a ton of bricks or a ton of pillows, and how either way it’s a ton — at some point weight trumps texture. Landis’ experiment reveals that amassed pillowy music doesn’t gather in density so much as exaggerate its inherent properties: a cloud becomes the sky.
To adjust the varying lengths, Landis took the longest piece as the norm and stretched the others to match it. Stretching is, along with supercuts (like the one of every time Metallica’s singer says “yeah” in a song) or the layering of related videos (like Michael Bell-Smith’s version of the first 12 chapters of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet), a popular means by which pop-culture audiences examine the objects of their affection. In supercuts, you can marvel at the mastery or mundanity of repeated elements. In the layered videos, you can note structures, tempos, and other commonalities. A major stretched-audio milestone was an 800% extension of a Justin Bieber track. This gained a lot of notoriety for turning the rakish pop figure into an angel — the thing being, you can stretch just about anything and eventually it becomes angelic. Arguably the key benefit of exaggerated stretching is getting inside the tonality of a piece, witnessing it as architecture: frozen music amid which you can wander.
Landis here uses stretching in a much more functional manner. By matching the start and end of the source recordings, he draws attention to variations in tempo and phrasing. By combining so many Saties in one place he honors the work by bringing an orchestral gravitas to a solo piano piece. At the same time, he also manages to put it off at a distance. “Every Recording of Gymnopedie 1” sounds like nothing so much as one person playing it at the far end of a very long hallway lined with glass — an opulent hall perhaps — the echoes triggering echoes triggering echoes.
The track was originally posted at soundcloud.com/hey-exit, found thanks to Gretchen Ju. More from Hey Exit, aka Brendan Landis of Brooklyn (I met him when he was living in San Francisco and performing with Erik Schoster) at heyexit.com.
*Let’s take Landis’ word for it.
January 14, 2016
Disquiet Junto Project 0211: Midnight Inside Out
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, January 14, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 18, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0211: Midnight Inside Out The Assignment: Shift between the midnight sounds both within and beyond a physical structure, preferably your home.
This project is the sixth in an ongoing occasional series that focuses on late-night ambience. Collectively these nocturnal endeavors are being called “One Minute Past Midnight.” No one’s work will be repurposed without their permission, and it’s appreciated if you post your track with a Creative Commons license that allows for non-commercial reuse, reworking, and sharing.
The steps for this project are as follows:
Step 1: You’ll be making a one-minute track of ambient, everyday sound. The best option is to make actual real-world field recordings, but certainly simulations (i.e., foley) and free resources (such as freesound.org and previous Junto projects) are fine. Just keep this in mind.
Step 2: Please develop two tracks of what the world sounds like at midnight. One track should be the sound inside a physical structure, preferably your home. The other track should be the world outside that same structure.
Step 3: Produce a track that moves back and forth between those two different sonic experiences at midnight. The transitions can be as you see fit. They can be realistic (e.g., opening and closing a door or window), and they can be fantastic (e.g., imagining being able to move freely through a wall).
Step 4: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
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, January 14, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 18, 2016.
Length: The track should be one minute long, exactly.
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 “disquiet0211-midnightinsideout.” Also use “disquiet0211-midnightinsideout” 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 211th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Shift between the midnight sounds both within and beyond a physical structure, preferably your home”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2016/01/14/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
More on the One Minute Past Midnight series at:
http://oneminutepastmidnight.com/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo associated with this project by Michel Banabila, a Junto member, used via Creative Commons license:
January 13, 2016
Listening for Context Between Raw and Cooked Orchestral Performances
It’s unfortunate that many classical composers who post work to SoundCloud and other general-access streaming services don’t annotate their work particularly well, if at all. Often it seems that the material posted was honed in academia and posted for peer distribution, but public music ends up with a public listen, and why not take the time to provide a bit of a program note: what you were aiming for, what you were exploring, what the instrumentation is, what to listen for? Then again, most commercial streaming services (Apple, Google Play, Spotify — even the dearly departed Rdio, which was the most album/artist-centric of its cohort, as opposed to a playlist orientation) provide little if anything in the manner of what was once called liner notes, so individual composers can’t be particularly blamed. Apparently the New Criticism, as it was once called, is new again – that is, the perception of the work as a standalone object, devoid of authorial or cultural context. Or, as C. Reider joked on Twitter, it’s not particularly “acousmatic” to expect a composer to say anything about a work. “Acousmatic” is sound one hears without being aware or certain of the originating source, which is a little different from listening to an orchestra and wondering what was on the minds of the composer and players.
None of which Emilie Cecilia LeBel should be critiqued for individually. She’s generously posted a selection of her compositions to SoundCloud for several years now. Originally from Canada and now an assistant professor of composition and music technology at the University of Montana, she in the past month posted not one but two very different takes on the same work. So, while we don’t know much in the way of background of the evocative, sprawling, and yet exquisitely ephemeral “Monograph of Bird’s Eye Views,” we can listen back and forth between the two takes. Better yet, they were performed by the same ensemble, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, in two very different settings: live in concert in Calgary, and in a studio in Montreal.
The work opens with a dream-like salvo, star-fall shimmers that resolve with a held note. This transfers to a nearly drone-like stature that much of the remaining eight minutes or so strain, successfully, to preserve. “Monograph of Bird’s Eye Views” is a very slow work, yet never tedious. And the strain isn’t a sign of difficulty, but of ambition. LeBel creates a broad quiet space in which individual instruments are paired across sections, and small bands within the orchestra provide soft clusters of chordal formations. The main difference between the two renditions is, of course, room tone. In the live version, the underlying subtlety has to persevere against a tinny, humming spatial reality, but there are also plenty of variations to note, something held back here, something slightly apart from the herd there.
This is the studio recording:
This is the live recording:
My opening comments about the frequent lack of context for music posted on services like SoundCloud, and Bandcamp for that matter, aren’t unique to classical music. And it’s an unfounded condescension to suggest there’s any more inherent depth in an orchestral work than in, say, a remix. However, classical music in particular suffers from far less popular-audience comprehension than do many other forms of music, so listeners bring less knowledge to it. Also, an orchestral score, such as this piece, likely results from an extended gestation period — which is to say, its development has a built-in narrative. Clearly this has been on my mind for awhile, and “Monograph of Bird’s Eye Views” provided both a good example and the kind of listening space conducive to formulating my thoughts. All of which said, LeBel’s composition is absolutely beautiful.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/emiliececilia. More LeBel from at emilielebel.ca. More on the National Youth Orchestra of Canada at nyoc.org.
What Sound Looks Like
A memento of a recent hotel stay. So many antiquities packed into one tiny space: the ballpoint pen, the stationery, the touch of personalization, the concept of “dialing.” Suffice to say there were no instructions inside, no matter what the note suggests. And what would these instructions have included? Proper finger positioning? Menu shortcuts? A technical manual? A schematic? In the end, the line, positioned at the page’s bottom, suggests itself as a creative prompt. Some visitors might not even know a telephone was ever involved.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
The Year Ahead
Thinking ahead this year, some key priorities are
(1) getting this This Week in Sound email published weekly,
(2) finally getting the podcast going,
(2) updating Disquiet.com several times a day rather than just daily,
(3) getting some playlists of (commercial) music going on Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Play Music (none of which have filled the sizable hole that Rdio’s disappearance has left),
(4) finishing a score to a science-fiction film I’m doing sound design and music supervision for (more on which later),
(5) getting my next semester of my class on the “role of sound in the media landscape” going (it starts the first week of February),
(6) finalizing “next book(s)” plans,
and … well, and more.
Current fixations: the not-quite-silences of conference calls … sound effects in comics … sound design of TV shows and film … making peace with the death of Rdio and trying to get into the groove with either Google Play Music, Apple Music, or Spotify …
This first appeared in the January 12, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
