Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 352

This Week in Sound: Sonic Fiction + Sonic Weapons + Jack Politics +

A lightly annotated clipping service, delivered weekly via email newsletter (tinyletter.com/disquiet):

Sonic Fiction: So, one of the characters in the acclaimed Chinese science fiction novel by author Liu Cixin says he implemented the “pop music as sonic weapon” approach to dealing with Noriega. The irony being that the futuristic nano-material the characters then employ to deal with a larger problem comes to resemble a massively oversized zither — in other words, a whole other sonic weapon, of sorts. (I have some sound-related thoughts on two other science-fiction novels I finished reading late last year, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and I’ll try to work them into an upcoming This Week in Sound newsletter.)

Robotic Dogs of War: Sometimes being loud is a benefit in warfare. It is punishing and intimidating. Apparently for the development of “robot dogs,” sometimes being loud can mean being too loud. “”As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself,” a spokesperson for the DARPA-funded Warfighting Lab told military.com. “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.” (Via cnet.com.)

Canine Accompaniment: Meanwhile, Laurie Anderson was composing for our canine companions, per the New York Times: “She and friends put on a concert for hundreds of dogs outside the Sydney Opera House, with the music emitted from speakers at a low, dog-friendly frequency. (She didn’t want to risk shocking the dogs with a high frequency.)”

The Hole Story: There’s a lot of uproar over concern that Apple will ditch the headphone jack. As of this writing, 246,000 of a hoped-for 250,000 signatures have been added to a petition for Apple to not do something it hasn’t said it’s going to do but that people are apparently concerned about. I’m a bit cautious about consumer activism these days. It often feels more consumerist than activist. In any case, while there’s concern about a whole new suite of cables required — should Apple go ahead with this plan — I think the real plan on Apple’s part may be to nudge us toward Bluetooth and other forms of wireless headphones. (Note a recent piece at macrumors.com.)

Tape Heads: It’s unclear if the novelist Rosecrans Baldwin (You Lost Me There) anticipated criticism of his attempted takedown of the cassette tape in a recent New York Times op-ed (“Our Misplaced Nostalgia for Cassette Tapes”), though he acknowledges in the piece that even his wife disagrees with him. In any case, subsequent letters to the paper make a case for the medium. Dan Zajackowski of New York City wrote: “The cassette is for people with an attention span, people who are generous enough to let an artist curate a whole half-hour of listening, or in the case of a mixtape, between 60 and 120 minutes.” And Portland, Oregon-based Ted Laderas (a Disquiet Junto participant) wrote: “I read Rosecrans Baldwin’s article as a slap in the face of small-time musicians like me. The cost of manufacturing vinyl and CDs is prohibitive for musicians who sell small numbers of albums. While not ideal, tape is easy to manufacture and easy to personalize, and provides small-time musicians with a viable way of sharing our music that our fans are willing to buy.”

This first appeared in the January 12, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.

Music for Fracking

Among recent recipients of Creative Capital awards, announced today, is composer and sound artist Brian Harnetty, whose Shawnee, Ohio, heard here in an excerpt, uses field recording and composed segments to explore the influence of fracking on communities and the environment. This piece is brief, under a minute, but the mix of elegant, slow-paced musical elements and snippets of spoken reminiscences is striking.

A brief note explains his project:

Performed with sampled archives, field recordings and live musicians, Shawnee, Ohio critically engages ecology, energy, place and personal history to ask: What are the sounds of mining? Of fracking? Of a town fighting to survive after a century of economic decline and environmental degradation? These sounds are recorded as compositional material reflecting layers of history and memory in Appalachian Ohio. Shawnee’s history includes coal, gas and clay extraction, and the formation of early labor unions. The town’s downturn and partial restoration act as an ethos of the struggles and hopes of the larger region, now immersed in a controversial fracking boom. Shawnee, Ohio considers these histories, evokes place through sound, and listens to the present alongside traces of the past.

Video originally posted at creative-capital.org. More from Harnetty, who lives in Ohio, at brianharnetty.com.

What Sound Looks Like

I’m very happy with where I live, in San Francisco’s Richmond District. I’ve lived here for 20 years as of this coming summer, excepting four years spent in New Orleans (1999-2003). But once in a while an interesting home goes on the market, and it’s fun to take a look, perhaps (though not really) to move, more likely to dream, in any case to gain an unfamiliar vantage on this tremendous city. This view is from the top floor of an apartment building that faces Japantown. More immediately, however, it looks down directly on the Chinese consulate. If you look out you see the city to the north. If you look down you see an array of communication apparatuses. The urban high rise is a focal point of discussions about population density and privacy. But it’s another thing entirety to view, and be in view of, a site synonymous with surveillance. The view draws the narrative into the building. Who within the apartment complex might, themselves, be tasked with observational duties? And who observes them? Who, in other words, listens to the listeners?

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

In Search of Bulgarian Industrial Techno

Evitceles’ expertly constructed “Careful Mirage” got an extra dose of exposure thanks to its appearance on the SoundCloud feed of Data Transmission. The well-followed dance-music site datatransmission.co.uk tracked down Evitceles, who is based in Bulgaria, for comment, and the musician comfortably likened the work to that of a prominent musician who traffics in stylish, consummate, suffocating industrial techno: “The influence obviously comes from Andy Stott’s work, I always liked his layered bass and the floating vocals. I really like sub-basses that hit you hard,” the quote goes. The piece is a dense churn of mechanical intrigue. As the musician himself states, it’s enlivened by these vocals that neither impose themselves on the goings-on, nor get lost in the digital proceedings. If there’s a club that regularly plays this, I want a visit, even if it means traveling all the way to Bulgaria.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/data-transmission. Found via a repost by Evitcele’s own account, soundcloud.com/evitceles. More at facebook.com/evitceles, evitceles.bandcamp.com, and breathindigo.tumblr.com.

David Bowie and the Artful Calculation of Death

When Dennis Potter, the great British television writer (The Singing Detective, Pennies from Heaven), was dying of cancer in the mid-1990s, he continued to work hard on a number of scripts. His energy was limited, he was interviewed on television while taking morphine for the pain, and yet he didn’t stop working. With characteristic mordant humor, he named one of his final two scripts Cold Lazarus. Better yet, it was a work of science fiction: Ever aware of his limited mortality, Potter wrote something that would take place in a distant future he’d never live to see — none of us will, as it’s set several centuries down the road — and titled it after a man synonymous with being brought back from the dead. Potter died in 1994, less than a month after his 59th birthday.

Apparently, we now know, David Bowie had similar things in the works as his death from cancer approached. Bowie’s “Lazarus” is both a song off his new album, Blackstar, and the title of a musical he developed with co-writer Enda Walsh (of Once). The musical Lazarus is, like Potter’s Cold Lazarus, a work of science fiction, drawing inspiration from Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film version of which Bowie starred in back in 1976. (The movie was directed by Nicolas Roeg, who also directed Track 29, based on a Dennis Potter script. Bowie was reportedly the first choice for the male lead in Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle, but the part eventually went to Sting.) Bowie died yesterday, just days after his 69th birthday, which coincided with Blackstar’s release.

A friend once told me, wisely, that when you cry you’re never crying about one thing. The sudden death of Bowie, at such a public moment, when his brand new Blackstar was getting such positive reviews, was not just a shock but an artfully calculated one. Not just a consummate singer, performer, composer, and musician, Bowie was theatrical to the core. His death was, we now know, as much a production as were so many aspects of his career. Thinking about his productivity during such hardship naturally had me think about Dennis Potter, a major hero of mine, and from there the various connections made themselves apparent.

When many contemporary popular artists die, they leave behind a totemic, iconic figure, a singular image. Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson come to mind immediately. But others, like Bowie, mean such different things to different people. One of the phenomenal things about Bowie is that so many of us who focus on different types of music all mourn different Bowies, their own Bowies. “My” Bowie is the ambient-minimalist-progressive Bowie, the one who collaborated with Brian Eno for the “Berlin trilogy,” the one who employed not one but two different King Crimson guitarists (Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew), the one whose Eno-era work was later revisited in a classical setting by composer Philip Glass. (I’d bought my first Bowie album, Hunky Dory, while wandering around Greenwich Village as a slightly fearful teenager. Why Hunky Dory? Because Rick Wakeman played keyboards on it. I was a big Yes fan at the time.)

Listening back to those works, watching live performances, and re-reading interviews, I take some solace in the sheer dedication inherent in those collaborations. In retrospect, we perhaps should have seen Bowie’s death coming, so clearly were ruminations on mortality written into his recent songs. Dennis Potter succumbed to cancer publicly, while Bowie chose to do so privately. Bowie had written in a science fiction mode for so long, we can forgive ourselves for not realizing sooner that his own future had come to an end. It took someone like Bowie to make death feel vital — not an absence, but a force. Like a black star. As he sang on Hunky Dory’s “Quicksand,” the song that closes the album’s first side: “Knowledge comes with death’s release.”

What Church Bells Might Sound Like in Second Life

This “Meeting of the Sines” piece by Los Angeles-based Bana Haffar is nearly three minutes of slowly spaced, bell-like tones, each settling just in time for the next to surface, to rise, and to then again fall. They’re clearly synthesized — sounds aside, the track is also tagged #modularsynthesis — but they have a recognizable tonality, like something ringing at a church deep in Second Life at noon, telling the bots it’s time to gather for lunch and prayer. The bells range from deep, thrummy bass notes to high, clarion ones. Each echoes with a swaying sense of easy consonance, and occasionally there are reflective moments, when a bit of timbre is singled out, the sonic equivalent of a lens flare. It’s graceful, stately stuff.

Images up top are from this video at moogmusic.com of Haffar performing live:

“Meeting of the Sines” originally posted at soundcloud.com/banahaffarmusic. More from Haffar at twitter.com/banaonbass. Found via a repost by soundcloud.com/ghostoflightning, aka Travis Blitzen of Oakland, California.

What Is the Sonic Domestic Utility of the Ocean Surf?

I spent the past few days in Los Angeles at a hotel in Hollywood. My room, a small studio on the 11th floor, was awash with ocean sounds when I first walked in. The hotel had a little sound machine set up near the bed. It was on a crowded end table, what with the lamp, cordless phone, and iPhone-friendly alarm clock also sharing the space. Each item was vaguely elegant on its own, but collectively they were a matter of overkill and incongruity by accrual. The sound machine itself was fairly old, the speaker rattly, the recordings mechanical — a fax machine’s idea of surf. There were other options, too: stream, rain, white noise, and so on.

I’d had a similar experience previously at the same hotel chain in a different city, but that time I’d arrived late at night and struggled to find the source of the ocean and turn it off. I used to travel a lot for work, and became amazed by how much variation there could be in the placement and functionality of something as presumably straightforward as a light switch. It’s one thing to master the ever-mutating light switch. A “sound machine” is its own far-from-ubiquitous apparatus, a still-striving category aspiring to private-space normality. The hotel intended the sound machine to be relaxing; it was anything but.

This time around I knew how to turn it off: that helpful large element in the front center was, in fact, a very large button — so large that it was hiding in plain sight.

Days passed, and this morning, while drinking coffee and listening through Bandcamp and SoundCloud, I came upon this track (up above) by Hilary Mullaney. It’s a deeply detailed field recording of surf off the Irish coast. A brief note from Mullaney sets context:

This is an edit of a longer recording made at the waters edge on a beach in Spanish Point, Co. Clare, leaving the recording device on the ledge of a black rock to capture the surrounding sounds. It was a cold, wet and windy day in August.

I had it on repeat for a couple hours, the nearly three-minute track washing out through my laptop speakers, a brief pause at each repetition, like a dream starting over again. There’s perhaps too much detail in a track like this to serve as serene background listening — the bird song, rough noise of perhaps the recorder herself moving about, the waves and bubbles washing at imagined feet, the ocean rumbling somewhat threateningly in the distance.

It’s unclear if real ocean surf serves the same sonic domestic purpose of fake surf, if the narrative inherent in a “real” recording, especially one as thorough as Mullaney’s, can provide the intended ease of the fake surf. Perhaps the main issue with the fake-surf device is the device itself: a substandard interface, a speaker that degrades over time, a busy addition to an already overstuffed bedside. Or perhaps it is the sound itself: a mechanical lullaby that reinforces (rather than distracting the listener from) the pressures of the modern world outside the window.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/hilarymullaney. More from Mullaney at hilarymullaney.com.

A Drum Corps Made of Fireworks and Typewriters

Giant Claw’s recently posted “Jan 6 2016 Improvisation” is a feast of martial counterpoint, of clashing, short-lived bursts of sound, some orchestral, the majority terse and hard. It’s like a drum corps that’s made of fireworks and typewriters, with occasional, echoing calls to arms that fade into the noise. There are passing, doppler sirens, too, adding to the militant flavor. It should, by all rights, fall apart from the sheer breadth of its disparate elements, but it holds together, the clanks and bangs and dramatic pauses keeping the ear alert throughout.

More from Giant Claw, aka Keith Rankin, who’s based in Columbus, Ohio, at giantclaw.bandcamp.com, twitter.com/KeithKawaii, and keithkawaii.com. Rankin co-owns the label Orange Milk Records (orangemilkrecords.com). Found via a repost from the account soundcloud.com/ears-have-ears.

Disquiet Junto Project 0210: Ice Coda

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.

This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 11, 2016.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0210: Ice Coda
The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

Happy new year! This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012.

Step 1: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Step 2: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 3: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the fifth (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

Deadline: This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 7, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 11, 2016.

Length: Length is up to you, though between one and four 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 “disquiet0210-icecoda.” Also use “disquiet0210-icecoda” 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 210th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2016/01/07/disqui...

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

Photo associated with this project by Michael Scott used via Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/5vyz3G

The Ever Portable Ukulele Meets Mobile Digital Audio Processing

There are many types of music apps — that is, apps employed in the making of music. In terms of the intent packed into those apps, through both features and branding, they can been seen, very broadly, to fall into two categories: first, apps that miniaturize for our phone/tablet age tools that existed in the past; second, apps that go new places.

As a longtime follower of digital music-making tools intended for use on the go, PalmSounds.net blogger Ashley Elsdon falls firmly in the latter camp — a subject explored in depth in an interview I did with him late last year (“Immediacy + Accessibility = Joy”). When I did the interview, I was very familiar with Elsdon’s fixation on mobile music making, from its early-ish fledgling flourishing on the defunct Palm platform, on through the golden age of iOS apps.

What I wasn’t familiar with was Elsdon’s own music. I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, to hear these recent experiments of his for digitally processed ukulele. All three employ different apps (as detailed in a short post at palmsounds.net) to both halo and process the ukulele’s unique, casual, often gestural tonalities. They’re quite distinct recordings from each other, but they also hold together as a set. “Ukulele Exploration 1” in particular rewards repeat listening, with its dubby echoes of gentle plucking and strums.

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/palmsounds.