Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 353
January 5, 2016
Feeling the Hand on the Pad in Instrumental Hip-hop
Arcka, aka Shawn Kelly, the artist also known as Arkatron, and formerly as Y?Arcka, has a release, Subtle Busyness, due out shortly on the Twin Springs Tapes label. Two tracks have been posted to the label’s SoundCloud account in advance. Both are instrumental hip-hop, which is where Arcka lives, but they go in distinctly different directions.
“Lunar” is a blissfully steady two-minute beat with dreamy undertones. Nudges in the bass and swirly synthesized, zithery accents entertain psychedelic associations. Put it on repeat.
“Aerofloat” is more characteristic of Arcka, which is to say it’s more difficult to pigeonhole and a rewarding listen for that very reason. Early on the beat slows to a syrupy pause, like a hip-hop train losing steam as it comes into the station, and for an extended period you listen inside the audio, to warped elements and a richly irregular rhythm. Of course, then it nearly flies out of control — though not fully, because Arcka is at the wheel.
Hip-hop production has a reputation for being studio music, and that’s certainly the case with Arcka, who does much of his work on an MPC, the classic rap-music workhorse. However, it’s useful to remember what a tactile machine the MPC is, how beloved its pads are to producers. In “Aerofloat” there are, throughout, these pixie-stick triggers that are just enough off the beat that you can sense the hand of producer. The music of Arcka may be recorded and constructed, cut-up and arranged, but the life blood is self-evident throughout.
Here’s a shot from a few years ago of Arcka cleaning the insides of his well-used MPC:
A photo posted by ARCKATRON (@arckatron) on Feb 11, 2015 at 5:07pm PST
The two-track set was first posted at soundcloud.com/twin-springs-tapes. More from Arcka at arckatron.us. More from the Twin Springs label at twinspringstapes.bandcamp.com and facebook.com/twinspringstapes. The album is due out, in a limited edition of 100 tapes, shortly. And here’s an interview I did with Arcka/Kelly, who is based in Philadelhia, back in 2009: “Young Communicator.”
January 4, 2016
When the Violin Provides the Saw Wave
Liz Meredith’s violin is so deeply buried in the glorious noise of this live recording, from July of last year, that the instrument is barely if ever recognizable. What is recognizable is an urge to take static and interference and loop them until they push at and against the ear’s penchant for pattern. There’s a sawing early on that could be the violin, or it could just as likely be a saw wave. For just over 10 minutes, she rages in slow motion, at one moment suggesting a third-world raga, at another a sonar beacon. The performance was taped at the Windup Space in Baltimore, Maryland, where Meredith lives.
On the gentler, if still at times nervous-making, end of the continuum, also recommended is this 2013 collaboration between Meredith and John Somers, The Disposition of Vibrant Forms, a collection of wonderful longform drones, ranging in length from nearly 12 to over 20 minutes:
The Disposition Of Vibrant Forms by John Somers & Liz Meredith
Live track originally posted at soundcloud.com/liz-meredith. Disposition album at thedispositionofvibrantforms.bandcamp. More from Meredith at lizmeredith.com, where the above photo originated.
January 3, 2016
Music That Can Be Thought of as Perfect
Air ( and the divisions between ) by Valid Lover
There is a kind of music that can be thought of as perfect. That’s not a qualitative statement of taste so much as an attribution that recognizes how fierce dedication to an elegant scope can yield something singular, effecting, evocative. The term applies, certainly, to a series of live improvisations for digitally mediated electric guitar recently posted by Valid Lover, who’s based in Brussels, Belgium. The music is deeply spare, consisting of brief, tentative moments, not so much riffs as instances when fingers hit strings, moments smaller still, within a cycle of a vibration. Those riffs trigger digital refractions, echoes, and splinters, high-pitched sounds that linger in the air like sulfur, quavering pulses that your ear keeps listening for long after they’ve passed.
The track “Sketch 16″ — they’re all “sketches” in the titling — is a great entry point to what serves as two full albums of examples, (Air ( and the divisions between ) and Weight ( with those held beneath ), both available from his validlover.bandcamp.com page for free streaming or a small download expense (€5). At times the derivations from guitar are so precise that they bring to mind the artificial strings employed by Oval (Markus Popp) on his 2010 album, O, but the majority have a casual quality that draws on the unique characteristics of live performance.
Track originally posted at validlover.bandcamp.com as part of the album Air ( and the divisions between ). Found via a discussion at the llllllll.co message boards.
January 2, 2016
Maria Chavez Listens to, Rather Than Through, Vinyl Surface Noise
“[E]ven without engaging the motor one can still create interesting sounds simply by placing the needle on the surface area of the platter and turning up your volume. It becomes a giant contact mic, reacting to the physical sonic characteristics of whatever you place on top of it. This versatility, along with countless other little features that the turntable provides, makes the turntable a valuable instrument in my opinion. Vinyl is a detail to me, a sound vocabulary that I can manually manipulate.” That’s sound artist and turntablist Maria Chavez explaining, early last year, to Kristin Iversen of bkmag.com both why and how the turntable is central to her sonic activities.
You can hear Chavez’s exploratory efforts in “Kids- TRIAL 18 (Unfinished),” a transfixing mix of brittle, foregrounded surface noise and warped, melancholic melody. The vinyl static and buzzy textural imperfections are like hard cold icy rain hitting the window of a parked car, as heard from the inside. That sound is precise and sharp and it comes in clusters, each wave suggesting that maybe just maybe the flurry of noise will finally recede, until the ear eventually makes peace with the fact that the noise is the music. For Chavez, that vinyl noise is what you listen to, not what you listen through. You listen for its patterning, its physicality, the slight variations in timbre, volume, and depth.
Amid that dusty precipitate in “Kids- TRIAL 18 (Unfinished)” is a soft, narrow melody, a mere riff that is repeated, cut up, looped, and heard in varying degrees of completeness, both forward and backward. It gives the ear enough familiar song-like content to satisfy an underlying, culturally accumulated need for something tonal, but it is by no means sufficient on its own. It is there as a foil for the surface noise of the vinyl, something that it purposefully never comes close to rising above.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/maria-chavez. More from Chavez at mariachavez.org,
twitter.com/chavezsayz, and
instagram.com/chavezsayz. Photo by Maggie Shannon, from an article at bkmag.com.
January 1, 2016
Finding the Tension in the Ambience
First day of the new year, many are all quiet on the social media front, while others are already getting going on the next 12 months’ productivity and creativity. Those two, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Benoît Pioulard has posted “Madrigal” for the new year. It’s a piece he recorded just yesterday, December 31, 2015. Judging by the time stamp, this went up shortly after the ball dropped. It’s a piece for “guitar and tape,” per the brief liner note. “Madrigal” is a soaring series of wafting swells, one after another after another. The momentum is colorfully at odds with the placidity. Likewise, while it has the pace of clouds, the texture is closer to that of rough sandpaper, the tones like the static shaved off of a shoegazer performance, the sampling stretched within a micron of its source material. Those tensions are what elevate this ambient music well beyond clouds-for-clouds’-sake haze.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/pioulard. More from Benoît Pioulard, aka Thomas Meluch, who’s based in Seattle, at pioulard.bandcamp.com and pioulard.com. (Track found via a repost from Tim Dwyer [soundcloud.com/offland-1].)
December 31, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0209: Audio Journal 2015
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.
This project was posted just before noon, California time, on Thursday, December 31, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 4, 2016.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0209: Audio Journal 2015
The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.
This week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past year.
Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2015. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.
Step 2: You will then select one five-second segment from each of these dozen audio elements.
Step 3: Then you will stitch these dozen five-second segments together in chronological order to form one single one-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.
Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.
(Level Up: Alternately, you can use more than 12 audio segments — do two a month, or one a week, or one a day. Whatever you choose, just keep them evenly distributed across the year. You might make the segments shorter, to keep the full track length to 60 seconds.)
Step 5: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This project was posted just before noon, California time, on Thursday, December 31, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 4, 2016.
Length: The track should be 60 seconds long.
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 “disquiet0209-journal2015.” Also use “disquiet0209-journal2015” 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 209th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/31/disqui...
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
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo associated with this project by Barry Silver used via Creative Commons license:
December 26, 2015
Japanese Tufts and Flares
The beautiful track “Kalte Luft,” German for “cold air,” comes from Kobe, Japan–based Hirotaka Shirotsubaki. It’s a nearly eight-minute drone with a loose, organic tonality. By “organic” is here meant that there are enough layered elements that the texture is ever changing, the effort throughout evident in a micro-scale level of detail, all tiny, incremental shifts and alterations. At a more macro level, the piece is a sequence of tufts and and flares, billowy, morphing waves and sharp, piercing grace notes. It’s a highlight of the album Étude 1, available for free download from Bandcamp, which is a four-song split between Shirotsubaki and his fellow Japanese electronic musician Sleepland:
Étude 1 by Hirotaka Shirotsubaki & sleepland
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/infection. More from Shirotsubaki at hshirptsubaki.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/tubakihiroki. More from Sleepland at soundcloud.com/sleepland and sleepland.bandcamp.com. (Found via a repost by Mexico-based Autumn Clouds, soundcloud.com/autumnclouds.)
December 25, 2015
Aphex Twin Holiday Treat
With the cheerful and characteristically gobbledygook sign off “spladgyklax,” Aphex Twin yesterday posted, as a holiday gift, a freely downloadable percussive little piece titled “pianopkupt1 [norm].” Accompanying it is this short message: “thanks for all your lush messages on here and the PM’s.” At least the track was there as of this typing, which I’ve set to post early on Friday, California time. Tracks have been coming and going on his slightly concealed, pseudonymous user18081971 account for months now. At one point there were more than 250 tracks, and then the cupboard was suddenly bare, and in recent weeks some older tracks have begun to reappear, along with some new ones, like “pianopkupt1 [norm].” (This past Monday, the 21st, I happened, around 4:30pm California time, to see all 269 tracks listed as available, and then a few minutes later they were gone, reduced to 9. As of today there are 10.) Of course, “new” is a qualified term, as much of the music Aphex Twin has been posting as user18081971 appears to be archival material, providing peeks into his process and alternate takes on familiar music, like “Avril 14th” and aspects of the Selected Ambient Works Volume II album. The newly arrived “pianopkupt1 [norm]” track has no year associated with it. It’s possible that the “pkupt” in the title refers to the use of pickups inside a piano, hence the exceptionally echoey sound of the keys. The continuum between the evident piano and the more neutral beats is a gentle reminder that the piano is, in essence, a well-tuned and mechanically complicated percussion instrument.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/user18081971.
December 24, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0208: In Situ
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.
This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, December 24, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 28, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0208: In Situ
Record a composition in place using only the sounds around you.
Step 1: The goal of this project is to make a composition in a short period of time, just one single sitting, from start to finish. You’ll only use the tools you have on hand (a laptop, an iPad, an OP-1, what have you). And you’ll only use sounds that you record on site. The first step is choose a time and place, preferably not at home or work, though those are certainly OK, too.
Step 2: At the appointed time, go to the place where you will make the composition. Sit for awhile and listen. Make some short source-audio recordings, preferably while remaining seated. Use only those recordings – snippets of room ambience, of overheard chatter, and so forth – as the raw material for your composition. Transform the sounds as you see fit, but do retain some recognizability. For example, if you record on a bus, then the finished track should retain something unique to the sound of a bus.
Step 3: Bonus round: use a photo of your setup/location as the image associated with your recording.
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 in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, December 24, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 28, 2015.
Length: The length is up to you, though between one and three minutes seems appropriate.
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 “disquiet0208-insitu.” Also use “disquiet0208-insitu” 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 208th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record a composition in place using only the sounds around you”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/24/disqui...
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
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Image associated with this project by David Kidd, used thanks to a Creative Commons license. Note: modification and commercial use aren’t allowed, and attribution is required:
December 23, 2015
Stephen Vitiello Revisits His Molly Berg Collaborations
Sometimes one step backward allows for two steps forward. Stephen Vitiello has peeked back inside the inner workings of one of his best albums, Between You and the Shapes You Take (12k, 2013), for which he collaborated with Molly Berg, and rendered something new from it. The original featured Berg on clarinet and vocalizations — that is, on vocal sounds, rather than lyrics — with Vitiello on guitar and an array of electronic processing. Here the source audio is whittled to a short five minutes of percussive, jittery vowels, bouncing like balls in a pixelated pachinko machine. At times it’s hard to tell where her sounds end and the featured bell-like tones begin. What’s especially beautiful about Vitiello’s processing is that even as he pushes her utterances deeper into a fractured zone, he retains some textural essence of her tone, her delivery, her presence.
Hahn Rowe, violinist long ago of the band Hugo Largo, whose quiet sound was an important precursor to today’s pop-minded ambient minimalism, guested on Between You and the Shapes You Take, though it’s unclear if any of his efforts surface — or are subsumed — here in this Vitiello reworking.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More on Between You and the Shapes You Take at 12k.com. More from Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com. Above image of Vitiello (center) and Berg (right), performing with Steve Roden (left), courtesy of 01sj.org.
