Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 354
December 22, 2015
Northern Darks
Island Life: Map of Senja, Norway, home to the musician Biosphere
Starting off in “the cultural hub of the Arctic Circle,” British broadcaster Petroc Trelawny reports on the sounds of deep, dark, sun-less winter — music of Tromsø, Norway, including its local ballet, orchestra, and a church choir known as Arctic Voices; the traditional vocal style of yoik (which a Norwegian student of mine did a report on last semester); and, most pertinent for this site’s coverage, the efforts of Geir Jenssen, aka Biosphere, to use the sound of frozen lakes and other natural regional resources as source recordings for his music. Jenssen’s segment, recorded on the island of Senja where he lives, begins at 26:30 and runs for a tad over 12 minutes. Jenssen discusses how at the right time of year, the ice on a frozen lake can serve like the skin of a drum — the effect is also known as “singing ice.” It sounds at times, as well, like the reverberation of long thick metal cable. He is also recorded playing a (reportedly bright orange) vuvuzela to test the deep echo of one of the spaces he and Trelawny explore. Now I’d really like to hear what Jenssen could make of yoik and that choir.
There’s no embeddable player, but the broadcast is available for download and streaming at bbc.co.uk. More from Jennsen at biosphere. (Several people drew my attention to this BBC broadcast. Many thanks.)
December 21, 2015
Music for Doorbells
Jeff Kolar’s new album, on the Panospria label, is all about doorbells. Titled Doorbell, it’s a series of recordings he made — music for doorbells — that follows up an earlier exploration he made of the smoke alarm. I wrote the liner notes for Doorbell, which is a free download:
“Welcome Music”
For whom does the doorbell toll? On the one hand, it is an alert for the inhabitant of a building. The bell rings, and that ring lets the inhabitant know that a delivery, a friend, a colleague, or some other visitor has arrived. On the other hand, the bell is a confirmation for the visitors that their presence has, in fact, been registered.
The doorbell is, thus, both ringtone and ringback simultaneously. The doorbell’s ringtone is, to some extent, the choice of the inhabitant, though the number of people who ever elect to fine-tune their doorbell’s sound is likely quite small. The ringback — “a sound made by a cellular phone that is heard by a person who is calling that phone while waiting for the call to be connected” — is a muted version of the doorbell. It is the doorbell heard through the door, shaped by the resonance of the hall in which it first resounds.
It took the artist Jeff Kolar, an obsessive sonic explorer, not only to fine-tune his doorbell sounds, but to record them himself. Kolar’s body of work is steeped in noise so quotidian that it is effectively ignored by, if not inaudible to, most people. Many doorbells can trace their tones back to bells and chimes. Kolar, instead, used a Yamaha organ to construct his dozen rings. The results range from mantra-like beading drones, to haunted-house chords, to swelling wah-wah, to subtle stepwise waveforms.
Kolar’s doorbells first took shape as actual doorbells, hung on a gallery wall, waiting for visitors to trigger them. Only later were they collected as recordings for anyone to stream, download, even — if they have the maker bug — to install at the entrance to their own homes and businesses. As such, the work builds on Kolar’s previous efforts with blissfully mundane aural subjects, such as his study of the fierce sonic textures of smoke detectors. That piece, like his doorbells, began in a gallery and was later documented as a record album. The doorbells also share a kinship with Kolar’s ongoing engagement with that most ubiquitous and ephemeral of sonic mediums: radio waves.
The sounds of Kolar’s doorbells have many inherent associations, but the organ, with its explicit churchly stature, seems to nudge forward one association in particular: the arrival of an evangelical missionary dead-set on sharing salvation.
Marc Weidenbaum
San Francisco
October 2015
Kolar provides a bit more information in the accompanying note:
Doorbell is permanently installed as a ringable doorbell system outside of the Urban Gray Ballroom in Greensboro, North Carolina. Each of the twelve Doorbell tracks are designed to loop continuously. This project was produced for the “Museum as Instrument” residency curated by Shannon Stratton and Joe Jeffers at Elsewhere Museum in July 2015.
Album originally posted on December 10, 2015, at archive.org. The surreal cover art is by Aleia Murawski. More from Kolar at jeffkolar.us.
December 20, 2015
Glitch Is Doing Fine
Glitch is doing fine, thanks. Certainly the once rarified, formerly left-field approach to isolating and celebrating errors intrinsic to digital media has long since gone mainstream, gone from sound experiment to plugin, gone from exotic ear-worm to everyday background music. But there’s plenty of life left in the pursuit of sounds that break upon impact, sounds whose impact is in the breaking, in the loveliness implicit in fracture lines. “Suturv0,” posted on the “overflow” account of London-based Encym, isn’t glitch by immediate association. Sure there are digital stutters and microsonic breakbeats, but it is far more than that: thudding drums that go nowhere slowly, circuit-breaker ambience that teases with your earbuds, water-drop percussion that doubles back on itself. All those things here have their own unique brokenness to them, collectively making for a denser kind of glitch.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/encym-soundtracks. More from Encym at encym.tumblr.com, twitter.com/encym_, and instagram.com/encym_.
December 19, 2015
“Sketch for Electric Guitar, Laptop & Electromagnetic Interference”
There are sharply plucked guitar strings and a combination of echoes — glitchy snaps, high-pitched synthesized tones, occasionally with a touch of Morse code to them, and the guitar itself playing a complementary line. This is the elegant “Sketch for Electric Guitar, Laptop & Electromagnetic Interference” by A Companion of Owls, aka Stephen Stamper of Helsinki, Finland. In a brief accompanying note he explains in slightly greater detail than the track’s title: “Sketch for single coil pickup electric guitar, monophonic pitch tracking sine wave oscillator, three randomly reversible audio buffers and electromagnetic interference.” The real beauty in the piece may be the pauses, the waiting, the time during which something is held before something else appears — it adds drama, intensity, and narrative to sounds that are quite simple unto themselves.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/a-companion-of-owls. More from Stamper at bitsnibblesbytes.wordpress.com and companionofowls.tumblr.com.
December 18, 2015
A Taste of The Revenant
Certainly, gauging by the initial promotional track, “Killing Hawk,” Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and Bryce Dessner’s music for The Revenant will be enthralling, just as gravitas-laden and epic as the forthcoming film looks to be. “Killing Hawk” balances an extended, slow-mo orchestral string section with what appears to be a digitally stretched version of the same audio, the backdrop a horizon’s-edge figment of generalized noise. It’s stunning, especially when a kind of ferrite pixie stick scatter appears, perhaps paralleling rampant birds in flight on screen. We won’t know until the film debuts, in about a week (December 25). Sadly, according to factmag.com, the score won’t be eligible for an Oscar (Sakamoto won for The Last Emperor back in 1987), because three composers are involved.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/milanrecords.
December 17, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0207: Remixing Marilli
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 17, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 21, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0207: Remixing Marilli
Rework source audio from Michel Banabila’s 1983 album, Marilli.
Step 1: Michel Banabila, the Dutch musician, this past week released a freely downloadable album of reworkings of his 1983 album, Marilli. (Full disclosure: I contributed a track to the remix collection.) He’s provided three brief samples from the album for the Junto to remix. The first step is to download the three samples from the Dropbox folder at this link:
Step 2: Create a new track using only those three samples.
Step 3: Upload your completed track from Step 2 to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 4: 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 17, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 21, 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 “disquiet0207-remixingmarilli.” Also use “disquiet0207-remixingmarilli” as a tag for your track.
Download: Having provided the samples, Banabila has asked that you assign a Creative Commons license allowing for downloads but not for subsequent reworkings or commercial use.
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 207th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Rework source audio from Michel Banabila’s 1983 album, Marilli”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/17/disqui...
The audio was sourced from the 1983 album Marilli by the album’s composer, Michel Banabila. This project marks the release of the 2015 album Marilli Remixed:
https://banabila.bandcamp.com/album/m...
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:
December 15, 2015
Hide and Seek with Aphex Twin
Richard D. James had, briefly, emptied out his alter-ego user18081971 SoundCloud account, but he’s been slowly turning tracks back on (their backdates remain, suggesting he isn’t deleting tracks, just turing them private, as part of an ongoing game of sonic hide and seek), and better yet uploading new ones. New old ones, that is, as the user18081971 account has consistently provided a peek into his archive — an archive long the subject of speculation and electronica myth.
What’s great about the recent haul is that much of it relates to his classic Selected Ambient Works Volume II album. The track “harmonium” is an alternate take of “Radiator,” or track 2 off SAW2, the see-saw melody augmented by an understated beat and some pneumatic, dubby white noise:
And “harmonicom 13” is another take on “Radiator,” even more beat-heavy than “harmonicom”:
The track “modal 10” is a variation — a fairly light one — on “Domino,” the bouncy penultimate track on side one of the two-sided version of the album.
It’s worth noting that all three tracks are the same length or within a couple seconds of the length of the originals. Tracks first posted at soundcloud.com/user18081971.
December 14, 2015
Remixing Michel Banabila’s Marilli (1983)
I was asked by Michel Banabila to contribute a remix to Marilli Remixed, a collection of reworkings of tracks from his very first album, Marilli, released in 1983. I selected the fourth track on the first side of the LP.
The full list of contributors to Marilli Remixed is: Andrés G. Jankowski, Andrew Lagowski, Arno Peeters, Bogumil Misala, Mike Kramer, Hanyo van Oosterom, Hero Wouters, Jos Smolders, Koos Derwort, Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek), Marc Weidenbaum, Martin Hoogeboom, Naoyuki Sasanami, Peter Van Cooten, Frans de Waard (QST), Radboud Mens, Roel Meelkop, Theo Calis, Wouter Veldhuis, and Lukasz Szalankiewicz. The full album is available for download at banabila.bandcamp.com.
Here are some notes on my remix. I’ll note in advance, they’re fairly technical, as a notebook entry on what went into this, and what I learned in the process.
I used the my modular synthesizer (mostly filters, and a little triggered live sampler), the software Audacity (to sequence it, and also for some effects), and my Monome (running the mlr patch in the software Max).
First I stretched a relatively percussion-less segment of the original track to get an ambient bed, yielding in the end something about 30 seconds long. I set it to run eight times in a row, overlapping to varying degrees at each repeat.
Then I extracted a small percussion loop from the original. I did a “live performance” of that percussion loop with the Monome (four simultaneous tracks: one straight through, two running tighter sub-loops against each other a little quieter, and one in reverse even quieter still, though it’s also the last bit to fade out of that sequence, so it has a little moment in the sun). The loop ran a little slower than the original, and I used a small Novation Launch Control to manage the relative volume of the four tracks within mlr.
And then I used my modular synthesizer to create variations on the ambient bed, which I layered in at various stages.
In the end I had eight tracks in Audacity:
The 1st and 3rd tracks are the eight sequential repeats of the ambient sound bed, each intersection overlapping to varying degrees.
The 2nd track is a filtered version of the ambient bed, which has a slow LFO on it (giving it a light Laurie Anderson–ish “ha ha ha” feel) and some echo. This was done on the modular using a filter (either the A-121 or the A-136 or the Z2040 — my notes are unclear — influenced by a digital LFO, the Hikari Sine, and then run through an Eko module).
The 4th is the “live performance” on the Monome of the percussion loop, running mlr. It has four tracks of the loop doing different things. I used a Novation Launch Control to balance the volume of those four tracks.
The 5th is a copy of the ambient sound bed, pitched lower for the full length of the loop. This gives it that deep vibe for the penultimate repeat of the ambient bed. In track 1 at that same stage the volume of the original ambient bed is a little quieter, to let the deep version sound even louder than it is, in relative terms.
The 6th track is a copy of the ambient bed but pitched higher, and I just use it for a very short moment, a final peak before the track fades out.
And the 7th and 8th are two different instances of the same tweak of the ambient bed, which I did in the modular using a Harvestman Polivoks. It’s a tingling, slightly irritating sound, a momentary breach in the ambience.
The whole idea is it opens with this expanse, and then goes to something a little tribal, and then returns to the expanse. I’ll be honest about my influences here. The ambient bed is striving toward Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, and the rhythmic part has Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ in mind. The first appearance of the Polivoks “irritant” is then repeated toward the end to provide a sense of reflection on where the piece started, but in between is that percussion performance. The deep vibe in track 5 gives an orchestral sense of closure, and the peak in track 6 is little filigree, like the clouds breaking, before it all ends.
At least that’s where I ended up. It wasn’t where I started. When I started, it was all gonna be about this firecracker/rattle sound in the original, but in the end I went a totally different direction.
Again, the full album is available for download at banabila.bandcamp.com. More from Banabila at twitter.com/banabila and banabila.com.
December 13, 2015
19 Years of Disquiet.com
December 13, 1996, is the day I used a fax machine during a lunch break at a dotcom I’d joined a few months earlier, in order to send in an order for a URL, this URL: disquiet.com. The name comes from the book The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.
Each year on December 13, if I have the time, I recount some memories of that time, and the time that has passed. On purpose, I don’t read previous entries while writing one of these semi-annual posts. I’m interested in what surfaces each year, what changes in emphasis may arise. These posts are as much objects of reflection as they are acts of reflection.
The main trajectory of Disquiet.com is as follows. It has several years of pre-history, as a series of FTP sites hosted at “~suffix” accounts at various ISPs. From its launch in 1996 through 1999 or so, Disquiet.com was largely a repository for work I’d already published elsewhere, primarily at Tower Records’ Pulse!, Classical Pulse!, and epulse magazines. At some point I was asked one time too many by someone when exactly I was posting something new to the site. I would generally explain, “Well, first I have to write something somewhere else, then wait for that publication date to pass considerably, and then I can upload the article to Disquiet.com.” Finally it occurred to me that I could just, you know, post something directly to Disquiet.com, bypassing prior publication. For reference, Webster’s English dictionary dates the origin of the word “blog” to 1999, before which we were all just typing cluelessly if excitedly in cyberspace.
In 1999 I moved to New Orleans from San Francisco, for what would last four years. The site came into its own in those years, with the introduction of datestamps and a more frequent occurence of publishing. I moved back to San Francisco in 2003, and continued to post regularly.
The next major change in the site was 2007, which was when, almost 11 years after launching the site, I finally began to add images to posts. Prior to 2007, it was text-only — straightedge ambient, no filigree. Somewhat ironically, the introduction of images to the site focused my ears. The first post with images was of a travel log of a trip to Japan, something I ported over from an early tumblr account I’d set up (sound.tumblr.com, which I occasionally turn back on, but have never found a consistent use for). With that travel log I began to emphasize sound as much as music. Also, 2007 is when the site was ported over from hand-coded HTML to WordPress — yeah, before 2007 I was coding not only the site but its RSS feed by hand.
The next major shift from that was 2011, when the WordPress theme was upgraded, by my friends at futurepruf.com, to be “responsive” (i.e., it works smoothly on phones, tablets, and full-size browser). 2012 saw the introduction of the Disquiet Junto series of weekly music projects (the 206th Junto project is underway as I type this), the start of the course I teach on sound at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco, and my signing a contract with the publisher Bloomsbury for a book on Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which was completed in 2013 and came out in 2014, the same year I had my first museum exhibit, at the San Jose Museum of Art.
As on any 19th anniversary, what’s particularly top of mind this year is next year, the 20th anniversary. I’d like to do something special for it.
Gabie Strong’s Rituals of Noise
The sheer noise of Gabie Strong’s live solo guitar performance is exhilarating. She played at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, back on October 25, 2015, and the set was captured in a nearly 17-minute audio recording, titled “Sacred Datura.” It starts with the sound of an amp being turned on, of a guitar cord making its electric connection, and never veers particularly far from that. It’s all wild static and drenching noise, noise that comes in deep swells, hanging for extended stretches, and then dipping into near silence. It’s rapturous stuff. The last minute is especially rich, when a final screech is burnished by the sound of wind against a microphone.
Strong writes in an accompanying note:
The title refers to the native California datura species that populated the hillsides of what is now downtown Los Angeles, and was used by indigenous peoples of the Southwest during puberty rituals. Otherwise known as Jimson Weed, sacred datura is a common female-flowering plant that when cooked and ingested causes out-of-body sensory effects and hallucinations. In poet Dale Pendell’s excellent book Pharmako Gnosis, he classifies datura as Daimonica, and writes that “Datura and her sisters … they can sneak up on you and steal your mind and you don’t even know.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/gabiestrong. More from Gabie Strong at gabiestrong.com and twitter.com/Dreammmama. The audio was recorded by Jorge Martin. The accompanying photo is by Chrystanthe Oltmann.
