Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 355
December 13, 2015
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.
December 11, 2015
Minimal Techno Minus the Techno
Naotko has posted a seven-minute improvisation that wanders through echoey spaces. It’s longer than it seems, because despite its length it moves through a variety of stages, and yet the procedure never seems rushed. There are water drops and rattling metal, quavering drones and sudden silences. If there’s a constant, it’s the ambience of a field recording, the constant presence of tiny sonic variances that suggest a real-time experience. Of course, there’s nothing real here; it’s a fantasy, an aural one. The track, titled simply “E2,” is like minimal techno minus the techno, all the place-setting, all the scenic portent, yet lacking the beat. When a hard rhythm does appear, it’s little more than a tease — a beat arrives, and then is quickly quelled, the hard arrival dispensed within a split second. Some dub follows — not so much a beat as the delayed reverberation of a beat — but impression has been made: the beat, such as it is, is just one element among many. The track was posted to a sub-account of Naoyuki Sasanami, a graphic designer and prolific musician based in Tokyo.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/naotko-686248380. More from Naoyuki Sasanami at soundcloud.com/naotko, naoyukisasanami.bandcamp.com, and twitter.com/naotko.
December 10, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0206: Three Switches
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.
Tracks added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, December 10, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 14, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0206: Three Switches
Compose a track with a trio of through-lines that repeatedly alternate relative prominence.
Note: It is generally helpful to read through all the steps before starting the first step.
Step 1: This week’s project involves a single piece of music with three separate simultaneous parts. Each of those three parts should run for the full length of the piece. The parts should individually be relatively consistent throughout.
Step 2: The one change that should occur is that every few beats, two of the three parts should be pushed to the background and the one remaining part should be prominent in the foreground. These relative positions should alternate every two seconds to four seconds or so for the full length of the piece.
Step 3: For the final few seconds, the three lines should be heard at equal (foreground, not background) volume for the first and only time in the piece.
Step 4: Upload your completed track from Step 3 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 10, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 14, 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 “disquiet0206-threeswitches.” Also use “disquiet0206-threeswitches” 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 206th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose a track with a trio of through-lines that repeatedly alternate relative prominence”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/10/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:
Source photo (“Three Light Switches”) by Zoran Kovacevic used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
December 9, 2015
Waves Upon Waves
The waveforms that accompany SoundCloud tracks can be as misleading as they are informative. With pop songs, you can quite literally see the breakdown between verse, chorus, and verse — and if you have a good eye you might even spot a bridge. With techno you can see the beat. Noise and ambient music are, to some extent, especially with drone-based noise, more a matter of volume than anything else — they’re often characterized visually on SoundCloud by a homogenized block of sound that represents a relatively minimal variation in volume. What can sound relaxing often looks hard as a brick. However, the look of a waveform can be deceiving. The only thing that’s dependable is a hard edge, which generally accompanies mechanical sounds.
As for this piece, “Their Time Up There” by Todos, the visualized sine waves are especially close to what is heard. The track is a series of adjacent swells, one after the other, the differences between them fairly indistinct. At the time I first listened to this, there were two clues that something, an alteration, a dramatic shift, was in the making. One was the evident push up about two thirds of the way through, where the waves get taller, sharper, longer — suggesting volume and length, a combination of something both more intense and yet even slower than what came before. This is very much the case.
The other clue was the splendid “Hell yeah!” from listener Idiwa. He called it. The burst that occurs at that moment is quite splendid, like your ears popping as the plane lands, just as the sun breaks through the clouds. Only in the context of listening to ambient music regularly would this alteration, this sudden development, deserve a “Hell yeah!” — but if that is a zone your listening occurs in, then your response will likely be similar to Idiwa’s.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/djtodos. More from Todos at twitter.com/todosofficial. (Account found via a repost of a different Todos track by Novitzkas of Cape Town, South Afrika.)
December 8, 2015
North Carolina Minimalism
Gentle if fairly rapid percussives lay the groundwork for muffled chatter, both bird noise and the captured voice of what is a United Airlines flight attendant. This is “We Belong to the Universe” by High Tunnels, aka Dave Ramirez of Hillsborough, North Carolina. It’s a brisk little piece. The beat occasionally sounds like it might erupt into a proper post-rock song, and yet it never quite goes there, never fully unleashes any dense math. It never quite aligns firmly, either, with minimalist classical music. Instead it hovers in the nether realm between them, at peace with its own chipper rhythmic developments, changing from one plateau to another as it proceeds. At one point the beat sounds like it’s caught in a locked groove, and then is let loose into a blissful new permutation. At another the sheer precision is balanced by the texture of the sound source: what is reported to be a pair of wooden spoons.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/hightunnels. More from High Tunnels at hightunnels.bandcamp.com and hightunnelsmusic.com.
December 7, 2015
Michiru Aoyama’s Glorious Haze
Michiru Aoyama’s glorious new track (Google Translate is failing thus far on this one’s title) is a sweeping, four-minute expanse of sonic cloud formations that turn round and round inside themselves. Glimmers surface and then become the foregrounded sound, only for another theme to pierce the veil and, at a slow pace, subsume everything that had preceded it. The piece isn’t grounded so much as tied to ocean imagery, for amid the haze is the sort of creaking that comes from a taut rope on a boat.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/michiru-aoyama. More from Aoyama, who is based in Kamakura, Japan, at michiruaoyama.jimdo.com and michiruaoyama.bandcamp.com.
December 6, 2015
John Frusciante’s Electronic Output
Right around the time Aphex Twin’s SoundCloud account went dark (it’s since been revived), the account of John Frusciante got a fairly sudden injection of new material. Frusciante, best known as a member at various times of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, has posted a number of tracks that essentially lay claim to aspects of the RHCP sound — and then go somewhere else entirely. At the current moment, the lead track on the account is something titled “Genex 44,” which opens with a combination of light trap set and loose guitar; it has the SoCal boho feel of the band’s less funk-oriented music, dubby effects included. And then, at 38 seconds, there’s an EDM-quality fritz, screams from a schoolyard, and an intense run of drum and bass percussion, followed by stretches of asynchronous, gawky synth noise interspersed with spoken word segments and gentle melodies. Much of the account, soundcloud.com/jfdirectlyfromjf, is inherently electronic. Some notable pieces, such as “Motiern 58,” seem especially informed by Aphex Twin’s mix of rhythmic digressions and monophonic lullabies. (The Picasso-ish face painting associated with the account brings to mind one of Bob Dylan’s self-portraits.) There are only 18 tracks on the account right now, and both commenting and track counts have been turned off. Free downloading, however, appears to be on. In an essay on his johnfrusciante.com website he talks about making his music available without the infrastructure of a record label.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jfdirectlyfromjf. Found initially via a discussion on the muffwiggler.com discussion forum.
December 5, 2015
Japanese Sonic Forensics
The Japan-based Gaapiiiii’s three-track set Elementary Particle likely takes its name from how the compositions focus on the reworking of a series of concise audio sources.
The central melodic snippet of “The Kingdom Which Was Lost” may or may not be a tiny sliver of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Edelweiss,” but its treatment here works in favor of the likelihood. The short bit is caught on a loop, a shard of Cold War radio set on repeat as if the remainder had been lost in transmission, and the surviving segment is treated to all manner of rescanning and forensics, eking out what sonic content can be located. By track’s end all that remains is just glitched-out vestigial noise. The melodic curiosity appears as well in “Strange Moment,” just before the track’s midpoint, surfacing out of muddily retuned percussion, and dissolving into murky static.
“Infinity of Feelings,” the third and final track on Elementary Particle, is roughly the length of the two previous in combination, and the extended play serves to make it all the more difficult — in a pleasurable way — to get a hold of, to wrestle with. It’s all the more ethereal, wispy, fragmentary, fleeting. Length here does not translate into density — quite the contrary. The most tangible moment is an acoustic guitar figure that takes form out of an initially rain-like sequence of percussive patterning. The guitar part is quite pretty, but what makes it memorable is how it came to be, how in its complete form it retains, for the listener, a memory of its earlier, hyper-particulate self. This is the case for all three tracks. Over the course of Elementary Particle Gaapiiiii trains your ear to stop listening for the source audio and to pay attention, instead, to the process.
Set originally posted at soundcloud.com/gaapiiiii. More from Gappiiiii, who is based in Hyōgo, Japan, at selfhelptapes.bandcamp.com, phinery.bandcamp.com, and fagashrecords.bandcamp.com.
December 4, 2015
Madeleine Cocolas Maps Cascadia
The composer Madeleine Cocolas has a new album, Cascadia, her first ever, due out in a few days. Two tracks from Cascadia have been posted in advance, the highlight being “I Can See You Whisper.” It combines lines of piano and strings with an interest in economy and momentum.
The piece emerges out of an opening sequence in which the classical instrumentation is warped and backward masked. That sense of materializing is echoed in a more analog manner later when the strings are heard coming in just as held piano chords begin to fade. The piece puts the piano and the strings through both slow and speedy paces, pitting them against each other, and noting congruences. It’s rich with filmic minimalism. The full album, cover below, is due out December 8 from the label Future Sequence. Cascadia is the result of her “52 weeks” project, which has been covered on Disquiet.com in the past.
Track originally posted at
futuresequence.bandcamp.com, and at soundcloud.com/futuresequence. More from Cocolas, who is based in Seattle, Washington, at soundcloud.com/madeleine-cocolas and madeleinecocolas.com.
December 3, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0205: Superposition
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 3, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 7, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0205: Superposition
Interpret boxed-up music-education materials as a graphic-notation score.
This week’s project falls broadly into the category of “graphic notation.” It uses a found assemblage as its starting point.
Step 1: Look at this image associated with this project, and imagine it as a score in the tradition of graphic notation:
http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...
Step 2: Record a piece of music based on that score in Step 1.
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 3, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, December 7, 2015.
Length: The length is up to you, though between one and two 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 “disquiet0205-superposition.” Also use “disquiet0205-superposition” 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 205th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Interpret boxed-up music-education materials as a graphic-notation score”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/03/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:
