Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 357
November 23, 2015
Cross-pollinations of Meter and Tone
Daniel W J Mackenzie’s Four Places for Piano will likely be misread as Four Pieces for Piano. There’s a blurry glimpse of one of the title instruments on the album’s cover. As for whether the piano actually played an active role in the recording of the album, that’s a far more blurry topic. Four Places for Piano is four pieces of long-form, slowly modulating drones. It opens with the highlight, “Diocleia,” which has several pulses set against each other, most noticeably a bell-like ringing that arrives every eight seconds or so. Other elements run through more quickly or more slowly, but that bell tone is the heart of it. At almost 11 minutes in length, “Diocleia” lets the ears fall prey to various cross-pollinations of meter and tone.
Each track on Mackenzie’s Four Pieces for Piano is noticeably distinct from the others, and yet any one of them, once you get three or four minutes in, can, as with much drone music, sound like the background noise of an electrical substation. The similarities are an illusion. Part of the pleasure of Four Pieces for Piano is listening not just within a track, but between them. “Duklja” has more of a sense of urgency than the others; it grows as time passes, occasionally pushing the waveforms into something rough-edged. “Zeta” has an even more pronounced bell than “Diocleia,” here like a carillon caught in a loop. And “Podgorica” distinguishes itself with a slow, crunchy beat amid its already noisy churn.
Album posted at urbanartsberlin.bandcamp.com. More from Mackenzie, who also goes by Ekca Liena, at danielwjmackenzie.com.
November 22, 2015
Saxophone vs. Machine(fabriek)
Machinefabriek turned the tables on his own production technique. As described in an advance notice, his forthcoming release with saxophonist Neil Welch began as a one-way affair. He was to provide a foundation (a “backing track,” in the official release language) for Welch to improvise upon. However, upon receiving Welch’s responsive work, Machinefabriek proceeded to work upon it some more. The result, as heard in this four-minute advance listen of an eventual 38-minute release, to be titled Tides, makes any discernment between background and foreground imprecise at best. There is a dense blur between the original work and what Welch provided. In part this is because Welch’s work is often heard with several parts layered in a manner that an individual player couldn’t achieve live, except with looping equipment. In part it’s because the horn often dissolves into the greater noise, leading to something akin to John Zorn fronting a Ligeti concerto. But the real beauty of the resulting piece is how segments of Welch’s work were themselves improvised upon by Machinefabriek, who took the nuances and used them as source audio for his own efforts. Welch’s work was, in turn, as much a foundation for Machinefabriek’s efforts as was Machinefabriek’s for Welch’s. It would be interesting, down the road, to be able to listen to what it was that Machinefabriek sent to Welch in the first place.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/machinefabriek. More from Welch at neilwelch.com, and from Machinefabriek, aka Rutger Zuydervelt, at machinefabriek.nu. The full album is due apparently from Confront, though it isn’t yet showing on the label’s website (confrontrecordings.com).
November 21, 2015
A Solo Guitar Drone
The musician Toaster’s tagline on Twitter is “I make music by programming things.” However, the origin of his recent track “Beacon, for Marissa” is not a computer but, instead, a guitar. The piece is a nearly 20-minute solo drone, recorded live. Now, “solo” needn’t simply mean singular. There are several lines that thread through “Beacon,” overtones and grungy throbbing strings among them. And a “drone” needn’t simply imply steady-going. Various aspects of the track suggest a trajectory in the stasis, a direction to the flux. There are pause-like moments early in that focus the ear toward shrill bits of noise, and as the piece progresses its low-tide ebbing and flowing become recognizable, familiar, almost song-like in their patterning. “Beacon” is a beautiful, sedate, peaceful apparition — perhaps not music from programming, but certainly music for programming, and other cerebral tasks.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/toaster-1. More from Toaster, aka Todd Elliott of San Jose, California, at toaster.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/toddbert.
Social Media Break
I usually take off the last two weeks of the year, but this year I’m starting a little earlier with my social-media retreat/cleanse/void/break. I have no idea what truly constitutes “social media” these days. I know Instagram is “social,” but I use it mostly as a broadcast stream for short essays accompanying an image — sure, I look at other people’s images, too, and like/comment on occasion, but aside from the “like” aspect, it doesn’t feel all that different from commenting on someone’s blog post. Anyhow, for the most part I mean I won’t be on Twitter or Facebook.
See you on the other side.
November 20, 2015
Strain and Grain
C. Reider’s Tape Loops, recently released on Linear Obsessional Recordings, returns him to an early favorite media of his, after many years spent in the digital world. The media is magnetic tape, which Reider, who’s based in Colorado, once enjoyed as a participant in the mail-art network.
He revisits what was long ago an everyday technology as something today of an archival and arcane one (though there is a growing number of cassette labels in recent years). There was a physical release of this album, true to its inspiration. That combined a CDR, which was a spiritual grandchild of the cassette, with hand-engineered cassettes that contained a loop. Even though the physical edition is sold out, the digital release is a rewarding one all on its own. It’s a series of looped compositions, half an hour in all. The strain and grain of the tape is evident in every piece, bits of noise, and orchestral glimmering, and vocal warbles, all pieced together amid an overarching mechanical sensibility.
An annotation to the album provides some additional context:
Getting deep into the process and working with thrift-store cassettes he uses a number of radical techniques to create his tape loops, including lengthening the tape, shredding it, making new tapes from tiny fragments and reassembling them.
The resulting piece is a haunting and mesmeric meditation on the texture of sound recorded on magnetic tape and is one or reider’s most powerful works to date.
A booklet accompanying the release gets into more detail. Here’s an excerpt:
Some of my experiments involved extending the length of the loop inside the shell. When making a loop housed in a standard tape shell, the filament can’t be too slack or too tight. If it’s too slack, it will get caught in the playback mechanism resulting in the tape being “eaten” (is that how they say it outside of the US?) If too tight the loop just won’t play back. Normally, I would loop the tape around the two tape guide rollers and the two reels inside the re- used tape shells, requiring a strand of tape 9.125 inches in length. That would result in a loop that comes back to the splice point every 5 seconds when played back at the normal speed of 1.875 inches per second. The physical barriers inside the shell dictate the length of the loop. To shorten or lengthen a loop one has to remove or provide more barriers around which the tape will pass. I found that if there were a bunch of new barriers inside the shell, the tape makes a turn at each one (imagine a serpentine fan belt in a car,) meaning more length can fit. More length equals more time. To add barriers, I drilled holes through one side of the cassette shell, and pressed through pieces of PTFE Teflon rod to give me pivot points around which to guide the tape. The most complicated of my pivot-point alterations had the tape traveling around nine different points resulting in a tape length of 19 inches that looped every 10 seconds.
As with most techniques I use in my sound practice, the process of these modifications were easy to do in terms of technique, but they did require some amount of patience and mindfulness.
Audio originally posted at linearobsessional.bandcamp.com. More from Reider at vuzhmusic.com, soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic, and twitter.com/vuzhmusic.
November 19, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0203: Beat Basis
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 assignment was made in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 23, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0203: Beat Basis
Add something to a rhythm track titled “It.”
Step 1: Listen to and download the track “It” by Name Constant:
https://soundcloud.com/random-coil/it-1
Step 2: When posting the track, Name Constant accompanied it with this invitation: “additions welcome, should anyone be inspired by emptyness.” Please create a new track with the source audio as the foundation. (Do not change the source audio, though you can also use it as raw material for whatever you choose to add.)
Step 3: Upload your completed track 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 assignment was made in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, November 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 23, 2015.
Length: The length is up to you. The original is just under six minutes, though you needn’t create something that 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 “disquiet0203-beatbasis.” Also use “disquiet0203-beatbasis” 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 203rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Add something to a rhythm track titled ‘It'”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/19/disquiet0203-beatbasis/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Image associated with this project originally accompanied the source audio (“It” by Name Constant) on SoundCloud:
November 18, 2015
Monochrome Music for Symphony Orchestra
The spare, grey-toned home page of Justė Janulytė describes her simply as “composer of monochrome music.” Her compositions bear that out. Monochrome, however, does not mean simplistic. Where colors fail, textures prevail. Hence her “Textile” for symphony orchestra,” which over the course of seven and a half minutes grows from slender layers of symphonic tonal material. Strings and horns eke out small phrases. As time passes, the meager parts grow, and the orchestra summons a gargantuan swell, and yet “Textile” never gains momentum, only density. True to the work’s title, these slivers of sound are like threads in a piece of fabric that gets larger and larger as the piece progresses.
In a brief description of the piece, she writes:
Textile (2006-2008) for orchestra is a single gesture, one metamorphosis of register, timbre and dynamic. There are no sound attacks used in the score; the only gesture which reflects also the macro form of the piece is the sound emerging and submerging into the silence. The layers of dense texture are based on this gesture, thus evoking an image of underwater pulsations. Even though “Textile” is written for different instruments, the author, who usually writes for the ensemble of the same timbres, is is trying to achieve the “monochrome” aestetics of the sound.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/juste-janulyte. More from Janulytė, who is Lithuanian, at janulyte.info.
November 17, 2015
A Memory of a Night Out
It’s not uncommon to come upon a description of culture that is said to take apart the very thing it seems to be a part of: gallery exhibits that critique the art world, pop music that is poking holes into pop music, poetry that undermines poetry. Often the supposed critique is so difficult to distinguish from that which it is commenting on that it becomes a part of the whole. The revolution is televised, and then syndicated. Now, “Fear Biz” by IQbit makes no immediate claims for its purpose. The track, as posted on the Italy-based IQbit’s SoundCloud account, is accompanied just by one bit of description: “Any Resemblance to Real Persons or Actual Facts is Not Coincidental.” The comment may just be a toss-away joke, or it may be a direct reference to the reality that surfaces in “Fear Biz,” courtesy of sirens and street noise. No matter. The heart of the track is a sequence of club-like emanations: synth pads, strobing percussion, throbby beats, echoing voices, dramatic modulations. A few of them on repeat for six minutes would be a minimal brand of dance music. Instead, it’s a story of sorts, a suite of transitions, three-and-a-half minutes of moments, more like a memory of a night out than the score to a night out. I’ve written once previously about IQbit’s music, back in November 2011. The subject then was a remix he’d done that emphasized the ecstatic opening moments of minimal techno over the rote beats that often follow.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/iqbit. There’s a lot more of music from IQbit — aka Claudio Curciotti — at brainstormlab.org. He makes his home at claudiocurciotti.com.
November 16, 2015
The Industrial Drone
Offret is the duo John Spell and Matthew Swiezynski, and “Ester et Iselin” is their nearly 13 minutes of reckoning with mechanical drones. It’s a track of deep tonal loveliness that masks an underlying industrial intent. Beneath the hovering warmth of a dark, low-register moan is an extensive array of factory noise: machine tools, overworked engines, metal shards, acetylene torches. Of course, none of that is actual source audio, necessarily, just associative comparisons of the sounds. The track is a live recording, posted by the Invisible Birds label, made on September 16, 2015.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/invisible-birds. More from Spell, Swiezynsky, and Invisible Birds at invisiblebirds.org. Track found thanks to a repost by soundcloud.com/experimedia.
November 14, 2015
“White Noise Beat”
I’ve wanted to get a white-noise module for awhile, and finally added one to my setup. This module has 7 different noise sources, including white, red, grey, and blue. Each is being triggered by a different sequence. They’re all in sync, though one is slightly delayed, which lends a tiny bit of character to the cadence, I think. The only reason I skipped pink is because I don’t have any pink cables right now, and the color-coded cables helped me keep track of things.
You can blame this on someone who’s listened to too many Chain Reaction releases, too much Consolidated, and too many scores to Michael Mann films.
Slightly more technical information: The sequences are all in CV Toolkit (a piece of software running on my laptop), and they’re getting to my modular synthesizer via an Expert Sleepers ES-3 module. The noise-source module is the Quantum Rainbow 2. The white, red, and grey sources are all receiving sequences directly from the software. The blue source is getting a slight trigger delay (and a slightly extended length to the trigger), thanks to the Doepfer A-162. The whole thing is being mixed in an ADDAC 802 VCA Quintet, and out through a Pittsburgh Outs, through a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. It was recorded in Audacity.
Then Rupert Lally ran with it, writing:
Marc (disquiet)referenced Micheal Mann’s films in his track description, so I decided to “take that ball and run with it”, overdubbing more synths, percussion, and electric lap steel on top of his original track.
And, in turn, Yellow Salamd’r took a go, writing:
I heard Marc’s track … and thought “Nice! I like whitenoise, I should mix that into something”, then I hear Rupert’s remix, and I think “Wow, it’s been done, and damn nice too!”, but I couldn’t “not” mess with it somehow, so here is my remix of the remix :),,,, I took Rupert’s mix, reversed it and slowed it down, and then I kept cycling Marc’s slowed down track overtop of Rupert’s mix.
Original posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet. Lally’s “White Noise Industry” at soundcloud.com/rupertlally. Slamand’r’s at soundcloud.com/user-440651706.
