Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 359
November 6, 2015
The Pleasure of a Systemic Shock
It’s a pleasure to listen to this glitch piece by Lord of Overstock, “HHstairsC,” as it slowly accumulates mass, as it gingerly locates a central pulse. The piece ends where it begins, with a series of digital shudders and twitchy breaks. In between there is a rattling, distant percussion, and a series of off-kilter rhythmic slaps. The core of the piece is a sequence of minor systemic shocks that begin as a semblance of errors and, true to glitch, become a form of purpose unto itself.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/lordofoverstock. More from Lord of Overstock, aka Matthew Austin of Germantown, Maryland, at twitter.com/lordofoverstock.
November 5, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0201: Real Future
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 will be added to these playlists for the duration of the project.
This is all the music derived from the Montano album:
This is all the music derived from the Salmo album:
And this is the full project:
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 9, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0201: Real Future
Encapsulate an album for efficient yet meaningful consumption.
This week’s project is a special collaboration with Real Future, as part of the Real Future Fair being held in San Francisco on November 6 and 7. On the evening of the 7th I’ll be presenting some of this project’s audio during the Fair’s Real Future of Sound segment, and talking about the Junto with Alexis Madrigal, the Editor-in-Chief of Fusion. Madrigal and Fusion’s Cara Rose DeFabio participated in the development of this week’s project.
Step 1: First, ask yourself this question: As the population on Earth increases, and more and more people are creating art, how will technology and our brains collaborate to process all that creative information. In 2015 it’s hard enough to keep track of all the TV shows, albums, novels, and video games. What about in 2055?
Step 2: Choose one of these two albums to be your source material and download it:
This self-titled ambient pop album by the New Zealand act Montano:
https://montano.bandcamp.com/album/montano
This self-titled album by the French rock band Salmo:
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Salmo/Salmo/
Step 3: Consider an approach to compress the selected album for … let’s call it “efficient yet meaningful” consumption. Already today supercuts and superfuses condense material through quick sequences and dense simultaneity. Come up with an approach to similarly compressing a full-length album. You might consider the “overture” employed in project 0198, but you’ll likely come up with your own approach. And keep in mind that the end result should be … let’s call it “enjoyable.”
Step 4: Apply the result of Step 3 to the album you downloaded in Step 2.
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 assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 9, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be as long as you see fit.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, 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 include the term “disquiet0201-realfuture” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: Due to the Creative Commons nature of the source material, you should use the following license for your work:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 201st weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Encapsulate an album for efficient yet meaningful consumption”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/05/disquiet0201-realfuture/
This project was developed for the November 2015 Real Future Fair in San Francisco at the encouragement of and with the participation of Alexis Madrigal and Cara Rose DeFabio:
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:
[And here be sure to mention which of the two albums served as source audio, because attribution is an essential part of the Creative Commons.]
November 4, 2015
The Next 33 1/3 Books
Back on September 30, when the 33 1/3 series posted the “shortlist” of potential titles, the list had been whittled down by the publisher, Bloomsbury, to 83 prospective titles from the proposed 605. I listed, at the time, the 19 I was especially hopeful for, based on their subject matter. Today 33 1/3 announced the 16 that had been commissioned, and 6 of the ones I was hopeful for made the cut:
The Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde — Pharcyde
Homogenic — Björk
Switched-On Bach — Wendy Carlos
Tin Drum — Japan
Twin Peaks OST — Angelo Badalamenti
Uptown Saturday Night — Camp Lo
And on top of those, there are four more I’m especially interested in that I hadn’t noticed when the shortlist was posted: Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow, Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, Lou Reed’s Transformer, and Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker, the latter especially because it’s by Joe Gross, who is sure to do a great job.
Congrats to all the new authors. I’m excited that you’re keeping strong the series that published my book on Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. I’m happy to see so many albums on the 33 1/3 list I want to read about. And I’m happy, for the breadth and life of the 33 1/3 series, to see plenty of LPs I don’t particularly want to read about.
Read the full list at 333sound.com.
November 2, 2015
Aphex Twin Reworks “Avril 14th”
Aphex Twin added an especially welcome piece to his waxing and waning, vaguely quasi-semi-anonymous SoundCloud account, user18081971, today: a reworking of one of his most popular pieces, “Avril 14th,” which has spawned a Kanye West sample, several film-soundtrack appearances, and a funny April Fools joke. This version, “avril altdelay,” is a hint of the melody subsumed in deep echoes, the piano keys a little stunted, like it’s an old bar-room upright that’s seen too many spilled beers and too few visits from a professional tuner. The melody is broken up by waves of repetition as the piece refracts into the distance. So remote is the original that this reworking brings to mind some of Aphex Twin’s takes of other musicians’ records, back at a time when, in response to a remix request, he’d return something with barely a passing resemblance to the source material. That isn’t the case here. For one thing, there’s no sonic violence intended, just deviation and derivation. For another, lovers of the original will enjoy re-experiencing it as a loose collection of hints and indications.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/user18081971.
Poll: Boolean Birthday
Is today, November 2, 2015, the 200th birthday of George Boole?
— Marc Weidenbaum (@disquiet) November 2, 2015
October 31, 2015
Poll: Siren Versus Siren
Can you, from a modest distance, tell a police car's siren from that of an emergency vehicle (ambulance, firetruck)?
— Marc Weidenbaum (@disquiet) October 31, 2015
October 30, 2015
Real Future x Junto 0201 (San Francisco, November 7)
More details on this shortly, but I’ll be doing a little presentation/spiel/performance on Saturday, November 7, in San Francisco as part of realfuturefair.com. (The highlights above in yellow are mine.)
This will tie in with the 201st Disquiet Junto project, which begins the evening of Thursday, November 5.
October 29, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0200: Kadrey Score
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 will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, October 29, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 2, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0200: Kadrey Score
Create a score to a Richard Kadrey short story — using his own voice as source audio.
This week marks the 200th weekly Disquiet Junto. I’m very excited that the accomplished novelist Richard Kadrey recorded himself reading interlocking segments of his own short story specifically for use as source audio for this week’s project.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir books. The eighth book in the series, The Perdition Score, will be out in July 2016. Some of his other books
include The Everything Box, Metrophage, Butcher Bird, Dead Set, and the graphic novel Accelerate. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.” More from Kadrey at richardkadrey.com, facebook.com/richard.kadrey, and twitter.com/Richard_Kadrey.
These are the 5 steps in the project:
Step 1: The author Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim, Metrophage) has recorded himself reading seven separate one-minute segments of a short story that can be listened to in any sequence. Choose a number from 1 to 7. The tool at the top of this page is useful:
http://www.randomnumbergenerator.com/
Step 2: Download the numerical track from this following playlist. The tracks are listed from “MUDROSTI 1” through “MUDROSTI 7.” Download the one that correlates with the number resulting from Step 1 of this project.
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/richard-kadrey-mudrosti-junto/s-H7sas
Step 3: Create a score to accompany Kadrey’s reading of his own short story in the track that you got in Step 2. Primarily use Kadrey’s own voice as the source material for your score — bend it, shape it, extract from it, and burnish it to your will. Additional sonic elements, both musical and foley, are welcome, but a substantial percentage of the sound should be from Kadrey’s own voice. Also: keep Kadrey’s own reading audible and inteligible; don’t slow or speed or otherwise edit it. Your score should accompany his reading, not thoroughly supplant it.
Step 4: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. Include the term “disquiet0200-kadreyscoreX” in the title of your track, where X is the number of the track you were assigned (1 through 7).
Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, October 29, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, November 2, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be the same length as that of the original Kadrey track you downloaded.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, 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: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term term “disquiet0200-kadreyscoreX” in the title of your track, where X is the number of the track you were assigned (1 through 7).
Tags: And include “disquiet0200-kadreyscore” as a tag for your track.
Download: Due to Kadrey’s generosity and the Creative Commons nature of his source material, you should use the following license for your work and make your work available for download:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
More on this 200th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a score to a Richard Kadrey short story — using his own voice as source audio”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/10/29/disquiet0200-kadreyscore/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
More from Kadrey at
http://richardkadrey.com
http://facebook.com/richard.kadrey
http://twitter.com/Richard_Kadrey
October 27, 2015
The Tonal Rhythms of Vladimir Conch
Vladimir Conch has posted five short pieces of what might best be thought of as tonal rhythms. “Bits,” he calls them — more specifically, they are “bit1” through “bit5,” four of the pieces under 28 seconds in length, and the outlier (“bit4”) an extravagant 38 seconds. SoundCloud, where they’re hosted, allows for putting an individual track on repeat, but not a playlist. Fortunately they’re all available for download, so drop them into your favorite audio player and set them on random: “bit1” is Mark Snow’s idea of a video-game cue; “bit2” is downright aquatic; “bit3” is a short, playful little riff, a Bernard Herrmann lullaby; “bit4” is like a kettle hit in Pauline Oliveros’ basement, the reverberation hard and long; and “bit5” has a unique echo that seems to overwhelm the initial beat.
Tracks originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/vldcnch. More from Conch at proz.ac, vladimirconch.bandcamp.com, and twitter.com/VLDCNCH. I made the playlist, which is at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
