Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 360

The Psychoacoustics of Layers

Quick staccato notes suggest forward momentum. Backward masking suggests reflection. The rapid beats take us into the future. The molasses-slow warped sound takes us into the past. The former happens by quickening our pulse. The latter happens even as the music proceeds forward, even though we’re aware it moves forward. This psychoacoustic illusion is pushed to lovely ends in “A Gentle Southerly at Dusk [jimmy kipple’s Autumnal miasmix],” a reworking by Kipple of a Nettles original. The source material took guitar and turned it into something akin to a post-rock, minimalist gamelan. Kipple lovingly rends the Nettles piece until it has none of its rhythmic underpinning, until it is a constant flow of hints and gestures and flashbacks, of sliver moments stretched until their ends meet, stretched until they become transparent. We listen through that transparency, to layer, upon layer, upon layer. The track proceeds, but we’re stuck in an eternally held instance, winding and unwinding until past and present blur.

Here, for reference, is the original track, by Australia-based aScytheThroughNettles, from soundcloud.com/ascythethroughnettles:

Kipple track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jmmy-kpple.

Satie on Pause

If commitment is the measure, then Max Richter’s deservedly well-received Sleep, his eight-hour sonic paean to slumber, has one major peer this year. That would be Taylor Deupree’s ongoing 2015 Studio Diary. At about 70 tracks so far, the diary is only half the length — just under four hours — of Richter’s Sleep, but like Richter’s work, Deupree’s balances length with lightness, intensity with a soft touch. The October 12 entry, “a piano in autumn,” is little more than a digital piano refracted over the course of a minute and a half, as minor artifacts of tone are extended and warped while the full, simple piece continues. It’s Satie on pause, Feldman heard from a right angle. It’s a work composed entirely of grace notes.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/12k. More from Deupree at twitter.com/taylordeupree.

Disquiet Junto Project 0199: Space Crickets

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 22, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, October 26, 2015.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0199: Space Crickets
Make a field recording of a field recording in a spaceship.

Step 1: You’re going to make an original field recording. Use only your own recordings and those from copyright-OK sources, such as freesound.org.

Step 2: There’s a brief scene in the film Interstellar (2014, directed by Christopher Nolan) aboard a spacecraft in which it’s revealed that the pilot, played by Matthew McConaughey, calms himself by listening to a field recording of crickets and rain. There’s something intimate and reflective about that little sonic trinket of Earth being of use aboard an interstellar ship. In turn, we back here on the planet are going to make a field recording — a “fake” field recording, that is — for our own use. It should answer this question: What does it sound like to listen to a field recording of crickets and rain while aboard a spaceship? (For reference, you can view the scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNI-iZ_1Rac.)

Step 3: Make the field recording described in Step 2.

Step 4: 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 22, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, October 26, 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 “disquiet0199-spacecrickets” in the title of your track, and 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).

More on this 199th Disquiet Junto project (“Make a field recording of a field recording in a spaceship”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/10/22/disqui...

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The image associated with this project is a screenshot from the film Interstellar.

Geneva Skeen Layers Her Voice

The loop-based “multnomah_fall” by Geneva Skeen (aka Geneeeeves) employs vocals as instrument-like source material. Glottal sounds and incandescent moans take on drone-like roles in a slow-build, slow-burn recording that amasses density as it progresses. Dense as it gets, though, you can still hear deep inside it — past the wiry, wooly, bristling noise, past the eventual incursion of industrial rhythms — to the base materials on which it is all founded. It’s 15 minutes to be put on repeat.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/geneeeeves. Skeen is a Los Angeles–based artist whose efforts also include a women’s chorus and active exhibition curation. More on her in a brief profile at laartstream.com. More from Skeen at twitter.com/geneeves.

A Collection of Sources

Certainty Reducing Signals is the title of a 10-track set that C. Reider released back on July 13, aka Netlabel Day. That’s the day when we celebrate the phenomenon of small record labels that actively distribute their music for free, often — though perhaps not as often as one might want — with the intention that listeners subsequently rework the music themselves. Reider is a longtime proponent of experimental music and creative re-use. And true to form, the record’s liner notes include details on what went into it. (Full disclosure: Three of the tracks originated in the Disquiet Junto series of weekly projects, and I’m thanked in the notes.)

One highlight is “Dirigible,” a rusty, wired, dense thicket of noises that has a delightfully slow internal pulse. Starting out as a Junto project, it employs as source material Marsh and May’s album Falling More Slowly, from the Linear Obsessional netlabel.

Another favorite is a “site recording” titled “Vaporizing Rain,” a mix of rattling and white noise, likely the title substance hitting a metal roof. The result, two minutes in length, is a thoroughly engaging generative rhythm. True to the generative paradox, it is never quite the same twice, yet consistent throughout.

(The audio was autoplaying, and in advance of me sorting out how to turn off the autoplay, please proceed to freemusicarchive.org to listen.)

The album was released by Happy Puppy Records and is available at freemusicarchive.org. More from Reider at vuzhmusic.com, twitter.com/vuzhmusic, c-reider.bandcamp.com, and soundcloud.com/vuzhmusic.

Police-Siren Violins, White-Noise Beats, Static-Laden Dub

Raz Mesinai has been busily filling out his ghostproducer.bandcamp.com account. On the 11th of the month he posted Freakatone Beats Vol. 1, a collection of broken white noise disguised as funk, 15 tracks that come with their own unique “parameters,” a mix of practical and theoretical constraints. This is Freakatone‘s “Nervous System”:

FREAKATONE BEATS VOL.1 by Ghost Producer

And these are the freakatone parameters — a beatcraft Oulipo, a downtempo Dogme 95, a drone Fluxus:

The rhythm’s tempo is irrelevant, and can change without warning.

The rhythm is constructed by a simple pattern, chosen for its importance in urban music for centuries, in festivals, ceremonies.

There is no “drop”, however alluding to one is fine.

No overdubs are allowed when producing Freakatone as the key to its power is spontaneity, improvisation and mastering the sound system as an instrument.

Freakatone is often Produced with noise and dissonance in mind. Dissonance is important, and frequencies used are primarily rejected from Main Stream Sound Systems, such as streaming.

Freakatone cannot be performed without a dancing audience.

Noise must be generated within the very sound system used to produce Freakatone, either by feeding back into itself, adding other effect processors to the output of said instrument. Once the noise is revealed, the Producer must not end, but continue on and freak the tone.

The day prior to Freakatone Beats Vol. 1 came Sweet Dreams, Soundboy, a beatless collection of 16 industrial-ambient swaths, some harrowing, others lilting, all serrated. Here is the fourth in the otherwise title-less sequence, one of the set’s relatively lighter pieces, which to say the fear is at the far end of the dark corridor, rather than right in your face:

Sweet Dreams, SoundBoy by Ghost Producer

Especially welcome is the four-part String Quartet for Four Turntables, a Lincoln Center Festival commission in which the “quartet” was in fact four separate parts (two violins, one viola, one cello — the classic quartet format) recorded to vinyl and manipulated by two DJs. Here is part two — check it out around 5:50 when the scraping violin is made to imitate a passing police siren. The collection was posted on October 16:

String Quartet For Four Turntables (vinyl score) by Raz Mesinai

A brief liner note explains the turntable audio’s provenance:

It was first performed by Dj Olive and Dj Toshio Kajiwara at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City in 2000 but was never recorded or released until now. Mesinai insisted on letting the vinyl sit, uncovered, for 15 years, so that the crackles and pops would be more present.

It dates from 2000, when it was performed alongside work by the X-Ecutioners, as well as a quartet consisting of DJ A. Vee, DJ Frankie, Kuttin’ Kandi, and Christian Marclay playing versions of John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 5.” I mentioned it here back in 2009. And I interviewed Mesinai back in 2006.

And then there’s the far more expansive and varied Time Is Just an Update, also from October 11, 13 tracks that include attenuated drones, hauntingly sublimated orchestrations, and extremely slow chamber music. This is a track, “Tag Hash,” seemingly made almost entirely from vinyl crackles, repeated and echoed into a dubby matrix:

Time Is Just An Update by Ghost Producer

The music is streaming for free, and available for purchase: $9.99 for Sweet Dreams, SoundBoy (there’s also a $35 “endless cassette” version), $4 for the String Quartet (there’s also a limited-edition $200 vinyl edition), $7 for Time Is Just an Update, and $5 for Freaktone.

Mesinai, a prolific experimental turntablist based in New York City, is at ghostproducer.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/razmesinai.

The Outdoor Public Warning Nest

Every Tuesday at noon in San Francisco, the outdoor public warning system rings out across the city. There are 109 speakers in total as part of the OPWS, though these days only 108 of them are functioning. That’s because the one at the intersection of Taraval and Great Highway has, reports Rick Prelinger, been turned off. The Taraval siren isn’t broken. None of the sirens are broken. The whole point of the weekly siren test is to check and quickly repair any siren — any one of the four speakers that make up each of the 109 sirens — that isn’t functioning. The Taraval siren is silent because it has become a shelter for a family of Red-Tailed Hawk.

Prelinger, who gave me permission to post the photo shown up top, wrote on his Facebook page:

When I toured the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management on June 16 prior to my communications infrastructure talk that evening at Long Now’s Interval, I was told they’d turned off the emergency siren and speakers at Taraval and Great Highway so as not to disturb a nesting Red-Tailed Hawk. Of course I had to go and see what was going on.

(Update: He also clarified this morning that the nest may be empty by now.)

If you’ve never heard it, here’s a recording:

Here’s a shot of the tower at Taraval and Great Highway via Google Street view. This is facing north. A very short walk to the left and you hit the Pacific Ocean:

Residents near Taraval and Geary needn’t worry too much for their safety. There are three other sirens within blocks. For reference, Taraval and Geary is number 78 in this chart, available as a PDF at the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management’s website, sfdem.org. The actual number of sirens is a little unclear. The main site states 109, but there are 114 listed in that PDF and 111 in an accompanying list. Note that some, like the one at Taraval and Great Highway, double for tsunami warnings.

Thanks to Rick Prelinger — associate professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founder of the Prelinger Archives (prelingerlibrary.org) — for sharing the photo, and to Paul Socolow for alerting me to it. More on the sirens at sfdem.org. For additional reading, last month the duo 52-Blue (Nick Sowers and Bryan Finoki) in their designobserver.com series ran a piece on the tainted, wartime history of the siren. My audio recording of the siren is at soundcloud.com/disquiet. And for a recent shot of siren number 102, the one closest to my office, visit instagram.com/dsqt.

Two More Ambient Pieces from Aphex Twin

Aphex Twin’s soundcloud.com/user18081971 account has waned and waxed in recent weeks. It hovered around 250 total tracks for quite awhile, then dipped down to 236 — which specific tracks disappeared wasn’t entirely clear — and now it’s back up to a high of 260. Among those newer tracks are two particularly ambient pieces: “4 Voice Solo 1 Teac” and “4 Voice Solo 2 Teac.”

Both are simple sequences of layered waveforms, very reminiscent of the gentler moments of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. They’re the first in awhile that felt like natural companions to the earlier 11 pieces from user18081971 that I’ve been compiling as part of a prospective Selected Ambient Works Volume III beta album:

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/user18081971. More on my ongoing Selected Ambient Works Volume III beta playlist.

Two More Listeners

Earlier this week I posted responses I’d made to a series of questions about listening posed by Steve Ashby, who teaches music at Virginia Commonwealth University. Two more people have replied to Ashby’s questions, and I wanted to share segments of their thoughts here, both of them responding to the fourth, and core, question in Ashby’s survey: “How does one make their listening listened to?”

This is Bryan Walthall, a recording and mastering engineer who runs Stereo Image in Richmond, Virginia:

my perception of the way music sounds has changed greatly over the past 15 years. my favorite records when i was a kid (hendrix, nirvana) sound completely different! sometimes it breaks my heart because they don’t have the exact same magic they did when i was younger. its as if my “suspension of reality” has been diminished because I’ve seen the sausage being made for 15 years. for the most part they still evoke the same emotional response, but it has been diminished. i hear things completely different now, because i know how they were achieved. thats good for me making records, but the kid in me gets a little bummed sometimes that i can’t just listen to the song, i have to “hear the drums” or “know thats a plate and not a spring” or that “thats obviously a vocal double.”

This is the sound artist Stephen Vitiello. Up top is an image of visitors to one of his sound installations:

I mostly hope to achieve this in installation environments. Setting lighting in a space, comfortable seating, establishing a volume level and a speaker system that works well with the material are all important. Also, removing or minimizing visual distractions is vital – so that it is clear that in the work I’m presenting, sound is primary and not secondary to any sort of visual content. As I re-read these responses, it seems I’m hoping to create a space for the installations that goes back to what I used to create for myself when listening to a new record for the first time.

Ashby is archiving the responses at his ashbysounds.com website, and on his syllabus page at VCU’s rampages.us site.

Disquiet Junto Project 0198: Overture Remix

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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, October 15, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, October 19, 2015.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0198: Overture Remix
Create an overture for a full-length album.

Thanks to Lee Rosevere (twitter.com/leerosevere) for proposing the source audio for this project.

This week you’ll produce an overture for an album. You’ll do so by culling key representational material from each of the five tracks that comprise Chris Zabriskie’s album Thoughtless.

Step 1: Download and listen to the five tracks of Chris Zabriskie’s album Thoughtless, available at this URL:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...

Step 2: Cull a representative segment from each of the five tracks.

Step 3: Create an overture to the album by combining those segments into one standalone piece of music.

Step 4: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, October 15, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, October 19, 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 “disquiet0198-overtureremix” 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/b...

More on this 198th Disquiet Junto project (“Create an overture for a full-length album”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2015/10/15/disqui...

The source audio for this project is the album Thoughtless by Chris Zabriskie, more on which here:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Chr...

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The image associated with this project is the cover of the original Chris Zabriskie album. The photo is by Patrick Scott Bell.