Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 364
September 19, 2015
Intensity Is Framed in Small Dimensions
Jo Thomas’ music flirts with disaster at a tiny level. In “Glitch,” there is a rising tone like something about to explode, but the tension of those imminent pyrotechnics is secondary to how the intensity is framed in small dimensions: The real tension is hearing it all play out in sonic language that is actually quite subtle.
In “Alpha,” the title cut of the release on which “Glitch” also appears, bell tones and bassy thrums and white noise are sliced and shattered, resulting in a riveting sequence of tiny, split-second occurrences. “Dark Noise,” the quietest of the three tracks by far, is also the most self-effacing, providing no easy momentum or urgency, and relying instead on drawing the listener into a field of what could be nocturnal insect noise heard through thick glass and an increasingly diminishing illusion of comfort. Alpha was released by the label Entr’acte back in 2010, and has just been added to its excellent SoundCloud page.
More from Thomas, a tutor in Electronic
Sound and Music Culture at the University of East London, at jothomas.me. More on the release at entracte.co.uk.
September 18, 2015
Premonition of Snow
The artist Havdis, of Nordland, Norway, has committed to tape nine-plus minutes of seasonal gloom. “Withering in Snow” is all moaning digital organs cut through occasionally by shards that glisten. The whole thing echoes into the distance, where it is consumed by the dark. A wind slowly forms, while the music ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, the air current making a frigid ocean of the surroundings.
The track, originally posted at soundcloud.com/havdis, originates from 2013, and the upload is about a year old, but I just came across it this week thanks to a repost on SoundCloud by Birgit Jauernig of Vienna, Austria (soundcloud.com/ahornberg). It’s an extended version, about twice the length, of a Havdis track that appeared on a massive free holiday-music compilation, Petroglyph Music – The X-mas Compilation 2013. More from Havdis at gterma.blogspot.com.
September 17, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0194: Clock Play
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 evening, California time, on Thursday, September 17, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 21, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0194: Clock Play
Record the sound of a clock and make something playful and sweet out of it.
Sometimes Junto projects have very detailed rules, and other times the rules are, true to very first Junto project, simple and open-ended. This week’s project is the latter. (Thanks to Brian Biggs for the timely creative nudge.)
Step 1: Record the sound of a clock and make something playful and sweet out of it. (You can also use pre-recorded sounds, like those at freesound.org, if you prefer.)
Step 2: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 3: 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, September 17, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 21, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be between roughly one and three minutes long.
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 “disquiet0194-clockplay” 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 194th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of a clock and make something playful and sweet out of it”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/09/17/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Image associated with this project by Brian Biggs, who drew it specifically for this project, and who provided the project’s timely creative nudge.
September 16, 2015
This Week in Sound: Forensic Audio + Miéville’s Djinn …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— JFK’s Whispers: The upcoming convention of the AES (Audio Engineering Society) will have a presentation by Bruce E. Koenig, who will give the Richard C. Heyser Memorial Lecture. Koenig will be talking about “using sound to investigate critical events.” The talk is titled “Acoustic Forensic Gunshot Analysis — The Kennedy Assassination and Beyond.” AES’s New York conference will run from October 29 through November 1 of this year. (Found via Gino Robair.)
— Sound Startups: Dave Haynes left SoundCloud back in January 2014, but he didn’t leave sound. In a post at Medium, he discusses various ways that sound is fueling computer science, consumer products, and culture. He touches on a variety of new companies and items, including a “smart house sitter” called Point, and broader concepts like “hearables” (a subset, per se, of wearables).
— Gallery Sonics: John Kannenberg asks and answers the question “Why Listen to Museums?” in a paper he’s uploaded to academia.edu. He collates his observations to field recordings he makes at art institutions: “Museums as sonic environments contain a record of the present day mingled with the past. Every footstep, every echo, every bang of a ventilation duct that I record while in a museum captures data about how the sounds performed by contemporary people are affected by the historic objects in that space.”
— 3D History: Billy Ó Foghlú of the Australian National University has used 3D printing to bring back iron-age instruments. “These horns were not just hunting horns or noisemakers,” he says in a piece at sciencedaily.com. “They were very carefully constructed and repaired, they were played for hours. Music clearly had a very significant role in the culture.” (Found via Mike Rhode.)
— Sonic Artifacts: And I love this brief bit from the China Miéville short story “The 9th Technique,” which appears in his new collection, Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories.
The occult economies of charged items were always jostling. War had flooded the market.
Helmets that remembered the last sounds heard by those who died. Melted iPods pried from burnt-out tanks — if you could make them play again, they would infuriate djinn.
Miéville is often characterized as an urban fantasy writer, but what he really reads like is science fiction’s answer to Billy Bragg. His work focuses largely on class, and yet has a florid, romantic nature. Bragg posited capitalism in contrast to love; Miéville connects it to horror. The lurid detail of Miéville’s stories can mask their romance, but it’s there in the rich descriptions, the emotional scenarios, and the difficulty people have forging connections. In “The 9th Technique,” a character hunts for objects infused with dark magical forces (his “charged items”) as a result of torture at Guantanamo and other fronts in the War on Terror.
This first appeared in the September 15, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
SFEMF 2015 + Interrogative Music
I made it to three of the four nights of this year’s San Francisco Music Festival. It’s been running since 2000, and I think I’ve attended every year since I moved back to San Francisco from New Orleans in 2003, with the exception of 2010, when it coincided with the birth of my little kiddo, who decided to arrive two weeks early. This means I’ve managed to miss out on Alessandro Cortini twice: he played the 2010 show and he had to drop out of this year’s opening-night event due to a family emergency.
As always, SFEMF, which ran from September 10 through 13, was admirably style-agnostic except to the extent that it remains pop-antagonistic. The performances included a comical theatric mini-opera by Kevin Blechdom and Aqulaqutaqu, a full-on ambient-industrial immersion by Lawrence English, a percussive live score to a short film by Surabhi Saraf, a modular synthesizer set by Doug Lynner (using the first commercial Serge, which dates from the mid-1970s), and a four-channel “film-less film” by Olivia Block. English’s performance was about as “pop” as it got, because his smoke-machine aura and booming minimalism might also be at home in a handful of adventurous techno clubs.
And as always there was at least one elder statesman. This year it was the improviser Charles Cohen, who played twice — on Saturday (the night I missed) and on the opening night, in a makeshift, last-minute synthesizer duo with Wobbly (Jon Leidecker), to fill the hole left by Cortini’s absence. Because I missed the Cohen show on Saturday, I also missed Robert Rich and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Rich is arguably an elder spokesman of sorts, too, because even though he was born in 1965, he started releasing music in his teens, and gained prominence early on.
Thursday I got to see Thomas Dimuzio put a massive amount of modular synthesizer gear toward an admirably minimal, often microsonic, goal. Friday I caught English and Saraf (the latter of whose video of an especially louche pharmaceutical production line seemed to have some technical issues), and opening act Horaflora (Raub Roy), who used massive, slowly deflating balloons as audio sources and tactile triggers. And on the closing night, Sunday, I caught Blechdom’s antic interstellar opera, during which she managed to have a slide projected for every single word in the libretto and many additional syllables, as well as sets by Block and Lynner.
Lawrence English and Olivia Block arguably performed the most memorable sets of the three nights I was in attendance. Everyone on the festival bill was experienced and unique — SFEMF is no slouch in its curatorial efforts — but the English and Block sets were the two that seemed to fully consume the space. (Note: there were two spaces. The first night was at the Exploratorium, and the remaining three nights at the Brava Theater.) English’s was a throbbing white noise of dense drama. Block’s was an ever-shifting collage of sonic elements with an underlying through-composed, narrative sensibility. It isn’t that a set has to surround the listener to make an impression, but this year saturated listening made the most sense as concert music. A lot of this has nothing to do with the other performers in particular, and almost everything to do with concerts in general. I go through phases in and out of love with live performance of experimental music, and there’s an extent these days where shows of experimental concert music (seated, reflective) can feel a bit like going to the movies. Movies have been undone by television, and while live concerts don’t have a direct parallel challenger, there are times when the purpose remains equally unclear. After a movie, you walk out of the theater wondering what the point is — why, unlike with television, can’t you see the characters again, witness their continued development. Experimental concerts also often fail to fulfill a specific desire. One thing that surprises me regularly at shows is that there is no time set aside for explanation. Even major symphonies regularly schedule pre-concert discussions by the conductor and sometimes the principal soloist. The term “experimental music” can fall short for what’s been undertaken. It’s really interrogative music. It’s experimental because it’s intended to go places no one has gone before, but in doing so it is, like anything experimental, trying to find answers to questions: does this idea work, does this sound register with an audience, is this technology stage-ready, does this music cohere? Likewise, the audience has questions, too. I don’t think it would undermine a concert were the musician, if so inclined, to take a moment to talk about what was about to happen, or what had just happened.
I do also wonder if SFEMF would to well to add a night at a third venue of more populist work — a place where dance-friendly, or at least head-bobbing, music by Monolake or Amon Tobin or the like would be at home.
Anyhow, it was a great year for SFEMF, and I’m looking forward to next year’s festival — right after my kiddo’s sixth birthday.
This first appeared in the September 15, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Infrastructure Incantation
Like violin being practiced at an electrical substation, “Time Goes More Slowly” by Chrissie Caulfield initially features a healthy contrast between the cautiously bowed instrument and a mix of clank, drone, and distortion that suggests some sort of unmanned municipal outpost. As it proceeds, the violin dissipates — or enters the drone entirely — in favor of an ominous metronome and white noise. Collectively it’s a kind of infrastructure incantation.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/chrissieleeds. More from Chrissie at chrissieviolin.info and twitter.com/chrissie_c.
September 15, 2015
Law & Order’s “Chung Chung” Turns 25
Every pop-culture sound-design element gets its 15 minutes of fame, and sometimes even more. On the 25th anniversary of the Law & Order TV series, the show’s famous “clang,” or “chung chung,” has been stretched to 25 minutes by sound artist John Kannenberg. Kannenberg is pursuing a PhD focusing on the role of sound in the museum, but he’s clearly aware the that the court is just as fertile a bed for audio research as the art gallery. To listen to this stretched to such a length is to go inside the sound and peruse its details. The shimmery lattice of sound is akin to The Matrix‘s bullet time crossed with an electron microscope. You get a sensory experience of every tiny undulation.
Here is the original, via Wikipedia:
Here as a bonus is a 20-minute talk Kannenberg gave recently on “Why Listen to Museums?”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/johnkannenberg. More from Kannenberg, who also runs the fine Stasisfield label, at johnkannenberg.com.
September 14, 2015
New Eivind Aarset Tracks
Eivind Aarset has announced a new album, I.E., due out this month from the label Jazzland. Aarset, a Norwegian who emerged as a player in the band of latter-day fusion trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, also from Norway, has a deep talent for electronically mediated guitar — not electric guitar as it’s become generally understood, but an electric guitar so filtered through a battery of effects and other tools that it isn’t inherently recognizable as a guitar anymore. Pop fans will recognize timbres from U2’s the Edge, the Police’s Andy Summers, and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who to varying degrees insinuated FM radio with ethereal, echoing, otherworldly atmospheres. Aarset brings those atmospheres to the foreground. The new record features nine tracks, five of which are previewed (either in full or part) at his website, eivindaarset.com. (The streams aren’t currently embeddable, so you’ll have to click through to listen.) Some rock fairly hard, while others, notably “One and the Same” and “Through Clogged Streets, Passed Rotten Buildings,” venture into filmic territory.
Aarset’s band consists of Audun Erlien (bass) and Wetle Holte and Erland Dahlen (drums, percussion, “and a lot of other stuff”). Guests include Jan Bang (“livesampling co-production”); Lorenzo Esposito Fornaseri (vocals on “Through Clogged Streets”); the wind ensemble Det Norske Blåse; Michele Rabbia (“electronic treatments”); and Jan Galaga Brönnimann (contrabass clarinet). One of the tunes (“Rask,” according to the album’s discogs.com page) — was mixed by Tchad Blake. Design-watchers will want to know that Ian Anderson of Designers Republic did the album cover.
Tracks originally posted for streaming at eivindaarset.com. News via Michael Ross’ guitarmoderne.com, which is a great ongoing source for electronically mediated guitar. More details on the album’s recording process at jazzlandrec.com.
September 13, 2015
Matt Madden’s Late-’80s Instrumental Music
Matt Madden is best known as a comics artist. His work plays with form, notably in his book 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. I’ve known Matt for over 20 years, having edited comics he produced for Tower Records Pulse! magazine back in the 1990s and early 2000s. (Here’s an essay I wrote about one of them: “Home Decorating in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”) He also allowed the Disquiet Junto early on, for its 14th project, back in April 2012, to riff on his 99 Ways book.
Despite all of which, I wasn’t fully aware he himself made music. He’s begun posting some of his old work at a new SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/mattmadd. The first track he uploaded, “Telepathy,” dates from 1988. It’s a short, slow, introspective piece. It brings to mind various threads of what would come to coalesce in part as trip-hop, as well as illbient. There are bits of what we’d come to associate later with “Money” Mark Nishita’s funky-sodden organ grooves, and Kid Koala’s sad-sack, muddled beatcraft. A guitar, trying to soar with weighted-down wings, brings manages to bring to mind both Robert Fripp’s echoing guitar loops and Adrian Belew’s chatty six-string birdsong (in particular “The Sheltering Sky” off Discipline). There’s something fitting about hearing amorphous ambient music from an artist whose visual work is often fixated on the rigors of form.
Back to the present, Madden has lately been providing music for Out on the Wire, a series of podcasts by his wife, Jessica Abel (whose comics work I’ve also edited), relating to her new book by that name, Out on the Wire: The Storytelling Secrets of the New Masters of Radio, for which Ira Glass wrote the foreword. Check it out at soundcloud.com/out-on-the-wire.
“Telepathy” originally posted at soundcloud.com/mattmadd. More from Madden at mattmadden.com.
September 10, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0193: Semi-Parallel Lines
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, September 10, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 14, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0193: Semi-Parallel Lines
Record a short composition for two voices/instruments that occasionally intersect.
This project explores how two simple lines can occasionally intersect.
Step 1: Plot out a short piece of music, maybe a minute in length. It will consist of two separate lines recorded by two distinct instruments.
Step 2: When plotting out the piece, plan on the two lines intersecting on occasion. Plot, for example, a three-note riff 20 seconds in, or a held chord at 30 seconds, and so forth. The number of intersections is up to you — four to six seems like a solid range.
Step 3: Record the two lines independently. (It’s a natural occurrence of this process that despite the planning, the periods of simultaneity may be slightly off. That’s great. It’s arguably even preferable.)
Step 4: Layer them atop each other, with little to no post-production effort, aside from adjusting relative volume and introducing a fade in and fade out.
Step 5: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. (Bonus points if you manage to sync the audio and animation and upload to a video service.)
Step 6: 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, September 10, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, September 14, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work will likely be about a minute long.
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 “disquiet0193-semiparallellines” 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).
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information, and link to (and identify) the two SoundCloud pages for the source audio you selected:
More on this 193rd Disquiet Junto project (“Record a short composition for two instruments that occasionally intersect”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/09/10/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Image associated with this project by Tom Wachtel, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
