Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 365
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:
What Sound Looks Like
The doorbell is a simple device. Yet it must be a complicated one to fix. Out and about in the city, you frequently come upon makeshift solutions to a specific problem. The problem is that an old doorbell no longer works. A new doorbell intended to replace the old doorbell may well work, but often as not, the overall solution doesn’t. This specific combination of heavy-duty tape, a handwritten sign, and a complete relocation of the doorbell deserves a prize for multi-stage suboptimal domestic hack. And don’t let its seemingly temporary nature fool you. The city is full of temporary hacks that remain in place decades later, likely lasting longer than the doorbell they replaced. Perhaps that is an accomplishment worthy of commemoration if not respect.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
This Week in Sound: Old France and Sonic Weapons …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
Remarkable efforts are underway (witness the video above), thanks to Mylène Pardoen, in reconstructing what Paris sounded like in the 18th century. (Link via Margaret Schedel.) … At the BBC, Ian McMillan documents how avant-garde techniques were ingrained in the education of little kids. … The New York Times’ Jeff Gordinier looks into the battle to make dining in public less noisy. (Link via Bruce Levenstein.) … Lee Fang documents how the “acoustic cannon” has become a post-Ferguson feature of police forces, at theintercept.com. … The comments section in Jay Barmann’s piece on the noise issues in the San Francisco Bay Area’s BART system make it clear we have no claim to notoriety. Nonetheless, there is welcome news that this linchpin for high-tech commuters may be getting an upgrade.
And finally, I love this little bit of monologue from the TV series The Strain, based on novels by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. This is a servant of the vampire master explaining to an anointed vampire how she will has been granted some access to her human self:
“The master has released his will enough for you to find yourself in him. Your thoughts, your memories, your voice. … Your voice – you will feel it along with him, like tinnitus, or two speakers badly aligned. But they will tune in, and the ability to speak fluently will become second nature.”
That is from “Intruders,” The Strain season 2, episode 8. It first aired August 30, 2015.
This first appeared in the September 8, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
September 9, 2015
A Finnish-German Duo Flirts with Cacophony
The brief liner note for this manic bit of synthesizer cacophony, approaching serial orchestral music at times, is pure tech talk, so if you’re not regularly following the details of contemporary modular synths and electronic-music software, just suffice to say that the piece is pushing several items in popular use to their limits. And then give it a listen. The track is “Circuits – A Human Way to Play Them” by Duet Mysteron. The result is at times like dozens of quickly vibrating instruments heard at once, and at others like a small foggy town full of car alarms that all go off at once. Which is to say, it’s all about simultaneity, at a large and small scale. That orchestral comparison isn’t cross-genre hyperbole. There is a harmonic component at the start, all clashing maximalism, and a melodic component toward the close, a through line of gentle probing, that have an admirable amount of certitude to them.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/duet-mysteron. Found via a repost by Anarchy4bits, out of Traunstein, Germany, who is half of Duet Mysteron. The other half is the Turku, Finland-based Regenbot.
September 8, 2015
The Podcast Nocturne
Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne podcast focuses on her fascination with the dark of night. The next to most recent episode, number 8, “Into, Under, Through,” which aired back on July 6 of this year, involves Lowe recounting her solo walk through the woods in the north bay, above San Francisco. In it she talks a lot about the sounds of a forest when it is empty of people, and about the fears, both real and imagined, that fill the void. In it we hear her speaking both during the walk and after, and the timbre of her voice is quite a study in contrasts.
One highlight of Lowe’s Nocturne is that its backing music is provided by her husband, the very talented composer and sound designer Kent Sparling. His accompaniment has an especially meta moment in this episode when a sharp distinction is drawn in the narration between a real walk in the woods, and the heavy-handed scoring that often goes along with such action in horror movies.
More on the Nocturne podcast, including subscription information, at nocturnepodcast.org. More from Sparling at kentsparling.com. Art by Robin Galante.
The Podcast Nocture
Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne podcast focuses on her fascination with the dark of night. The next to most recent episode, number 8, “Into, Under, Through,” which aired back on July 6 of this year, involves Lowe recounting her solo walk through the woods in the north bay, above San Francisco. In it she talks a lot about the sounds of a forest when it is empty of people, and about the fears, both real and imagined, that fill the void. In it we hear her speaking both during the walk and after, and the timbre of her voice is quite a study in contrasts.
One highlight of Lowe’s Nocture is that its backing music is provided by her husband, the very talented composer and sound designer Kent Sparling. His accompaniment has an especially meta moment in this episode when a sharp distinction is drawn in the narration between a real walk in the woods, and the heavy-handed scoring that often goes along with such action in horror movies.
More on the Nocture podcast, including subscription information, at nocturnepodcast.org. More from Sparling at kentsparling.com. Art by Robin Galante.
September 7, 2015
Audio Obscura’s “Artist of the Week” Playlists
SoundCloud has done something of a net-zero adjustment to its social aspect over the past few years. On the one hand, it diminished the presence of discussion groups to the point of making them nearly non-existent. On the other, it increased the means by which non-musicians can contribute. It accomplished this by making reposting a means by which someone can add something to a feed. The reposting has its demerits. Some rampant reposters — and they know who they are — can clog up your feed all too easily. The functionality is the equivalent of Twitter’s “retweets,” though of course it takes a split second to read a tweet, whereas a retweeted hour-long EDM DJ mix or audiobook sample can mess up your afternoon background listening. It’d be nice, as with Twitter, to turn off those retweets — or, in SoundCloud parlance, “reposts.” (It’d also be nice to have another Twitter feature, “lists,” both public and private, but that’s a whole other subject.)
In any case, whether or not reposts have expanded the SoundCloud user base’s sense of collective participation, another feature, used less frequently than reposting, provides a great means by which a listener can contribute to the listening of others. This is the “playlist” functionality. It’s the same tool used by musicians to collect tracks into albums, and it’s a way to make digital mixtapes of material from multiple accounts, too. A great example of the functionality is a new project by Audio Obscura, aka Neil Stringfellow of Norfolk, in the U.K. He’s begun producing short “Artist of the Week” playlists, the first of which features Yasutica Horibe, of Hiroshima, Japan. Horibe records as Stabilo-Speaker-Gain, and his music is a collage of tiny materials, scrapes and drones, threadbare waves and gentle percussives, just beautiful stuff. Stringfellow is onto something here.
More from Stabilo at soundcloud.com/stabilo-speaker-gain. More from Audio Obscura at soundcloud.com/audio-obscura-music, where he’ll post more Artist of the Week playlists, along with is own music.
September 6, 2015
Post-Classical Ambient Minimalism for Crepuscular Airports
The track “Augmentative” by Suss Müsik is described in a brief accompanying note by its composer-performer as “Post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports.” The intention is clear. The “post-classical” aspect is the presence of static violins and receding timpani. The “ambient minimalism” is the overall sense of hovering waveforms in favor over active, self-evident melodic or thematic development. The “crepuscular” is the way such a still piece can bring to mind moments in the day, such as that of twilight, when things seem to pause on a psychic, emotional, and sensory fulcrum point, with an underlying and intense momentum toward what might come next. And then, of course, the “airports” is a nod to Brian Eno’s foundational work, where he likewise likened the travel portal to a unique mental juncture. At nearly 18 minutes long, “Augmentative” plays like the score to a short, word-less film of constant transitions that lead nowhere in particular, a dream-state in which a vision of travel is, in fact, a metaphor for some entirely other deeply rooted anxiety.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/suss-musik.
What Sound Looks Like
The three buttons at this multi-unit dwelling suggest three stages of apartment living. The topmost one is still fairly active. The middle one has been abused to the point where the button is hollowed out, the plastic melted from the heat of a thousand fingertips, from accumulated social pressure; it functions if you nudge it at the edges, but most visitors, to the extent there are any these days, give up and walk away. The bottom button signals plainly that the dweller no longer accepts visitors, and has in fact painted over the button, rendering it useless, and removed the apartment number from public view.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
September 5, 2015
The Room Tone of Post-Katrina New Orleans
I left New Orleans 12 years ago last month, two full years before Hurricane Katrina hit. As we reflect on Katrina 10 years after, I’ve been revisiting some of what I wrote about New Orleans over the years. Sadly, I have not had the opportunity to go back to the place since, though it’s often on my mind, always a reference point — and I still bear the 504 area code on my mobile phone number. I refer to that as my “information-age tattoo.”
A few months after Katrina, I wrote “NOLA-tronic,” about the presence of electronic music, directly and indirectly, during my time there. This is back when Trent Reznor was still a resident. His studio, a former mortuary, was around the corner from the house I rented. I’d regularly walk around the neighborhood, only to find the Edge or Zack de la Rocha hunting for a croissant, or inspiration, or both. It was also shortly after the former White Zombie bass player Sean Yseult had moved to town, when Quintron was well into his rise, and lots of local jazz musicians, from trumpeter Nicholas Payton to Dirty Dozen Brass Band trombonist Big Sam had jazz fusion on their mind. I can say that it can be very informative to live somewhere where your primary interest is in the cultural background rather than the foreground. San Francisco is a great place to live if your mind is focused on electronically mediated sound and culture, but I wouldn’t trade my four New Orleans years (1999-2003) for anything.
On the fifth anniversary of Katrina, I woke up to the concept of “acoustemology,” in large part thanks to an explanatory essay by Matt Sakakeeny, an assistant professor in the music department at Tulane University. The originator of the term, Steven Feld, defines it as ““a sonic way of knowing place.”
David Simon’s landmark television series The Wire started airing on HBO a little more than a year before I left New Orleans, and I started watching it from the premiere of the first episode. Having visited Baltimore, I had already sensed a kinship between the two cities, and it felt like deja vu when he debuted Treme in 2010. After it first aired, I thought about the role of sound and music in his ode to New Orleans.
A lot of this has been on my mind thanks in particular to a recommended listen from Gene Kannenberg, Jr., a friend and comics scholar based in Evanston, Illinois. NPR on August 25 posted a piece by John Burnett (“At a Shelter of Last Resort, Decency Prevailed Over Depravity”) about the on-the-ground reporting in the aftermath of Katrina, and a minute into the story the producer reflects on the tumultuous ambient room tone of a makeshift “refugee camp” in New Orleans. I’d written recently about room tone here on Disquiet.com, and Kannenberg pointed me to the NPR piece because it reversed the role of room tone. Room tone is something used in audio recording to fill gaps and provide a base-level sonic snapshot of a room: it is, quite practically, employed as background. In the case of this NPR piece, however, the room tone is itself, however momentarily, the subject of the story.
Burnett audio originally posted at npr.org.
