Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 372
June 21, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
I now know the Chinese word for “doorbell.” (I need to read up on the derivation of the individual characters.) What really needs translating, though, is neither language: The sign has to explain what is not immediately evident. The doorbell is hidden by the metal gate, and rendered humorously difficult to utilize. The small button is situated directly behind the crosshairs of the lattice work. The whole thing is a marvel of poor choices. It’s rusted through and the wires are exposed to the elements. If you do manage to press the button you’ll be welcomed into a church across the park from where I live. Not quite the gates of heaven, but a trial to access nonetheless.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 20, 2015
The Time Within Time
I was invited by the musician and composer Kenneth Kirschner to write liner notes for his forthcoming album on 12k Records, Compressions & Rarefactions, which is due out on July 10th. Mine are one set of notes among several. Also contributing notes are Simon Cummings, Kysa Johnson, and Mike Lazarev. Johnson also created the artwork on the cover. The recordings make for a beautiful album of stasis and motion, ruptured filaments and broken patterns. Kirschner often deals in massive scale in his music, and this album, while managing the length and depth he’s accustomed his listeners to, also heads in other directions. One of the pieces includes Tawnya Popoff on viola. Below, with Kirschner’s permission and that of 12k head Taylor Deupree, are my liner notes. More on the record at 12k.com.
Here are some samples of the album:
And … next Tuesday, June 23, there will be a giveaway in my email newsletter for one physical copy and three digital copies of Kirschner’s Compressions & Rarefactions.
“The Time Within Time”
There is a cloud overhead, and there is an ocean below. There is a vast and slender circle around us. Between us and the circle there is water as far as the eye can see, as far as the mind can perceive. There is no land to be recognized, just water, endless water. The world is a panorama of two half spheres: a gaseous plane above, an aqueous plane below. A thin dark seam surrounds us, marking the stable and eternal truce between the twin planes. Perhaps the stars, when they are visible, might provide some form of orientation, but orientation toward what? Where are we going? We’re just going, nowhere in particular. We go because time passes. In a world without landmarks, let alone land, motion and stasis are close siblings, often mistaken for each other. In every direction, there remains nothing but water. The stars move across the plane above us, but we, whatever direction we move, see nothing but water and sky, and perhaps our own reflection.
The moon passes overhead, notching the pace of time. It casts beams through the thick wood, piercing the lace canopy, alighting on and framing various natural still-life occurrences: congruences of flora and fauna, of naked rock and shallow streams, of decaying loam and iridescent shoots. We have walked seemingly forever, and wherever we walk there is simply more and more forest. There is no out of the forest. There are just trees as far as the eye can see, which isn’t very far, since only a few steps ahead they combine, from various distances, to create the equivalent of a wall, a wall of bark, branch, and leaf. We move from one patch of land to another, making our way through trees — not really our way but the trees’ way, the way the trees allow us to move, the way the landscape shapes our perception, our destiny. The forest is the world. The world is this forest, so dense that for all our wanderings, we never leave much of a trace, let alone make a proper path for anyone else to follow.
There is a life ahead of us, and there is a life behind us. At any moment, much of the past seems to linger at an equal distance, a faded distance, a middle distance. The future is a series of crisp options, all in conflict. We focus on these alternate futures, much as we do on street signs deep in the night, and we try to make one of these futures real, to choose one as a guidepost, as an eventual horizon. As for memories, they hover well beyond recent events, apart from daily concerns, without any interconnection or context except that they all come back to us without warning: first school, first pain, first love, first blunder, first epiphany, first loss, first sailboat ride, first camping trip, first night alone. The futures are sharp if conflicted, and there is a haze to the memories, a lack of focus, a gentle and continuous shifting of the mind’s foundation. And sometimes a sharp recollection pierces, and then it is gone, back to the haze. The further we proceed in life, the more life there is to hover in that past middle distance, and yet the past is never fully occluded. It gathers no density. It is simply always out of reach.
In the music of Kenneth Kirschner we hear slender sounds merge with the functional silence of whatever medium on which they are recorded, and whatever medium on which they are, later, reproduced. This music, in its overwhelming emphasis on quietude and space, tests the pores of whatever scenario it invades. With occasional exceptions for fierce eruptions and rhythmic play, his compositions are the quiet voice that draws the listener in more closely. His music doesn’t require attention or demand attention; Kirschner’s music is a finely tuned engine of attention. And like all music that draws inspiration from ambient, his is a music that inspires attention as much as it benefits from attention. It isn’t music that exists at the moment when it hits your ear. It is music that lingers in the air, in the room, in the moment.
In Kirschner’s music we catch glimpses of recognizable elements, of familiar artifacts: classical-ensemble strings, rich and deep echoes, florid percussive shimmer, aggressive sawing, undulating drones. We listen on as these sounds overlap, layer, eclipse, as each of them in turn recedes into the underlying hazy tonal bed of the work, and as new such sounds arise. Kirschner has many tools at his disposal, and among them the most conspicuous is time. He embraces a sense of periodicity that challenges the listener’s comprehension. His longest fixed works, those with a formal beginning and end, have the dimension of a full-length feature film — except, of course, in terms of narrative. That’s to put aside, for the moment, his literally endless works, the ones that employ algorithmic progressions to proceed for, in essence, an eternity. Even in the most generous and contemplative and present listening scenarios, one will lose oneself in the ocean or forest — or alien landscape, or post-industrial labyrinth — of his two-plus-hour pieces.
So dedicated is Kirschner to these through-composed, shard-faceted monoliths, that a half-hour work of his registers as “short,” even if it takes about that much time for a martial glisten to take on a richer, more varied percussive patterning. These “shorter” works serve as listener-training tools in advance of the substantially longer works — they’re not so much sprints before marathons as they are leisurely hikes before undertaking the Appalachian Trail. When, for example, that same glisten appears later below a wider range of rhythms, it is not just an element among many; it is a memory of how the same glisten once appeared, earlier on. The re-surfacing of the glisten serves as a loop, bringing the work full circle, thus suggesting an even lengthier span. The short work is a fragment of a possible work. It is a glimpse of time within time.
If time is Kirschner’s most self-evident compositional tool, then memory is his most active one. As we find our way — that is, find a way — through the immersive, perception-consuming, periphery-spanning territory of his work, as time passes, as life passes, our sole guide is the work itself.
This first appeared in the June 16, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: Purple Reign, Station Eleven, Ornette Coleman, …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Purple Reign: In the New York Times, Randy Kennedy on the new home for La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s long-running “Dream House” installation. There are few things on the planet like this perpetual sound/art space, a dedicated, artist-specific union of site, sound, and vision. In San Francisco, the closest may be the Audium. Another somewhat kindred site is the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
nytimes.com
— Station to Station: I haven’t yet read the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, but it’s now high on the my list thanks to a recommendation by Nicola Twilley on Twitter. The story of musicians and actors in a post-apocalyptic world, it touches on something I talk about a lot in my sound course I teach, which is the role of sound and culture beyond our current sense of pervasive technology:
twitter.com/nicolatwilley
— RIP, Ornette: Ornette Coleman died on June 11 at age 85. So many musicians of note die every month, it can be overwhelming, but I always keep an eye on obituary pages because the timing and pacing and rapidly reported history of those passings give a sense to the shape of generations. I rarely take the time to do more than tweet an acknowledgement, but Coleman’s passing hit hard, and had me thinking back to how I first came to listen to him. When I left for college, I took with me all my LP records — and some of my dad’s. When Dad visited me at college, he took back all the Charles Mingus, but left the one Coleman album, Body Meta, with me. Dad said at the time he had no idea how it is he’d come to possess the recording, which in 1978 came out on Artists House, a small label run by John Snyder. That record remains a constant for me, in large part because of the presence of guitarist Bern Nix, whose lines intertwine with Coleman’s in a way I can hum by heart. The broken rhythms of that record prepared my ears for much of what I’d come to love in the subsequent years, from John Zorn to Roy Nathanson to Marc Ribot. I can’t recommend the album highly enough, though I should mention in this context that there is nothing ambient about it. Speaking of Body Meta, if anyone reading this actually does Wikipedia updates, the album listings associated with Coleman have a mention of Body Meta, but no link to the actual page for the album, which is here:
wikipedia.org
This first appeared in the June 16, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Hardware from a Musician Named for Hardware
That small grid screen you see in the screenshot above is from a prototype of a synthesizer module developed by the prolific British musician Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, who is working on the equipment in cahoots with James Carruthers and Adrien Harris. Scanner has been deep in modular synthesis of late, and it’s a natural development that he would go on to develop his own hardware. After all, Rimbaud takes his Scanner moniker from the police-band device that was central to his early recordings. This track is a test of the device, an 8-step sequencer now in prototype stage (hence its awkward physical dimensions). A sequencer is of limited use on its own, so here it is hear activating other modules, among them one that produces old-school percussion sounds, and the Music Thing, a module that allows access to banks of prerecorded samples. The result is a mash of blissfully chaotic layers of snippets. If the pulse and dynamics of a day on a busy urban street could be transformed into a musical score, it might sound like this.
For more on the device, there’s an interview with Carruthers, who runs through the device’s toolset on YouTube.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/scanner. More from Carruthers at twitter.com/jamescarruthers and jamescarruthers.com.
June 19, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
Most of my doorbell photographs are taken outside of buildings. This one was taken inside a friend’s house. When I rang the bell by pressing a button outside his front door, there was an unfamiliar delay before the bell was audible. The bell wasn’t so quiet as to suggest it was ringing from deep in the house. There was simply first a decidedly extended pause, two beats passing in silence before there was a response. After being let in, I took off my shoes in the foyer, and I saw on the floor three long, narrow metal tubes of varying lengths. The doorbell itself was attached high on the wall, its innards exposed: just one tube, hanging off center. I asked my friend what was going on. He explained that the doorbell was loud, very loud, regal in its fancy grandfather-clock mode. His housemates had decided to remove the three loudest of the four chimes. The result is that the first two chimes are triggered, but since there’s no tube on either, we don’t hear anything. Only when the third bell rings does the person who pushes the doorbell button get confirmation that the inhabitant has been alerted to their arrival.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 18, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
Someday there will be doorbells where these wires hang. Someday soon. I’ve lost track of where I shot this, so it’s unlikely I’ll be able to compare the wired building to the current wire-y one. Will it be a multi-button, multi-unit device? Will it include a surveillance camera? Will the camera just be for show? Will the tones it emits be regal or modest, and will the packaging announce a variety of sonic options, and will the inhabitants make use of those options, and if the inhabitants are renters will they be allowed to change the doorbell tone, and how many times will the residents change before the instructions are lost? How long before the pushbuttons are rubbed hollow? How long before the small plastic windows over the inhabitants’ names fog over? How long before the apartments are subdivided and new buttons must be added?
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Disquiet Junto Project 0181: Instrumental Dream
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at Disquiet.com, 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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 18, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 22, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0181: Instrumental Dream
Imagine your favorite instrument is dreaming while it sleeps — what does it sound like?
Step 1: Focus on your favorite instrument.
Step 2: Imagine that your instrument sleeps.
Step 3: Imagine that your instrument dreams.
Step 4: What does it sound in your instrument’s dreams?
Step 5: Record what it sounds like.
Step 6: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 18, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 22, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work is up to you, but between one minute and four minutes is probably best in this context.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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 “disquiet0181-instrumentaldream” 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:
More on this 181st Disquiet Junto project (“Imagine your favorite instrument is dreaming while it sleeps — what does it sound like?”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/06/18/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 Tim Patterson used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
June 17, 2015
Sonic Color and Post-Drone Music
There are more than enough drone composers at work that we can begin to really appreciate post-drone music. Drone composers have opened our ears to works of ecstatic stasis, in which micro-shifts in texture and tone take center stage. In post-drone music, as exemplified by the exceptional “Yellow” from Darren McClure, those same elements are brought back into a more traditional compositional format, with a structure of give and take, in which thematic development plays a substantive role. The track is from McClure’s album Primary Locations, which was released earlier this month on Dragon’s Eye Recordings. Each of the tracks on Primary Locations investigates the sonic equivalent of the visual spectrum, and also comprises field recordings consistent with the theme. “Yellow,” for example, includes audio recorded on a “metal overpass supporting train lines.” This explains the rough shudder and brief snippets of bird song, among other facets of the piece.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dragonseyerecordings. More from McClure at darrenmcclure.bandcamp.com and soundcloud.com/darrenmcclure.
June 15, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
It’s quite common that doorbell devices installed on multi-unit buildings have more buttons than there are apartments or offices. Still, why this place opted for a six-button item when there are four addresses is a mystery — even-number doorbells are easy enough to come by. Kudos, in any case, to whoever thought it best to vertically center the fourth buzzer, even if the choice inadvertently suggests two towers, one of which has been merged into a single home. The real mystery is the button above number four: Why has an unassigned button seen so much use?
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 11, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0180: Matryoshka Music
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at Disquiet.com, 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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 11, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 15, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0180: Matryoshka Music
Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition.
Step 1: Consider the Russian nesting doll called the matryoshka, in which hollowed-out wooden figurines are designed to be stored inside each other, excepting the smallest doll, which is solid.
Step 2: Compose a short piece of music that somehow takes as its basis the doll’s structure. (For a further constraint, imagine a matryoshka consisting of 6 dolls.)
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 evening, California time, on Thursday, June 11, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 15, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work is up to you, but between two minutes and four minutes is probably best in this context.
Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this assignment, and 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 “disquiet0180-matryoshkamusic” 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:
More on this 180th Disquiet Junto project — “Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/06/11/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 James Jordan used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
