Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 373
June 10, 2015
The White Noise of Summer
This is not an industrial variant on synthesized white noise. It is not a composite of fractured random sonic particulate across the audio spectrum. Well, it is, but it isn’t synthesized; it isn’t the result of software or hardware. This crunch, this rumpled-paper sonority, this harsh, brush-like texture — it is a simple field recording. The subject of the microphone is the interaction of wind and grass. Writes Leslie Rollins, of Berrien Springs, Michigan, in a brief accompanying note:
A recording of wind moving the tall, brittle grasses which occupy the dividing line between the sandy shore and the beginning of dune elevation in Warren Dunes State Park. It was a blustery day with constant wind rustling the stalks. I was able to wedge the two contact microphones at the base of two clumps and they held them, almost like a clothes pin, while the wind whipped the tops. I was surprised how sharp and pointy the drier stems were as they jabbed me while I got the microphones in place.
Perhaps most remarkable is the sheer length, the uninterrupted consistency.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/337is. More from Rollins/337is at facebook.com/337is.
June 9, 2015
Guitar + Echo
Another track in Taylor Deupree’s ongoing, endlessly satisfying journal of his musical activities. It’s a short piece, just under two minutes, all guitar and echo. In his liner note to the piece he talks about the technology behind it. The specifics are at the link for those with the interest and vocabulary. His detail in his notes is not gearhead talk. It’s an expression of his thinking, his compositional approach through technology. Here all that consideration surfaces with an electric guitar set on an echo you can almost see, so hard in its reverberance that it brings to mind not so much ripples in water as it does dominoes falling in slow motion.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/12k. There’s also an ongoing playlist of Deupree’s 2015 Studio Diary, currently at 46 tracks, or almost two and a half hours of music. More from Deupree, who lives in Pound Ridge, New York, at taylordeupree.com.
June 8, 2015
The Phantom Waveform
You’re working at your modular synthesizer. It’s nothing particularly technical, what you’re up to. There’s an oscillator that emits a variety of waves: sine, saw, triangle, and so forth. You patch the oscillator into a filter, and the filter into a mixer, and the mixer into a speaker. It’s one straight channel. Its buzzes, sonorously, at least to your ears. Then you patch another, slower-moving oscillator into the filter as well. This secondary source makes the filter all the more complex, though in the end it’s just tweaking one source wave. It has texture. It moves back and forth. It grows and swells. Then you turn on the sequencer, and let its syncopated triggers send pings through the system. As time passes, you move things around, doubling and tripling the variations on that original source signal. You slow one oscillator, and then you change the waveform sent from another. You let the filter cut off one range of the spectrum, and then another. You pitch the tempo of the sequencer slower, and slower still. You adjust the balance between a handful of cables now routed through the mixer. The sequencer is being fed into plugs for which it was not entirely intended, and yet the end result is exactly what you’d hoped for, a burr-like beat that’s like an occasional metronomic absence in the soft, noisy wave. You’re learning as you go. And then you look back at the filter, and something is odd. There is nothing at the moment plugged into its “Audio In” jack. There is no source audio. At some point you’d removed that cable, and the speaker has yielded no sign of that absence. There should be no sound at all, except perhaps those sequencer blips. There is, technically, no source audio for what is happening in your synthesizer. Somehow, though, in this largely analog modular setup, the electric hum has taken on a presence of its own. There is a ghost oscillation caught in a signal loop. At some point you’ll need to turn off the machine, but for the time being you listen to the beading hum, ponder the phantom waveform, and marvel at the small dark hole in that empty jack.
The current stage of my rig is pictured above, and an occasionally updated system view is at modulargrid.net.
Jmmy Kpple’s Home Life
Only three comments into the Jmmy Kpple track does its source material surface. In retrospect, there were clues. The track title, “weakov injune,” in the glitch spelling that’s at the core of Kpple’s generous pleasure center, suggests either a week off or a weak oven, or both. The sole accompanying text, aside from his standard “#cheap concrete” tag, is the spaced-out word “/ d o m e s t i c i c i t a t i o u s.” This is domestic sound, turned into something else, in this case a drowsy, dolorous clanging that slowly builds to a mild clamor. It’s just loose enough to be mistakable for a quotidian field recording, though of the deep bowels of a municipal substation, not of a contemporary residence. You might have been left imagining that Kpple had, indeed, wandered underground with a tape recorder, had he not responded to someone complimenting the piece — “Love the subtle metallic chords” — with the experimental-sound equivalent of a tell-all: “thanks – s’all slow-motion kitchen implements.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jmmy-kpple. More from Jmmy Kpple, based in England, at twitter.com/jmmy_kppl, jmmykppl.tumblr.com, and mixcloud.com/jmmykppl.
June 6, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
The simplicity of the doorbell’s functionality is often belied, over time, as buildings subdivide and technology fails. Jury-rigged systems of substitute buttons and makeshift signage supplant the initial elegant solution. It can be remarkable to track the decisions made, from repeating apartment numbers in handwriting to posting written instructions with paper and tape. It’s one thing to write an apartment number a third time. It’s another thing entirely to elect to explain which button is the correct one, as if the chronology of the installation isn’t self-evident. The term “wayfinding” is used in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and related fields to describe the process of instilling a sense of orientation and direction into physical spaces. Sometimes it seems as if it’s the people trying to give simple directions who have lost their way.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 4, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0179: Tech(nique) Talk
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.
This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, June 4, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 8, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0179: Tech(nique) Talk
Show off (and explain) one thing you’ve learned recently about an instrument/tool.
Step 1: Think of one thing in the recent past you’ve “figured out” related to how you use an instrument or another piece of technology to make music.
Step 2: Record a short piece of music that employs that technique.
Step 3: After uploading the piece, explain in the accompany text (and/or in the captions to the SoundCloud file) what the thing is you’ve figured out, so others can benefit from what you’ve learned. Explain how you’ve employed it in the track.
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 4, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, June 8, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work is up to you, but less than two 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 “disquiet0179-techniquetalk” 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 179th Disquiet Junto project — “Show off (and explain) one thing you’ve learned recently about an instrument/tool” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/06/04/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 Thomas Galvez used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
What Sound Looks Like
I’ve hit this button at the door to a friend’s house more times than I can count. Until yesterday, when I was left lingering longer than usual, I’d not ever taken the time to really look at it. I probably look more closely at doorbells I encounter randomly on the street than at the ones I use regularly. When I’m walking, I’m looking. When I arrive, the doorbell is functional. This one’s button has a discoloration that signals regular use, unlike the majority I’ve photographed, their disrepair simultaneously suggesting significant past use and, yet, no current visitations. What really caught my eye this time was the name on the device, which I’d long misread at a glance as Airphone. That’s not what it says. It’s Aiphone, or as I like to think of it, AIphone. The company, founded in Japan, has been making intercoms since the late 1940s. The name reportedly comes from the Japanese concept of “living in harmony,” not “love” as I’d guessed. There’s a certain beauty to the Japanese “ai” correlating with the universal abbreviation for “artificial intelligence.” The origins of Aiphone intercoms apparently relate to a matter of convenience, more than those of security. I like the idea of an AIphone, which reads the face of a guest, checks their security, identifies them, and even chats them up while they wait for the door to be answered.
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
June 3, 2015
Sampling Memory
Over the years, some content has accidentally disappeared from this site, during migration from one publishing platform to another, and on occasion I have the time and opportunity to reintroduce it.
An email out of the blue last night reminded me of this interview (“That Creeping Feeling”) I did with Rob Zombie back in 1999, when he was still with White Zombie. I’m really proud of this piece. It appeared in Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine, where I was an editor from 1989 to 1996, and continued to write freelance almost monthly until it closed down after Tower filed for bankruptcy (a story that is now the subject of the Colin Hanks documentary All Things Must Pass). Zombie is a super smart guy, not just idea-smart, but emotionally so — he connects his own experience, especially childhood memories, to his music. His work in film I’m less familiar with — this piece covers in part his first forays into shooting videos (both as a young teen, and as a professional rock musician), which helped lay the groundwork for his later horror-film career.
In our current world that the geeks have inherited, I’m surprised he’s not more of a prominent figure. Here’s a short segment of the larger interview in which he talks about copyrights and corporate control of the very memories they instill in us:
He taps on a set of round tin film canisters sitting on an end table: “In this old Super 8 footage I have from the ’60s that I wanted to use in the video, there’s actually a scene of me and my brother when we were little kids going to meet Ronald McDonald. And it’s really creepy the way it’s filmed, the old footage. I wanted to use it because it’s very scary. But guess what? I can’t. I can’t use Ronald, even thought it’s, you know, my memory.” Ronald McDonald, little Rob’s first clown.
Rob Zombie’s brain — like those of his bandmates, peers and fans, all of us — is stuffed with data he is not allowed to access; he’s learned the same lesson as Rushdie and every rap group since De La Soul was sued by the Turtles. The cultural ramifications bring to mind William Gibson’s currently vogue short story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” about a data courier who transports information in a special chip in his brain, to which he has no access. Rob’s living room, like his memory — like White Zombie’s music — is crowded with cultural objects, treasured pop artifacts that, in his words, “spring the memory.”
“I love playing Tempest,” Rob says of one such childhood relic, a video game in this case. “But I won’t play Mortal Kombat. That’s some other kid’s childhood memory, not mine. I mean, some kid is gonna hear that fighting noise when he’s 30 and get all sentimental: ‘Destroy him! Ha ha ha ha.’ Good old days. Like with Star Trek. When I was a kid, it was on three times a day. I remember kids would come over and be like, ‘Ya wanna come out and kick some ball?’ And I was like, ‘No, man, I got two more hours of Star Trek left.’ But today’s show is about as exciting to me as watching General Hospital.”
Read the full piece, “That Creeping Feeling.”
June 2, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
And then there’s the time I was at Comic Con in San Diego and met an illustrator who had filled my teenage imagination. I was working for a company that had a large booth, and I took a break from helping set up to wander around. Artists Alley, several rows of tables set aside for individuals rather than companies, was still all but empty, excepting a few early birds. Each table had a little piece of paper, like at a wedding, stating who would be there. I took a peek at the names of the people who would be exhibiting. They were familiar ones from superhero and autobiographical comics alike. And then one name stood out. And someone was standing behind the table. “Excuse me,” I asked. “Are you really Roger Dean?” His answer: “Yes.”
An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
Do Aviaries Dream of Electric Tweets?
Andrew Pekler has a synthetic menagerie, an electronic aviary. He has made “unreal field recordings” — his excellent phrase — that consist of chatty birdsong, except there are no actual birds, just his machines, his software, however it is that he constructed the sounds. They’re modeled, certainly, on familiar bird noise: the quick reverberating of their tiny speech organs, the inherent echo of the natural environment, the layered density of a forest. As the piece proceeds, his artificiality gets more self-evident, the songs bring to mind pictures not of small birds but of small synthesizers. At which point the brain switches from bird to synthesizer is unclear, and arguably unimportant. In either case, we simply hear Pekler’s lovely birds sing across the uncanny valley.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/pekler. More from Pekler, who has recorded for ~scape, Kranky, Entr’acte, Matador (under the name Sad Rockets), and other labels. at andrewpekler.blogspot.de.
