Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 375
May 25, 2015
New Music for a 17th-Century Organ
The note is held, and held — and then it is held some more. The note is dense and thick. It is braided with overtones. It sounds like a bag pipe chanting a mantra. It sounds like a ship coming into port in slow motion. It sounds like a car horn stuck in some blissful mid-state — traffic honking turned into reverie, in other words: the annoyance at lack of motion turned into a celebration of stasis.
What it is is Johan Graden and Marcus Pal performing a piece by Marta Lennartsdotter at Tyska Kyrkan, an church in Stockholm, Sweden, where the instrument was installed in the late 1600s. She describes the work as “A piece for two players composed with drawn-out tones interrupted by lack of air,” and herself as “a violinist and a electroacoustic composer. I work in the field of free improvisation and slow, drone based music.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/marta-lennartsdotter. More on her in this brief interview at futurelegendsmalmo.tumblr.com. The live concert was recorded October 3, 2014. Also on the program (see the Facebook.com event) were works by Lo Kristenson and Ellen Arkbro.
May 22, 2015
What Sound Looks Like
Of course the #noiseoffice intern uses a Traktor controller when transcribing interviews.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Of course the #noiseoffice intern uses a Traktor controller when transcribing interviews.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
May 21, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0177: Netlabel Portrait
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 evening, California time, on Thursday, May 21, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 25, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0177: Netlabel Portrait
Use samples of recent Dark Winter Records releases to produce a sonic image of the label.
Every couple of months the Disquiet Junto hosts a netlabel remix. All of the source audio for a netlabel remix is available for free, non-commercial download and creative reuse thanks to a Creative Commons license. This series of “netlabel remixes” is intended to promote that sort of thoughtful, collaborative sharing.
The netlabel Dark Winter has already released three albums this year. We’re going to use a snippet of one track from each of those records, and in combining them produce a kind of sonic snapshot of the label.
Step 1: Create a new piece of music by using nothing but the following segments of the following songs:
Use the first 30 seconds from “Part 1″ off Scott Lawlor’s World of Ice and Snow:
http://www.darkwinter.com/dw095.html
Use the first 30 seconds from “Underground Shelter” off Nadador Nocturno’s Harsh Winters in the Distance:
http://www.darkwinter.com/dw096.html
Use the first 30 seconds from “DSM III – The Cristalline Entity” off Ovdk vs Seetyca’s Allegorik Symptom Before the Cataclysm:
http://darkwinter.com/dw097.html
Step 2: Upload your 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, May 21, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 25, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between one minute and four minutes.
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 “disquiet0177-netlabelportrait” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: Set your track as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution), per the license of the source audio.
Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:
More on this 177th Disquiet Junto project — “Use samples of recent Dark Winter Records releases to produce a sonic image of the label” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/05/21/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
What Sound Looks Like
Noise office: The red book is the new Rothko bio. The yellow poster is my fake Rothko, a framed Pantone poster.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Noise office: The red book is the new Rothko bio. The yellow poster is my fake Rothko, a framed Pantone poster.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
May 20, 2015
Straddling Experimentation and Accessibility
One of the great things about Stringbot’s music is that even as it ventures into noisy areas and explores the automated patterning made available by modular synthesis, it retains an inherent pop appeal. “Shapeshifted” is a great example of how he straddles these two ends of the continuum, between experimentation and accessibility. The beat here has a vaguely random feel, not the rhythm itself but the way it plays out, how filters alter the relation of the foreground and the background, and how the foreground sound itself is modulated. At times it is pinched, at others deeply echoed; it can feel like a handmade instrument one moment, and a machine-tooled automaton the next. All the more interesting is how the beat moves, in a nuanced manner, from one such stage to another. That main percussive element is steady, with an enjoyable bounce to it. It has the feel of something Laurie Anderson might intone over.
The track is a trial run of a new piece of gear that Stringbot obtained, something called the Shapeshifter, a collaboration between the companies Cylonix and Intellijel. In the image accompanying the track, it’s the one with the lit-up rectangle on the bottom half of the shot. More on the module at intellijel.com and cylonix.com.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stringbot. Stringbot is Joshua Davison, who is based in Chicago, Illinois.
May 19, 2015
Beat in the Cathedral
When the piece “Ternary Cathedral” by Darkmatter opens, it consists largely of a shimmery, muted melodic line, like the high end of a pipe organ set in reverie mode. It is heard in a dark echoing chamber, and as time passes, distortion enters. The inbound backdrop for that melodic bit seems to be the same phrase set through some heavy filter. A brief drum pattern helps connect the two, finding a rhythm in the fairly loose and cloud-like melody, and hammering it home. That the beat doesn’t last very long makes it doubly interesting — usually a beat is the backbone of a track; here it is a cameo, one element among many.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/darkmatter. More from Dark Matter, based in London, at twitter.com/malloc8.
May 18, 2015
The Birds: After and Before
By the sounds of Richard Fair’s “Birdy Birdy,” the temporary autonomous zone has gone to seed. The birds have taken over the biodome, the dusty, moldering place long vacated by humans. The air is thick with the birds, and the cold surface echoes their songs with mechanical affect. Simple, cheerful tunes are quickly transmuted into something threatening, something hard. The birdsong itself is beginning to show evidence of an environmental feedback cycle, the birds’ own tune becoming slower, drowsier, more defensive, more feral. (Fair is aware of such a transaction, having written in a brief post: “I do wonder if the birds outside are reacting to what I’m doing in.”)
“Birdy Birdy” is not a real field recording, in the sense that it is not a pristine document, not by any means. What it is is the result of a field recording, a fairly blissfully mundane one, turned electronically into something quite other. The source audio was posted by Fair, who goes by Audiodays, of Norwich, England, as “Norwich Birdsong 17 May 2015.” It is bird song heard in the urban wild, complete with motorcycles and other evidence of 21st-century life. “Birdy Birdy” was posted shortly thereafter, the diary turned into a fiction.
This is the after:
This is the before:
More from Fair at audiodays.org and richardfair.co.uk. He also has a podcast.
May 17, 2015
Sine Waves for Samuel Beckett
There are three characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Play, one for each of the three points on the lover’s triangle. Dave Seidel is preparing a score for a live performance of Beckett’s Play (something he announced back in January), and the first taste matches the characters’ geometry with a kind of existential precision. That is, the work is both intellectually diagrammatic and eternally open-ended. The piece, titled “Threefold Soliloquy,” is comprised of three sine waves — three groups of three, actually. They’re set to intersect in a generative manner, the waves overlapping, intersecting, creating resulting new patterns. No two performances of Seidel’s composition will play out the same way — well, not statistically speaking. Presumably these overlaps are intended to reference not only the varying connections between the characters, but the cacophony of voices with which the play opens and closes. At the start and end of Play, the three characters are directed to speak “altogether.” The script notes the intended effect: “Voices faint, largely unintelligible.”
For reference, here is a version of the play directed by Anthony Minghella back in 2001, featuring Alan Rickman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Juliet Stevenson. Minghella elects to echo their voices to a purgatorial extreme afforded him by staging this for highly edited video rather than live performance:
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mysterybear. More from Seidel at his website, mysterybear.net.
