Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 377
May 5, 2015
Kate Carr Reports from Iceland
A photo posted by Kate Carr (@k8_carr_) on May 4, 2015 at 2:23am PDT
Kate Carr is not only what often gets labeled a “sound explorer.” She is a more literal sort of explorer as well. Her instagram.com/k8_carr_ feed is often detailing one corner of the globe or another. Originally from Sydney and now based in Belfast, Carr appears at this moment to be wandering all over Iceland. Recognizing this, I headed to her SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/katecarr, in the hopes that her sound-artist ear would be brought to bear on the soundscape as much as her camera has been on the landscape. There was no disappointment. She’s been documenting the world with contact mics and hydrophones and other techniques, like this record of an iced fence:
And this of two trawlers:
Her recordings show not just an editor’s ear for considered framing, but also a variety of approaches. She writes of the trawler piece:
A four channel hydrophone recording taken between two trawlers, one making a low slapping sound, the other a high leak. You can also hear a trawler being unloaded by a small fixed crane in the background, and some gulls.
And there is a little Cageian touch. The trawler track’s length is 4:33:
More from Carr at twitter.com/flamingpines.
May 2, 2015
Selected Ambient Kremlinology
Now at 190 total, the feed of tracks being uploaded by Aphex Twin (aka user48736353001) from his personal archive has expanded in recent days, after a two-month break, to include a wide range of sounds, among them industrial grinding and freeform experimentation. This piece, “6 Gear Smudge,” is the first in awhile to come close to the level of ambient simplicity that is represented by the (currently) 10-track Selected Ambient Works Volume 3 playlist I made from the uploads on the user48736353001 account. With its prominent synth melody, it’s arguably too poppy to make that cut, but it’s still a great nugget.
My favorite in this recent batch, by far, is “3 Slothscrape,” which one commenter (user1789670, the account of which has no tracks associated with it) perceptively likens to the work of Pierre Bastien. It indeed has the warped, melting pacing that Bastien shares with Kid Koala and Gavin Bryars. The “6 Gear Smudge” track is dated as “94 ish” but there is no date associated with “”3 Slothscrape.”
Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, isn’t just posting tracks from his relative seclusion. He’s also joining in the comments section. He explains to one commenter in the “6 Gear Smudge” thread that he created the hip-hop (“btw its all me inc. the scratchin”) heard in the introduction to the Chris Cunningham–directed “Windowlicker” video, and expresses disappointment about a longstanding beef with a fellow musician. At one point his generic account name appears not as “user 48736353001″ but as the French “utilisateur 48736353001,” which suggests he was logged in from a different computer or location.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/user48736353001.
May 1, 2015
April 30, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0174: Glove Songs
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, April 30, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 4, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0174: Glove Songs
Play something on your favorite instrument — wearing gloves.
Step 1: Think of the instrument on which you are most proficient. (Touch screen interfaces such as iOS devices are excluded from this project.)
Step 2: Choose a piece of music you’ve recorded that employs that instrument.
Step 3: Re-record that same piece of music, this time wearing gloves.
Step 4: Upload your track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. When posting, if possible include a link to the original (non-gloves) version of the piece.
Step 5: 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, April 30, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, May 4, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly the length of the original.
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 “disquiet0174-glovesongs” 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 174th Disquiet Junto project — “Play something on your favorite instrument — wearing gloves” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/04/30/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo associated with this project by Myxi, used via Creative Commons license:
April 28, 2015
Two More from Aphex Twin
The remote user48736353001, aka Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, yesterday posted his first SoundCloud track in two months. It was #174 in his account’s feed, and of course the question lingered whether the dam was about to break again.
We have a partial answer. In the past 24 hours, another pair of tracks appeared. “36 Shroommdot [miCro3] [8th dimension transmission]” is an expansive piece, at over 20 minutes perhaps the longest in the user48736353001 account. It’s an apparent improvisation of rangy sounds, tea-kettle whines and morphy noises and shrill waves. It sounds less like a “track” than much of what he’s posted, and more like a free-form run-through of a range of different tools and techniques. In contrast, the brief — well, relatively compact, at 6:24 minutes — “25 rogphlange 1″ places a backbeat behind a select number of such sounds, rendering it more approachable, attractively abrasive. Both tracks are from the 1990s, “rogphlange” listed as “199?” and “Shroommdot” as “1993.”
None of the past 24 hours’ three uploads falls into the ambient category that made 10 user48736353001 tracks fit into the Selected Ambient Works Volume 3 (Beta) playlist I’ve put together.
Check out “36 Shroommdot [miCro3] [8th dimension transmission]” and “25 rogphlange 1″ on their respective SoundCloud pages.
April 27, 2015
#174
For a few months now I’ve loaded the Aphex Twin page on SoundCloud, aka that of user48736353001, each morning wondering when 173 — long the standing track count — would jump to 174.
And it did, less than 10 minutes ago, with the track “24 Triple D.” If the above embed doesn’t work, click through to the track’s dedicated URL.
It’s a piece of hard rapid synthesis, a sonar beep buried deep in the grinding beat, and the overtones taking on a semblance of human speech. By Aphex Twin standards, it opens in a nearly industrial mode, but in time more familiar slow-moving, comforting waves infuse themselves into the proceedings, though never enough to fully subsume the foreboding, driving beat. The sole accompanying information is a date (1993), and a hashtag for one of Richard D. James’ many monikers: #afx.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/user48736353001.
April 26, 2015
Under the River Paiva with Andrea Parkins
The semi-obscene, rubbery bending. The almost comically resilient resounding of a metal surface. The shushing noise of texture. There is something sensual, in a very direct way, to “Under the River Paiva” by Andrea Parkins. She recorded it at Nodar, Portugal, as source audio for a broader project. The sounds are all from beneath the surface of water, all recorded with a hydrophone. Writes Parkins of the context for “Under the River Paiva”:
It features filtering created by placement of objects and movement of the hydrophones in the riverbed’s rocky crevices. The recording later became part of my 12-channel sound design for Symptom, a multi-disciplinary work directed by US-based choreographers The Body Cartography Project, presented in 2011 at CounterPulse, SF in 2012 and in 2011 at The Coil Festival, NYC.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/andreaparkins. More from Parkins, who is based in New York City, at soundcloud.com/andreaparkins. More on the Coil performance at ps122.org.
April 25, 2015
Elliptical Techno
So often minimal techno tracks quickly forgo the ear-catching intrigue of their opening moments, and then they simply give themselves over to the expected routine, as pleasurable as that routine may be. Not so the elliptically titled “…..” by Daiskue Tanabe. For “…..” doesn’t just end where it begins. It maintains that sensibility throughout, slightly off-kilter glitch of nanoscale gears that sound like they’re one dust-particle event away from pure chaos.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/daisuketanabe. More from Tanabe at facebook.com/pages/Daisuke-Tanabe.
April 24, 2015
Stasis in Darkness
This set of nine tracks by Ambienteer lays out slivers of atmospheric tonal gestures. At a low volume they are barely discernible, fully on purpose, from the low level electric hum of daily life. At mid-level they are more likely to suggest activity one or two rooms over. Some, like “Echoic” and “Darkening,” include gentle sonic baubles that engage in rhythmic play, but the majority, like the opening “Aethereal,” are intentional wisps. One anomaly is “Ariel,” which layers in the Sylvia Plath poem from which it takes its name, the voice roughly recorded, seemingly like it’s emerging from the depths of history. The poem’s opening line, “Stasis in darkness,” could stand for this entire album.
Full set posted at soundcloud.com/ambienteer More from Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, at ambienteer.com and twitter.com/ambienteer.
