Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 379
April 15, 2015
April 14, 2015
It’s “Avril 14th”
It’s April 14, which for some means the day before the due date in the United Staes for income taxes, and for others a reason to celebrate the British electronic musician known as Aphex Twin. “Avril 14th” is one of Aphex Twin’s most loved pieces, and that affection has resulted in a wide number of samplings (Kanye West, in the song “Blame Game”), remixes, and reworkings. The best known reworking is probably the arrangement by John Pickford Richards performed by Alarm Will Sound on its 2005 collection Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin. A couple days ago, Anthony Fiumara posted his own lovely acoustic-ensemble arrangement:
It’s part of a set of eight Aphex Twin arrangements by Fiumura. Full set first posted at soundcloud.com/anthony-fiumara. More from Fiumura, who is based in Amsterdam, at twitter.com/Anthony_Fiumara and anthonyfiumara.com.
And consider supporting the petition set up, as announced on Medium by Sam Bungey and Larry Ryan, to make Aphex Twin Day official.
April 12, 2015
Pictures at an Arvo Pärt Exhibition
Classical music and synthesizers go hand in hand, in part because of the academic origins of much beta-era synthesizer experimentation, and in part because of how renditions by Wendy Carlos, Tomita, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, among others, of standard repertoire helped expand the early audience for electronic music. The tradition is alive and well. This coming month, Sony will release the retro Bach to Moog by Craig Leon.
What follows are two different versions of a contemporary classical favorite: the same Arvo Pärt piece performed on two very different synthesizers. The piece is Pärt’s “Solfeggio,” which in its original form is arranged for a gently shifting array human voices. Here it is with its tones transferred by the artist Tomorrow the Cure to the Tetra, from Dave Smith Instruments, the “father” of MIDI:
There is also a version from 2009 on the Doepfer Dark Energy by the same musician, who is based in Norfolk, Great Britain (more at soundcloud.com/tomorrowthecure). That Dark Energy recording is not available for embedding, but can be accessed at the musician’s youtube.com account.
And here, for cross-reference, is a vocal rendition of the same Pärt piece:
The Tetra version was originally found thanks to the excellent matrixsynth.com website.
April 10, 2015
April 9, 2015
The “Negative Music” of The Good Wife
This past weekend’s episode of The Good Wife (“Loser Edit”) opened with a purposefully bland testimonial montage on the good fortune of the title character, Alicia Florrick. The episode prior, Florrick had won a statewide election. “Loser Edit” opened with a recap of her career, which is to say of The Good Wife itself, now well into its sixth season. The camera eventually backed up, revealing that we were watching not a commercial within the show, but a piece of television journalism within the show. It backed up further and we recognized that we were seeing the journalism being constructed, in real time, in a television studio.
The Good Wife often plays with its audience’s expectations. It will return from a commercial break into the middle of a fake TV commercial, or a YouTube-ish “viral” video, or a bit of “native” web advertising, or some other bit of transient media, forcing the viewer to sort out where exactly we are in the story, from whose perspective we’re experiencing the narrative, before yanking us back into the action. The Good Wife puts the “media” in “In medias res.” When the title character occasionally gets a night off, she can be found sitting at home alone watching a parody, titled Darkness at Noon, of the sort of existential anti-hero machismo that gets shows like True Detective and The Shield so much critical attention. The episode the week prior, in which Florrick’s season-long race in a state election was decided, the TV newscaster within the show told the audience — including Florrick herself, seated on a couch in front of a TV — that they would have to wait until after a commercial break before being told the race’s outcome. And then The Good Wife itself took a commercial break.
With its married and divorced middle-aged characters and its presence on CBS, traditionally the grayest of the major American broadcast networks, the show is often misperceived as a rote legal and marital procedural. It is anything but. What it’s especially good at is tracking the use of media, social and otherwise, in the lives and careers of its characters. Sometimes technology takes center stage, as in a running sequence that involved NSA surveillance; this was structured as if a bleak hipster sitcom had been posited within the drama. There have been legal battles on the show involving a search engine and bitcoin, not to mention the illegal editing of email metadata.
The credit due The Good Wife isn’t merely related to the breadth or the frequency or the variety of its stabs at how media mediates life and work. What’s exceptional about The Good Wife is the detail that it brings to its depiction of how technology by both chance and intent influences, often for the worst, life and work and, most specifically, politics.
In “Loser Edit” we watch as the bit of career-recap news is first pitched as a generally favorable overview and then, with the sudden arrival of a slew of damaging emails, as an act of ambush journalism. When the timbre of the still-in-progress story shifts from biography to admonition, the producer of the bit is shown back in the studio with her editor. Earlier in the episode they had left the Florrick character alone in color, against an otherwise black and white photo. Now they switch the emphasis, leaving her alone in black and white, amid a color setting. We watch as, with a simple shift in color coding, they entirely alter the meaning of the photo. The Good Wife is the rare show on television that shows people working on computers in a manner that actually is how people work on computers. We see colors being adjusted and photos being manipulated and text being edited with everyday tools.
And at this moment in “Loser Edit,” the editor dips into a folder of generic background music and switches to a file titled “Negative Music” from one titled “Positive Music.” The sheer, brazen laziness of the action — the sad binary of “positive” and “negative” — speaks volumes of the journalist and her ilk, and though it’s a split-second instant in the overall episode, it also speaks volumes of the intricacy of The Good Wife and the attention of the folks who make it.
“Loser Edit” was directed by Brooke Kennedy, who has also directed episodes of Fringe and My So-Called Life, among other dramas. She has directed many solid entries in The Good Wife, including “Live from Damascus,” back in season 3. That’s the episode in which Will Gardner, the main love interest of the title character (that is, aside from her husband), learned that he was going to be brought up on charges that might lead to his disbarment. At that moment in the episode there is a subtle shift in the background music. A party is going on elsewhere in the law offices, and it is ominously muted, going from joyful to foreboding, as Gardner is faced with the imminent legal action. I was so struck by the moment at the time, that I tracked down Kennedy and interviewed her about it. I was especially interested in speaking with her because of her work on Fringe, which also made great regular use of sound as part of the narrative.
Kennedy spoke to me by telephone about how different television directors manage sound differently: “Just in general,” she said, “when it comes to television, there are certain directors who go in with sound design and have at least some sense of it, and there are others who go in with nothing and put it in at the end. The way you can tell the two, truly, is somebody who shoots more insert work. People who shoot insert I find tend to hear sounds and they want to incorporate that into storytelling. A spoon hitting a glass — it’s that moment; they want to take a moment. Others who don’t do any of that, you find that they don’t think in terms of sound.”
She helpfully walked back through the sequence in the “Live from Damascus” episode: “That entire scene is constructed as things that are happening off stage, so in the center of the offices there’s the party and music is changing constantly. I think we use almost three to four songs and the idea that the party gets more raucous as it goes on, and then every time the sound changes where the proximity of Will is to the party. Then you have to add into that his emotional weight that happens at the end. You want to nurture that. We’re playing with sound through glass. That in itself is rather complicated. They walk down the hall, the door opens, he comes in and closes that door and then we pretty much changed the volume. There are maybe one or two tones in the end in there just to make sure we’re going out on an emotional beat.”
In the course of our conversation, Kennedy touched on an example of how The Good Wife distinguishes itself from other shows: “Most television would have picked a piece of source music for that scene and basically at the end raised the source music so you’re given what to think by the vocals of the song. We actually went the opposite way and wanted to hear the ringing-in his-head kind of thing.”
In other words, the attention to sound that is a hallmark of The Good Wife is very much the opposite of the work characterized by the news segment at the center of the “Loser Edit” episode. The title of the episode refers both to the shift in tone in the segment and to the fate of its news-production team, but it might also be read to refer to a less ambitious, if widely practiced, realm of audio-visual storytelling.
Alone, the “Negative Music” moment in “Loser Edit” is simply a smile-inducing instance for those who happen to catch it. But in the broader scope of Kennedy’s work and of The Good Wife in general, it’s a testament to the shortcuts that the show itself does not take, the way it engages with its own topicality, and the attention it pays to — and shares with — its audience.
All screenshots from the episode “Loser Edit.” Thanks to Lauren Franklin for assistance with transcription of the Kennedy interview.
Disquiet Junto Project 0171: Oblicardo
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 set for the duration of the project:
This assignment was made in the late afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 9, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 13, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0171: Oblicardo
Rework a pre-existing field recording in response to an Oblique Strategies card.
I hadn’t intended to do another “One Minute Past Midnight” project so soon after the previous one, but this week’s project was inspired by the recent and very interesting Cities and Memory: Oblique Strategies project (http://disquiet.com/iuAWF), in which more than 60 musicians and artists from almost 20 countries around the world took the classic card set by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt as their guide. The koan-like instructions of the Oblique Strategies set were a huge influence on the original planning for the Disquiet Junto series, and so it’s odd that it’s taken 171 weeks to finally address it directly with this homage.
This project is the fourth in an ongoing occasional series that focus on late-night ambience. Collectively these nocturnal endeavors are being called “One Minute Past Midnight.” No one’s work will be repurposed without their permission, and it’s appreciated if you post your track with a Creative Commons license that allows for non-commercial reuse, reworking, and sharing.
The steps for this project are as follows:
Step 1: The primary goal of this project is to explore the inspiration provided by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. First published commercially in 1975, and revised iteratively since then, the set consists of numerous gnomic instructions that are alternately direct and, well, oblique. If you are unfamiliar with the cards, you might want to read up on them a little.
Step 2. You’ll be reworking a pre-existing audio track based on the instructions inherent in a specific Oblique Strategies card. Select a track from one of the three previous projects in this series, #0160 from January 22, 2015, #0163 from February 12, 2015, and #0170 from April 2, 2015. All three of these previous projects involve field recordings made of the sound one minute past midnight:
http://disquiet.com/0160/
http://disquiet.com/0163/
http://disquiet.com/0170/
Step 3: When choosing, per Step 2, a pre-existing track, confirm the track is available for creative reuse. Many should have a Creative Commons license stating such, and if you’re not sure just check with the responsible Junto participant.
Step 4: Select the Oblique Strategies card that will serve as your guide. If you have a deck, then pull one card randomly from it. If you don’t have a deck, then use an online tool, such as the website oblicard.com. When you go to oblicard.com you will immediately see the card that has been assigned to you.
Step 5: Rework the track from Step 2 in response to the instructions inherent in the card from Step 4.
Step 6: Upload your 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 evening, California time, on Thursday, April 9, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, April 13, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be one minute.
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 “disquiet0171-oblicardo” 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 171st Disquiet Junto project — “Rework a pre-existing field recording in response to an Oblique Strategies card” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/04/09/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
More on the One Minute Past Midnight series at:
http://oneminutepastmidnight.com/
More on the Oblique Strategies series at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo associated with this project by Rusty Sheriff, used via Creative Commons license:
April 8, 2015
The Boxhead Ensemble’s Ambient Beat
There’s a new Boxhead Ensemble album, La Hora Magica, which is to say there’s a new album of gentle, half-folk, half-ambient musings. The loose-knit group is centered around Michael Krassner and has included among its members David Grubbs, Scott Tuma, and many others, and they have released a steady series of tremendous records that explore the tonality of folk and country without foregrounding elements generally emphasized in proper songs. That said, the group’s The Unseen Hand: Music For Documentary Film, released last year, was less ambiguous than previous releases, especially thanks to light guitar lines that, for all their simplicity, fell short of falling short. The first track hinting at La Hora Magica‘s contents adds yet another element to the Ensemble’s kit, a spare if persistent and automatic beat, not a drum or drum machine, more like a small battery-operated device left on a loop, a children’s toy, perhaps. It underlies all of the track in question, “Cats Cup,” and what keeps it in the sphere of ambient-ness is how that trenchant beat never quite aligns with the melodious cloud of sounds that surround it, all bowed violin and pristine guitar. I haven’t heard the full album yet. I bought it as a “batch” pairing with the RED Trio’s Live in Munich from Monofonus Press. As evidence of how below the radar Boxhead Ensemble tend to fly, neither La Hora Magica nor last year’s Unseen Hand are listed on the group’s Wikipedia or Discogs pages.
More on the record at monofonuspress.com.
April 7, 2015
A Roadside Snapshot
A fine field recordist has skills like those of a fine photographer. An everyday slice of life takes on the sense of a composed thing, a considered object, something constructed by hand from start to finish. The person holding that camera no more put that mountain next to that moon than the person holding that microphone put that bell next to that birdsong. And yet, by framing the material, they both present it as their own, lay claim to the natural world and the built environment. This “Small Roadside Shrine” on the SoundCloud account of London-based Mola Recordings frames a brief moment in time, when the rush of water or traffic, or both, and a dull bell — or perhaps a bucket — and the wisp of bird chatter combine into a sonic snapshot of a moment and a place. It is barely half a minute in length, but then again that framed photo over your desk is just six inches square. Both contain lifetimes.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mola-recordings. More from Mola Recordings at mola-recordings.blogspot.com.
