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Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 382
March 21, 2015
Lauren Sarah Hayes’ Improvised Techno
By “Technoscribble,” the title to a track by Lauren Sarah Hayes, she might mean a rough draft of a techno track, or she might mean a track whose wandering, less-than-composed state is an intentional tweak on techno’s vigilant, beat-focused stick-to-it-ness. Either way, “Technoscribble” is a delight, an improvised 10-plus minutes of exploratory rubbery rhythmic engagement. It’s all fritzes and fuzzies, static and blips, wrangled into a pleasingly braing-tingly zone. It moves through so many stages, it’s more like a medley than a song, a sequence of varied metric volleys, each of which feels very much like a live performance.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/elleesaich. More from Hayes, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, at laurensarahhayes.com.
March 20, 2015
Fuzzy Metric Logic
One person’s test run is another person’s listen-on-repeat. Case in point: a rhythmic experiment by Mint Loader, who describes the sonic event as follows: “Test run of code I am working on, to create rhythms with phased control arrays in SuperCollider.”
The result is a cool bit of fuzzy metric logic, under two minutes’ running time. The on and off of the beat has a semblance of binary to it, but each step has the fritz of a laundry room’s threadbare neon sign. This means the on is never fully on and the off never fully off, and the transitions between are not as clear cut as they might be. In addition, the resulting broken shimmy has an elegant randomness to it, like the neon sign has absorbed lessons from decades of hip-hop and r&b hits produced by Timbaland.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mintloader. Mint Loader is based in Hampshire, Britain.
March 19, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0168: Three of a Kind
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 evening, California time, on Thursday, March 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 23, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0168: Three of a Kind
Create an original, multi-part piece with a single audio source.
Step 1: You will be making a single track with three different parallel lines. It might be easiest to think of them as melody, rhythm, and an ambient foundational bed, but you might also do three counterposed rhythms, or a drone of three varying ambient beds. It’s up to you.
Step 2: Select a single source of audio. Perhaps it’s a segment of pre-existing track, or a single note on a favorite instrument, or a short recording of you humming or breathing.
Step 3: Transform that single source of audio to produce each of the three separate lines you plotted in Step 1.
Step 4: Record the track with those three lines running simultaneously.
Step 5: Upload your track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 6: 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, March 19, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 23, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between one 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 “disquiet0168-threeofakind” 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 168th Disquiet Junto project — “Create an original, multi-part piece with a single audio source” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/03/19/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 track by Len Radin, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
via instagram.com/dsqt
Got copies of Minutemen comix book I wrote intro to. Win a copy in next tinyletter.com/disquiet email.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
This Week in Sound: Wiki Sonification, Rephlex Pharm …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Wiki Radio: There’s a great example of data sonification in the Listen to Wikipedia project, which plays a tonal real-time score based on editorial occurrences reported in the site’s API, such as new members, new entries, and altered entries. The site recently added hashtags to the data that it parses for its sonic content:
http://blog.hatnote.com/post/112756032432/the-humble-hashtag-now-on-wikipedia
— Cornwall Playa: Grant Wilson-Claridge of the Rephlex record label is following up the more famous half of the operation, Aphex Twin (Richard D. James), with a Kickstarter of his own. Wilson-Claridge is looking to raise $30,000 to fund a piece of British real estate for music and parties.
http://www.factmag.com/2015/03/17/rephlex-co-founder-wants-to-release-idm-album-as-a-piece-of-land-in-cornwall/
— Sound Studies: Lengthy, detailed interview with Holger Schulze, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, on the role of sound studies from an anthropological perspective. He talks about the need to document our current practices for future historians, the relation between sound studies and musicology, and his writings on aleatoric (chance-based) sound, among other topics:
http://www.soundstudieslab.org/interview-anthropology-sound/
— Commerce Clause: The Museum of Modern Art has added the double-c-circle logo of Creative Commons to its holdings. This makes one wonder how an institution purchases something that represents a new approach to copyright:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/45008
— Tower Power: There’s a new documentary about Tower Records, Colin Hanks’ All Things Must Pass, that just debuted at SXSW, and it’s getting some pretty solid reviews. I worked at Tower from 1989 through 1996 as an editor on its music magazine Pulse!, and on two additional magazines I helped found there, Classical Pulse! and epulse. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sxsw-review-colin-hanks-insightful-tower-records-documentary-all-things-must-pass-20150317
This first appeared in the March 17, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
March 17, 2015
Brinkmann Color Chart
The brisk, efficient minimalism of Thomas Brinkmann reaches an elegant sustain on “Agent Orange,” a track off the forthcoming What You Hear (Is What You Hear), dedicated to the late Zbigniew Karkowski and due out on May 25. (There’s an extra “w” on the Mego site. Maybe that’s a transliteration thing, or just a spelling error?) The track is a slowly driving assemblage of dense, singular sound, like a mass of brutalist concrete read from the distance as a graphic score, like bug noise reiterated by drastic machinery, like a single helicopter blade inspected in an anechoic chamber. The result is fortifying, the sheer singular motif a marvel of industrial nuance.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/editionsmego, the account of the Editions Mego label. More on the record at editionsmego.com. Here, by the way, is my 2000 interview with Karkowski, who died in 2013: “Sounding Floor.”
March 15, 2015
March 14, 2015
An Unnerving Slice of Collage Sound Design
An unnerving slice of collage sound design arrives from Japan-based Shtialictem: “sh ti a &&. 567(7)” is two and a half minutes of ringing drones, fragments of speech, animal noise, and sweeping static, just to name a few choice elements. The key to it isn’t, of course, those — and other — individual elements so much as how they’re layered and sequenced, how rattling percussion, just to focus on one example, gives way to short-wave humming in a manner that seems random and alarming on first listen, but whose considered structure becomes evident on repeat. This is jarring work.
Track posted for free download at soundcloud.com/shtialictem. Found via a repost on SoundCloud by Magnit▲rus of Johannesburg, South Africa soundcloud.com/magnitarus.
