Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 384
March 10, 2015
This Week in Sound: Animal Music, Conrad’s Drone, Telephone Music, …
A lightly annotated clipping service:
— Sonic Husbandry: It was a big week for sound and the natural world. We learned from Kevin Holmes at the Creators Project how scientists are using slime molds to make music, and from just about every news service on the planet of a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that explains how to compose music with cats as the intended listeners. (The mold item via the theater director and playwright Elyse Singer.)
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/scientists-are-making-music-with-slime-mold-and-whale-songs
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/03/150310160037.htm
— String Theory: Liz Glass at the great website of the Walker Art Center writes at length about the 1972 “Long String Drone” of artist Tony Conrad: “Conrad’s relationship to the sounds created by the Theatre of Eternal Music is based on both an understanding of mathematics and musical mechanics as well as on an interest in attaining certain physical, spatial, and spiritual experiences. The plasticity that Conrad attributes to the sounds created by the Theatre of Eternal Music’s unyielding drone signals a shift in his understanding of his role as the maker of a sound, moving from the position of a composer to that of a technician, or, as he would say, ‘from progenitor of the sound to the groundskeeper at its gravesite.'”
http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-expanded/moment-enlightenment-sound-tony-conrad-long-string-drone/
— Bell Tones: The National Museum of American History has an exhibit running through October 25 on Alexander Graham Bell and the Origins of Recorded Sound. (Via the Washington, DC, comics blogger and medical-history archivist Michael Rhode.)
http://americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/hear-my-voice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/01/29/smithsonians-hear-my-voice-reveals-sounds-thought-lost-to-time-like-the-voice-of-alexander-graham-bell/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/hear-my-voice-alexander-graham-bell-exhibition-at-american-history-museum/2015/02/05/3b0ecf4c-a8a2-11e4-a2b2-776095f393b2_story.html
— Sample This: Ethan Hein has started a month-long residency at the composer-oriented website NewMusicBox.org. His first piece there is about the aesthetics and politics of sampling: “Playing a riff from a chart sounds very different from discovering it in the heat of the moment.”
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/biting-breaks-sampling-and-ownership/
— Beyond Delia: Over at rateyourmusic.com, a user who goes by hardboiledbabe has compiled a massive list of female practitioners of “early electronic, electroacoustic, minimalism, tape music, drone, and musique concrète.” Kudos.
http://goo.gl/XsOgTn
This first appeared in the March 10, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound” email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
March 9, 2015
Listening to JG Ballard’s High-Rise
San Francisco, California, where I live, has one of those “One City, One Book” programs, where a single volume is selected for the general population to read and discuss. The idea is that we’re all more likely to have a single subject of conversation, one that touches on what we have in common. In an age of (supposedly) short attentions spans and the exodus from mass communication in favor of (perceived) silos of narrowly defined interests, a city united around a book addresses many transitions at once. Not all of us have such an ameliorative response to the changes wrought by technology. JG Ballard was the bard of how new technologies don’t so much improve humanity as they reveal, with each consumerist iteration, our basest origins, our most animalistic urges. New technologies, in his telling, don’t make us better; at best, they bring into high definition our failings as a species, and at worst they free us to make poor use of our position atop the food chain.
Since the downtown of San Francisco has become a boomtown for massive, sky-high apartment complexes, I’ve been pushing for Ballard’s visceral 1975 novel High-Rise, about class war playing out floor by floor, to have a turn on the city’s One City, One Book shelf. There is a movie in the works from director Ben Wheatley, with a strong cast, including Tom Hiddleston and Jeremy Irons. Before it threatens to supplant our mental images of Ballard’s story with formal ones, the musician Rupert Lally has released an 8-song instrumental set of music inspired by the novel. If the Wheatley film looks like it is re-setting the story in the present, the music by Lally, with its conscious emphasis on the sine-wave symphonies of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, tries and succeeds in capturing the retro-futurism at the time of the book’s release. (Wheatley has done some directing for Dr. Who, whose famous theme was an early product of the Radiophonic Workshop. The score composer of Wheatley’s High-Rise has not yet, I believe, been announced.) Lally’s High-Rise is all machine-hewn sound, all electric drones and quavering effects in service of a story in which all the latest technology can’t save us from each other, or from ourselves.
Scenes From A High Rise by Rupert Lally
Set available at “name your price” at rupertlally.bandcamp.com. More from Lally, who lives in Switzerland, at twitter.com/rupertlally.
March 8, 2015
A 24-Hour Soundscape of Found Sounds
Keeping track of the Scha/ef/f/ers of everyday sound can be confusing, at least in an International Spelling Bee sort of way.
There is R. Murray Schafer (one f, one e), the Canadian who gave us the concept of the soundscape. There is the late Pierre Schaeffer (two e’s, two f’s), of France, who helped give us musique concrète. And there is England-born Janek Schaefer (two e’s, one f), of Canadian and Polish parents, who is the youngest of the three, and who specializes in sound art made from everyday noise.
A culmination of the latter’s efforts has made its way online in the form of foundsoundscape.com. It is a 24-hour streaming assemblage of field recordings. Those recordings were collected in 1,000 different places by 100 different artists. In turn, (Janek) Schaefer collated and layered the source audio, so at any point the service is playing three different feeds. Make that four feeds: in addition, there is a live mic in Schaefer’s own studio, and that gets added to the audio. The resulting stream is intended to complement your own place and time. It is less a listening experience than something to be filtered into daily life. The Foundsoundscape site bears the description “live collage of foundsound places to underscore your personal spaces” and the instruction “adjust your volume to background sound.” I ran it for half a day today, and wandered by my desk to occasionally hear chanting, water flowing, and mysterious rhythmic pulses. More often than not the audio was more texture than recognizable content, like a hint of fragrance coming through an open window. In this case, the “window” is an imaginary one, a fiction constructed painstakingly by Schaefer, a window of windows.
Several generations of sonic innovators contributed material, including Taylor Deupree, Brian Eno, Chihei Hatakeyama, Charlemagne Palestine, Stephen Vitiello, Chris Watson, and Mike Weis. (For something sprawling enough to accomodate 100 contributors, it seems a little bereft of female participants.) Here is the full list:
Janek Schaefer * Chris Watson * Brian Eno * Charlemagne Palestine * Phil Niblock * British Library Sound Archive * Richard Chartier * Stephen Vitiello * Douglas Benford * Graham Dunning * William Basinski * Gino Zardo * Marc Richter * Arno Peeters * Peter van Cooten * Mike Weis * Knut Aufermann * Mary Malecka * Paul Cox * Philip Blackburn * Stephan Mathieu * Philipp Ilinskiy * Susan Martin * Jake Muir * Chris Dooks * Darren McClure * Jeremy Young * Stuart Bannister * Robin Parmar * Yui Onodera * Frans de Waard * Ben Gwilliam * Craig Johnson * Stuart Craig * Luis Fernandes * David Slater * Hiroki Sasajima * Chris Deison * Paul Whitty * Bas Mantel * Justin Bennett * Scanner * Martin Franklin * John Kannenberg * Charlotte Heffernan * Martin A. Smith * Derek Holzer * Ben Horner * Nick Fells * Taylor Dupree * Peter Cusack * Nickolas Mohanna * Ian Baxter * Bobbie-Jane Gardner * Yan Yun * Tomotsugu Nakamura * Chihei Hatakeyama * Yannick Dauby * William Yates * Chris Koelle * Simon Fisher Turner * Rod Stasick * Jonathan Palmer * Gregory Kramer * Rob Dansby * Dave the Rave * Wouter Messchendorp * Robert Svantesson * Omer Eilam * Radboud Mens * Michael J. Schumacher * Danny Lavie * Christopher Bradbury * Stephen Packe * Kevin Wienke * Mark Lyken * Michael Jennings * Kerry Ware * John Grzinich * Marc Namblard * Radovan Scasascia * FOO|OFF * Jason Domers * Craig Goods * Vijay Sekhon * Jan van den Brink * Robin Russell * Ben Minto * Bibio * Yasuhiro Morinaga * John Wynne * Wayland Iverson * Matt Wright * Cedrick Eymenier * Tony Webster * Hanetration * Javier Ucelay Urech * Philip Jeck
The site is located at foundsoundscape.com with the audio hosted at mixlr.com/foundsoundscape. More from Schaefer at his audioh.com site.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Space occupied by my Phonogene, headed to @controlvoltage for firmware upgrade. #eurorack
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
March 7, 2015
March 6, 2015
Martin Gore Solo — and Vocal Free
Martin Gore has long been known as the songwriting core of Depeche Mode, having taken over that role after Vince Clarke left the band after one album in the very early 1980s. The division of labor for the group was fairly clear: Gore wrote the music, Dave Gahan sang, and Andy Fletcher was akin to an in-house manager, and while they all played instruments, it was often a fourth member or a guest producer who filled out the sound. When I interviewed the group for a 1993 article, that delineation of duties became apparent as I spoke separately with each member of the band.
But Gore is about to, thankfully, confuse matters with the release of a rare thing: a solo album, and all the more interesting a solo album on which he doesn’t sing at all. The instrumental set, with the title MG, has been teased with a promising sample track, “Europa Hymn.” In some ways, it feels like a period piece, like at any moment an early Depeche Mode peer like Cyndi Lauper might start intoning — the chimes and playful bloops are straight out of her songbook. But listen past the melodic material and there is great attention to detail, especially in the sparse pneumatic clatter that serves as its beat.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/muterecords. More from Gore at martingore.com.
March 5, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0166: Slow by Steps
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 length of the project:
This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, March 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 9, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0166: Slow by Steps
Take a pre-existing track, slow it in descending states, and then add something to it.
This week we’re slowing down an ancient piece of audio, dating from 1910, and adding sounds atop it to create one continuous composition.
Step 1: Download at http://goo.gl/aMlHXm a public-domain recording of Eugène Ysaÿe performing “Rondino” by composer Henri Vieuxtemps. (Note: If you land on the new archive.org site and can’t figure out how to download, click on the “exit beta” button in the upper-right-hand corner of the webpage to go to the original archive.org site design, where the downloading is self-evident.)
Step 2: Choose a short segment of the recording, roughly between three and five seconds. Label it as Segment A.
Step 3: Create a Segment B by slowing Segment A to half its original speed.
Step 4: Create a Segment C by slowing Segment B to half its original speed.
Step 5: Create a Segment D by slowing Segment C to half its original speed.
Step 6: Create an underlying foundational track by stitching instances of A, B, C, and D together in that order. Recommended for a five-second segment is Ax4, Bx2, C, D (or AAAABBCD), which would be 100 seconds.
Step 7: Create a new piece of music by recording accompaniment to add to the foundational track, which will otherwise remain unadulterated.
Step 8: Upload the combination of your accompaniment and the foundational track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 9: 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 5, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 9, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be roughly between one and three 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 “disquiet0166-slowbysteps” 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 166th Disquiet Junto project — “Take a pre-existing track, slow it in descending states, and then add something to it” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/03/05/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 Bruce Berrien, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
