Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 391
February 3, 2015
The Modular Radio
When the voice kicks in at the 14-second mark, you will likely be hooked. It is at that point when the initial scattered beats are suddenly supplanted in part by something verbal, and the rhythmic incomprehensibility is enticing. What is heard is unclear. The language is pure syllable, not words, just elements of words. These elements suggest the origin may itself have been a chant. There is something to them, some sense of echoing, of group effort, but at this level of phonic chaos it could just as easily have been a recording of someone defending their dissertation on quantum something or other. As the piece proceeds those voices are subsumed, lightly muted; the pace doesn’t slow, but it feels more glacial. There is motion in the service of stasis, like white noise slowed and mapped to a percussion and vocal ensemble. All manner of material resounds as semi-tuned percussion.
What it all is is prerecorded audio material being sorted and scattered by a new audio tool that is likely to pop up in the rigs of some of your favorite musicians, if in fact some of your favorite musicians play with modular synthesizers. The devices is the Music Thing Radio Music module, designed by Tom Whitwell. What it does is store audio on an SD card and allow that audio to be funneled through and triggered by other synthesizer modules. You can watch it in action here:
The word “radio” refers not to the audio source, because all the sounds are prerecorded. It refers to that dial at the top of the device, which allows the user — the musician — to move between audio tracks, which all are playing in sync, so if you move away from a spoken word segment to listen to a jazz track, when you return two seconds later to the spoken word segment it will be two seconds further along.
Now, Disquiet.com is a technology website, in that it’s about the role of technology in art and it’s about the role of art in technology. What it isn’t, by and large, is a gadget site, or a gear site — which is to say, it’s not about technology from the standpoint of consumer guidance. That said, it is not gear-agnostic or, more to the point, gear-ignorant. In the interest of decreasing gear ignorance on my part, I’ve been slowly accumulating a modular synthesizer. I try not to say “building” a modular synthesizer because that’s a bit like saying you “rebuilt” your engine when, in fact, you paid someone else to do it. Still, I’ve been accumulating the pieces and learning how they work, and this Radio Thing is soon to be part of that rig.
Track originally posted at Whitwell’s soundcloud.com/musicthing account. If you want to dig into this more, there is a page on the module’s development site, musicthing.co.uk, collecting various video and audio documentation. (Thanks to Marcus Fischer for having first introduced me to this module when it was a public work-in-progress.)
February 2, 2015
Strata of Biological Development
Ian Haygreen’s track “Thin on the Ear” isn’t thin by any means. It has three layers at the very least. There is an underlying tick tock of a beat, a slow-paced melody atop it, and then in between a slightly out-of-sync gurgle, all rumbly and hard to fully get a sense of, both as a result of its constant motion and it being out of sonic focus. They all strike the ear, collectively, as being akin to strata of biological development. The beat is purely mechanical, rote, while that gurgle seems primordial, maybe without consciousness but most certainly alive. The melody is the most developed, according to this structure. It is simple enough, just a note at a time, that it feels more eked out than composed, like it is finding its way, like something that has just pulled itself on land and is getting to know the territory. The tentative life forms find balance with the routinized machine.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ian-haygreen. More from Haygreen, who’s based in Northwest Essex, at twitter.com/IanHaygreen and borealechoes.wordpress.com.
February 1, 2015
Fragments of Serbian-Finnish Sound Design
Svetlana Maraš, who is based in Belgrade, Serbia, has been filling her SoundCloud account with bits and pieces of film scores and sound design projects, some finished, others from efforts that never reached completion, stalled at unforeseen junctures. Five shared fragments of trumpet soundings and quotidian atmospherics are sourced from one of the uncompleted ones, which Maraš describes as “a beautiful, experimental film by a Finnish director.” She writes, “Unfortunately, the film never went into the post-production and was never finished. However, the soundtrack remains.” These include two “soundscapes” and three
three spots of trumpet, the latter of which blur the line between soundscape and sound design by emphasizing tone and the slurry space within notes over melody. The room in which the music was played is as much a part of the recording as is the trumpet itself. She lists the constituent elements as “Trumpet, objects, glitch, noise,” and references Nenad Marković as the trumpeter. Marković plays the trumpet, while Maraš plays the room.
Maraš is quite active and prolific, and a Vimeo page (vimeo.com/svetlanamaras) tracks some of her efforts, such as this short video of a live improvisation on small electronic devices, including a Korg portable and a Buddha Machine, with the ticking of an alarm clock providing the back beat, such as it is:
Set originally posted at soundcloud.com/svetlanamaras. More from Maraš at svetlanamaras.com. More from Marković at nenadmarkovic.net.
January 31, 2015
An Extract, a Diary, a Symphony
Marcus Fischer has not been updating his SoundCloud account (soundcloud.com/mapmap) with the regularity of Taylor Deupree, who throughout 2014 maintained a near daily journal of sounds from his studio (soundcloud.com/12k), and who has begun to do so again this year. But like Deupree he has been sharing brief instances, 58 seconds of modular synthesizer activity here, two minutes of guitar and cassette tapes there. Some of the tracks are considerably lengthier than Deupree’s entries, and seem closer to finished work. And then there’s an occasion where their journals — or at least the circumstances of their journals — collide, as on this piece from Fischer’s account. It is drawn in part from a show he performed recently with Deupree. The image up top, source from Fischer’s Instagram account, is from that show.
It isn’t from the live performance, per se. It is source audio that Fischer developed for use in the performance, a rich wavering resonance that meanders this way and that, ever so slightly, for the length of its one-minute run, like an orchestra heard from the bar in some grand but dilapidated symphony hall.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mapmap. More from Fischer, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at mapmap.ch.
January 30, 2015
The Industrial Music of a Modest Machine
Corruption is a prolific musician based in Funabashi, Japan. There are two sets of tracks on Corruption’s SoundCloud account. One is labeled “Corruption Music Drugstore 2,” and it has 48 tracks at current count. The other is labeled “Lullaby for the Losers/The Baddest of Corruption,” with 25. Those selections are culled from the now nearly 600 tracks in the Corruption account, ranging from tweaked cicada sounds to lounge synth jams, from warped vocal electronics to hardcore industrial noise. One recent favorite, “みぞれ,” which appears to be the Japanese word for “sleet,” appears to combine several of Corruption’s most central themes. These include the everyday weather from which it takes its name (and associated image), the lofi quality of the employed electronics, the slight dub influence, the just-shy-of-earworm melody, and the louche sensibility. Any one of those elements would define a batch of Corruptions tracks, and all those elements are heard here, in barely two and a half minutes. All that is missing is the occasionally forceful sentiment that sometimes constitutes a Corruption track. Then again, the minimalist pacing and repetitiveness of the rhythm of “みぞれ” constitutes a low-key descendent of industrial music. It is the industrial music of a modest machine.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/corrption. Note that Corruption drops the “u” in the account URL, because someone else snagged it first, though that person has yet to upload a track. Which is fine, because the missing vowel carries over some of the urban decay inherent in Corruption’s sprawling catalog.
January 29, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0161: Netmix Relabel
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, January 29, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 2, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0161: Netmix Relabel
The Assignment: Create a new track from three tracks from three different netlabels.
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.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Create a new piece of music by using nothing but the following segments of the following songs:
The first 15 seconds of “Dog Kiss” by Chtin Mara off the album Animus Animal Anima (Enough Records), available for free download at:
http://goo.gl/iWcJJs
The first 10 seconds of “Qif Kiff” by Ayato & Natalia Kamia off the album Cluster (eg0cide Records), available for free download at:
https://eg0cide.bandcamp.com/album/eg...
The first 10 seconds of “Espasmo” by Lingering Last Drops (Bump Foot Records), available for free download at:
https://lingeringlastdrops.bandcamp.com/
Step 2: Upload the finished 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, January 29, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 2, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be between two 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 “disquiet0161-netmixrelabel” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: It is necessary for this specific project 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 161st Disquiet Junto project — “Create a new track from three tracks from three different netlabels” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/01/29/disqui...
This track includes material from the songs “Dog Kiss” by Chtin Mara off the album Animus Animal Anima (Enough Records), “Qif Kiff” by Ayato & Natalia Kamia off the album Cluster (eg0cide Records), and “Espasmo” by Lingering Last Drops (Bump Foot). More on Enough at enoughrecords.scene.org. More on eg0cide at eg0cide.com. More on Bump Foot at bumpfoot.net. All work used courtesy of a Creative Commons license allowing for derivative use.
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
January 28, 2015
Rhythmic Revival
A forthcoming collection by the percussion player Emanative, aka Nick Woodmansey, is getting deserved advance notice, in large part due to an absolutely tremendous cover that Woodmansey has committed with Four Tet, aka Kieran Hebden, of an earlier duet. The subject of their rhythmic revival is a track off the album El Corazón, a 1982 release on the label ECM by Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell. The track is titled “Makondi.” Cherry is best known as a trumpeter, but he doesn’t play trumpet on the original “Makondi,” which is a deeply percussive, mantra-like piece with no clear beginning or end. It is comprised almost entirely of a brief pattern that is repeated with slight variations as it proceeds. In spirit it brings to mind efforts toward a jazz minimalism by folks like Abdullah Ibrahim, Randy Weston, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Both the original Cherry-Blackwell recording and the new Woodmansey-Hebden version are the same length, just shy of three minutes and 50 seconds. Hebden is credited with thumb piano on the new take, and Woodmansey with drums and percussion. I seriously played this on repeat for an hour straight yesterday. Today I layered the two versions, new and old, and listened to them in near-sync, which I recommend for the simpatico moiré that results.
Here is the new rendition, off Woodmansey’s forthcoming album The Light Years of the Darkness, which is due out March 2. It’s available for pre-order at stevereidfoundation.bandcamp.com. As the URL suggests, album sales will fund the foundation named for the late drummer Steve Reid, who played with Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, and Miles Davis, among others:
And here, for comparison (and sync layering), is the original:
New version originally posted at soundcloud.com/four-tet.
A Qualitative Social Network
It’s funny, much as I’ve used SoundCloud daily for all these years now, I’ve never really found use, myself, for the stats. Likely, that’s because almost all my focus is on the Groups functionality. I do post a track occasionally, but not with any particular hopes of a broad listenership, just to participate, to float a musical idea, or to mark a milestone, like the addition of a new module to my little synthesizer rig.
For the Disquiet Junto group each week, all I look at is three things:
(1) where we’re at in active users (not members, but accounts that have actually posted tracks, which just topped 500),
(2) the number of tracks in the most recent project (I don’t even keep track of the numbers, but I do note it mentally — we’ve been as high as 70+ in a week and as low as around 10, and we’re generally around 30 or so), and
(3) the number of total tracks (we’re so close to 4,000 in just over three years).
I tend to be more qualitative than quantitative in general, but, yeah, maybe if there were Groups-oriented stats, that’d help me a bit, but I wouldn’t make it a priority. I look at the Junto qualitatively — are folks commenting on each other’s tracks, and is the commentary constructive; are the projects being met with enthusiasm, not so much in terms of number of participants in a given week but the sense that effort was expended by those who did participate; are there any obvious breakouts, in terms of levels of listenership, that sort of thing.
I think I’m more focused on functionality than on stats. You know what I would love would be the ability to transfer a track. I’d love if someone who’s posted a track but didn’t want it associated with their account any longer could transfer it to me, or to someone else.
Note: I originally posted this in a conversation on Facebook, but figured I’d post it here, too.
January 27, 2015
This Week in Sound: Cars, Visuals, Space, Home
It’s nearly February, and until today I’d yet to produce an edition of this newsletter in 2015. I took a few weeks off at the end of 2014, and the system I’d gotten into fell off track. I realize why, clearly. The benefit (to me) of this newsletter is it gives me a process, a routine, to funnel lots of material I come across in research and in general reading. When I take a break, the system breaks down. One of the issues I have with prolific link-sharing — beyond the weird ahistoricity that has things circulating repeatedly in cycles, with no natural conclusion to their distribution — is sorting out what is and isn’t already on other people’s radar. I try not to, in general, simply link to things, but to layer in some context, to provide some frame, to add to the shared material. In any case, producing this newsletter provides me a system that helps me process the sound-related information I come across daily, weekly. I’m hopeful that getting started again, having cleared the cache of my RSS reader and my Pinboard and my Twitter favorites, will mean this thing will be regular as 2015 gets proceeds.
Four Wheels Loud: The overarching automotive-sound story for several years has been about addressing the perceived near silence of hybrids and electric vehicles. But the street, as William Gibson told us, has its own use for things, and the makers of traditional automobiles are making use of the same artificial soundtracks. “Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away,” writers Drew Harwell of the Washington Post:
http://goo.gl/BckC6h/
Visual Noise: Sound art need not make a peep, and sound branding needn’t either. Bruce Mau Design created the new logo for Sonos audio consumer product company, which pulses naturally, as the result of an optical illusion, such as when scrolling up and down a web page:
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3041367/sonoss-hot-new-viral-logo-was-a-happy-accident/
Space Sounds: It seems every week now that the sounds of space are reworking our conception of space as a vacuum. Among the latest is word that the Venus Express spacecraft emitted one last, loud signal before its end of life. Mika McKinnon of space.io9.com explains the sound “was picked up by the European Space Agency monitoring the unmodulated X-band carrier signal on January 19th”:
http://space.io9.com/venus-express-blasts-out-one-last-message-from-beyond-t-1681437327/
Always Listening: The New York Times managed to publish a cautionary piece about risks from the “smart home” technology that is on the rise, without once mentioning the microphones embedded in some smart-home technology. The story, by Molly Wood, focuses instead on images and data security, and introduces something called the Bitdefender, which is sort of like a virus protector for your home.
http://goo.gl/vHmOSn/
This first appeared in the January 27, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
