Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 392
January 27, 2015
A Course in Sound
Tomorrow, January 28, marks the start of a new semester of the course I teach on the role of sound in the media landscape. The course unfolds over 16 weeks — 15 weeks of class plus one week off for spring break — and I think I’ll be summarizing it here each week, not just the lecture topics but the resulting class discussion and, when we have them, the special guests and occasional field trips.
Last semester we had someone from BitTorrent and someone from SoundCloud address the class, and we took a field trip to an anechoic chamber at the local research lab of an audio company. The guest speakers aren’t generally lecturers; I usually interview them in front of the students, who also ask questions. The semester prior both the sound artist Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) and the voice actor Phil LaMarr (Samurai Jack, Static Shock) visited via Skype.
I teach the course to a mix of MFA and BA students at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco. This is the sixth semester in a row that I’ve taught the course. I’m taking off next semester, with the intention of teaching it once a year rather than twice a year from now on, to leave room for lots of other projects.
This first appeared in the January 27, 2015, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
Playing with Fire (Alarms)
Few of us ever really take or have the time to consider the sonic nuances of a smoke alarm. We’re either too busy exiting the building or, more often, yanking the 9V battery when the boiling pasta has set the thing off. But characteristically curious Jeff Kolar has lowered the everyday gadget’s volume and applied to it his sonic microscope, yielding five tracks of high-pitched tones heard from various perspectives. The tracks are labeled with successive narrative aspects: “Ignition,” “Flame,” “Growth,” “Fully Developed,” and “Decay.”
There may be no sound more capable of getting someone’s attention than a smoke alarm, except perhaps for a crying baby. But in Kolar’s hands they are less piercing than insinuating. The shrill, sharp noises warp and layer and bend, each sequence suggesting itself as nanotech minimalism, from the bright chirp with which “Fully Developed” opens, to the ticking drone of “Flame,” to the tea-kettle anxiety of “Decay”. The effort is a work of audio forensics. In time, you come to understand the functional sonic components of the classic alarm, perhaps to even reflect a bit on this blissfully mundane aspect of life or death situations. It’s almost enough to make you linger the next time a smoke alarm goes off — but please exit the building before making sound art about it.
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar. The piece was part of the glitChicago exhibit that ran during August and September of 2014, and was produced by Kolar during his residency at ACRE. More on the project at jeffkolar.us/smokedetector. Smoke Detector CD, complete with its great “As Seen on TV” cover, via amigosshop.storenvy.com. Twitter image via Slate.com.
January 26, 2015
Sentient Fluorescence
The thick, rich glisten of “Tidal Magnefication” off the forthcoming Nils Quak album, Moiré / Braille, gets all the more detailed with each successive play, as each layer of shimmer takes on clearer form, like an orchestra’s membership slowing coming into focus as a fog clears. The piece has the bellows-like timbre and swell of a mind-altering raga, and provides the scene-setting undercurrent of a fine bit of sound design. It’s the sound of a fluorescent bulb that’s suddenly gained sentience and serves as an existential guide to all who have worked under its flickering watch.
Get the full release at j-and-c.bandcamp.com. More from Nils Quak, who is based in Cologne, Germany, at nilsquak.com and twitter.com/nq_music.
January 25, 2015
After “Sorry”
There are few pleasures unique to the post-Internet age as the fairly immediate experience of hearing your effort as filtered through another person’s viewpoint. In the case of the music remix, the idea of a filter can be quite literal. Yesterday while playing with the manner in which one sine wave can be used simultaneously to multiple ends, with an interest in a kind of coherent complexity, I stumbled on something that resembled human speech. Today, the far more talented Larry Johnson has taken the tones of that work and attenuated them into a throbbing, dusky drone.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1.
January 24, 2015
“Sorry Sorry Sorry”
Teaching my modular synth to speak. It apologizes for me.
I’ve been really focused on how one sine wave can serve multiple purposes, in this case affecting another sine wave. I think I’d like a second voltage control oscillator.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Hear that whistle, or equivalent, blowing. At Caltrain station. #soundstudies
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 23, 2015
That New Aphex Twin Track
Get it while it’s available. Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, aka AFX, aka the musician behind the Selected Ambient Works Volume II album I wrote the book about for the 33 1/3 series, having previously wiped clean his SoundCloud account, suddenly, yesterday, popped a new track up, “Diskhat ALL Prepared1mixed [snr2mix].” I tweeted the arrival at the time (twitter.com/disquiet), but am only now getting around to a post.
It’s a minor downtempo masterwork, the plinky pianos against loose-snare vaguely funky-drummer beats sounding more like early DJ Cam, or DJ Krush, or Funki Porcini for that matter, than like what folks might necessarily expect from Aphex Twin. Its appearance coincides with the release of the new EP Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt2, and this freely downloadable track appears to be a slight variation on the EP’s opening cut. After an album, the widely praised Syro, that sounded like it was recorded shortly after his 2001 Drukqs, it’s especially refreshing to hear something that sounds unlike him, even if, peculiarly, from a stylistic standpoint, it sounds like it was recorded before Drukqs.
Highly recommended. And, again, download now, because he’ll almost certainly soon enough again wipe clean that SoundCloud account. Speaking of which, does anyone reading this have a copy of the alternate version of “Avril 14th” he briefly had on his SoundCloud account?
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/richarddjames.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Snapshot from my childhood or John Slepian ode to Sol LeWitt at Catherine Clark?#both
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
