Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 394
January 18, 2015
The Flute in the Cellar
Isnaj Dui is Katie English of Halifax, West Yorkshire. Her work generally focuses on the flute, which, along with other instruments, is transformed through unusual performance practice, including electronic processing. The track “Dean Clough Cellar” is named for the Halifax business and arts center “that was once the world’s largest carpet factory.” The piece is gestural, the flute heard as a series of looped, layered fragments amid the ritual clank of, perhaps, pots and pans. Over the course of nearly four minutes, the looping provides a mechanical inflection to the flute, helping form a complementary pairing with the more percussive material.
More on Katie English / Isnaj Dui at isnajdui.bandcamp.com and facebook.com/isnajdui and at the label she runs, FBox (fboxrecords.co.uk). A note accompanying “Dean Clough Cellar” says it was originally recorded in October 2014 for the awards show of the Dead Albatross Music Prize (deadalbatross.com).
January 17, 2015
A Latinate Bach
What is great about Ethan Hein’s participation in the public discussion of music isn’t simply that he writes exuberantly about the making, the distribution, and the consumption of his subject, or that he ably employs images to point out the Venn Diagram that is funk or the constellation of pop that orbits a single sampling data point, but that on top of it all, he uses music itself to pursue ideas. For example, he explored a Bach invention by using MIDI to apply the note sequence to the Latin percussion pack that is part of the popular music software suite Ableton. The effort is doubly effective because in addition to sounding out Bach’s classical piece in what, cultural context might suggest, is a more populist instrumental realm, Hein also connects back to the piano being, for all intents and purposes, a well-tuned percussion instrument itself:
Here for reference is the Bach in question performed on, you know, a piano:
Hein’s work originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ethanhein. More from Hein at ethanhein.com.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Reading Miyazaki Totoro storyboards with my 4-year-old. Stereo delivery. #anime
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 16, 2015
Kid606 in a Aphex Mood
“One Unchanging Constant in My World of Variables” by Kid606 could almost be a slowed-down cover version of Aphex Twin’s “Domino,” off Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It has the same rounded staccato, bubbly minimalism, the same pop pointillism, the same bubblegum Philip Glass/Steve Reich appeal. Kid606’s take on the material is even more sedate than Aphex Twin’s — in the brief accompanying note he says, simply, “feeling relaxed” — and the piece gains, as it proceeds, an underlying drone. In different circumstances that drone would be heard as the foundation of the piece, but here it is just apart enough from the percussive melodic material that it provides a source of tension, of distance.
Track originally posted earlier this week at soundcloud.com/kid606. More from Kid606, aka Miguel De Pedro, who is based in Los Angeles, at twitter.com/Kid606 and instagram.com/miguel_kid606.
via instagram.com/dsqt
Doorbell, “this one is a bit of a puzzle” edition. #soundstudies #ui #ux
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 15, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0159: Recipe Hyperlapse
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 early evening, California time, on Thursday, January 15, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 19, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0159: Recipe Hyperlapse
The Assignment: See what music the steps of a favorite recipe yield.
The steps for this week’s project are as follows.
Step 1: Choose a favorite recipe.
Step 2: Note key moments in the recipe: the procurement of materials, the preparation of an ingredient, the turning on or off of a device, etc.
Step 3: Prepare the recipe, and when doing so record a sound representative of each of those key moments.
Step 4: Stitch the audio resulting from Step 3 into a single piece of audio, roughly a minute or two minutes in length.
Step 5: It’s not necessary, but consider adding tonal material to the results of step 4.
Step 6: Upload the finished 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: 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 19, 2015.
Length: The length of your finished work should be between one minute and two 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 “disquiet0159-kitchenhyperlapse” 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 159th Disquiet Junto project — “See what music the steps of a favorite recipe yield” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/01/15/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Photo associated with this project by Andy Schultz used via Creative Commons license:
January 14, 2015
The Sound of Achieving the Third Dimension
We purchased and installed a new dishwasher recently. It is so quiet that it requires a little red light to be displayed on the floor to confirm that it’s even running. When the machine is on rinse cycle, there is enough sound that one is aware of the motion, of the water, but still it sounds more like your neighbor is running a machine, several walls away, than you yourself are. When the little bell rings to announce that the full cleaning cycle is over, you would be forgiven for having forgotten it was running in the first place. If the previous dishwasher sounded like a stem from an Einstürzende Neubauten remix project, all clangy industrial noise, this new machine sounds like an alarm clock set to play a rainforest storm.
In contrast, our car is a pre-electric, pre-hybrid thing — the appropriate retronym escapes me — and it’s not so loud as the friend’s ancient Volkswagen we used to drive to the city in my relative youth, but neither is it as quiet as its 21st-century vehicular brethren.
What this audio track presents is 30 seconds of a 3D printer, perhaps the epitome of 21st-century proto-domestic appliances, doing its magic. It was recorded by qDot, aka Kyle Machulis, of the San Francisco Bay area, during (I believe) his recent stint as an artist in residence at Autodesk. The sound is nothing anyone wants in their kitchen or garage, necessarily, but convenience can trump all manner of other concerns, from privacy to comfort. One is left to wonder if this sound will become as common to a household as that of the microwave and toilet, or if several more generations of iterative improvement will pass and transformations transpire before the technology is welcome in homes.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/qdot. More on Machulis at his nonpolynomial.com site.
January 13, 2015
Where the Work Ends and the World Begins
There is just enough noise that none of it stands out, and just few enough noises that the ears strain for distinctions. There are children playing, and a news report, and music from various genres and languages. There is a thick static that seems to want to become music; it hangs low, a sonorous drone, whining like a wounded animal hoping for just a little affection. Sirens pass, and the whole range of noises just keep going, stalwart despite their modest proportions, their simplicity, their everydayness. This is “Oscillating Cities” by Chris Wood. This is, in fact, “Oscillating Cities” heard amid the sounds of the city. Where the work ends and the world begins is unclear, and that may very well be part of Wood’s point.
In an explanatory post, Wood explains how the piece came to be: “Osciallating Cities is a dynamic sound environment built from local radio, field recordings and internet radio from distant locations retransmitted over FM. It was performed on the square at Comte de Flandres, Brussels in June 2014.” The work was made at the behest of iMAL, the Brussels-based interactive Media Art Laboratory, more on which at imal.org.
The mix of source material isn’t the extent of Wood’s mediation. There are, he explains, various aspects of the employment of radio, which influence the quality of the signal, and some of the source audio is filtered through delays and other treatments. Still photographs and footage evidence the sculptural quality of the generic radios placed around the plaza. A video documenting a series of related works features a short interview with Wood (at timecode 5:29):
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/wordthecat. More from Chris Wood, who is based in England, at wordthecat.com and twitter.com/whirringcat.
