Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 395
January 12, 2015
Anna Meredith Plays the Skyline
Last year BBC 4 ran a three-part series in which musicians looked at the sky and read it as a musical score. Each entry in the series featured two composers, including Anna Meredith, who has posted her piece, “Blackfriars,” on . “Blackfriars” features cellist Oliver Coates, who employed a special, curved bow. Curvature is at the core of Meredith’s piece, which is modeled on the design of the bridge that commanded her view of the skyline.
An image, shown above, hosted as part of the BBC’s documentation of the project, shows an initial vision of how the rough sketch of the bridge was turned into shapes on a proper musical score. The completed piece is slow, and centered on swellings that bring to mind the water’s pace, its give and take. Underlying it is this quiet yet intense tick-tock.
Track originally posted at . The other musicians featured in the series include Kizzy Crawford, Julie Fowlis, James MacMillan, Courtney Pine, and Gwilym Simcock. The full series, presented by Tim Marlow, is housed at bbc.co.uk, which among things shows the first page of her score. More from Meredith, who is based in London, at and twitter.com/annahmeredith.
January 11, 2015
What to Call Drone Music After Drones
You can call it “drone” music, but the word “drone” has, of course, come to be synonymous with hovering agents of surveillance. So, Michael Rooke, the Finnish sound designer and coder, just calls it “One Note,” or at least that’s his name for a recently posted track. There is, arguably, more than one note to “One Note,” since that note dangles like a platonic ideal amid all manner of light, nuanced variations. It sounds like a bowed glass harmonica more than anything, this one intoned sound on repeat, the lulling pace of its sine wave see saw occasionally usurped by secondary, deeper tones. As Walt Whitman said in a different context, this one note contains multitudes.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/urlme. More from Rooke, who is based in Hyvinkää, Finland, at rookelabs.com.
via instagram.com/dsqt
A highly worn doorbell at once suggests many visitors and no visitors.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 10, 2015
Violin in the Machine
The track “Weavezyme” is Chrissie Caulfield turning noise into music, specifically machine noise, and specifically something with a distant yet clinging association to classical music. The track is from a recent collection, titled Mechanisms, in which Caulfield’s violin and, to a lesser degree, cello join up with transformed recordings of machinery in action — here sodden thud and distant clank and rumbling drone. She notes in a brief accompanying statement, “This is an album based loosely on ‘mechanisms’ of various kinds. Many of the tracks feature actual mechanical noises, but some are just a nod to classical compositional ‘mechanisms’ or structures.” That sentence makes a helpful parallel to the concept of language itself being a form of technology.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/progchick. The album Mechanisms is streamable in full and available at “name your price” on music.chrissieviolin.info, via Bandcamp. More from Caulfield, who is based in Leeds, England, at chrissieviolin.info and twitter.com/chrissie_c.
January 9, 2015
Piano Phase Is Urban Noir
The title for J.C. Combs’ simple piano piece references the beading rhythmic experiments of famed minimalist composer Steve Reich. But it arguably has as much Gershwin in it as it does Reich. “Phase Study for Paul Muller” manages a small amount of swagger, a fair measure of swing. The driving pulse of the music has the busy urban nightscape quality of Reich’s early works in this manner, where musical lines of close derivation create sonic moiré patterns. Perhaps its the compact length, at barely three minutes, but Combs’ seems bustling and jaunty, rather than hallucinogenic and geometric.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jc-combs. More from Combs, who is based in Seattle, Washington, at jccombs.com.
January 8, 2015
Disquiet Junto Project 0158: Syllable Gumbo
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 8, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 12, 2015.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0158: Syllable Gumbo
The Assignment: Go from noise to signal with words.
Quite often Disquiet Junto projects actively avoid the human voice. This week’s project engages directly with the voice, and with language.
Step 1: Select the least important story on the front page of your local newspaper or the home page of your local newspaper’s website.
Step 2: Select the first or first two sentences of that story. Combined the resulting text should have between roughly 15 and 25 words.
Step 3: Record yourself, or someone else, reading the text aloud. You can use text-to-speech, though it is by no means required.
Step 4: Break the recording from step 3 into tiny parts.
Step 5: Produce an original piece of music in which the randomized “noise” of those tiny parts heard out of order slowly, over the course of one or two minutes, comes to form the full original statement.
Step 6: Add tonal and rhythmic material to the results of step 5.
Step 7: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 8: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Deadline: 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 12, 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 “disquiet0158-syllablegumbo” 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 158th Disquiet Junto project — “Go from noise to signal with words” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/01/08/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 Beanbag Amerika used via Creative Commons license:
via instagram.com/dsqt
Rule posted inside entrance to neighborhood cram school. #silence
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
January 7, 2015
She Steadies the Noises with Her Harmonium
The harmonium is the steadying presence in “External Cabinet” by Yiva Lund Bergner. Amid her sheer, chilling, buzz-saw noise, and fragile splinters of sharp, momentary bursts, and whirligig juts, and rattly percussive overlays, there is the settling calmness of gently speculative keyboard movements. The organ sound provides an underlying drone that in turn serves as a glue for the other constituent parts.
The piece is fully scored for harmonium and electronics, and the score is available for download as a PDF from her website. The detail shown below, from the first page of the score, describes how the percussive elements, as the composition’s title suggests, are the result of using the harmonium casing as an instrument unto itself.
More from Bergner, who hails from Sweden and currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, at ylvalundbergner.com.
January 6, 2015
13 Minutes from the Next Ryuichi Sakamoto Album
Taylor Deupree has posted a taste of a forthcoming record that features him as part of a quartet, alongside Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto and the duo Illuha (Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date). The posted music is the final movement of three that comprise the forthcoming album Perpetual, due for January 27 release on Deupree’s 12k label. It was recorded live as part of the 10th anniversary festivities of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. The piece is nearly 13 minutes long and consists of a slow piano line that emerges from a mix of drone and texture, a rich field of sound given tension and grounding by a constant scraping, perhaps the most elemental of percussion sounds.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/12k. More on the release at 12k.com.
