Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 400
December 3, 2014
December 2, 2014
At Play in the Depth of Sonic Field
Raised High in Badwater Basin by Andrew Weathers
Even without the title Raised High in Badwater Basin, this two-song set by Andrew Weathers would bring to mind a quiet burble akin to the continuous motion of water — well, at least the first track, “Last Light at Sonora Pass,” would. That parallel is thanks to the pixelated nature of the music, which is built from a slow, gently random occurrence of very slight notes, small instances of tone. What pushes “Last Light” beyond pixel-stuff is an underlying shimmer that comes and goes, lending depth of field, as well as the occasional, if muffled, presence of field recordings that had me repeatedly pausing the track to see what was happening outside my window when in fact it was happening right there in the room. That balance between foreground and background is flipped on the second track, “There’s Gold in These Hills,” in which the seeming background material, an intense raga-like treat akin to a fine Terry Riley piece, commands the majority of the piece, and the more Western-melodic material, such as it is, appears as a rarified series of simple chords. Beautiful, rewarding work, throughout. Both tracks are nearly 15 minutes long, allowing for immersive listening.
Originally posted for free download at basicsounds.ca and at andrewweathers.bandcamp.com, though you can pay a little, if you like, at the latter. More from Weathers at andrewweathers.com.
Do You Want Punk or Do You Want the Truth?
The talented artist Warren Craghead, whose comics I edited a million years ago, recently published a small book — “a drawn tribute” — in which 58 artists drew the 48 songs from the now 30-years-old album Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen. The contributors included several other artists whose work I have edited in the past — among them Gabrielle Gamboa, John Porcellino, and Dean Westerfield — and such talented folks as Josh Bayer, Marc Bell, Luke Ramsey, and Sarah Boyts Yoder, just to name a few. Craghead invited me to write the collection’s introduction. I was tempted, of course, to connect mini-comics and self-published art to the “econo” mode of the Minutemen, but in the end I took another route, based more directly on my own experience of the music when it was first released. Here is the text of my introduction:
“Do You Want Punk or Do You Want the Truth?”
I never saw the Minutemen play live, but I did get to witness Mike Watt carry the flame in the years that immediately followed their tragic, premature dissolution.
I started college a few months after the album Double Nickels on the Dime was released. Double Nickels was something of a soundtrack to that first year of school. While the dormitory quad echoed with dueling boomboxes — there was an ongoing rivalry between recent live releases by Bruce Springsteen and Talking Heads — the college radio station was more partial to the Minutemen. Those taut, ever so brief songs that populate the album popped up regularly on the radio, like public service announcements: short, direct, impassioned. The title of the album’s “#1 Hit Song” might have been intended as a jokey self-defeatism, but on college radio it was something of a fact.
And then, well into the first semester of my second year at college, the Minutemen’s legendary singer and guitarist, D. Boon, passed away. I happened to attend school where Kira, of Black Flag, was originally from, and she’d recently returned to town. She and Watt, in the process of recuperating from losing Boon, formed a group called Dos, which as the name suggests consisted just of their two basses. Seeing Dos perform live off campus was the first time I ever saw Watt play in person. It was a very disorienting experience, because the rollicking, intense, chaotic sound that I recognized from the Minutemen was, in the form of Dos, funneled into something far more meditative and reflective, more subtle and remote. If the Minutemen were like funky beatnik Woody Guthries, Dos was as if Johann Sebastian Bach had hooked a pickup to a cello.
And to be frank, at barely 18 years of age, I had found Double Nickels on the Dime extremely befuddling at first. Like with many records that would later become favorites — Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II — I was by no means immediately smitten. It was less love at first listen than it was an immersive, confounding experience that I felt a strong desire to wrestle with. Unlike with Brew or SAW2, the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime isn’t something I ever really managed to wrestle to the ground. Instead, I simply managed to come to grips with it, to make peace with its intensity. To this day the pummeling language, the short songs, the changes of sonic environment — live audience here, tiny garage there — all combine into a persistently formidable listen. We all make our way into a record this intense in our own ways. It was, really, only through the musical language of Dos that I came to begin to understand Double Nickels on the Dime, to appreciate the individual instrumental lines, to recognize the play between guitar and bass, bass and drum, and to hear Boon’s booming innuendos and admonishments as one among many rumbling forces in the fierce assembly.
Pick up a copy of the book at doublenickelsforever.tumblr.com.
This first appeared in the December 2, 2014, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
This Week in Sound: SoundCloud, Replicants, Comedy, Surveillance
One-Track Mind: SoundCloud recently added a “repeat single track” function to its web player. This means that if you’re listening to something on SoundCloud you can click a button to have it repeat when it ends, rather than have the service automatically move on to another track. This is a very welcome turn of events. When it comes to audio streaming, we often don’t really hear something the first time we hear it, and often get lost in the continuity. The ability to repeat a single track in some ways having a chance to really pay attention through repetition.
http://disquiet.com/2014/12/01/soundcloud-single-track-repeat/
Replicant Soundscape: Speaking of listening on repeat, this following track has been online since August, but I only just learned of it via an io9.com post about a related subject. The account of “crysknife007″ on YouTube is filled with great “ambient geek sleep aids” such as the sound of the Starship Enterprise’s engines running for 24 hours straight. What follows is the sound of Rick Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner playing for half a day, so you can imagine you’re a cyberpunk gumshoe when you’re really just sitting at home paying some bills. Though YouTube comments are rightly avoided, a useful follow-up to the track did note that this same sound was later used in Alien for the Nostromo’s medical bay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7FhEpif1cA
Ambient Comedy: The BBC has produced a retrospective of Chris Morris (Blue Jam, Four Lions), the British satirist. I had very much hoped to interview Morris for my recent book on the Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works Volume II because he used music from the album in his radio and television sketches to especially haunting effect, but sadly he wasn’t available. The BBC retrospective is three hours long and, according to the BBC webpage, will be online for another four weeks:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04sp5pq
New Heights in Eavesdropping: A thorough overview of the U.S. government’s system “Automatic Speech recognition in Reverberant Environments,” aka ASpIRE, an advance speech-recognition tool.
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/12/what-happens-when-spies-can-eavesdrop-any-conversation/100142/
This first appeared in the December 2, 2014, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
December 1, 2014
The Broken Beats of Laughing Khokmah
B SIDES (drunk.) by The Laughing Khokmah Ensemble
The Laughing Khokmah Ensemble has placed another fine set of gloriously broken instrumental hip-hop up on Bandcamp. Titled B Sides (drunk.), the set is all atmospheric rhythmic incongruities, from what sound like the clipped sonics of a video-game arcade of “Program.” to the echoed, darkly psychedelic funk of “Sphere.” to the strict surface-noise abstractions of “End.” It’s not all downtempo, by any means. “Aura.” plays with a threateningly cyborgian choral effect, and “Brutal.” employs a low-slung bass throb that could have been liften from a Bill Laswell live recording. The album, 17 tracks in all, is at tlke.bandcamp.com at “name your price,” which allows for free download but, hey, how about chipping in a few bucks.
SoundCloud Single-Track Repeat
I’m not sure how long this has been part of the SoundCloud interface, and if it’s been a long time then I’m embarrassed to say I’m only just noticing it, but SoundCloud now has single-track repeat available. This track-repeat function is part of the “now-playing bar,” a tool that was introduced awhile back to show what is playing. The tool in general is helpful because after a track plays, the service automatically proceeds to another track, and the bar both shows the name of what’s playing and is clickable through to that track. If you’re playing a set, then after the track you’re playing it moves on to the next one in the set, but if you’re playing just a standalone track, then the tracks are drawn from the general SoundCloud database based on what the previous track was, the latter option providing a nice, low-key “discovery” apparatus. The “now-playing bar” emulates the “mini” view of audio players like VLC and iTunes, among others. The “single-track repeat” function appears courtesy of the fairly ubiquitous treatment of a circular arrow with a “1” in it.
The bar looks like this, if you’re not familiar with it. It resides in the lower-right corner of the page:
And this is how the implementation appears on the SoundCloud webpage:
PS: A SoundCloud employee just let me know (today, December 1, 2014) that the single-track repeat has been active for “about two weeks.”
November 28, 2014
November 27, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0152: Comet 67P Cover
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, November 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 1, 2014, as the SoundCloud deadline — though the encouraged optional video part of the assignment can wait a day or two longer, if necessary.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0152: Comet 67P Cover
The Assignment: Record your own cover version of the “song” sung/emitted by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The mysterious song of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has been floated as a likely subject of a Disquiet Junto project since it first was announced by the European Space Agency. Thanks to everyone who suggested it, and I hope you find this approach to the material of interest.
Step 1: Record your own cover version of the “song” sung/emitted by the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. You can hear the “original” here:
https://soundcloud.com/esaops/a-singi...
Step 2: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 3: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Note: Per the track’s SoundCloud page: “To make the music audible to the human ear, the frequencies have been increased in this recording. This sonification of the RPC-Mag data was compiled by German composer Manuel Senfft (www.tagirijus.de). Read full details in ESA’s Rosetta blog: wp.me/p46DHN-Li.”
Length: Your finished work should be between roughly 1 and 3 minutes long.
Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 1, 2014, as the deadline.
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.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0152-comet67pcover” 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 152nd Disquiet Junto project — “Record your own cover version of the ‘song’ sung/emitted by the comet Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/11/27/disqui...
Copyright Notice: Original Data Credit: ESA/Rosetta/RPC/RPC-MAG. Sonification: TU Braunschweig/IGEP/Manuel Senfft, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
Credit for image associated with this project:
ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.
November 25, 2014
This Week in Sound: Fahrenheit, Sonar Sabotage, Unsilent
Audiobook Culture: The past weekend’s Sunday Book Review in the New York Times had an extensive section of audiobook coverage, including a review by Dave Itzkoff of Tim Robbins reading Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. The conflict in Itzkoff’s piece seemed to be how the rise of the audiobook somehow is part of the gadget-ization of culture. And he credits Bradbury’s book for having posited the notion “that it was not a distant stretch from dismissing books as quaint and obsolete to banning them outright.” He writes, as well, “Fortunately, a few thousand years ago, we gave ourselves a sustainable and still reliable mechanism to provide shelter from these distractions, as well as the option to use it or not” — this “reliable mechanism” is, of course, the physical book. What he doesn’t mention in the review is how Bradbury’s book itself closes with an image of an even more ancient mechanism, in which people — not just people, but maintainers of culture — tell each other stories out loud. Full disclosure: I didn’t so much “read” Itzkoff’s review as listen to it via text-to-speech thanks to the function that is part of the New York Times’ Android app.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/books/review/fahrenheit-451-read-by-tim-robbins.html
Sonar Sabotage: The headline says it all: “Study Shows Bats Jam Each Other’s Sonar to Snatch the Best Prey” (via Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner). Rishi Iyengar reports in Time magazine on research published in the journal Science that bats can block each other’s frequencies. Science’s Penny Sarchet likens it to “sonar sabotage.” It’s nature’s own EMP. The researchers are Aaron J. Corcoran and William E. Conner.
http://time.com/3571704/study-bats-jam-sonar-hunting/
Secular Robot Choirs: Unsilent Night is the annual secular caroling event, in which communal processions of boomboxes layer ambient scintillates provided by the composer Phil Kline. The schedule for the 2014 holiday season is now appearing online, including Manhattan on December 13, San Francisco also on December 13, and Toronto on December 19, with more dates to be added soon. I’ve walked the route in San Francisco, in the Mission, for many years, listening as Kline’s music fills narrow alleys and disperses into the street, as slight variations in playback create false echoes backward and forward in time. If it’s coming to your town, don’t miss it. If it isn’t, consider taking a trip.
http://unsilentnight.com/schedule.html
This post first appeared in the Disquiet email newsletter: tinyletter.com/disquiet.
