Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 403
November 10, 2014
The Technology of the Ether
We have no accepted documentary evidence of UFOs, and yet we know what they sound like. They hover, and have a tonal system apart from our own — except when, to eerie effect, they actively embrace one of Earth’s, as in the classic sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and seem both ethereal and technological at the same time. The technology of the ether is the heart of “I Assumed the Same,” a piece that Malmö, Sweden–based Pythagora (aka Dan Henry Pålsson) uploaded this week. It’s a “jamsession” (Pålsson’s word) he completed with Metek, a full half hour of murky jangles. They seem mechanical, conjuring up images of metal and routinized activity, and yet their otherworldliness is such that they can linger in the foreground and yet remain entirely out of reach.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/pythagora.
November 8, 2014
Aphex Twin Reverses Himself
Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, continues his return to semi-public existence as a musician by posting to his under-appreciated SoundCloud account, soundcloud.com/richarddjames, which as of this writing has just 7,089 subscribers. The account got some coverage this past week when he posted recordings attributed to his young son. He also revisited some of his own more youthful music, specifically “Avril 14th.” Originally appearing on the 2001 album Drukqs, “Avril 14th” is one of Aphex Twin’s most licensed tracks, having, among other things, appeared in a Sofia Coppola movie and been sampled as part of a Kanye West track (“Blame Game,” off My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). The newly posted “Avril 14th Reversed Music Not Audio” is exactly that, not the song played backwards by reversing the recording, but the song played backwards a note at a time. The echo in the room is strong and seems to share a certain resonance with “Aisatsana,” the final track off Aphex Twin’s Syro, the recent album that marked his return to active pop-culture duty. It says something about the structural simplicity of the original “Avril 14th” song that the melody reversed sounds no less composed, no less thoughtful, no less lovely.
Of course, an Aphex Twin release is, as always, as much the beginning of a process as it is the end, which is to say post-release treatments have followed, such as the inevitable and welcome “what happens when you reverse the reversed” version. Hearing the melody unfold as a series of reversed notes is like listening to a funhouse mirror made of cellophane. It’s an instant-classic example of making the familiar exotic, and brings to mind the machinations that Hans Zimmer employed with the Inception score by interpolating Édith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien.” Here is the reversed reversal of “Avril 14th” by a Eugene, Oregon–based musician who goes by the name Granola:
And here, related to that room-resonance comment up top, is “Aisatsana,” off Syro:
November 7, 2014
When Damo Met Can
The third comic in the series I’m editing for Red Bull Music Academy is now online. The series is timed to RBMA’s annual, city-centric festival, which this year takes place all over Tokyo. It’s by writer Zack Soto (Study Group Comics) and illustrator Connor Willumsen (Treasure Island). The comic, “When Damo Met Can,” presents the period when Damo Suzuki was recruited as the lead singer of the German rock band Can. (In related news, the 33 1/3 series book on Can’s Tago Mago, written by Alan Warner, is being published this month. The timing is a nice coincidence.) Willumsen lends incredible detail, period feel, and psychedelic immersion to Soto’s story, which draws from band anecdotes and drops in some sly references.
The original, English-language version of the comic is at redbullmusicacademy.com, and the Japanese translation, with lettering by Haruhisa Nakata (“The Tree of Maüreca,” Levius), is at redbullmusicacademy.jp.
The first two comics in the series were on MF Doom and DJ Krush.
November 6, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0149: Processing the Present
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 6, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 10, 2014, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0149: Processing the Present
The Assignment: Take a walk around the block and make something from it.
This week’s project is about everyday sound and processing the present.
Step 1: Read all the steps before initiating the project.
Step 2: Trace a path on a map that will take about three minutes to walk and that will end where it began.
Step 3: Walk that route and record the sounds you experience.
Step 4: Create an original monaural recording that is the result of that field recording being processed without the recording being edited or otherwise shortened, lengthened, or reorganized. This result should, naturally, be the same length as the source recording.
Step 5: Create a track that has the original audio in the left channel and the processed audio in the right channel.
Step 6: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 7: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Length: Your finished work should be about three minutes long.
Deadline: This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, November 6, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 10, 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 “disquiet0149-processingthepresent″ 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 149th Disquiet Junto project — “Take a walk around the block and make something from it″ — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/11/06/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 Jerolek and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
via instagram.com/dsqt
Sneak peek at an upcoming comic in the Red Bull Music Academy series I’m editing. Details tk.
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
November 5, 2014
Something Majestic That Way Goes
This 4.5-minute piece by Matthew Mercer has the inherent sense of forward motion of its title, “Headlong,” but takes it at an admirably slow pace. This isn’t the pace of something slowed down so much as something experienced in a perception-altering state. Waves of counterposed undulations form a wall of ambient noise, ethereal sounds made from masses of sharp shards. An ever-rising tone suggests something passing out of the atmosphere. All in all it’s like the doppler effect in full majestic mode.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mercerm. More from Mercer at mattmercer.com. Based in Portland, Oregon, he is half of the group Microfilm microfilmmusic.com, the other half being vocalist Matt Keppel.
November 4, 2014
Alarm Will Tag
In a compact parallel to micro-fiction, liner notes have not so much gone away as been reduced to bare essentials. Liner notes more often than not these days take the form of a complementary blog post, or a brief text accompanying a track posted online, or — in the perhaps most constrained format — just a series of tags. Such is often the case with Alarm Will Sound, the highly regarded chamber ensemble, which regularly posts performances it does of works outside the standard chamber literature. Not that standard chamber repertoire is its modus operandi. This is the group that made its name initially with an album of Aphex Twin covers. The group’s SoundCloud page gives a false impression of its activity. The “spotlight” section up top focuses on music released about a year ago, if not longer. But down below more recent items pop up, including “Half-Glimpsed” by composer Jay Lin. It was posted just today. Recorded live at the Mizzou International Composers Festival on July 27, 2013, it is primarily built around a frenetic series of organized cacophonies. Even the quieter moments early on are antic, with strings and horns playing against each other in a swarm-like manner: individually at their own pace, but collectively forming something spacious and very much alive. And for context, there is just that datestamp and this brief collection of tags:
#sinfonietta
#noise
#textural
#dense
#contemporary classical
#chamber orchestra
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound.
November 3, 2014
MF Doom + DJ Krush + Comics + Manga
I initiated and have been editing a series of three-page comics and manga for Red Bull Music Academy to coincide with its Toyko festival, which is underway right now. The first in the Red Bull Music Academy series tells the story of “The Rise of MF Doom” (detail above) through the lens of classic comics like, naturally, The Fantastic Four, with art by Dean Haspiel (Billy Dogma, The Fox, Batman) and a script by Gabe Soria (Batman ’66, and Life Sucks with Jessica Abel), supported by Allen Passalaqua on colors and Vito Delsante on lettering.
The second RBMA piece (detail above), created by manga-ka (or manga creator) Haruhisa Nakata (“The Tree of Maüreca,” Levius) focuses on one of my favorite Japanese musicians, DJ Krush. The story takes Krush’s early childhood habit of making new toys out of spare parts and connects it to his making music from pre-existing recordings. Titled “Building It,” the manga is based on an interview that Krush did specifically for the RBMA series. I co-edited the Krush manga with Hideki Egami, who was long the editor of the excellent manga magazine Ikki, known for such series as Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea, Iou Kuroda’s Sexy Voice and Robo (I wrote an essay that appears in the English edition of the manga), and Taiyō Matsumoto’s No. 5 and Sunny. Egami generously accepted my invitation to help on the Japanese side of this international project. All the RBMA comics are appearing online in English and Japanese, and each features light elements of animation. The crew has coalesced in a great way, with Nakata taking the time to assist by lettering in Japanese some of the English-language comics, and Delsante assisting on some of the English versions of the manga.
For background, I edited the comics in the music magazine Pulse!, published by Tower Records, from 1992 to 2002, and later worked for half a decade at Viz, the U.S.-based publisher of manga in translation, and it’s been great to bring those experiences together. At Viz I worked with folks like Jessica Abel, Ed Brubaker, Barry McGee, and Adrian Tomine early in their careers, and with folks like Dan DeCarlo, Justin Green, Peter Kuper, and P. Craig Russell further along in theirs. Full index of the Pulse! comics here.
There is more to come in this Red Bull Music Academy series. Watch it unfold at redbullmusicacademy.com in English and redbullmusicacademy.jp in Japanese.
Wire and Tin
RP Collier of Portland, Oregon, makes spare and admirable use of tags on his SoundCloud account. It means one thing when a track of Collier’s is tagged “ambient” and another when it says “minimal” — and as for “percussion,” that seems to signify something else entirely. The work is “minimal” in the sense of limited resources, but it’s quite apart from minimal music otherwise, quite ecstatic and exploratory, pushing the tools in various directions, from springy resonance to abstract rhythmic opportunities. Collier explains the piece in this case was made with the following setup: “Pulling and plucking thin piano wire through tiny holes drilled in the center top and bottom of a medium-size cookie tin.” And despite being more a collection of sonic potentialities than a self-contained composition, a working out of a small set of equipment, the piece ends with a little flourish.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/rpcollier.
