Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 404
November 3, 2014
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.
October 30, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 148: Peripheral Listening
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, October 30, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 3, 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 148: Peripheral Listening
The Assignment: Make music inspired by and suitable for listening to while reading William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral.
For this week’s project we’re making music that would make suitable listening material when reading William Gibson’s new novel, The Peripheral. These are the steps:
Step 1: You will make two minutes of loopable background music. The music will be inspired by a phrase from William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral. Think about music that is suitable to reading.
Step 2: Select one of these three phrases, or locate another phrase from the book:
Chapter 6 (“Patchers”): “The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape.”
Chapter 32 (“Tipstaff”): “Then a ringing silence, in which could be heard an apparent rain of small objects, striking walls and flagstones.”
Chapter 56 (“The Light in Her Voice Mail”): “The ambient sound was glum as the light, as calculated to unsettle.”
Step 3: Compose a piece of music two minutes in length that is informed by the phrase you have selected.
Step 4: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud. Be sure to mention the source phrase from the novel in the text field accompanying your piece.
Step 5: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Length: Your finished work should be 2 minutes long.
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 “disquiet0148-peripherallistening″ 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 148th Disquiet Junto project — “Make music inspired by and suitable for listening to while reading William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral″ — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/10/30/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
October 25, 2014
via instagram.com/dsqt
Side view of my 3-screen, 21-composer installation at the San Jose Museum of Art. Video by Josh Azzarella. #soundart
Cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.
October 23, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0147: Slight Noise
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, October 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 27, 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 0147: Slight Noise
The Assignment: Record 8 seconds of white noise in your own personal style.
This week’s project:
Step 1: Record 8 seconds of white noise in your own personal style.
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.
Length: Your finished work should be between one and three minutes long.
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 “disquiet0147-slightnoise″ 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 147th Disquiet Junto project — “Record 8 seconds of silence in your own personal style″ — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/10/23/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
October 22, 2014
How to Build a Girl
There have been many responses to the eight-second accidental hit of white noise attributed to pop star Taylor Swift. At theatlantic.com, Megan Garber stitched together quotes from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise to form a review (“It is the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”). At vulture.com, Nate Jones drew a comparison to the late Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The white noise snippet was erroneously titled “Track 3,” so at theverge.com, Ross Miller compared it to a silence inherent in the real third track on the record:
Swift’s actual track 3 (actual name TBD) does have actual lyrics, as teased on her Instagram account: I say “I heard that you’ve been out and about with some other girl” — all followed by an extended, anxiety-inducing, 29-dot ellipses.
And over at his soundcloud.com/junkrhythm account the Los Angeles–based Junk Rhythm went so far as to create white noise from scratch and post a how-to on YouTube:
October 21, 2014
Like a Robot Tuvan Choir
Gretchen Jude’s “Midsummer Dark” track was performed live this year at Oakland, California’s annual Garden of Memory, an annual solstice event that takes place in a columbarium and invites a wide range of musicians. Her sole instruments on this appear to be a synthesizer made from a kit in the famed (at least famed in the maker set) Japanese magazine Gakken and a sampler from Roland, the SP-404. That isn’t intended as gear-hound talk, just as a recognition of the systems in play. The result is glottal, droning mass, the undulating layers like a robot Tuvan choir. For 16-plus minutes straight, she pushes at the drone, eking out impressive states yet never piercing the veil.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/gretchenjude. More on the Garden of Memory at gardenofmemory.com. More from Gretchen Jude at gretchenjude.weebly.com.
October 20, 2014
Vicky Chow’s Piano Is a Machine
Vicky Chow performs the 20-minute “This Machine Breathes to the Rhythms of Its Own Heartbeat,” a recent composition by Adam Basanta. Basanta’s website describes the work a being “for solo piano, electronics, and two surface transducers.” What that description lacks is mention of the voice with which the piece begins — a monologue that serves as the contemporary classical equivalent of the sort of procedural introduction to an episode of a show like Dragnet or, more recently, Southland. It lays out the facts, which have the plainspoken quality of the piece’s title, with limited emotion, a distance that lends the everyday a peculiar level of depth and intensity, of foreboding. The music then does those suggested qualities full justice. “This machine will not communicate. All it knows to do is turn on and off. This machine does not operate according to our timescale,” and so on. From there a mix of droning feedback and rarified piano figures alternate, the former no doubt originating in the latter. The result is an exploration of vibrant mechanical activity, from the white noise of strong feedback to the snare-drum-like rattle of open chords to isolated keys that echo like pin drops.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/vicky-chow. More from Basanta at adambasanta.com. More from Chow at vickychow.com.
October 19, 2014
What Is Julia Mazawa Reworking?
Glitch isn’t inherently entropic. Glitch may sound like things falling apart, but in capable hands it can also sound like things coming together. In more neutral terms, glitch may be considered a means of taking stock of something by considering as its underlying structure not the work itself but the reciprocal connection between the work and the medium on which it was recorded and reproduced. “Mere Anarchy” is the title of Julia Mazawa’s gracefully broken bit of chamber music, a piece heard as embedded in vinyl and then looped in small fragments thanks to digital technology. In Mazawa’s piece, the sounds heard being reworked are not unlike a memory playing over and over in one’s head, slowly reassembling after some extended period of disregard. Tiny flecks of strings are looped, at first a few seconds of alternating moments, then a more extended excerpt, then just after the eight-minute mark a separate violin, pitched higher and more foregrounded. The format of the memory is vinyl, evident in the scratchy surface noise that, with each repetition, takes on the semblance of a percussive element. Mawawa performs a kind of ecstatic exploratory surgery on the original, never quite revealing it, but laying the parts bare and reveling in their inherent qualities. I had it in mind to send Mazawa an email asking her to help identify the source material, but decided to first see if anyone reading this might recognize it.
Track originally posted for streaming at soundcloud.com/juliamazawa. Mazawa, who is based in Oakland, California, opened the final night of the recent San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, and has a piece in the “Sonic Frame” installation that I developed for the 45th-anniversary exhibit Momentum: an experiment in the unexpected, which opened October 2, 2014, and runs at the San Jose Museum of Art through February 22, 2015.
October 16, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0146: Swyping Silence
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, October 16, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 20, 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 0146: Swyping Silence
The Assignment: Make a short piece of music based on a typographic symbol for the word “silence.”
In this week’s project a symbol for the word “silence” will be probed for its sonic associations. The image is available at this URL:
As is evident in the image, this is the “Swype” gesture for the word “silence.” Swype is an alternate text-entry system in which a single stroke along the various keys that spell a word trigger the word’s appearance, in contrast with the traditional keyboarding method of typing with one keystroke after another. The resulting symbols for words can take on a certain familiarity and even a kind of enchantment as time passes and frequency of use increases. The symbol that results from the word “silence” has many characteristics, including bit not restricted to the sideways hourglass timer, the inherent asymmetry, and the mix of sharp angles and curves.
The steps for this week’s project are as follows:
Step 1: Consider the symbol that results from using the Swype technique to enter the word “silence” on a keyboard, as shown in image at this URL:
Step 2: Develop sonic associations with this symbol.
Step 3: Produce a short piece of music informed by those associations.
Step 4: Upload the finished track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.
Step 5: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Length: Your finished work should be between one and three minutes long.
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 “disquiet0146-swypingsilence″ 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 146th Disquiet Junto project — “Make a short piece of music based on a typographic symbol for the word ‘silence’″ — at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/10/16/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
