Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 429

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 22 (“Spots”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.

There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.

It sure is exciting to see it pop up in feeds by people whom you’ve never met:

“Spots” on Selected Ambient Works Volume II weighs in at about 55bpm and just under 12 minutes in length, at 11:27 according to my file’s data as it plays in VLC. But what is the BPM of a song, especially an ambient song, an ambient piece of music? The beat is less like a drum and more like a drum machine designed by the people who make Nerf footballs. The beat becomes the melody as time goes on. In other words, when the beat is this simple, and left alone, the minor variations take on melodic importance.

There’s a vocal, too, what seems at first to be a girl’s giggle refracted down a digital hall of mirrors until it pixelates and merges with the beat, until the giggle becomes vaporous and its rhythm and that of the beat become one. Later the voice gets oafish, takes a deeper tone, less Girl Scout blushing at the cookie table, more Dungeons and Dragons aficionado who’s spilled chocolate milk on his character binder. The girl’s isn’t the only talking, either. There’s something spoken, broken up digitally, like if C3P0 had been the subject of surveillance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

And one more thing, and a not unimportant one: The song ends. About 30 seconds before it ends, much of the interior content drops out and then, quite suddenly, the momentum slows, like someone’s pulled the plug on a metronome and it’s left to sway as its remaining energy slowly flags.

Here it is reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.

Disquiet Junto Project 0108: Free Bassel

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.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 project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, January 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 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 0108: Free Bassel

For this week’s project, we’re going to create soundscapes for an ancient Middle Eastern city. And in the process, we’re going to raise awareness about an imprisoned open-source developer with strong ties to the Creative Commons community. Bassel Khartabil, before his arrest on March 15, 2012, in Damascus, was working on several projects, among them a 3D rendering of the ancient city of Palmyra. Much as Bassel was trying to revive an ancient world, you are, in essence, keeping one of his projects alive while he is incapable of doing so.

The project instructions are as follows:

Step 1: View this video for background on Bassel’s digital Palmyra project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G7fy...

Step 2: If you aren’t viewing this instruction on the Disquiet.com project page, go to the following URL to view three still images from Bassel’s 3D work:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/23/disqui...

Step 3: Create a soundscape of between one and three minutes that might be employed in an immersive, completed digital visualization of ancient Palmyra.

Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 minutes in length.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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 “disquiet0108-freebassel” 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, be sure to include this information:

More on this 108th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a soundscape for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.”) at:

http://disquiet.com/2014/01/23/disqui...

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/?p=16588

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...

More on the campaign to free Bassel at

http://freebassel.org/

For their collaboration on this project, special thanks to: Niki Korth, Barry Threw, and Jon Phillips.

Proof of (Book) Life

This is a picture I’ve been looking forward to taking for a long time:

Post-Classical Sequel

The second album from Christina Vantzou is due out on February 24. Titled No. 2, it follows her earlier No. 1, which was released in late 2011. The new album is on the label Kranky, which is home to such notable musicians as Jessica Baliff, Greg Davis, Grouper, and Keith Fullerton Whitman, as well as the Dead Texan, which is Vantzou’s collaboration with Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid, also on the Kranky roster. Kranky has posted a track from No. 2 in advance of the album’s release. “Going Backwards to Recover That Which Was Left Behind” is a slow-moving chamber piece that builds as it goes, its increasing density of instrumentation at each moment in an eager, quiet struggle to keep the increasing momentum from undoing the stability of what the piece has accomplished thus far. Melodic fragments are repeated on varied instruments, the orchestration swelling as it passes its midpoint, and a reticent horn section — reminiscent of David Byrne’s Knee Plays — eventually filling things out. Absolutely beautiful.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kranky. More by Christina Vantzou at christinavantzou.com, which is where the above images are from.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 23 (“Tassels”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.

Can't wait to read @disquiet's book on Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Volume II' (33 1/3) that just arrived! pic.twitter.com/UJvEUtiT8A

— Jess Lemont (@BrewCrewJess) January 22, 2014

There is some irony to doing this countdown since the book is already shipping to folks who pre-ordered it via an online retailer such as Amazon, but the official date stands, and that’s the target — the end date — of this countdown, February 13.

This piece is about as far from the concept of a “song” as the album gets. “Tassels” is a noise whorl, a burred whorl, a flangy spray, a sequence of undulating static. It is a thick mass of white noise that gets the appellation of “song” — gets categorized as “song” — for the simple reason that it is one track among two dozen or so on a record of things that are occasionally taken as songs, that broader understanding itself more a matter of context and format than of form. “Tassels” is a song by association. Beyond that association, it is anything but a song.

There are, in essence, two portions to the material that make up “Tassels”: There is the noise and there is the tone. The noise is like that of a passing jet plane, its fuselage drone a slow-motion experiment in doppler fantasia. The tone is a sinewy curve of synthesized anxiety; if it suggests an airborne vehicle, it would be more spacecraft than plane, and considerably less likely of Earth origin. The track is the less the score than the sound design to a sequence of an unscreened Alien sequel. There’s a long hallway, and a lot of dead crew mates, and things are almost certainly going to get worse. Perhaps this is why “Tassels” appears toward the end of the album. It’s a premonition of exiting the chill-out room.

Here it is, reversed:

More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.

Thanks to boondesign.com for the sequential grid treatment of the album cover.

The Drone, Writ Long

The latest Elizabeth Velvdon track is quite distinct from other recent work of hers. Where her “The Pure Water, Filled with Light”" was a solo piano work marked by brief moments of melodic fragments and sudden stoppages, her “The Frost Is Setting In” is a deep, “longform” drone that tests the listener’s patience at the same time as lulling the listener. Like those two opposed responses, the track comes in alternating waves, short ones that arrive in brief, dependable cycles, like a boat adrift on a mechanical current. The word “longform” is one that she herself has applied to the track as a tag, along with “minimalism” and “cold drone” and, for good measure, simply “drone.” The word “longform” is used most often in description of online writing, of pieces whose length allow for a depth of exploration and insight, research and perspectives. Here, there is certainly an immersive intent, but the piece, quite the contrary, is still and singular, despite its extended length.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/elizabethveldon. More from Veldon, who is based in Glasgow, Scotland, at elizabethveldon.tumblr.com, twitter.com/elizabethveldon, and elizabethveldon.bandcamp.com.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 24 (“White Blur 2″)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.

If Selected Ambient Works Volume II is to be thought of as chillout music, as sanctum music, as comforting-from-the-storm music, then the final tracks of it prepare you to head back into the world, in particular this piece (heard above), which is track 24, 23, or 22, depending on your edition. It is commonly referred to as “White Blur 2” (with another track, often re-titled “White Blur” or “White Blur 1,” being the one that is built on a wind chime).

In my book I interview Greg Eden, the individual who was responsible for the “fan naming” of the officially untitled tracks on the album. At the time of the record’s release, back in 1994, Eden was a British university student of physics. Later he worked for Warp for a decade, and these days he is a manager of such electronic musicians at Mark Pritchard and Chris Clark. He says, in part, of the process of looking at the art on the inside cover of the album and divining track titles: “That’s a white blur, but there’s another white blur, so that’s ‘White Blur 2.’ I didn’t consult a mystic or go on a DMT journey. It was just very ‘describe what you see.’”

There’s a rudimentary melody played as if on futuristic talking drum, a tuned drum where each beat is succinct in being, essentially, little more than a soft attack, a cotton mallet. At times a second voicing of that melody occurs, heard above the original, but it, too, while tuned higher, is a beat in the form of a melody, or perhaps vice versa, or more to the point standing in the space between those two presumed poles. There’s a gurgle and an insistent, geiger counter beat at the very start of “White Blur 2,” and that gurgle, a contorted roar at points, slowly takes on the appearance of a voice, eventually becoming a stoned cackle. (Detractors — there are those who persist in the idea that the album is a prank — might suggest this is Aphex Twin laughing at his audience.) The final moments are the track’s most beautiful, as each phrase of the core melody is tweaked slightly, nudged and bent as if it’s been pulled like a piece of Silly Putty.

Here is the track reversed (pretty much all the tracks are available backwards). The melody is symmetrical enough to be almost indistinguishable, but the voices are warped, and the attack on notes during certain segments is long enough to sound significantly backwards here:

More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.

Aphex Twin SAW2 Countdown: Track 25 (“Matchsticks”)

I am going to do this track-by-track countdown to the release, on February 13, 2014, the day prior to Valentine’s Day, of my book in the estimable 33 1/3 series. It is a love letter to Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which will mark its 20th anniversary this year, less than a month after my book’s publication. More on my Aphex Twin book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com. The plan is to do this countdown in the reverse order, from last track to first. For reference, an early draft of the introduction is online, as is the book’s seven-chapter table of contents. The book’s publisher posted an interview with me when I was midway through the writing process.

Depending on your copy of the album, this (heard above) is track 25, 24, or 23. It is, no matter, the closing track of the album. It is commonly referred to as “Matchsticks.” One likely shouldn’t read too much into the placement of the final track of an album that came very much out of a genre of music, a community of music, that sees sound as inherently mutable, that sees the recording process as the start and not the end of a creative process, a process that continues in the aftermarket in various forms: remixes both commissioned and fan-fictional, mashups, edits, placement in a DJ’s set, use as licensed content.

Thick chords, heavy and dense, seem to play vocal harmonies, like something out of an Italian horror movie. There’s this underlying percussion, what seems to be a series of short, dulled four-beat echoes that are unto themselves rhythmic, but that are introduced in ways (overlapping, or after a brief pause) that keep them from collectively serving as a steady pulse. It’s all more water than land: there’s a surface, and it serves that fundamental purpose of keeping things afloat, but it isn’t entirely dependable. Occasional flat notes emphasize this sense of a lack of dependability, the sense that things could sour, and sink, at any moment.

Here it is reversed (pretty much all the tracks are available backwards), showing the melody to be fairly symmetrical:

And here is a skit from Chris Morris’ comedy/satire project Blue Jam that uses the track as backing music. In the book I talk about another Morris employment of Aphex Twin’s music in a chapter, titled “Embedding Vapor,” about the album’s use in film and contemporary dance:

More on my Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works Volume II book at amazon.com and Bloomsbury.com.

Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2014.03)

This would be roughly the week of January 13 through January 19.

5 Years Ago (2009): I wrote about videos by Lauren Lavitt and Sara Blaylock shown as part of a group exhibit at the Michael Rosenthal gallery in San Francisco. (The above image is Blaylock’s.) … The quote of the week (“Everybody wanted to be a DJ, now everybody is a DJ and wants to be a curator”) was from a lecture-in-the-works by Digiki, born Antonin Gaultier, who’s French but lives in Japan. The images of the week were interfaces from audio tools announced at NAMM. … I had a brief entry about social networks I participated in — apparently I still did MySpace at the time. … Downstream entries (free, legal downloads) included a Mark Pritchard track, some Finnish remixes of the Buddha Machine, the duo of Hiroshi Kumakiri and Jessica Rylan, a landmark 1985 album, and 11 MP3s in search of Ingmar Bergman.

10 Years Ago (2004): The quote of the week was Gavin Bryars talking about his cellphone going off during a concert. … Downstream entries included a video interview with Brian Eno, music by 400 Lonely Things, a jazz-electronic hybrid by Pino the Frog, and some Warp downloads and video.

15 Years Ago (1999): Nothing this week (but stuff this coming week).

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Imagining how loud a drone-supported self-adjusting floating standing desk would be. ->



Skype UI note: "The largest bar in the volume icon is an exclamation mark." http://t.co/Hl32qyRra9 (via @littlebigdetail) ->



Belated RIP, Leland Smith (88), computer-music pioneer: http://t.co/5NQMA0ANLE. (Via @G3NtR0pH08ik + @tedgioia) ->



There's only one song by Souled American on Rdio. ->



LPs that melted your brain upon release and, decades later, you play on repeat while cooking all Sunday long: Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation. ->



The revolution will become a TV mini-series. RT @vuzhmusic: @disquiet the most difficult to assimilate becomes the most comfortable ->



And my Aphex Twin book for 33 1/3 (on the album Selected Ambient Works Volume II) comes out one month from today. ->



Thanks, @citylightsbooks, for hosting the March 20 reading/concert in San Francisco for my Aphex Twin 33 1/3 book: http://t.co/rcc4SRjBAW ->



2,991 tracks in Disquiet Junto in past 2 years and 2 weeks. Wonder if we'll hit 3K when current project ends tonite: https://t.co/RG5yL7CI2z ->



I'm interviewing Prefuse 73 in half an hour. If you have questions for him, lemme know. ->



Prefuse 73 says it refers to the sound of fusion jazz prior to 1973 (starting around 1968). RT @nynexrepublic: @disquiet why that number? ->



Judging by my Twitter page, staff got back from lunch and posted a redesign of the website, which it is now slowly tweaking in real time. ->



Helix: You come for the science fiction; you stay for the Arctic research-station room tones. ->



Still likes to think that the new version of WordPress is named after the Donald Westlake / Richard Stark character. ->



On Almost Human, it seems like the suspects are always listening to ambient music and the cops are always listening to EDM in their cars. ->



MOMA and SFMOMA are expanding at the same time and they'll join somewhere in the midwest at a golden spike made by Jeff Koons. ->



RIP, jazz guitarist Ronny Jordan (51): http://t.co/OnYlRX3tNo. Here's one of his team-ups with DJ Krush: http://t.co/LqYiO3jcBu ->



Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->



Of course Bruce Springsteen's music was in a Good Wife episode this past weekend about an ethically challenged (albeit Illinois) governor. ->



Hopeful that @SoundCloud technical issues are solved by tomorrow, but pondering stopgap @djunto options (e.g., Disquiet-post comment links). ->



I love my Nexus 7 but Google must get the accessories gears churning. There's nothing for the N7 close to Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Folio. ->



If you participate in the Disquiet Junto, try the SoundCloud URL ( http://t.co/3Vl0MYqdZd ) and lemme know if it's coming up for you. Thanks. ->



If SoundCloud's tech issues continue tomorrow we may experiment with posting the next project as embeds/links in comments on a Disquiet post ->



Thanks for the quick replies folks. On my Mac the SoundCloud URL works OK on Safari, just not my default browser (Chrome). #patience ->



"This webpage has a redirect loop." Been getting major conflicts between Google accounts lately. ->



"It is an auditory 3-D sculpture." That description of pop-music recording isn't from Brian Eno. It's Sandra Boynton: http://t.co/TPqOQR4ZGc ->



Amazon's market-bots are quite insistent that I purchase a copy of my own 33 1/3 book. ->



Even more depressing than the Professor dying is the radio broadcasters feeling the need to explain what Gilligan's Island was. ->



Aeolian metrics. That's the theme of this week's @djunto project. ->



Tomorrow is January 17, the 308th birthday of Benjamin Franklin, whose Junto club, formed when he was 21, lent its name to the @djunto. ->



I vote they make 10 spinoffs of Arrow and rename the network the DCW. ->



Happy birthday, Benjamin Franklin. You weren't a model father, but I can't think of a founding father more relevant or inspiring today. ->



Hopeful. I set up that four-digit project numbering for a reason. RT @jonautry: @disquiet #junto4evr in reply to jonautry ->



Mail.app (OS X) now in doghouse. Was so good until Mavericks. Giving MailMate a try. ->



Super cool. Time Out Dubai (@TimeOutDubai) on that sound art exhibit I participated in: http://t.co/5Ve5gNdtun ->



Whoa, that massive Amon Tobin box set sold out. Glad I got a copy. ->