Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 431
January 8, 2014
Roppongi Street Noise
Corruption is out of control. Not the phenomenon of fraudulent conduct among the powerful, but Corruption the prolific and acquisitive sound recorder based in Funabashi, Japan. With no additional contact or web-presence information made available, Corruption’s SoundCloud account (avatar: the compacted “corrption“) is a steady stream of daily noises and lo-fi electronic music, 324 tracks as of this writing. Among the latest in the “sound diary” series is a minute and a half of Roppongi neighborhood street audio:
There are myriad Corruption tracks available. Highly recommended is the 16-piece set The Collector_Insect Beats:
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/corrption.
January 7, 2014
10 Great “Sound (in) Art” Starting Points
The Dubai-based Gallery of Light, part of DUCTAC, the Dubai Community Theatre and Arts Centre, is hosting a sound art exhibit this month, January 2014. The curator, Simon Coates, invited me to participate.
Artists featured include the British musician Scanner and the early musique concrète figure Dr. Halim El-Dabh, as well as Porya Hatami (Sanandaj, Iran), the British-Iranian Soosan Lolavar, Leopoldo Amigo Perez (among his works is a recreation of Arseny Avraamov’s 1922 “Symphony of Factory Sirens”), and Christina Kubisch (Germany). The exhibit will also include an installation of Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” with Lucier’s approval.
For my part, Coates requested that I hand write a list of 10 recommended works of sound art, the intended reader being someone somewhat new to the subject. His concept was to then print the piece large scale and hang it in the Gallery of Light, along with the other exhibited work. I expanded on his idea a little, and fleshed out the 10 recommendations with brief descriptions, plus an opening and closing statement. The title of it is simply “10 Recommended Works of Sound in Art.” Here’s what it will look like from across the room (click it and you’ll see the thing at a more legible scale):
Here’s a detail:
And here’s the text, along with correlating YouTube videos. The videos aren’t in the exhibit, just in this post.
. . .
“10 Recommended Works of Sound in Art”
I spent an afternoon once wandering the city of San Francisco with a pop musician who had begun to put aside song in favor of sound. I brought up “sound art” but he rebuffed me: genre, he said, was antithetical to the creative enterprise. I was confused until I, months later, recognized I was less interested in “sound art” than in “sound in art.” These 10 works are intended for listeners starting down a similar path.
Marc Weidenbaum
2013.12.03
. . .
1. The Forty Part Motet
By Janet Cardiff
2001
Forty speakers stand in a room. Each emits the vocal line of a different member of a choir singing a 16th-century piece of music. Walk amid them like one of the angels in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire.
. . .
2. Vexations
By Erik Satie
c. 1893
A short piece of music is played 840 times in a row, for close to 20 hours. Soon enough the music ceases to be music and takes on new purpose: installation, endurance test, mystic journey, wallpaper, irritant, lullaby.
. . .
3. Video Quartet
By Christian Marclay
2002
Bits of footage from numerous films run on four separate screens. Sound and motion are choreographed in a manner to make connections, and jokes, and even alternate narratives.
. . .
4. The Buddha Machine
By Christiaan Virant + Zhang Jian
2005
The Buddha Machine is a tiny box (also available as software) that plays brief sound loops. It is sound art on the go, an objet d’art that is practical and economical.
. . .
5. Deadly Edge
By Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake)
1971
“Up here, the music was just a throbbing under the feet, a distant pulse.” Thus begins the 13th novel in the Parker series: a rock-concert heist. All novels have a sonic component, especially novels about thievery.
. . .
6. Electrical Walks
By Christina Kubisch
2004
Participants in a walk around the city wear powerful wireless headphones that are sensitive to electro-magnetic fields. They discover the autonomous music that surrounds us.
. . .
7. Listening Post
By Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin
2003
Dozens of small screens display text pulled live from the web based on singular queries. Text-to-speech and music bring the data to life.
. . .
8. Test Pattern
By Ryoji Ikeda
2008
Sound, along with other source information such as text and photos, is turned into an immersive installation of barcode patterns.
. . .
9. The Rise and Fall of the Sounds and Silences from Mars
By Christof Migone
2011
All the audio-related words from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles are extracted and displayed — in a book, in video, as an installation, on flag-like cards outdoors on a hillside.
. . .
10. Times Square
By Max Neuhaus
1977
Warm, enveloping drones emanate from below a midtown Manhattan grate that serves primarily as a steam vent for the subway. Passersby mistake the sound as municipal in origin, or luxuriate in its unique properties, or both.
. . .
I’d like to close with an exercise we do in a class I teach about sound in the media landscape. Sit somewhere and write down for 15 minutes everything that you hear. After the self-evident sounds are accounted for, it can become arduous — but then the world opens up again. The longer we go on listening, the more things open up to our ears: one’s home, one’s office, a street corner. Even a museum — and even a museum where no art is intended to make a sound.
. . .
Update (2014.01.08): Here’s a shot from the curator, Coates, of the individual notebook pages, each of which has been enlarged to the size of an A2 piece of paper. They’ll be hung shortly:
. . .
More on the exhibit at Coates’ facebook.com page and at ductac.org/art.php. Coates’ home on the Internet is at simoncoates.com. Special thanks to Holly Leach of Albertson Design for the assistance with scanning.
January 6, 2014
The Drone at Light Speed
Still yet swift, the track “A String of Lights Beneath the Lake” by Australia-based musician Tuonela combines the hazy apparation that is drone music with an urgent momentum often considered anathema to drone-ness. If still waters — to borrow a metaphor suggested by the track’s title — run deep, then still music might yet travel at light speed. The held notes, phrases of sheer linear delight, in Tuonela’s track bring to mind such visual parallels as faces contorted in Silly Putty and starships switching on their FTLS hyperdrives. Both those, of course, are variations on warping. This tension between stasis and speed is at the heart of “A String of Lights Beneath the Lake,” a serene mass comprised of elements in turmoil.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/tuonela-1. More from Tuonela at tuonela.bandcamp.com.
January 5, 2014
An Encouraging Junto Nudge
I just sent this following note to the subscribers to the Disquiet Junto email list. It’s about participating in the Disquiet Junto, which is currently in the midst of its 105th weekly project.
Hi, Members of the Disquiet Junto,
This is a quick note to anyone out there who’s still on the fence about participating in this week’s Disquiet Junto project. We’ve had a great showing so far this week — over 30 tracks as of this writing — and certainly more tracks will appear in the remaining 24 hours or so.
Ultimately, the Junto projects are nudges, intended as prompts to assist musicians in being more productive and in trying out compositional approaches that may not be familiar to them (those two things are interrelated).
This first project of the year is a great one for newcomers to join in on for various reasons. The assignment is the same as the very first Junto project, 105 weeks ago, and the same we did at the start of the second year of projects, 53 weeks ago. As such, it’s a project that many members have a familiarity with — in a way, doing the “ice project” is a part of joining in the Junto.
So, anyhow, there are far more people subscribed to this email-announcement list than participate in any particular week, 675 subscribers as of last count, in contrast with the 413 active participants in the Junto, or the varying subset of roughly 30 to 40 who in a given week manage the time to record and upload a track. I’m sending this note out to say that if you’ve been subscribed for some time and have yet to join in on a project, this is a great one to get started with.
Best wishes from San Francisco. I’ve been largely off social networks for the last week or so, and look forward to diving back in tomorrow.
Yours,
Marc Weidenbaum
You can subscribe to the list at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.
More on the Junto at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.
The Sound of One Tree Creaking
“Me recording the tree.” That’s how the photo caption reads. The photo accompanies a track by the “me” in question: Justin Buckley. He is visiting family in Nova Scotia during the current North American storm that has made “polar vortex” a household term. The tree is heard for 32 seconds, creaking in the intense winter wind. It sounds as much like a deck of brittle cards being shuffled or a typewriter making hesitant progress toward a thesis. It’s an audio document of a uniquely fierce and persistent storm, the sort of resolute cold more often documented in photographs, such as this one associated with Buckley’s track, and verbal complaints. Buckley reports that recording the sound was not a simple thing: “Most [attempts] were rendered useless from wind noise, but here’s a short snippet of a tree creaking in the wind, with the sound of a foghorn in the distance. Thought I’d share it with you to mark the occasion.”
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/justin-buckley. More from Buckley, who’s based in Berlin, Germany, at crumblereshape.com and twitter.com/crumblereshape.
January 4, 2014
Fine Populist Minimal Techno
Dance music often arrives by accrual. Layers of rifflets, mostly derived from drum patterns as well as small tonal and melodic elements, join in as a track progresses. This is how “Spooky Version 1″ by RobinGrownTear makes its way. House-music hi-hats, dubby synth approximations of bass drums, and Tangerine Dreamy arpeggios gather together, like a ragtag crew of disparate origins assembled for some greater purpose. Which is to say, fine populist minimal techno.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/robingrowntear. RobinGrownTear is based in the Netherlands.
Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2014.01)
This would be roughly the week of December 30 through January 5.
5 Years Ago (2008): My top-of-2008 list included commercial albums (among them Unitxt by Alva Noto and The Elephant in the Room: 3 Commissions by Mira Calix), free downloads (among them Wobbly’s massive birdsong megamix and computer-addled metal by Drumcorps), and “key processes” (among them the continued rise of netlabels, ambient movie scores, and fetishized sound objects). … At the start of January 2009, I’d checked in on the listens to the Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet project I had put together in September 2006, and noted that it had over 25,000 downloads. The album collected reworkings of music from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, who had put up stems from the album for open-source remixing. Participants included Brian Biggs (aka Dance Robot Dance), Roddy Schrock, Stephane Leonard, John Kannenberg, My Fun, and Mark Rushton. As of this writing, a week or so before 2014, the release is making its way toward 60,000: it has had almost 41,000 downloads on archive.org and an additional 15,000 or so at freemusicarchive.org. In many ways, that Bush of Disquiet endeavor started me down the course that led to the weekly Disquiet Junto projects. … The last two Downstream entries of the year were a piece made on a Nintendo DS port of the Korg DS-10 and piano-based music by Emmanuel Witzthum released on the Stasisfield netlabel. … Among the first Downstream entries of the new year, 2009, were historic Frippertronics pieces from 1978, some Austrian d’n'b, and Berlin sound art. … The quote of the week was Nico Muhly on working with tape. … The image of the week was a taxi-based sound-art project by Staalplaat Soundsystem, from a New Delhi residency. … I posted brief reviews of a DJ Rob Swift album (Dust to Dust) and the score by Alex Wurman to the film What Doesn’t Kill You. … And I wrote about the John Zorn–curated sound installation at the then recently opened Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco:
10 Years Ago (2003): My best albums of 2003 list was posted this week. It included Matmos’ The Civil War, Rhythm and Sound’s The Artists and The Versions, and Brian Eno’s January 07003: Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now. … The first Downstream entry of the year was Human Isolated Bacteria’s Boleros Románticos de Ayer y Hoy (“blippy background jazz, groovy syncopation and whiz bang party music, with occasional bridges of timeless suspense”).
15 Years Ago (1998): My best albums of 1998 list was posted this week. It included Amon Tobin’s Permutation, Autechre’s LP5, and Praxis’ Mold.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
"Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it." http://t.co/ebeTjqHF7E. The 1st @djunto of 2014, 105th overall. ->
OK, now that I've posted the first Disquiet Junto project of the new year, I go back into social-network slumber until Monday, January 6. ->
January 2, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0105: Ice for 2014
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 2, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 6, 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 0105: Ice for 2014
Happy new year! This week’s project is as follows:
Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single sentence as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series on the first Thursday of 2012. Revisiting it a year later, on the first Thursday of 2013, provided a fitting way to begin the new year. Now, at the start of the third year of the Disquiet Junto, it is something of a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a weekly habit. It’s beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
Deadline: Monday, January 6, 2014, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 4 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 “disquiet0105-ice2014” 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 105th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/02/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Photo associated with this project found via Creative Commons at:
January 1, 2014
New Year Dub
One of the beauties of SoundCloud.com is the casual nature of much of its content. Musicians upload not only finished recordings but works-in-progress, which serve as windows into their creative process, arguably providing a more intimate, fluid, and digitally natural listening experience that do sites whose structure is more clearly modeled on the brick’n'mortar system of a traditional record store. Often as not, these experimental, mid-process SoundCloud-housed tracks are brief, in the one-minute range, though in the realm of electronic music, they are only short on first listen — they are then adapted by fellow musicians (unfolding into myriad remixes), or simply set on loop.
A one-minute dub track, such as Kyle TM’s “New Year Dub,” easily turns into a half-hour of trance-worthy listening. In fact, while many short pieces on SoundCloud merely make for repeat listening, in this case it’s Kyle TM’s intent: “Meant to be looped,” he writes in a brief accompanying liner note. The piece has a familiar dub reggae rhythm, tweaked with a squeaky, delectably sour, further-off-the-beat percussive, like a screw is loose somewhere in the sound system.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kyletm. More from Kyle TM, who’s based in Greer, South Carolina, at thekyletm.tumblr.com and twitter.com/thekyletm.
