Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 433
December 14, 2013
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Super-minimal techno made from the sounds of three analog switches. A track from the 101st weekly Disquiet Jun… ♫ http://t.co/LbkP5bTAD2 ->
Spoiler anxiety is so high, I eagerly await people complaining that waveform visualization spoils the good parts of new songs. ->
Confused that Metallica didn't play "Trapped Under Ice" at its Antarctica gig. #sadbuttrue ->
RT @SoundCloud: There are 5 days left in the competition to find the Most Beautiful Sound in the World. Enter a captured sound today: http:… ->
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->
Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol II disappeared from US iTunes for several months. Now back with track #s replacing makeshift titles. ->
"On" and "Ventolin," the two Aphex Twin EPs/singles that bookended Selected Ambient Works Vol II, now on Rdio. ->
San Francisco Tape Music Fest has been announced: http://t.co/yNJVfOPznZ Features: Hafler, Reich, Payne, Xenakis, Caruthers, Westerkamp … ->
Nice. If you use Nova Launcher on Android, the KitKat-UX update just went live. Full bleed on wallpaper (under navigation) is nice. ->
Tomorrow in sound class: soundwalk in downtown San Francisco, discussion of Southland (TV), selling of audio equipment (e.g., headphones). ->
Leave it to me to schedule a soundwalk during one of San Francisco's most bitter cold snaps in recent memory. We'll start indoors, for sure. ->
Playing browser-tab Jenga again. ->
"It’s very unfair voting. It’s who you know.” That's Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. #time ->
RIP, jazz guitarist Jim Hall (83): http://t.co/6ZOul2SqRy ->
RIP, former Napster executive Milton Olin, Jr. (65): http://t.co/WvceeWZFUN ->
mid-mid-season penultimate, post-mid-season denouement, off-season easter egg, alternate-reality reality tv, canonical spin-off ->
Misread something about midseason finales on the CW and thought it meant the cast needed to take a break to study for finals. ->
Morning downtown soundwalk plans: Nordstrom merchandising, Yerba Buena MLK waterfall, Salvation Army bells, Market St listening sculpture. ->
Last student presentation today: mantra (om, aum). Things came full circle to our discussion of Gordon Hempton's idea of "American mantra." ->
Took class on soundwalk of downtown San Francisco. We were confronted by evangelical with battery-powered megaphone. A kind of serendipity. ->
RIP, Joe Bihari (88), early r&b record label founder: http://t.co/GrZjC11gpG ->
Cibo Matto and Luscious Jackson both have new records. Who would make that a trifecta? ->
President of your college sends alumni holiday card. Photo is credited to member of class of '15. You're not sure if it's 2015 or 1915. ->
That not-so-distant future when all bricks'n'mortar businesses are food, medicine, or tech support — and the lines between those blur. ->
Not a speaker: http://t.co/3kSam3SriE ->
RIP, New Orleans music advocate George Buck (84): http://t.co/hTlfp4WDvo. Been 10+ years since I left NOLA. I gotta get back for a visit. ->
Writing about sound in art. Which of course means writing about the Parker novel Deadly Edge. ->
Man, only two more Disquiet Junto projects for 2013. Bunch of cool stuff planned for 2014, including getting back into live concert events. ->
By the way, the plan for the 102nd weekly @DJunto project will be: sonic tinsel. It goes live shortly. ->
There's word that Polish noise musician Zbigniew Karkowski (b. 1958) passed away. I interviewed him back in 2000: http://t.co/MkTe1sITto ->
The 102nd Disquiet Junto project is live. Make secular holiday music: http://t.co/PTgLYsNweA + http://t.co/FlT55RXosD ->
Man, the new WordPress admin dashboard looks good. ->
Disappointed. Was expecting Beyoncé's next project to be an Andy Goldsworthy collaboration. ->
Every time I re-read Rashomon it's like it's a different story. ->
17 years ago this afternoon I purchased the Disquiet .com URL. Here are 17 sentences reflecting on that time: http://t.co/RaIwoWW1Z1 ->
WordPress 3.8 is named Parker in honor of Charlie Parker, but I'm just going to lie to myself and say it's the Westlake/Stark character. ->
Pretty much going on a social-network break until Jan 6, 2014. See you on the other side. ->
December 13, 2013
A Drone in Progress
The Bell Mechanical describes the drone in question as a work in progress, which begs the question as to how it might be improved. Drones in general have a holistic if not entirely natural aura to them. The distinction is that they often sound self-contained, almost automated, more field recording than composition, and yet they also generally seem inherently technological — the sound of machines, not of the natural world. “The Bethel Construction Company,” by the Bell Mechanical, is such a drone: the hum of a low level industrial activity, albeit with choice textural elements. Given that it is, apparently, unfinished, one wonders what alterations might be implemented: more or less variety of momentary glitches, a change in key or root tone, more of a sense of development? In any case, it is quite enjoyable as it currently stands. Or perhaps when the musician says it’s a drone from a series he’s been working on, as he does in the brief accompanying note, it is the series he’s working on, not the drone itself. Perhaps this one is done, and a new one is in the works.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/thebellmechanical. More from the Bell Mechanical (aka Salem, Massachusetts–based M.J. LeBlanc) at thebellmechanical.com.
A San Francisco Soundwalk
We were confronted on the street corner by an evangelical wielding a large, battery-powered megaphone. This being a soundwalk, the appearance on this very cold day of the screaming man in the t-shirt was something akin to an act of serendipity. As he burdened us with the fear of eternal damnation, all I could think was: “My, what a perfect specimen of the urban soundscape.”
A soundwalk is a docent tour of everyday reality. A docent in a museum walks a group of visitors through the galleries and discusses the art: drawing connections, recounting history, responding to and posing questions. The leader of a soundwalk describes the sounds that are encountered en route — how they function as part of the overall soundscape, what they mean culturally, what their origin is, how they set context and are shaped by context.
The “we” on this cold winter Wednesday in San Francisco was myself along with students (a mix of BAs and MFAs) from the course that I teach on sound at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. The course’s subject is the role of sound in the media landscape. It is divided into three sections: how to listen; how objects, services, and organizations employ sound to express themselves (industrial design, jingles, etc.); and how music-related products (bands, stereo equipment, social networks) express themselves in non-sonic ways.
I had mapped out the soundwalk agenda in advance, but the world has a way of intervening, and not just in the form of an angry man hellbent on, well, talking about hell. Which is fine — in fact, interruptions are part of the plan. An itinerary, as they say, is the map, not the territory.
What follows are some key moments along the walk, some planned, some chance:
Simulated Activity: The tour started early on Wednesday morning at the entrance to the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, near the corner of Fifth. Inside the mall, if you closed your eyes, you might have thought it was as busy as holiday shopping could get. In fact, the only business with customers was a coffee shop on the basement level, where office workers and mall staff were lined up for post-dawn caffeine. The mall, however, seemed to brim with activity because the house music — that is, the music played on the speakers from the ceilings — was loud, upbeat pop. It was downright noisy, in pop-punk sort of way. The noise provided a simulacrum of activity. Without it, the mall would have felt like an airport at 3am: ghostly, void. The noise was a form of wishful, self-fulfilling prophecy. It set the pace for commerce, and in time consumers would arrive and adhere to that pace.
Score-by-Accrual: While still in the mall, we discussed how the structure had its own score-by-accrual, a score in addition to the “official” music. The majority of the individual stores had their own interior musical playlists, and these sounds leaked out and merged in the atrium and walkways. These individual playlists served as cues to potential shoppers, and as such were distant descendents of the barkers at stalls at the bazaars of yore. They also served, once one was inside a specific shop, to block out the sounds of the rest of the mall. The result is a music arms race.
Horns and Chatter: We walked back out to Market Street and headed east, toward 4th Street. The noises of the street provided a clear contrast to the music of the mall. There was no single overarching sound. There was instead a mid-level cacophony of horns and chatter, street cars and shuffling. Each time, though, that I attempted to suggest this contrast between mall and street to my students, the siren of an emergency vehicle managed to muffle my voice.
Different Kinds of Quiet: When we reached 4th Street, we turned south and immediately experienced just how quiet a simple change in direction could be. The bustle of Market subsided. The mall had presented itself as an interior city, but in fact the rules of the mall city differ from those of the actual city. In particular, stores on the street were not each blaring their own scores. Noise ordinances take care of that, as do the closed doors of cold winter days. Of course, the city doesn’t need music to suggest activity. It simply is active. And when it isn’t active, that quietude is generally welcome — unlike in the mall, where it suggests economic downfall.
A Private Silence: On the way down 4th Street we passed the entrance to a building with a large, artfully barren lobby, and discussed how the lobby provided, with its visual and literal quiet, a salve for those who entered. In a city, money buys many things, key among those things a relief from the pressures of the city.
Reel Life: At the corner of 4th and Mission we stopped — briefly, because soon the angry man with the megaphone appeared — to look up at the logos emblazoned on the exterior wall of a newly refurbished shopping mall. The ones high above the adjacent corner emphasized the movie theater situated on the upper floors of the mall. It was noted that these signs announced the presence of an Imax screen, but not of the sound systems. The heralding of high-quality sound comes and goes just as hemlines rise and fall. There are periods when THX and Dolby logos are everywhere. This is, at least in downtown San Francisco, not one of those times, even though this theater features screens with Dolby Atmos, which is barely a year old. Even on the website of the theater, the Atmos brand is subsumed as part of the ETX (“enhanced theatre experience”) brand.
Holy Noise: We paused in front of the lovely St. Patrick Church, whose congregation dates back to the mid-1800s, and talked about the role that church bells play in a city, about the unique nature of that accommodation. It is difficult to imagine a new kind of business or organization appearing in a city and being allowed to make such a regular contribution to — or intrusion in, depending on your point of view — the city’s soundscape. And yet around the city, around the world, church bells ring out repeatedly, marking not just the hour, but regular times of prayer. (Photo of St. Patrick Church by Andrew Crump.)
Water Wall: Mission Street is fairly narrow between St. Patrick and the Yerba Buena Gardens, divided by a midsection, and the park area feels quite remote from the city. Part of that sense of ease in the park is owed to the constant waterfalls of the Martin Luther King, Jr., memorial that lines the rear of the space. In addition to being lovely, and filling the urban valley with a light mist, it also provides a subtle white noise that blocks out much of the city’s intruding sounds.
Unscheduled Playtime: Among the many chance incidents that informed our walk, a favorite of mine was the oversize poster for the Jacques Tati film Playtime that we saw on the inside wall of a French-themed cafe at one corner of Yerba Buena. Playtime was one of two films I had the students watch as part of their homework this semester, the other being The Conversation (our classroom is just blocks from where the openning of The Conversation was filmed, which makes the surveillance theme all the more eerie). Next semester I may swap out one of those films for Diva.
Ambisonic Planning: We crossed back over Mission Street and made our way up the alley alongside St. Patrick and the Jewish Contemporary Museum. Just two steps from the sidewalk, and the noise of the street, in particular the idling of a delivery van, largely disappeared, the result of trajectory, but also of some sizable concrete structures. I talked a bit about the work of Arup, the architectural and engineering consultancy with offices a few blocks away, and how it employs ambisonic technology to allow architects and urban planners to test in a virtual space how structures will influence sound in real space, how materials, forms, and other variables shape not only the physical but sonic space in which people interact.
Parabolic Fun: The soundwalk concluded back on the sidewalk on the south side of Market Street. Here an installation by the Exploratorium as part of the city’s Living Innovation Zone program had two oversized concrete hemispheres situated in such a way that anyone sitting in one could converse with the person sitting opposite them. (There is, apparently, also an “singing bench” that involves a completed electric current, but we didn’t see or hear it on this walk.)
And, this being an academic soundwalk, there was homework.
Students are to map three sounds in a two-block radius of the building at the corner of Bush and Kearny that houses our classroom:
The assignment is: “Pin the spots where those sounds originate. Then write up for each spot a sentence or two in which you (1) describe the sound and (2) note the sound’s meaning, utility, function, or some other aspect.”
If you live in the area and want to upload your own map here, or a map of your neighborhood, that would be excellent.
17th Anniversary of Disquiet.com
Seventeen years ago today I purchased the URL Disquiet.com.
Each passing year, when I have the time, I write a bit about that process, that time period.
I think I’ll give myself the additional Oulipo constraint of utilizing only as many sentences as there are years to the anniversary, though of course parentheticals, em-dashes, semi-colons, and other delaying tactics will allow me some leeway.
One constraint that has been consistent over the years: I don’t read back what I’d written before, because part of this semi-annual reflection is allowing mis-rememberings to seep in; I’ve seen and read Rashomon enough to appreciate the value of multiple viewpoints, all the more so when those multiple viewpoints are one’s own.
In 1996 I had moved to San Francisco right around my birthday, August, from Sacramento, where I’d been living since 1989, after moving out from Brooklyn in 1989 to take a job at a music magazine, Pulse!, published by Tower Records.
I’d had various FTP and low-key web presences since 1994, around when 1993′s Mosaic browser gave way to the Netscape browser, and mostly I used them as places to store small documents, to link to things of interest (in 1994 there was only so much of non-scientific, non-governmental interest on the then very new World Wide Web), and to practice my HTML.
I considered various names for Disquiet.com, including Yellow and Cilantro, but eventually went with Disquiet because I was under the spell of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and because, clearly, the word fit so well with what I was interested in: quiet music, sound manipulated by electronics, shifts in culture as a result of technological augmentation.
As I recall, purchasing the URL involved a lot of non-Internet activity, including some phone calls and faxing.
It also took quite a while for the DNS system to function properly, so that entering the URL into the browser brought up the web page.
Even then, server time-outs and other issues would often yield the site not loading.
I was, at the time, newly installed as editor-in-chief of a website about San Francisco (Citysearch.com), and my anxious weekend duties included waking up early and testing if the site was live (which it quite often was not), and then dealing with IT to correct the situation.
At first, Disquiet.com was simply a repository of material I had published elsewhere, primarily at Pulse! (along with its sibling publications Classical Pulse! and epulse), where I continued to contribute until the magazine closed in 2002 — this is why the site’s earliest posts actually predate the site’s debut; only later on, when my friend Jorge Colombo suggested that I start date-stamping my posts, did this site become what would be termed, later still, a blog.
Among my first freelance pieces for Pulse! after leaving the magazine fulltime was an interview with Aphex Twin for his quasi-eponymous Richard D. James Album — I had no idea at the time that I would 17 years later write a book about Aphex Twin, albeit about the record he had released two years prior, Selected Ambient Works Volume II.
I would eventually write the cover story to the final issue of Pulse!: Missy Elliot.
The Aphex Twin interview took place in corporate housing (i.e., Noe Valley apartment abandoned by a senior Citysearch manager and filled with small cots, like a safe house for wayward travelling salespeople), while I looked for an apartment (eventually landing one in the Richmond District, about which at the time I knew absolutely nothing) during what was probably an even more difficult time to find housing than is the case today.
I frequently make lists of the 10 things I most thankful for, and this website has never dropped off — and I am very much looking forward to what I will do on it (and tangentially off it) in 2014.
A web search informs me that December 13, 1996, was a Friday, just as it is today — so much for bad luck.
December 12, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0102: Sonic Tinsel
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, December 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 16, 2013, as the deadline.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0102: Sonic Tinsel
This week’s project has a simple, fairly open-ended instruction. Tis the season, so we will contribute by creating secular holiday music. Record a one-minute track of loop-able background music that can be described as glistening, reflective, and gentle.
Deadline: Monday, December 16, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track’s length should be one minute.
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: Include the term “disquiet0102-sonictinsel” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free 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 102nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (Record original secular holiday music: glistening, reflective, gentle) at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/12/12/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Image associated with the project found via Creative Commons at:
December 11, 2013
Threadbare Exotica
“Shake Rain” by Oval Angle starts like a white-noise whir. Given that there is so much white noise flourishing in experimental music of late, one wouldn’t be surprised, let alone disappointed, if it had continued with its wooly, slightly jittery gait. But then brushy shakers and a fluttery keyboard line, of the sort that Money Mark made famous in his solo outings when away from the Beastie Boys, cut through. It’s a thrilling little ditty, bracing and fully assured. It’s threadbare exotica: lounge pop made with the spirit of Fourth World music, all rudimentary resources put to chill use. It’s a teaser for the full (cassette and download) album Conversation with a Table, which has both a 2013 release date and a “coming soon” notice — given that it’s December 11, that makes for a short event horizon. Looking forward to the full thing.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jordskredmusic. Oval Angle is Geran Knol of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. More from Knol at jordskred.com and geranknol.nl.
December 10, 2013
100th Podcast, 20 Field Recordings
The Touch Radio series of podcasts, an offshoot of the esteemed Touch Editions label, has reached its momentous 100th episode, and it is marking the occasion with just the sort of low-impact gesture that would be expected of an enterprise that traffics in the everyday. See, much of the Touch output is field recordings: expertly recorded, lovingly sourced, casually framed documents of the sonic quotidian. The 100th episode features a montage, a medley as it were, of recordings from the archives of BJNilsen.
Download audio file (Demona.mp3)
The sources range from ports to cemetaries, industrial factories to fishmarkets. The full list is as follows: Beachy Head, Eastbourne, England; Karl Marx Tomb, Highgate Cemetery, London, England; Whitstable Bay, Kent, England; CleanCar Berlin, Mitte, Germany; Temple Gas Works, Glasgow, Scotland; Fruitmarket City Hall, Glasgow, Scotland; Port of Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Carlsberg Brewery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Unknown Music School, Naples, Italy; Galleria Umberto, Naples, Italy; Barbed Wire, Todmorden, England; Side Street, Lisbon, Portugal; Tempelhof Airfield, Berlin, Germany; Cave, Durness, Scotland; Fishmarket, Via Tribunali, Naples, Italy; Hatún, Reykjavik, Iceland; the Jacobite Steam Train, Armadale, Scotland; London Olympic Rehearsal, Islington, London, England; Boleskine Cemetery, Scotland; Train Bridge, Nijmegen, Netherlands (MP3). The sensory overload is titled “Bottomless Perfume.”
Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More on Nilsen, who also did the very first Touch Radio podacast, at bjnilsen.com.
December 9, 2013
Drum Solos Revisited
The drum solo has long been synonymous with extravagant posturing, with the worst excesses of rock’n'roll virtuoso exhibitionism. The reputation is unfortunate, but whatever one thinks of drum solos, the forthcoming album of solo drum work by Machinefabriek is something entirely apart from the usual associations. The source audio for Machinefabriek’s album — its bland title, Drum Solos, putting to rest concerns of showmanship — is all analog drum equipment, yet as evidenced by a six and a half minute preview track posted to his soundcloud.com account, it has nothing to do with the crowd-rousing arena epics of yore.
It is, instead, a patient, occasionally irritant-exuding, and all around thoughtfully considered endeavor. The equipment is used more for textural than percussive effect, and the extent to which there is anything akin to a rhythm or a beat is how the gong-like cymbals take the form of slow, undulating sine waves. The music is processed this way and that, at times deeply removed from the original audio, including what appears to be a backwards effect.
Here’s Machinefabriek on the project:
Driven by my love for solo albums by drummers and percussionists like Jon Mueller, Wil Guthrie, Nick Hennies and Burkhard Beins, I’ve made Drum Solos. It’s my take on a solo drum record, despite the fact that I lack the talent to hit a steady beat or a play a drum roll. Instead, I used the sounds of a drum kit as a sounce for further processing.
I booked a rehearsel room with a drum kit, and recorded as much sounds as I could in one afternoon. Hitting, bowing, stroking, whatever ways I could find to create sounds, I recorded. And these soundfiles were chopped and screwed til it sounded like what you hear on the album.
Each track focusses on one part of the drum kit. I like to think that purposefully employed limitations like that make me more creative, and my work more focussed. It’s part of the aim to make my music as minimalistic and ‘pure’ (whatever that may be) as possible. In this case it resulted in a short but varried and at times meditative album that might not have any virtuoso drum acrobatics on it, but shows its quality on a more subtle level.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/machinefabriek. Machinefabriek is Rutger Zuydervelt of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. More from him at machinefabriek.nu.
December 8, 2013
Music from What Ails You
Alison Doyle has not posted a new track to her SoundCloud account in nine months. The last one was less than a minute in length, a field recording of the sound of the Arts Music Building at Cornish College. What is heard is someone’s piano practice, routine stuff, from a distance. The music, the performance, is but a portion of the overall audio, however — the remainder is wind noise and bird song and a significant amount of otherwise everyday ambience. The second most recent Doyle track is also nine months old, and it tells a specific story, in firm contrast to the field recording, which is willfully and expressly quotidian. This other piece, “Bloodwork,” is a slow, steady, explorative piano piece. It takes its time, rarely moving beyond its rudimentary, and yet thoroughly engaging, melodic line.
The rhythm is the thing here. If it sounds like martial music, solemn in its own way, that seems fitting as Doyle wrote at the time that it came out of her experience of damaging one of the core parts of her toolset: her left hand:
Mostly improvised, this piece was written one week after stabbing a knife through my hand. My apologies for the seriously flawed mastering and wonky recording; a work in progress and so thankful I didn’t permanently damage my hand.
As such, the work brings to mind other musicians’ response to injury, such as Brian Eno’s sick bed revelation, as he recounted in his liner notes to his Discreet Music album in 1975, which laid the groundwork for his ideas about ambient music, as well as Nils Frahm’s 2012 album Screws, which took its title from the items in his hand after he damaged it. Frahm, like Doyle, is a pianist. The Disquiet Junto, shortly after the release of Screws, did a collection of reworkings of his recording, essentially adding our collective figures in the temporary absence of his out-of-commission one.. It is difficult to listen to the Arts Music Building field recording after listening to Doyle’s “Bloodwork” and not imagine her sitting there, patiently waiting — well, perhaps not patiently — to heal enough to get back at it.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/alliedee.
December 7, 2013
Modular Jazz
The musician who goes by mudlogger, aka Ubon Ratchathani of Thailand, has been uploading modular synthesizer experiments. Among them is this piece, “OrLo,” which he describes as “modular jazz.” No doubt it gets that description because the white noise percussion suggests a robotic trap set, and the intransigent pneumatic piping sounds like a European free jazz saxophone solo. Or perhaps it’s some source material surfacing through heavy manipulation.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mudlogger. More from mudlogger at twitter.com/bitchhands.
You can get a glimpse of (and short listen to) his modular setup in this Vine video:
Video located at Vine video.
