Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 435
December 1, 2013
Desiccated Folk from Tara Jane O’Neil
The new album from Tara Jane O’Neil (a founding member of Rodan), Where Shine New Lights, isn’t due out until late January, but its releasing label, Kranky, has posted an initial track for free download. Titled “Wordless in Woods,” it’s a gorgeous, slow-motion, desiccated-folk track. O’Neil’s voice is a solitary component amid a lulling hum, the attenuated guitar played at such a pace that the light feedback of what could be a bum cord often rivals it for presence. For RIYL context, the sense in which the tracks strives to delay each passing phrase brings to mind Earth, while its gentleness touches on Low. The closing minute, an out-of-the-blue reverie, hints at O’Neil’s greater ambition. This is an album to look forward to. Where Shine New Lights comes out January 27, 2014.
Guests on the album include Tim Barnes, Jean Cook, Corey Fogel, Anna Huff, Daniel Littleton, Elizabeth Mitchell, Ida Pearle, and Wilder Zoby. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kranky. More from O’Neil at tarajaneoneil.com.
Top 10 Posts & Searches of November 2013
I haven’t done one of these “best of” posts in some time, but they seem useful, especially to new readers.
The 10 most popular posts on this site during November 2013 were: (1) an update on my forthcoming book in the 33 1/3 series on the Aphex Twin album Selected Ambient Works Volume II in which I listed the chapter titles, (2) a demo by musician Dean Terry of the iSEM app (an iOS adaptation of the 1974 Oberheim SEM synthesizer), (3) music by Monolake derived from an airport soundscape, (4) a shoegazey track by Westy Reflector, (5) news of an old Oval album made available for free download, (6) a Disquiet Junto project based on a Ford Madox Ford observation, (7) an autobiographical Disquiet Junto project, (8) code in three different programming languages used by participants in Ford Madox Ford project, (9) the 100th Disquiet Junto project, and (10) an FAQ update to the Disquiet Junto.
The 10 most popular search returns of the month were: gauzy, register, xenakis, anniversary, guardian, compilations, rendition, topic, conlon, joke.
November 30, 2013
1 from the 7th Sequence’s 30
Among the best free-download ambient-leaning experimental music projects is the Sequence compilation series. Each collects a bounty of recent work by a wide range of contributors. The latest, Sequence7, is 30 tracks in all, the selection whittled down from approximately 200 that were submitted for consideration. The recording artists include such notables as Radere, Moon Zero, Guy Birkin, Masaya Ozaki, and Subnaught. Many of these Sequencers have participated in the Disquiet Junto series of weekly creative-restraint composition prompts. A highlight of the current album is Linear Bells, aka David Teboul, whose “San Francisco Broke My Heart” is an aching drone of cello, piano, and field recordings, a thick veil of maudlin langourousness. The sawing on the cello brings to mind the song-less country soundscapes of Boxhead Ensemble, while the way the piano peeks out of the haze suggests moments from Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.
Track available for free download directly at soundcloud.com/linearbells. More on the album at futuresequence.com. More from Linear Bells (David Teboul) at linearbells.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/linearbells.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
It's a Kev Brown instrumentals morning. ->
Google Hangouts is nifty but, based on recent experience, response time and interface are not SMS-ready yet. ->
Oval put up his great "hyperreal" band release the Oh EP for free download: http://t.co/JWzQ8EQnl1. Free for a limited time. ->
Thanks! MT @bldgblog: And @disquiet will be hosting some acoustic thoughts and electronic sonic ambience on @Gizmodo: http://t.co/2egRy26fnd ->
It's 2013 and people still freak when an email list accidentally goes from one-to-all to all-to-all. (For the record, not one of my lists.) ->
Oooh, my Nexus 7 just got 4.4. ->
Excited to have http://t.co/0sUii6Un65 join http://t.co/iI8LCKRNyd + http://t.co/knBSYOh2nb beneath the Gizmodo umbrella. ->
http://t.co/1z7O7QbuD5 #nifty ->
I've got a $50 credit to the OS X App Store and for the life of me I can't think of anything I particularly need. ->
No everyday word seems to confuse Swype-style keyboards as much as "thanks" does. ->
When bitcoin hits its 21 million cap, Steven Moffat will figure a way out of it. ->
Hobby: collecting breathless descriptions of retina screens in advance of 4k arrival. ->
Me too: MT @ablerism: Pleased to join @nathanunbound @disquiet! RT @Gizmodo: Say hello to 3 new subdomains on Gizmodo http://t.co/ERpEnYjwFP ->
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FPYND6scRB ->
Can't find it online, but the hyperreal face-mask trailer for The Following is hella "Come to Daddy." ->
Now my Nexus 4 has 4.4, so it's caught up with my Nexus 7. Email and Feedly are a little troublesome, but it'll work out fine. ->
It used to be that a good article had a good ending — but I’d say these days a good article “ends” with good comments. ->
The Unsilent Night schedule is online: http://t.co/3X9DwoJVpC. Brussels, NYC, and Saskatoon are booked. San Francisco is TBA. ->
.@westyreflector If a single was often an ad for an album, then a video was often an ad for an ad. in reply to westyreflector ->
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving … and the 100th (!) weekly @djunto project. ->
No sound class this week. Next week: online communities, digital music retail, mapping cultural connections. ->
Looking forward to #BlackMetalFriday. It's gonna be a full day of playlists seeded with Sunn O))) + Celtic Frost + Slayer. ->
I'm thankful for lots, but for the moment I'll restrict myself to the 400+ Disquiet Junto folks who share their time and creativity weekly. ->
The first @djunto project was about ice, way back the first week of January 2012. The 100th weekly project (tonight!) is about vapor. ->
Please record the sound of water boiling and make something of it: http://t.co/24OADPUIZw. ->
Major thanks to @soundcloud for hosting the @djunto projects! Here's to another 100 consecutive weeks: http://t.co/4C8WH92xro ->
The Rankin/Bass “Frosty the Snowman” is weird. It's like a musical with just one song. ->
Kitchen glitch. MT @lownote: Spring on tea kettle broke as I went to record for @djunto. Bummer until I heard the frustrated sound it made. ->
Main sound in house now: dryer. Deep drone emanates from back of house, but clatter of zippers bounces off dining-room wall. Surround sound. ->
November 29, 2013
The Sound of Melting Pewter
Few sounds become as routinized as those of one’s own workplace. The process of routinization breeds familiarity, which in turn lends these everyday sounds something akin to transparency. We learn to listen past them, to listen through them, even when they have an intensity that visitors might find distracting, or even annoying. For his new release Oído con plomo, the Colorado-based musician and sound artist C Reider has created a single track that is three quarters of an hour in length and that is comprised of recordings made at the pewter casting studio where he has been employed for 17 years. The sounds move back and forth between drone and rhythm, often situated in a space somewhere in between. Sometimes the sounds are especially peculiar, standing out from the tapping and whirring of machines. Around a fifth of the way through, for example, there are tonal elements like dolphin song, alternating with the fundamental activities of what suggest the manual manipulation of materials.
As antiquated as the idea of pewter casting may seem, the modern world invades on occasion, as when what appears to be the sound of telephone ringing appears. Much of Oído con plomo is the thick white noise of background activity. The source audio was recorded in 1999 and 2013. Reider’s piece brings to mind Vanessa Rosetto’s recording of the process of packing boxes of books, and Lauri Warsta’s fictional audio work “Dictaphone Parcel” of a box experiencing surveillance as it is packed and shipped.
The release is available for free download from the netlabel Impulsive Habitat. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a “netlabel,” it is an online record label that actively, purposefully makes its releases available for free download. There are as many as 500 of these netlabels currently in existence around the world.
The Reider Oído con plomo file is not easily streamable here because it is only available as an MP3 in a Zip file, or as a standalone FLAC, or as a FLAC in a Zip. Both Zips include the cover art. Get the album at impulsivehabitat.com. More from Reider at his vuzhmusic.com outpost, which houses two netlabels that he administers: Dystimbria and Derivative.
November 28, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0100: Vapor Wave
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, November 28, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 2, 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 0100: Vapor Wave
The instruction for this project is simple: Please record the sound of water boiling and make something of it.
Background: This is the 100th weekly Disquiet Junto project. The milestone happened to fall on Thanksgiving in the United States. The simple instruction this week is intended as an echo of the very first Disquiet Junto project (“Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it”).
Deadline: Monday, December 2, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track’s length should be between two and five minutes.
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 “disquiet0100-vaporwave” 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 100th Disquiet Junto project (Record the sound of water boiling and make something of it) at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/11/28/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Associated image found via:
November 27, 2013
A Festivus of Sound
Tomorrow may be one of the more beloved holidays on the United States’ calendar, but a global secular holiday with a moveable dateline and a growing following begins soon after. This is “Unsilent Night,” the brainchild of composer Phil Kline. Each year in cities around the world, people gather with boomboxes and CD players, Bluetooth speakers and makeshift portable audio systems, and they create a lovely collaborative din. Kline’s “Unsilent Night” consists of four complementary (and complimentary — they’re free to download) recordings of sheer sonic tinsel. Individually they are enjoyable to listen to, but the real pleasure comes in hearing them played in near simultaneity on dozens of different audio players as you walk through the city.
When played in public on Unsilent Night, the tracks are delightfully discordant even beyond the intended combination of Kline’s four jigsaw compositions. First of all, no two people start their systems at the exact same time, and the lack of true sync lends the music an echo effect. Second, the playback varies from device to device: well-worn cassette tapes played against high-fidelity CDs, bass-heavy Jamboxes joining in a robot choir with tinny old RadioShack computer speakers. From a distance, it can look like a Say Anything flash mob. Up close, the chiming percussives bring to mind minimalist composer Steve Reich at his most ebullient.
The calendar is being updated at unsilentnight.com/schedule.html. Right now the earliest date is December 6 in Indianapolis, Indiana. Other dates include New York City, where the work originated 21 years ago in Greenwich Village, on December 14; Brussels, Belgium, on December 14; Los Angeles on December 21; and Kansas City, Missouri, on December 8. As of this writing, dates for San Francisco and Montreal, among numerous other cities, are not yet set.
If you bring a boombox to the event, tapes and CDs are usually available, albeit in limited quantities. There are also Android (in the Amazon app store) and iOS apps.
Here’s a video about “Unsilent Night,” filmed to celebrate its 20th anniversary:
More on the composer Phil Kline, who is working on an opera about Nikola Tesla with Jim Jarmusch, at philkline.com. Photo from a San Francisco Unsilent Night shot by Steve Rhodes, via flickr.com.
November 26, 2013
Life After Glitch? Form a Virtual Band.
Ever been in a restaurant and found yourself entranced with the unfamiliar music playing on the stereo system — a glistening, lightly rhythmic piece of ambient pop — only to learn that it’s a scratched CD of Chinese folk tunes or an old Whitney Houston album skipping from one nanosecond snippet to the next?
If so, you are indirectly a fan of glitch. The genre was founded, in large part, on albums by the German act Oval, originally a group but eventually just Berlin-based Markus Popp working on his own. Popp made his reputation by breaking music. On Oval albums, the sound of malfunction was explored for its inherent beauty: slivers of noise, ripe sonic artifacts, and chance collisions.
And then Oval switched gears. Perhaps he’d gotten lonely, because beginning with the Oh EP in June 2010, he made music that at times sounded very much like a band, in particular like the post-rock acts Battles and Tortoise, or moments of splendid squalor from Pavement’s indie-rock catalog. The music on the Oh EP maintains the shimmer and bright cacophony of Oval’s glitch, but employs digital facsimiles of tightly wound guitar strings and drum sets in place of smudged compact discs. The album’s cover depicts a work by sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.
The full set of 15 tracks is streaming here:
Oh EP by Oval
Album available for download (“name your price,” which for the time being includes free) at oval.bandcamp.com. It’s the most recent of 12 albums (of varying vintage) that Popp has posted at his Bandcamp space, dating back to late-1990s glitch work like Dok and Szenariodisk. More on Oval at markuspopp.me.
disquiet.gizmodo.com
These are two things that I think Geoff Manaugh, editor-in-chief of the technology and design blog Gizmodo.com, didn’t know about me when he asked if I’d consider bringing Disquiet.com beneath his website’s expanding umbrella.
1: My “to re-blog” bookmark file has been packed in recent months with scores of items from pretty much all of the Gizmodo-affiliated sites — not just Gizmodo, but io9.com, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Gawker, and Kotaku. Probably Jezebel and Deadspin, too, but the file is too thick for me to tell.
2: Pretty much the first thing that I read every morning with my coffee — well, every weekday morning — is the “Morning Spoilers” at io9.com, the great science fiction website that is part of the Gawker network that also contains Gizmodo.
I knew Manaugh’s work from BLDGBLOG and, before that, Dwell Magazine. He’d previously invited me to involve the weekly experimental music/sound project series that I run, the Disquiet Junto, in the course on the architecture of the San Andreas Fault that he taught in spring 2013 at Columbia University’s graduate school of architecture. And I am excited to work with him again.
And so, there is now a cozy disquiet.gizmodo.com subdomain URL where I’ll be syndicating — simulposting — material from Disquiet.com, as well as doing original straight-to-Gizmodo writing. I’m hopeful that members of the Gizmodo readership might further expand the already sizable ranks of the Disquiet Junto music projects (we just completed one based on a post from Kotaku), and I’ll be posting notes from the course I teach on “sound in the media landscape” at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco.
For new readers of Disquiet, the site’s purview is as follows:
* Listening to Art.
* Playing with Audio.
* Sounding Out Technology.
* Composing in Code.
I’ll take a moment to break that down:
Listening to Art: Attention to sound art has expanded significantly this year, thanks in no small part to the exhibit Soundings: A Contemporary Score at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. That exhibit, which ran from August 10 through November 3, featured work by such key figures as Susan Philipsz (whose winning of the Turner Prize inspired an early music compilation I put together), Carsten Nicolai (whom I profiled in the new Red Bull Music Academy book For the Record), and Stephen Vitiello (whom I’ve interviewed about 911 and architectural acoustics, and who has participated in the Disquiet Junto). But if “sound art” is art for which music is both raw material and subject matter, my attention is just as much focused on what might better be described as the role of “sound in art,” of the depictions of audio in various media (the sound effects in manga, for example) and the unintended sonic components of art beyond sound art, like the click and hum of a slide carousel or the overall sonic environment of a museum. Here’s video of Tristan Perich’s “Microtonal Wall” from the MoMA exhibit:
/
Playing with Audio: If everything is, indeed, a remix, that is a case most clearly made in music and experimental sound. From the field recordings that infuse much ambient music to the sampling of hip-hop to the rapturous creative reuse that proliferates on YouTube and elsewhere, music as raw material is one of the most exciting developments of our time. Terms like “remix” and “mashup” and “mixtape” can been seen to have originated or otherwise gained cachet in music, and as they expand into other media, we learn more about them, about the role such activities play in culture. And through the rise of audio-game apps, especially in iOS, such “playing with sound” has become all the more common — not just the work of musicians but of audiences, creating a kind of “active listening.” This notion of reuse, of learning about music and sound by how it is employed after the fact, plays a big role in my forthcoming book for the 33 1/3 series. My book is about Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Volume II, and it will be published on February 13, 2014, just weeks ahead of the record’s 20th anniversary. As part of my research for the book, I spoke with many individuals who had come to appreciate the Aphex Twin album by engaging with it in their own work, from composers who had transcribed it for more “traditional” instruments (such as chamber ensembles and solo guitar), to choreographers and sound designers, to film directors.
Sounding Out Technology: A briefer version of the Disquiet.com approach is to look at “the intersection of sound, art, and technology.” The term “technology” is essential to that trio, because it was only when I learned to step back from my fascination with electronically produced music and to appreciate “electronic” as a subset of the vastly longer continuum of “technology” that connections became more clear to me — say, between the sonics of raves and the nascent polyphony of early church music, or between creative audio apps like Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers’ Bloom and what is arguably the generative ur-instrument: the aeolian harp. With both Bloom and the aeolian harp, along with its close relative the wind chime, music is less a fixed composition than a system that is enacted. As technology mediates our lives more and more, the role that sound plays in daily life becomes a richer and richer subject — from voice-enabled devices, to the sounds of consumer product design, to the scores created for electric cars:
Composing in Code: Of all the technologies to come to the fore in the past two decades, perhaps none has had an impact greater than computer code. This is no less true in music and sound than it is in publishing, film, politics, health, or myriad other fields. While the connections between mathematics and music have been celebrated for millennia, there is something special to how, now, those fields are combining, notably in graphic systems such as Max/MSP (and Max for Live, in Ableton) and Puredata (aka Pd), just to name two circumstances. Here, for reference, is a live video of the Dutch musician and sound artist Edo Paulus’ computer screen as he constructs and then performs a patch in Max/MSP. Where the construction ends and the performance begins provides a delightful koan:
All of which said, I’m not 100-percent clear what form my disquiet.gizmodo.com activity will take. I’m looking forward to experimenting in the space. I’ll certainly be co-posting material from Disquiet.com, but I’m also planning on engaging with Gizmodo itself, and with its broader network of sites. I’ve already, in advance of this post, begun re-blogging material from Gizmodo and from Gizmodo-affiliated sites: not just “sharing” (in the UI terminology of the Kinja CMS that powers the network) but adding some contextual information, thoughts, tangents, details. I’m enthusiastic about Kinja, in particular how it blurs the lines between author and reader. I like that a reply I make to a post about a newly recreated instrument by Leonardo Da Vinci can then appear in my own feed, leading readers back to the original site, where they themselves might join in the conversation. Kinja seems uniquely focused on multimedia as a form of commentary — like many CMS systems, it allows animated GIFs and short videos to serve as blog comments unto themselves, but it goes the step further of allowing users to delineate rectangular sub-sections of previously posted images and comment on those. I’m intrigued to see how sound can fit into that approach. (It’s no surprise to me that Kinja is innovative in this regard — it’s on Lifehacker that I first learned about the syntax known as “markdown.”) I think that all, cumulatively, makes for a fascinating media apparatus, and I want to explore it.
While I typed this post, it was Tuesday in San Francisco. I live in the Outer Richmond District, just north of Golden Gate Park and a little over a mile from the Pacific Ocean. The season’s first torrential rain has passed, and so the city sounds considerably more quiet than it did just a few days ago. No longer is the noise of passing automobiles amplified and augmented by the rush of water, and the roof above my desk is no longer being pummeled. But where there is the seeming peace of this relative quiet, there is also an increased diversity of listening material. The ear can hear further, as it were — not just to conversations in the street and to passing cars, but to construction blocks away, to leaf blowers, to a seaplane overhead, to the sound of a truck backing up at some considerable distance, and to the many birds that (unlike what I was accustomed to, growing up on the north shore of New York’s Long Island) do not all vacate the area come winter. It is shortly past noon as I hit the button to make this post go live. Church bells have sung a duet with the gurgling in my belly to remind me it is time for lunch. And because it is Tuesday, the city’s civic warning system has rung out.
Dim sum, anyone?
November 25, 2013
Airport Newtonian Sound Science (via Gizmodo)
Studies of the impact of sound can have a heady overestimation of causality, but they’re still worth keeping up on, especially when they include an hour of background listening. Nicola Twilley highlights research on airport soundscapes at gizmodo.com.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/thesoundagency. More on the Sound Agency at thesoundagency.com.
