Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 436
January 11, 2014
Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2014.02)
This would be roughly the week of January 6 through January 12.
5 Years Ago (2009): I wrote about the 246 and Counting exhbit, which had closed the previous Sunday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. By my rough estimate, exactly one of those 246 pieces had sound. It was by Diller + Scofidio. … I wrote about my experience at a Richie Hawtin concert in Chiba outside Tokyo the month prior, and I reflected on how cellphones had changed raves. (The photo here was shot at an outdoor mall near the Makuhari Messe, where the concert was held.) … I made a list of 11 things I wished at the time that my fifth-generation (“classic”) iPod could do. It’s kinda sad how few of them were ever implemented. … There was a review of Monolake’s Atom/Document album. … The image of the week was of a “recording studio as art installation” by Robert Kusmirowski. … The quote of the week was RZA talking about the late Isaac Hayes: “One Isaac Hayes song has made over 20 hip-hop songs. Look at ‘Walk On By.’ It’s a nice three-minute song by Dionne Warwick, but when Isaac got ahold of it, it became soulful, pimp-daddy, ride-in-your-car, lean-back, 12-minute song, restructured with organs and a flute.” … And the Downstream entries for the week included one-song hip-hop/r&b mash-ups by Y?Arcka, funk hidden by Hiroshi Kumakiri in squelchy noise, cello-tronic wonderment by Ted Laderas (aka the Ooray), material from Taylor Deupree’s “one sound each day” project, and quiet noise from Baraclough.
10 Years Ago (2004): This week I posted a lengthy interview (“The Organization Musician”) with Robert Henke, aka Monolake. I posted the transcript along with the profile article, written for the magazine e|i, that had resulted from it. … The quote of the week was from a lyric sung-spoke by Cake’s John McCrea on “The Headphonist,” a song off the Mexican rock band Kinky’s then new album, Atlas:
At this moment, I’m listening to a very, very quiet song / I’m walking alone again, with my headphones on again … sometimes it seems like everything I see has a sound and if it does — what is the shape of silence?
And these were the Downstream entries of the week: music on guitar for film shot out train windows by Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski), a lovely reworked Parisian field recording by Soundvial (aka Ken Reisman and Matt Simon — if anyone knows what came of them, please let me know), video of Brian Eno talking about the Long Now Foundation (which marks its 10th anniversary in 2014), Robert Willim (aka Selko) making much of noises from a sugar refinery in Sweden, and electronica from Alexander Wendt.
15 Years Ago (1999): Nothing this week.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
It was quite nice to be largely off social media for a couple weeks, but it's good to be back. ->
First day of new year back at my desk. Drinking my iced coffee. Listening to music made of sound of ice in a glass: https://t.co/rhNutPVub8 ->
Not sure which I enjoyed more: the "frak" in the premiere of Helix or the "ka-ching" elevator cue at start of most recent The Good Wife. ->
Yes, this coming Thursday's new Disquiet Junto project will be about the weather. ->
Evening sounds: laptop typing, passing automobiles (some evidently ignoring a well-lit stop sign), general electric hum. ->
And there's that time a Dubai art gallery asked me to recommend 10 works of sound art — and then hung it on the wall: http://t.co/CaMXq5hjKp ->
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->
Yo, people at CES this week, did any of you spy any new Nexus 7 (2013 model) keyboard cases? ->
The choreography-themed Disquiet Junto project is getting closer. It relates, tangentially, to my Aphex Twin book. Details in near future. ->
iPad busker: http://t.co/zBpNJnGIQv #instagram #music #urbanstudies #415 ->
Stoked. I'll be teaching my course on sound in the media landscape again this semester at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. ->
Regarding previous post, people get awful confused on the bus if the automated ticketing machine doesn't beep when swiped. ->
In San Francisco before Jan 31? Get to Highlight Gallery (Kearny St) for Chris Fraser show. Enter with 1 eye closed: http://t.co/uYoZozt1cX ->
RIP, Amiri Baraka (b. 1934). His book Blues People is pretty essential reading. ->
You know the day you go to the library for some quiet to get some work done is the day they are installing new bookshelves with hand drills. ->
Treat the weather chart as a graphically notated score: http://t.co/Rkg9R2iwVI. Cc @djunto ->
January 9, 2014
Disquiet Junto Project 0106: Sonar Vortex
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.
Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as the project proceeds:
This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, January 9, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 13, 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 0106: Sonar Vortex
This week’s project is about graphic notation. We’ll find the music inherent in weather patterns. The procedure is as follows:
Step 1: Go to the website WeatherSpark.com. Enter the city/town where you live.
Step 2: Find the weather for January 10, 2014. (Depending on when you do the project, this will either be a prediction or a matter of historical record.)
Step 3: This weather website has many viewing options, but the default is to just see the temperature, and you should only see the temperature for this project. The image should roughly resemble the one associated with this post (if not visible, see image at disquiet.com). The chart depicts the weather altering over the course of the day, and has it shown in various bands, with the actual/predicted temperature as a black line, and historical highs, lows, averages, and other data depicted in more subtle shades. For additional information about reading the weather chart, visit this URL: http://goo.gl/3fRGwW. Make a screenshot of the day’s weather chart of your area, and trim it to just show that one day. Be sure to associate that image with your track, so the listener can view it.
Step 4: Produce an original track in which the weather chart is read from left to right as a musical score. Perhaps you’ll assign a different instrument or tone to each band or line. Perhaps you’ll align pitches with temperatures. Perhaps you’ll set the pace based on the time of day.
Deadline: Monday, January 13, 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 “disquiet0106-sonarvortex” 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 106th Disquiet Junto project (“Treat the weather as a graphically notated score”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2014/01/09/disqui...
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
15 Weeks: The Role Sound Plays in the Media Landscape
This coming spring 2014 semester I will, again, be teaching my course on the role of sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
The class meets Wednesdays from noon until 2:50pm. There are 15 weeks in all, running from January 29 through May 14 (there’s no class on March 19). The course is divided roughly into thirds. The first third is about listening, the second third (“Sounds of Brands”) is about how companies and products use sound to define themselves in the market, and the final third (“Brands of Sounds”) is about how sound-related companies (music social networks, record labels), people (musicians, bands), and products (headphones, record albums) define themselves. In the Academy of Art’s catalog (online at academyart.edu), the course goes by the title “ADV 499-30: Special Topics: Sound Branding.”
This PDF summarizes the syllabus.
Previous posts about the course are collected here under the “sounds-of-brands” tag.
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.
