Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 438

How Hearing Shapes Your Fortune

Rhode Island–based Seth S. Horowitz, author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, is currently taking a busman’s holiday in Japan, recording sounds as he travels. He’s posted the first of these, taken at the Senso-ji Temple in the Asakusa district of Tokyo.

Writes Horowitz of the source event:

A 100 yen coin is deposited, a metal box full of joss sticks is shaken until a numbered stick falls out. The fortunee then opens a wooden drawer corresponding to that number to obtain their fortune.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/universalsense. More on Horowitz at neuropop.com. Image found via wikipedia.org.

Method to Their Moiré

For a few months there’s been a small note in the Current Activities part of this website’s left-hand sidebar mentioning something cool due out toward the end of the year. It isn’t my Aphex Twin book for the 33 1/3 series, Selected Ambient Works Volume II. That’s due out February 13, 2014. No, this is an essay I have in a forthcoming book from Red Bull Music Academy. The book is For the Record: Conversations with People Who Have Shaped the Way We Listen to Music. As the title suggests it is a compendium of new conversations between musicians — excellent pairings (and threesomes) that highlight parallels and contrasts. I used to love assigning these sorts of things when I was a full-time music editor. I think my favorite I ever put together was, back in 1993, asking the music critic Martin Johnson to get Randy Weston and La Monte Young in a room to talk about the blues.

In addition to the conversations, For the Record features introductions to all the involved musicians, and for my part I wrote about the pair Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Olaf Bender, who together run the Raster-Noton record label and in the book talk shop with Uwe Schmidt (aka Atom™). It was a pleasure to spend time luxuriating in their work, which often whittles the rhythmic intent of techno down to myriad displays of patterning. In addition to discussing the Raster-Noton label, the piece covers their work individually (such as the parallels between Nicolai’s music and his Moiré Index and Grid Index design books), and their Diamond Version band, which has released music on Mute and opened on tour for Depeche Mode. The For the Record book is already out in Germany, and arrives in the U.S. in November. In early December I’ll post the text of my Nicolai/Bender piece on Disquiet.com.

Here’s a full list of the conversations in For the Record:

João Barbosa x Kalaf Ângelo x Mulatu Astatke

Bernard Purdie x Jaki Liebezeit

Martyn Ware x Nile Rodgers

Kerri Chandler x Patrick Adams

Gareth Jones x Metro Area

Carsten Nicolai x Olaf Bender x Uwe Schmidt

Benny Ill x Moritz von Oswald

Lee “Scratch” Perry x Adrian Sherwood

Matias Aguayo x Sly & Robbie

DJ Harvey x Ben UFO

Cosey Fanni Tutti x Nik Void

Modeselektor x Mykki Blanco

Erykah Badu x The Underachievers

Just Blaze x Paul Riser

Robert Henke x Tom Oberheim

The full list of essay contributors is as follows. Great company to be among:

David Katz, Philip Sherburne, Sheryl Garratt, David Stubbs, Peter Kirn, Richard Gehr, Lee Smith, Melissa Bradshaw, Derek Miller, Anthony Obst, Rich Juzwiak, Ruth Saxelby, Lloyd Bradley, Gerd Janson, Bill Brewster, John Doran, Drew Daniel, Joe Muggs, Jordan Rothlein, Will Lynch, Marc Weidenbaum, Rachel Devitt, Jeff Mao, Andrew Mason, Paul McGee, Alfred Soto, Simon Price, Phillip Mlynar, and Marisa Aveling.

And there’s video documenting the book’s design and production by Chris Rehberger’s firm, Double Standards:

More on the book For the Record: Conversations with People Who Have Shaped the Way We Listen to Music at rbma15.com.

(Photo of — from left to right — Schmidt, Nicolai, and Bender by Dan Wilton. It appears in the book.)

Digital Chamber Music

Kenneth Kirschner has posted one of his characteristically attenuated compositions to SoundCloud. It is a beautiful piece that hovers gracefully between the sonic realms of chamber music and digital synthesis. There are pulled bows and plinked keyboard notes, but also a wistful haze that is as if the surface noise of some moribund recording media had become part and parcel of the composition. The piece is titled “September 13, 2012,” as each of Kirschner’s works bears as its title the date of its completion.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/kennethkirschner. More from Kirschner at kennethkirschner.com.

Oulipo + Disquiet Junto = Sound Workshop

On Saturday, November 9, I’ll be running a music and sound workshop from 2pm to 5pm at the San Francisco Art Institute. The workshop is part of a week-long series of events titled Subtle Channels: an OuLiPo laboratory. Here’s a brief description of Subtle Channels:

This multi-day celebration, presented by City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in conjunction with the Mechanics’ Institute Library and the San Francisco Art Institute, brings together members of the Oulipo and West Coast creators to trace potential literature from its origins to the present day and into the future, with discussions, readings, and participatory workshops.

Others presenting and presiding over workshops at Subtle Channels include Paul Fournel, the president of the Oulipo, as well as Hervé Le Tellier, Daniel Levin Becker, Rachel Galvin, Roman Muradov, and Doug Nufer.

My workshop’s description, from the Subtle Channels website:

Participants will produce a variety of original works in response to concise instructions, such as a medley of everyday noise, a fragmenting autobiography, and an exercise in municipal minimalism. Musicians and non-musicians are welcome.

To make the best use of the time, please bring a smartphone or other device capable of recording sound, and a laptop with Audacity or another sound-editing tool pre-installed. Basic ability to manipulate (cut, paste) audio would be beneficial, but tutorial assistance will be available on site.

The various projects that afternoon will draw from the approach of the weekly Disquiet Junto projects on SoundCloud, which use creative restraints as a springboard for productivity.

There is no fee for participation, but advance sign-up would be appreciated. There’s a sign-up sheet at the front counter at City Lights Bookstore (citylights.com) in North Beach, or you can reserve a spot by sending an inquiry to subtlechannels@gmail.com.

My sound/music workshop is one of three running on November 9. There will also be a cartooning event, led by Muradov, and writing events in both English and French. There are events earlier in the week as well, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Participants will share their work at an evening show-and-tell event.

More on Subtle Channels: an OuLiPo laboratory, which runs from November 6 – 9, 2013, at subtlechannels.tumblr.com.

The above image is Pierre Cordier’s “Chemigram 31/7/01: Hommage à Georges Perec” from the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The Ambient Music of Lou Reed (RIP)

Lou Reed, cofounder, singer, and songwriter of the Velvet Underground, passed away today at the age of 71. He was a key figure in the pre-punk era of rock’n'roll, which stripped artifice in favor of rudimentary chord progressions and urban narrative. But because contradictions are at the heart of culture, Reed and his band also provided an important bridge between the worlds of rock’n'roll and contemporary art.

Much has been made of Reed having said, “One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.” The comment is often referenced in favor of rock music that has an distinct disinterest in melodic, harmonic, and structural complexity. But one chord, at least in the metaphoric sense, also provided the foundation of some of Reed’s least rock-like recordings, music that aspired to an ambient state: his 1975 noise classic, Metal Machine Music, and his 2007 collection of contemplative soundscapes, Hudson River Wind Meditations.

The latter is a collection of meditative recordings — white noise in contrast with Metal Machine Music’s white heat — that he composed for his own tai chi practice:

The former is one of the most debated albums by a major rock musician. Many see it as a prank, an album of sonic violence that goes beyond merely challenging the ears of its audience. Such dismissal doesn’t explain why Reed returned to the music decades later, or how industrial rock, free improvisation, and noise music made good on the once isolated manifesto. That said, the perception of it as a prank assists in setting Metal Machine Music alongside John Cage’s 4’33″, another perennially reviled work: a wall of impenetrable sound to match Cage’s transparent silence:

Disquiet Junto Project 0095: Discuss Amongst

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 assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, October 24, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 28, 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 0095: Discuss Amongst

This week’s Disquiet Junto project is fairly open-ended. You don’t need to create a new track, necessarily. What you need to do is to post a single track, a relatively recent one, that you would like feedback on from your fellow music- and sound-makers in the Disquiet Junto.

There are three steps to this project, and each step is equally important:

Step 1: Upload a track. Please do not post a track that has previously appeared in the Disquiet Junto.

Step 2: When filling in the various informational fields, be sure to write in some length 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.

Step 3: As tracks are added by other musicians, be sure to comment on at least two or three of them. The more people who participate, the stronger the feedback and conversation will be.

Deadline: Monday, October 28, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between one and six minutes.

Title/Tag: Include the term “disquiet0095-discussamongst” 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 95th Disquiet Junto project, in which musicians post recent tracks with the express purpose of getting constructive feedback, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/24/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Going Underground

Grand Central Station is for much of the day and night a place of contast motion, myriad motions, bodies and trains heading along countless trajectories. Up close it can feel like being at the center of a hurricane. From a distance, it can be a delirious blur. In the microphone of Sepulchra, aka Michael Raphael of Brooklyn, it is a rich white noise punctuated by footsteps and a monotone public address announcer.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/sepulchra. More from Sepulchra/Raphael at sepulchra.com.

Circle Round Berlin as if with Tilda Swinton

When the 2009 film The Invisible Frame was being made, Simon Fisher Turner did some field recordings of the production. The movie, by director Cynthia Beatt, follows Tilda Swinton as she bikes around Berlin — literally around Berlin, in that she is following the path that had once been the Berlin Wall. Writes Turner of his part of the project: “I shot the sound as they filmed and every evening I made a new piece from the day’s rushes. We went to many locations around the invisible wall and its remains. For about an hour I was allowed to wander unsupervised and recorded whatever I wanted. This recording is an edited version of the master.” The recording he mentions is his contribution to the great Touch Radio podcast. His is the 99th in the series. It’s about half an hour of industrial noise, aural signs of life where there had once been an armed silence (MP3).

Download audio file (Radio99.mp3)

Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on the film at invisible-frame.com. More from Turner at simonfisherturner.com.

This Poster Is a Test. It Is Only a Test.

Every Tuesday at noon in San Francisco, California, a siren rings out, after which a voice provides some modicum of comfort by explaining that the siren was a test, only a test. The siren is part of the city’s Outdoor Public Warning System. Brian Scott of Boon Design decided to treat the siren as a symbol for the city — that is, what R. Murray Schafer would have called a “soundmark,” or the sonic equivalent of a landmark — when he responded recently to a call for posters by AIGA SF, the local branch of the professional association for design. The poster project, titled AIGA InsideOutSF, explains itself as follows: “A curated exhibition and silent auction of original posters by some of the most influential San Francisco Bay Area and international creatives, revealing their personal impressions of San Francisco.”

Brian put together a small crew for his poster, which appears up top. The photography, with purposeful echoes of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s sublime horizons, is by Heimo Schmidt. Additional key reference points include Vija Celmins’ graphite drawings of waves and Michael Snow’s 1967 film Wavelength. The waveform, shown at a 90 degree angle from its usual horizontal mode, cascades down the center of the image. The waveform is portrayed as a series of crosses intended to connect the wave to the idea of a map — to align the waveform with 113 sirens distributed around San Francisco (see the map below). This waveform visualization was accomplished by Nick Sowers. As for my role, I weighed in with ideas, writing, and editing. The text on the poster shows the announcement in the three languages it is heard in: primarily English, but also Cantonese and Spanish. The layering is intended to get at the distortion inherent in many of the city’s speakers, and at the overlaying and echo effect of adjacent speakers.

And because the web image of the finished poster doesn’t do justice to the impact of Brian’s art, here is a detail:

More from Brian Scott and Boon Design at boondesign.com. More from Heimo Schmidt at heimophotography.com. More from Nick Sowers at soundscrapers.com.

Our siren poster, by the the way, isn’t the only sonic symbol of San Francisco to be drawn from in the AIGA project. Nor is it even the only one to emphasize a public address system. Below is the wonderful poster submitted to AIGA by Jeremy Matthews and Brett Wickens of the San Francisco–based Ammunition Group. It shows the bullhorn of famed local activist and politician Harvey Milk.

More on the AIGA InsideOutSF poster project at insideoutsf.org. The InsideOut SF Fall Gala, to be held on November 12, 2013, will raise funds for the AIGA (“towards scholarships, educational programming and community events” per the documentation) in an auction of the posters.

Dusk Guitar

“From a Height” is nearly four minutes of gentle, guitar-infused ambience, all just-before-dusk gleams breaking through thick hovering clouds. Layers of glistening chords and picked patterns shimmer in a slow swell of lush stasis. It is by Valiska, who notes in his brief accompanying note that the track is something from a compilation that never saw the light of day.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/valiska. More from Valiska — that is, from Krzysztof Sujata of Calgary, Canada — at valiska.com.