Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 443

Free Oval / Markus Popp Ringtones

Oval, aka Markus Popp, continues to post free recordings to his Bandcamp page. Among the more recent is eight ringtones he released as a promotional EP back in 2010 to coincide with the double album O. This Ringtones EP contains brief tracks of repetitive, minimalist themes, half of them under a minute in length, the longest coming in at 1:23. They post-date the trenchant glitch of Oval’s early work and instead draw from his experiments with band instrumentation, in particular the use of taut guitar string sounds that have a distinct post-rock quality.

Ringtones EP by Oval

Album originally posted for free download at oval.bandcamp.com. The tracks are up for “name your price,” which includes “free.” More from Oval/Popp at markuspopp.me.

The Sound of Consumption

The sound comes from the end of the aisle. A wall of Lego boxes faces a wall of toy trains and other vehicles designed to delight children. The holiday crush is not quite in effect, but it is a weekend and the store is less than a month old, attracting curious shoppers. There is a temporary display at the end of the aisle. The display is a rack of inexpensive novelties, even by Lego standards: blind bags of toy figurines, each in an unrevealing foil package. You will not know which one you have purchased until you have opened it. Except in front of the rack there is a twenty-something man, clean cut and in good health, who has figured out a way around the blind bags. He is taking the Lego “minifigures” packages off the shelf one at a time. In short order, maybe five seconds each, he feels them, caressing the segments to ascertain what is inside: a gingerbread man, a yeti, a mustached policeman. The package design is covered in question marks, like the Riddler’s costume, but the man can essentially see inside. On an adjacent shelf he maintains a stack of the ones he desires, slowly and steadily making his way to a complete set of 16. Except for the brief moment when he switches between bags, there is a constant ruffling of metallic paper, like tinsel yet with an urgent, mechanical anxiousness in place of the seasonal gift-giving spirit.

Pachinko Fury

I’ve regularly said that a multi-floor pachinko parlor in Tokyo is by far the loudest, most aggressive sound I have experienced in person, and I’ve said that as someone who has seen Metallica, Danzig, Fugazi, Slayer, Godflesh, and Napalm Death live in concert, just to name a few bands famed for their volume. The closest I’ve come to the pachinko parlor intensity was probably a Dinosaur Jr. show that was so loud people walked out of the concert hall, though the lack of enthusiasm may also have been because Nirvana was the opening act on that tour, and Nirvana, then still on the rise, was the portrait of a tough act to follow. In any case, as mentioned here recently, Seth S. Horowitz, author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind, is currently in Japan and making binaural field recordings of what he witnesses. His latest item from that information-gathering trip is a pachinko parlor, which he tweeted about earlier this evening:

@disquiet this one's for you: Binaural recording of a pachinko parlor. WARNING: REALLY loud. Turn down your volume https://t.co/nvH64OjWMg

— Seth S. Horowitz (@SethSHorowitz) November 4, 2013

His description of the track, six minutes of white noise so dense with treacly pop music, mechanical fury, and crowd chatter is as follows: “In-ear binaural recording of a soundwalk through 3 floors of the Maruan Pachinko Tower in Shibuya, Tokyo at 11 AM. WARNING: Incredibly LOUD. Use low volume to listen.”

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

A Classic Synth, iOS-ified

Demos of apps by musicians are a great way to explore both their unintended consequences and their inherent strictures. In contrast with promotional videos, which generally show the app used by someone with advanced knowledge of its inner workings, initial demos by new adapters have a more hands-on feel, with the general sense of someone coming to grips with adapting something to their own musical style and performance workflow. What follows is one of Dean Terry’s demo runs through the iSEM app, which as its name suggests is an iOS adaptation of the 1974 Oberheim SEM synthesizer. He’s an especially good reference point. Not only is he familiar with the original, he has two of them in his studio.

Here are his notes on the piece, which has a steady, downtempo, stepwise flavor:

Quick test of the iSEM iOS app. This is a first patch with some live parameter noodling, driven by the built in arpeggiator. Single take, one track.

I have two actual SEMs in the studio. I think comparing is missing the point so I made something that took advantage of what this iOS app does best, which is modulation and polyphony. The best part is the 8 voice programmer which allows you to modify the sound for each of of 8 steps, which you can hear clearly in this test recording (except I’m only using 5 steps).

Recording notes: This is not exactly what the app sounds like raw. It was recorded via the ipad analog outs into outboard studio preamps, eqs, and a stereo compressor. It was then sent through a few mix bus eq’s and compressors in Protools. This is how I treat all iPad apps and other digital sources and it helps make them more vibrant and analog-like.

Two promotional videos for the app:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/therefore. More from Dean Terry at deanterry.com. More on the iSEM app at itunes.apple.com and
arturia.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

RIP, Lou Reed (71). It'll be a Hudson River Meditations day. ->



Read article for free about not doing things for free by guy who acknowledges he did something for free. ->



The ambient music of Lou Reed, RIP: http://t.co/EeN4jebTth ->



Yes! MT @_muncky: best thing about this week's @djunto: it demands you take time to listen rather than just produce: http://t.co/QAf7B9MzCW ->



RT @RBMA: 15 conversations with people who have shaped the way we listen to music. Out soon. #fortherecord #rbma15 http://t.co/S0U0oXhetC ->



Kudos to @geetadayal for getting at the tranformative experience of listening to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music: http://t.co/KTciZa62T2 ->



Layers FTW. MT @boondesign: @disquiet I was listening to SAWII + Stars of the Lid: Refinement was playing underneath on Spotify. Surreal. ->



Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: http://t.co/FrVmKgO1Mx ->



It's been almost two years since the Insta/gr/ambient compilation but SoundCloud + Instagram finally made good on it: http://t.co/HQqh6EX8Sy ->



Still in the "looks forward to looking forward to SHIELD" state. ->



Someone takes the time to post a lengthy negative response to an obituary yet doesn't sign name or use real email address? Ah, discourse. ->



RIP, William C. Lowe (b. 1941), who oversaw the launch of the IBM PC (b. 1981): http://t.co/VKLOo4DnDR ->



I like XXL and read it every month but every time I read XXL I just miss Scratch. ->



RIP, Lou Reed (71). It'll be a Hudson River Meditations day. ->



Today in sound class: the human voice (public address systems, spokespeople, phone menus). Particular focus on Dr Nina Power & pop futurism. ->



Great in-class presentations by students today on the sounds inherent in pool halls and in domestic kitchens. ->



Psyched to have essay in book alongside @chairmanmaonyc @DDDrewDaniel @peterkirn @PhilipSherburne + + + http://t.co/2R3rhitn9k #fortherecord ->



Tonight we moved our monthly SoundCloud API development group to @carbonfive. ->



Question 1: When will Google Drive spreadsheets be available offline on Macs? ->



Question 2: When is A$AP Rocky's instrumental album, Beauty and the Beast: Slowed Down Sessions (Chapter 1), finally coming out? ->



One good thing about my glasses: on Halloween all I do is let a bit of a Superman t-shirt be visible from inside my outer shirt ->



Nothing is scarier than witnessing company after company trying to make itself relevant to Halloween or vice versa. ->



That thing where you waste time looking for ways to make OS X allow you to right click to create a new txt file. ->



It's a good day to listen to Kid Koala. Which is to say, it's a day. ->



Peculiar sentence born of circumstance: Disquiet Junto project #96 (Lou Reed tribute) goes out shortly, now that Halloween has abated. ->



The 96th weekly Disquiet Junto begins. Due this coming Monday. A noise tribute to Lou Reed: http://t.co/iJoAHHGg2b #metalmachinemuse #rip ->



Already 2 tracks in Metal Machine Music tribute. Copper, steel, gold: https://t.co/HO62bSx3PQ Brass, nickel: https://t.co/755tuzGVPL #riplou ->



Q: Did you know RealPlayer is now RealPlayer Cloud? A: No, I didn't. ->



I'm only just beginning to use it much, but this now exists: http://t.co/Z35kkEyEk7. ->



I'm looking for a part-time paid research assistant with interest in sound, tech, music, media, art. Bay Area preferred but not essential. ->



Pretty sure my three-year-old would enjoy it if asked to accompany me to a Saturday afternoon Ableton Push clinic at Robotspeak. ->

Disquiet Junto Project 0096: Metal Machine Muse

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 31, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 4, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

This week’s project is a tribute to Lou Reed, who passed away earlier this week. His album Metal Machine Music from 1975 is a classic early noise endeavor. The project this week is straightforward. Using the phrase “Metal Machine Muse” as your guide, create a tribute to Metal Machine Music. Please employ at least one actual metal in your work, and note it in the title of your track.

Deadline: Monday, November 4, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between one 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 “disquiet0096-metalmachine” 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 96th Disquiet Junto project, in which metal machine music is made in tribute to the late Lou Reed, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/10/31/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Image found via citizenarcane.com.

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.