Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 443
July 29, 2013
Everything Medleys with the Night (MP3)
Timo Andres’ album Home Stretch, due out tomorrow, July 30, includes variations on work by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, as well as the fully original composition from which the release takes its name. A live recording from 2010 of the Eno piece, titled “Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno,” is available for free download at Andres’ site (MP3), performed by the Metropolis Ensemble, conducted by Andrew Cyr. The composer describes it as “a 19th-century style ‘orchestral paraphrase’ on the subject of Eno’s music, focusing on the albums Before and After Science and Another Green World, with some Apollo by means of an introduction.”
Download audio file (eno_paraphrase.mp3)
The full album is streaming for free this week at npr.org, from whom the above photos is borrowed. The performance was recorded at Angel Orensanz Center in May 2010. More on Andres at andres.com. More on the album at nonesuch.com. More on the Metropolis Ensemble at metropolisensemble.org.
July 26, 2013
Filtered in a Modular Way (MP3)
Imitation isn’t the sincerest form of flattery. The sincerest form of flattery is taking several tracks by someone and putting them through enough modular-synth filtration that they come out sounding like mere sonic sediment, whisps of flittery noise, sine waves heard as shadows of themselves, digital vapor hanging in the still air. At least that’s what Shadowselves (aka Medford, Massachusetts–based Michael T. Bullock) has done with/to work by Pataphor (aka Shannon Smith).
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mikebullock.
July 25, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0082: Minimal Haydn
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 evening, California time, on Thursday, July 25, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 29, 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 0082: Minimal Haydn
This week’s project is another in a series of explorations of the concept of genre as a constraint. (The “downtempo” exercise went well several weeks ago, project 79, and this is another in that mode.) The genre this time is “minimal techno.” The source material is from another genre entirely: “classical,” specifically chamber music in the form of a string quartet. The goal of this project is to derive elements from the source material in the service of a track that would fit in the prescribed genre.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Download the MP3 track at the following URL. The track is the third movement of Franz Haydn’s String Quartet in F Major:
Step 2: Listen through the full 1:55 of the track, noting the time codes of source elements that could lend themselves to a minimal techno track. Aim for roughly between three and six.
Step 3: Extract the handful of elements that you located in Step 2.
Step 4: Compose and record an original track that you feel conforms to the genre of minimal techno, using only the elements from Step 3. You can manipulate them in any way you choose, though at some point in the track they should each be somewhat recognizable from the source material. You cannot add any other sounds.
Deadline: Monday, July 25, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track should have a duration of 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 “disquiet0082-minimalhaydn” 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 82nd Disquiet Junto project, in which a minimal techno track was created using elements of a Haydn string quartet, at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/07/25/disqui...
The source Haydn audio is from:
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Cliff Martinez on Reddit.com
Film composer Cliff Martinez (Solaris, Contagion) did a reddit.com IAmA (“ask me anything”) crowd interview yesterday. As of this count, there were 649 comments, many of them unanswered questions, and he weighed in on a lot of topics, from his favorite music, to playing drums with Captain Beefheart, to his ongoing collaboration with director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives). Below are some highlights.
On the Cristal Baschet, pictured below:
[–]vincentmusic: You use a lot of Cristal Baschet on your scores. Where did you come across this instrument and how did you come to own one?
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[–]cliffmartinez: I first saw the Cristal at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 when I was a little kid. It was one of those mind altering early experiences that reupholstered my brain and turned me, not only into a musician….but into a weird musician.
On musical tributes:
[–]Roton7: Hi Cliff, I love your work! I really enjoyed the Only God Forgives soundtrack, especially “Wanna Fight”, which is just phenomenal. Were there any particular artists or songs that inspired that track?
[–]cliffmartinez: Yes. WANNA FIGHT is my impersonation of Philip Glass, Goblin and Ennio Morricone.
“Wanna Fight” starts 53 seconds into this YouTube clip:
Another on influence melding:
[–]sweextin: How do you handle the (sometimes blatant) plagiarism that goes on in the composing world? Does it bother you or flatter you?
[–]cliffmartinez: I think that’s part of the biz. My recipe for avoiding plagiarism is to rip off two artists at once. i.e. Gyorgy Ligeti + Tangerine Dream = SOLARIS
How his score to Solaris helps cheer him up:
[–]splooshy: The SOLARIS score is one of the most hauntingly brilliant things I’ve ever heard, and paired perfectly with Soderbergh’s vastly underrated version of the story.
Just want to say thank you. SOLARIS was part of what drove me to enter film school.
[–]cliffmartinez: Thank you, it’s my favorite. Whenever I feel depressed, I go to Amazon and read some of the testimonials on SOLARIS….”I held my blind dog up to the speakers and SOLARIS gave him back his sight….SOLARIS cured my arthritis, my razor blades stay sharp when I play them SOLARIS etc.”
Full interview at reddit.com. Read on for getting inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and not having slept with Lydia Lunch, among other topics. (Image of Cristal Bachet via wikipedia.org.)
July 24, 2013
Self-Destructing in 8 Bits
The great thing about great 8bit music is how it sounds as if it’s about to fall to pieces. The first half of “Phantom Spikes The Punch” by Michigan-based Luminous Fridge sounds like three different video games vying for your attention in a dusty old arcade. There’s white noise from a dying speaker cabinet, the blippy melody of a nocturnal adventure, and the heavy beats of a first-person shooter. Together, they form an abstract sort of pop song, one barely holding onto its own self-containment. And then, as if with the flip of a switch, near the 45-second mark, everything shifts. The music gets markedly more contemporary, the beats and tune gathering themselves with a sense of lounge-ready decorum — less Pacman, more Amom Tobin.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/luminousfridge. More from Fridge at luminousfridge.bandcamp.com.
July 23, 2013
Acoustic + Electric = Splendid (MP3)
It’s not so much that opposites attract as that they complement each other. In the case of “The Sighs” by San Francisco–based Edison, aka Nic Dematteo, the opposites are those old purported rivals, acoustic and electric. The acoustic is a rhythmic guitar part. The electric is the beat — not so much a beat as a beat plus underlying tonal foundation. That foundation has almost half a minute to cement itself before the guitar appears, some Sunday-morning chords and squeaky strings heard against the slowly developing rhythm. What makes the track work is that neither section is stagnant. The beat eventually goes into a double-time loop and the guitar, just after a bleepy melody suggests that “electric” has its own way with a tune, gives up in a gentle surrender. And then the guitar reappears for a refreshing coda. The whole thing is a delight.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/edison. More from Edison/Dematteo at buttonsofdoom.com.
The Children Next Door in NYC (July 26 – Aug 1)
From July 26 through August 1, The Children Next Door is screening every night at 7:40pm at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The theater is located at 34 West 13th Street. The movie was directed by Doug Block (The Kids Grow Up, 51 Birch Street) and produced by Lynda Hansen. The score is by the talented Taylor Deupree, which whom I shared sound design duties. I handled music supervision for the film.
Anthony Kaufman wrote of The Children Next Door at the Sundance blog, “Doug Block’s searing short … attains a level of pathos as deep as any feature-length documentary.” It’s had a great response at numerous film festivals, including Docs NYC and the Seattle True Independent Film Festival, at both of which it received special jury recognition.
Here’s the trailer:
Trailer hosted at vimeo.com. Additional production details at imdb.com and thechildrennextdoor.com. Theater website at quadcinema.com.
SoundCloud Blog on “Creating with Constraints”
Major thanks to SoundCloud for having posted this interview with me as part of its ongoing blog-post series on the value of creative restraints. Previous posts in the series have looked at Madeleine Cocolas’ weekly music compositions, musicologist Gilles Helsen’s everyday recordings, and Kyle Vande Slunt’s sound design experiments.
In addition to focusing attention on the ongoing Disquiet Junto projects and the Insta/gr/ambient compilation, the piece quotes frequent Junto music-maker Naoyki Sasanami, who is better known as Naotko on SoundCloud:
Naoyki Sasanami regularly participates in the Disquiet Junto group’s challenges every week and compares them to “experimental trials” that are opportunities for sound design. “I feel like I’m playing a weekly chess game using sound.”
Here’s a snippet of the article:
If you’re interested in making music as part of a communal group, Marc shares some advice: “First, I would not model whatever it is you want to do too closely on what other groups have done. Instead, I would identify the loose knit community that you find of interest, and think long and hard about that community’s motivations, about the way its constituents both produce and consume sound. I would try to develop a group approach with those unique characteristics in mind. Second, I would be prepared to alter your approach as time proceeds, in response to what the participants contribute, both in terms of the ideas they share with you but also, and equally importantly, the behavior, the predilections, the habits, they display.”
Read the full thing at blog.soundcloud.com.
And thanks, as well, to Jorge Colombo for having taken the photo that accompanies the interview. Colombo’s photographs were the inspiration for the 2012 LX(RMX) compilation that featured music from Scanner, Steve Roden, Kate Carr, and Marielle V. Jakobsons, among others.
July 21, 2013
Reworking Emma Hendrix (MP3)
Some of the best posts about exploratory Creative Commons music online are themselves works of music — not text posts, like the ones I do here at Disquiet.com, posts that are a kind of semi-casual public processing in words of recent listening, but music proper: reworkings, remixes, and answer tracks that in the course of revisiting the source audio make considered statements about it.
Larry Johnson, who goes by L-A-J on SoundCloud and elsewhere, frequently pops up on this site having taken a recent subject of of Disquiet Downstream post as the source audio for a reworking. Recently he focused on a piece by the talented Emma Hendrix that itself had taken the drone of the bagpipe and made proper, contemporary drone music out of it. Hendrix’s, titled “Prominal,” is a scintillating piece — imagine the proto-minimalist, raga-esque burble of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” turned into a frantic pulse, like a cicada having a heart attack. She writes of the track’s origin:
Promial is sourced entirely from the introductory notes of a Sailor’s Hornpipe. It is intended to envelope the sailor’s tradition in the vast expanse common to both the sea and the drone of the bagpipe. It was commissioned by the Community Radio Education Society’s (CRES) Media Arts Committee in Vancouver Canada in 2011.
Johnson, in his “Promial [Emma Hendrix] Remixed,” digs into the drone within her drone (that is, the drone within the drone within a drone), pulling a see-saw fragment from Hendrix’s piece and moving it about this way and that, nudging it to and fro, teasing out chance harmonics and rhythmic details.
This is his revision:
And this is Hendrix’s root track:
Johnson version originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1, and the Hendrix at soundcloud.com/emmahendrix. Hendrix is based in Vancouver, Canada; more from her at emmahendrix.com. The above image is from the Project Gutenberg ebook of The Little Skipper by George Manville Fenn (gutenberg.org). Johnson used it as the “cover” for his cover version.
July 20, 2013
Pink Floyd on Pause (MP3)
“Longing” by π Dogx is mournful drone of a song, nearly six minutes of gentle swells that sound like someone took snatches from Pink Floyd tracks, slowed the just shy of recognizability, and wove new sonic cloth from them. Aching bits suggest a voice struggling to be heard, and the pace is slow enough to cause BPM counters to short circuit. Though just uploaded this past week to SoundCloud, it’s a track from a January 2009 album, Reliquum Fertilis.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/peedogx. π Dogx is Bo Davidson and Håkan Müller of Linköping, Sweden.
