Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 446

Disquiet Junto Q&A @ NMBx

The Disquiet Junto by the numbers:

2,533: number of tracks currently live in the Disquiet Junto group page

569: number of subscribers to the tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto email newsletter

372: number of musicians responsible for those 2,533 tracks

87: number of weekly projects

71: number of tracks submitted to the most active weekly project

18: seconds in length of shortest project (a mini-suite based on the Vine app)

4: number of days from project announcement (Thursday) to deadline (Monday)

4: number of live concerts thus far (one each in Chicago, Denver, Manhattan, and San Francisco)

1: number of moderators (that is, it’s just me)

0: number of weeks we’ve taken off

Major thanks to Molly Sheridan for today having directed the attention of the excellent newmusicbox.org audience toward the Disquiet Junto, the weekly series of music projects. The above numbers came in response to her request for me to “quantify” the project. It’s the response to one of seven great questions in the interview she posted today, “Sounds Heard: The Disquiet Junto,” which also includes six tracks from past projects that she elected to highlight. Here’s one more bit of the Q&A:

MS: While I haven’t participated myself, it’s been my impression that the restriction provided by the assignment is key but that discussion of the employed method(s), a sort of “show your work,” is also central. There’s an outsider input and public process to the music making. Even though we often talk about the digital cocooning that new technologies allow, this is a reversal of that in some ways through technology—bringing others into what is often normally a private creative space for just one artist.

MW: Yeah, I agree entirely. I think three key things are essential to the Junto’s success. The restraints and the deadline are big, but so too is the knowledge that not just an audience but an audience of peers is at the ready: to listen, give feedback, befriend, collaborate with. As for the “through technology,” as you put it, absolutely: this project exists specifically as a means of utilizing the SoundCloud interface. I’m not saying it would not have existed otherwise, but it exists as it does to make the best use of that virtual public space as SoundCloud both intentionally and unintentionally happened to have designed it.

Read (and listen to) the complete piece at newmusicbox.org.

Interior Sound Design (MP3s)

At the start of the year, composer Zachary Todd Barr made, for 32 days straight, recordings of sounds from what he describes as “the domestic interior.” There was handwriting on day 31, dishwashing on day 29, and dusting on day 23, just to name a few. Some of the pieces are more intentionally musical than others, such as a highly rhythmic, if occasionally chaotic, piece “created from the wood and glass of kitchen cabinets”:

In other pieces, the selected sound is heard amid the general noises of daily life, including the drone of ventilation what must be the voices of people nearby. According to a brief bio on his website, Barr has degrees in music and physics, and he is currently pursuing an MFA in interior design at the Parsons the New School for Design: “a focus on what lies in the overlap between interiors, sound, interactivity, and performance.” Which explains why his recordings are listed as “Sounding Domestic / Thesis Journal.” More from Barr at zacharytoddbarr.prosite.com.

Litquake Appearance on October 18

On October 18, a Friday, I’ll be participating for the first time as part of Litquake, the big annual literary festival here in San Francisco. The event is being held at the Cartoon Art Museum downtown. It starts at 7pm and has a suggested donation of between 5 and 10 bucks.

The event is titled “Comics on Comix,” but I was told in advance, when I was invited to participate, that the fact that I am not a standup comic is fine. I was also told I don’t have to talk about comics, that it’s OK to talk, more broadly, about science fiction. I’m still sorting out what my spiel will be about. Right now the two top plans are: (1) things I learned about manga in Japan, a snapshot of manga at the height of its recent U.S. popularity, or (2) a memoir-y cultural map of science fiction touchstones in my hometown, a kind of proto–geek culture thing, a snapshot of that world circa 1979. Either way, the talk won’t be directly related to Disquiet and ambient music, but if I do the manga idea, there will be material about visual representations of sound, and if I go the 1979 route, there will be much reminiscing about my TRS-80.

That Friday we’re up against Mary Gaitskill, Anne Perry, and T.C. Boyle, among other luminaries, but if you can make it, that would be great. My fellow event participants are Joe Klocek, Michael Capozzola, Karen Macklin, Tom Smith, and Mike Spiegelman. Should be a lot of fun.

More on the event at litquake.org.

What a Picture Sounds Like (MP3)

Jesús Lastra’s “Decontamination” is one of several tracks to come out of a new SoundCloud-based group called Extrospection. Each month, starting this past August, the plan for Extrospection is to post a single image, which group members will then interpret in sound. Like the Disquiet Junto group projects, the Extrospection group runs on an open call basis — and for those who find the weekly pace of the Junto a bit demanding (not that there is any intended pressure to participate each week), a monthly approach might prove helpfully relaxed. The first month’s Extrospection image was a mix of sky and harsh plateau. The second, from which Lastra’s track was derived, shows a distant ferris wheel as viewed through a dilapidated residence. In Lastra’s imagination, this calls for a horror-movie pace, all heavily transformed vocals and nervous-making, static-laced beats:

The rules at Extrospection are the same each month:

1) refer your composing to the picture shown at the top of the group monthly.

2) download that picture and use it as icon of your track.

3) track should be max 5 min in length.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jalastram. More on the Extrospection group at its home page. The group was founded by Italian musician Paolo Mascolini, who also goes by Sōzu Project. More from Lastra, who is based in Venezuela, at jalaztram.tumblr.com.

Cues: The Sound of Typing

Three striking depictions of sound that I’ve come upon in the course of reading things not directly concerned with sound:

“The gentle hum of the traffic made a pleasant accompaniment to their conversation, as the holding down of a soft pedal fills in and supports dreamy organ music.”

That’s from early on in The Pit-Prop Syndicate, a crime novel by Freeman Wills Crofts. I’m reading it right now. The book was originally published in 1922.

“For eight decades, Manson Whitlock kept the 20th century’s ambient music going: the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop … bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys.

“From the early 1930s until shortly before his death last month at 96, Mr. Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven, cared for the instruments, acoustic and electric, on which that music was played.”

Those are the first two paragraphs of Margalit Fox’s obituary for a typewriter repairman, published in today’s New York Times, where the above photo, by David LaBianca, was published.

“After his landlord left he picked up the phone. The dial tone was the sound of vast distances across oceans and continents. Then it stopped, interrupted by much closer breathing on the other line.”

That is from my friend and former workmate Alvin Lu’s “Early Spring,” an excerpt from a pair of novels in progress, published in the debut issue of Your Impossible Voice, a new literary journal. More at yourimpossiblevoice.com and Lu’s city-god.tumblr.com. Lu can be heard reading it at soundcloud.com/your-impossible-voice.

Billows, Curtailed (MP3)

Olaf Wisselink is based in Utrecht, Netherlands. His short track “Nageur” sounds more like premonition than event. It comes in waves, a mix of anticipation and memory, both lighter than air and weighed down with experience, even a tinge of portent. The waves come pitched higher, then lower, then higher again. They are gracious reveries whose loveliness is curtailed, intentionally it seems, by the track’s all too brief running time, just 2:20. At an hour, this might have been a luxurious cushion. At barely two minutes, it ends soon enough to leave the listener with a sense of loss.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/olafwie. More from Wisselink at olaf.bandcamp.com.

Happenstance Ambience (MP3)

There are many things that might keep a freely downloadable piece of music from getting on radar. The hosting site may lack an RSS feed, which means the music doesn’t come to you: You need to remember to go to it. When there are 500-plus netlabels out there, not to mention countless MP3 sites and SoundCloud-hosted accounts, that is a tall order. The hosting site may, as well, post the music as, say, a FLAC file — a lossless format that is great for audio quality, less so for making it easily streamable.

Both of these matters are the case with the excellent Impulsive Habitat netlabel. The label’s most recent release is Corredor norte by Pablo Reche. A mix of rumbling drones and occasional bits of everyday happenstance, like moments of creek ambience, the single-track release is nearly 20 minutes of distant background listening. The source audio was recorded in Buenos Aires, Argentina, along the Tigre River, but the transformed sound is not intended as documentation so much as figment: “it is not the idea to represent the original sound or landscape of the place,” writes the Reche in a brief liner note.

Track/album originally posted for free download at impulsivehabitat.com.

Reworking Britten Reworking Purcell

Not all stretching is mere stretching. There is plenty of stretched music out there, key works in the public ear being Justin Bieber exposed as a slomo angel and the Inception theme making a nod to an actress’ prior role, but some stretching takes more effort than simply reducing a pace and, perhaps, maintaining a key. Tuonela’s “The Purcell Theme” adapts an adaptation by Benjamin Britten of music by Purcell, and not just attenuating it for interior exploration. As he writes in the accompanying note: “Not just a simple stretch, this is a twelve-track mix.” But more importantly, he writes, “It’s how the Theme always sounded in my head.” The core message being that while the phenomenon of people slowing down music has gained currency in recent years, and has been abetted by technological progress, the listening inherent in stretching is considerably older, and independent from the digital technique. I recently participated in a discussion (it will appear online soon) about Internet-based music communities, and I clarified that some forms of sound exploration are perhaps more akin to “active listening” than to the making of music, and this seems like a striking example. I’m not stating those as two points at opposite ends of a lengthy continuum so much as different approaches that, certainly, allow for considerable overlap.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/tuonela-1. More from Tuonela at tuonela.bandcamp.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0088: 3D

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, September 5, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 9, 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 0088: 3D

This week’s project focuses on the spatial aspect of sound. The instructions are as follows:

Part 1: Your track will consist of three simultaneous segments: a drone, a beat, and a melodic fragment.

Part 2: Each of those three segments will repeat consistently for the length of the finished track.

Part 3: The only thing that will change is that you will manipulate them to simulate three-dimensional motion for someone listening to the track on headphones. You can do this by using stereo effects, volume shifts, filters, or any other technological means.

Part 4: Your track will last one minute and thirty seconds. For the first 30 seconds, the drone and the beat will remain consistent, but the melodic fragment will move around in 3D. For the second 30 seconds, only the beat will move around, and for the final 30 seconds, only the drone will move around.

Deadline: Monday, September 9, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of one minute and thirty seconds.

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 “disquiet0088-3d” 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 88th Disquiet Junto project, which explores 3D sound, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/09/05/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Post-Singularity Dawn

Clarke Robinson’s “Tonal Experiment #1″ is a restrained swell of low-level feedback. It proceeds like a post-Singularity dawn, the slow-build of sound as an open circuit is gently nudged from its slumber.

More from Robinson at clarkerobinson.com.