Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 448
June 17, 2013
Repetition, Change, and Somewhere in Between
Vapor Lanes’ “Appearing” is little more than a few notes on repeat, but that little goes a long way. The cycle of these notes is such that one can get vaguely lost in the proceedings, wondering where one is at in the rotation, whether there has been melodic variation. Repetition is a form of change because the brain fills in the resulting blanks. A track like “Appearing” plays with those faculties by introducing just enough variation — a late-arriving bass line of sorts, tweaks to the original phrasing, intermittent grace notes — to throw off the listener’s memory. The notes settle into the background because they hover halfway between fuzzy and percussive, each sounding like a harpsichord made of dusty synthetic feathers, each isolated event a soft utterance that gently merges into the track’s white-noise foundation.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/vaporlanes. Vapor Lanes is based in Chicago, Illinois.
June 16, 2013
Birds Amid the Birds (MP3)
Eight minutes of unadulterated, unmediated bird song, ripe with chirping, and contextual circumstance. Listen through intently for what is amid the layers of song, the dappling of these percussive, repetetive chirps as they are repeated by countless other birds further and further into the distance, and listen again for everything that happens amid them, the moving of objects, the passing of cars. Over time, a scene takes shape — no linear narrative, and the birds sing on.
Track by Christopher Dooks, originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/bovinelife. Dooks lives in Glasgow and Ayr, Scotland. More from him at dooks.org.
June 15, 2013
A 22-Minute Wave (MP3)
Many works of exploratory sound and music are recipes for what the works contain, from the names of modular patches to Fluxus-like instructions. In the case of Roman Strange’s “pure 528 hz for 22 minutes. for love and dna repair.” the track is exactly what it suggests itself to be. After 30 second of slow build, and before a 30-second fade, this is 528 hz for 22 straight minutes. It is peaceful and annoying, sinuous and pulsating, languorous and full of inward momentum. Adds Stange in a brief liner note: “there are no hippy drums or new age stuff.”
Originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/romanstange. Stange is based in San Francisco, California.
June 14, 2013
Tape-less Tape Music (MP3)
There are two hard mechanical punches, in between which sits an extended, attenuated tension. The hard punch and near-silent attenuation complement each other, and bring each other into relief. On repeated listen, the crunch presents a mental image along the lines of an ancient marble step: at first a single, hard, square jut, but on closer inspection one riddled with tiny fissures — steps within steps. As for the space in between the two punches, it is an engineer’s rendering of still water that runs deep, the quiet clearly the result of something that might, at any moment, snap.
What it all is is the sound of a tape cassette machine’s transport, pictured up top in a patent drawing and described by the recordist, Matt Nix, as a “whine,” which seems quite appropriate. The recording, just 1:12 in length, is accompanied by Nix’s utilitatian haiku:
total shut off won’t go quietly
motor whine and belt slip
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mattnix. Nix is from Leicestershire, Great Britain. Tape mechanism image via google.co.uk/patents.
June 13, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0076: Dream Sound Dream
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, June 13, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 10, as the deadline.
Below are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.
Disquiet Junto Project 0076: Dream Sound Dream
This project is about dreams and surveillance. It involves the human voice. Some projects require unique resources that not everyone necessarily has: access to an iOS or Android device, ability to record a specific sound, even the simple availability of requisite time. This specific project requires that you have a dream — which not everyone will — sometime between the launch and the close of the project. Then again, if you don’t have a dream, perhaps you will devise an interesting alternative approach.
In this project you will create an original recording that consists of you describing in words a dream or a portion of a dream. The score to your verbal description of the dream will consist of music made from sounds recorded during your sleep. The idea is to explore the feedback correlation between dreams and the sounds of the environment in which those dreams unfold.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Set up a recording device to record the sounds of the room in which you sleep. (Avoid recording any material for which you do not hold the copyright, such as the radio playing from an alarm clock.)
Step 2: Put a notebook or equivalent device (tablet, phone) near your bedside.
Step 3: When you wake, either quickly write down what you recall from your dream, or record yourself speaking about what your recall from your dream.
Step 4: If you opted to write down your dream, then proceed to record yourself recounting the dream.
Step 5: Between Step 3 and Step 4 you have a recording of you describing a dream. Now take the audio that resulted from Step 1 and use elements extracted from that audio as source material for what will serve as score and sound design for your spoken description. You can manipulate the extracted elements as you wish, but do not add anything else to them.
Step 6: Combine the spoken and score/sound-design tracks into one track. You have now completed the project.
Deadline: Monday, June 17, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track should have a duration of between 30 seconds 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 “disquiet0076-dreamsound” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track. Also use the tags “spoken word” and “dream” 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 76th Disquiet Junto project, in which the sounds of the room in which you sleep serve as source audio for a score to you describing your dream, at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/06/13/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Image of pillow via Creative Commons and flickr.com.
June 12, 2013
Cues: Free Oval Downloads, Porcini/Rós Streams, …
◼ Oval Gratis: Oval (Markus Popp) has posted for free download four complete albums from 1998 to 2001: Aero Deko, Dok (embedded below), Pre/Commers, and Ovalcommers. They’re also streaming at those addresses. … Related: Popp has posted a series of audio interviews at his SoundCloud.com account. So far there are two in English and two in German.
◼ Trainspotter Spotter: New Funki Porcini album, Le Banquet Cassio, streaming at funkiporcini.bandcamp.com. Among other highlights, there is a track, “Foamer,” featuring a looped sample of a trainspotter freaking out over the sound of a horn:
Le Banquet Cassio by Funki Porcini
◼ Sigur Day: The new Sigur Rós album, Kveikur, is streaming for free at amazon.com.
◼ Sonic Purge: “Maybe take an air conditioner hum and run it through Camel Phat and see what comes out.” That’s The Purge composer Nathan Whitehead on his compositional toolset, at futurecomposer.com.
◼ Chairmen of the Boards: “You can pick out a melody from the squeaking rusty chains of a swing. I once zoned out to a melody I could hear in the TGV [high-speed train] from Paris to Geneva, and it turned out to be harmonics coming from the rails vibrating under the train.” That’s Mike Sandison, one half of Boards of Canada, in email correspondence with Jon Pareles of the New York Times for what is reportedly the only “their only United States interview” for their new album, Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp). There’s also a nice bit about the texture in the album’s track “Semena Mertvykh,” courtesy of the other half of Boards of Canada, Marcus Eoin: “It was performed into a dissected VHS deck with the motor running super slowly, so you can hear all the pockmarks, the dropouts on the tape.”
◼ Melancholy Assemblage: Great interview, if slightly off the topic of music and sound, at (http://citypaper.com/arts/books/the-m...) with Drew Daniel of Matmos on the publication in book form, *The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance* (Fordham University Press), of what originated as his Berkeley PhD dissertation. Not that it’s entirely off topic, given its focus on “assemblage.” Says Daniel, “I added the concept of the ‘assemblage,’ asserting that melancholy is not just an emotional state inside of one person but a socially extended phenomenon, something that connects bodies, signs, symptoms, and persons together.” The photo, above, is by Chrisopher Myers and it accompanies the interview. It was shot in Daniel’s office at Johns Hopkins University, where he is an assistant professor of English.
Post—Post—Tangerine Dream synthesis
For all the talk of computer-aided abstraction and broken beats, of post-apocalyptic robotics and machine unlearning, there is an incredible strain of unabashed emotion in much electronic music these days. The sort of thing that once was associated primarily with Tangerine Dream now has a host of far more contemporary touchpoints, from Boards of Canada to the self-reoriented Squarepusher. Jon Monteverde balances interests in songs and abstraction in his work, often going to one extreme or the other. He reconciles them in a recent track, “Suddenly.” All Bach-ian chord progressions and hushed cymbals, “Suddenly” is both low key in its unfolding and, yet, outgoing in its aspirations.
Monteverde is based in Chicago, Illinois. More from him at twitter.com/xyzr_kx.
June 11, 2013
EDM Minus the Arena Drama
“Cosmo Pollen” by Peter Brombaer lays sounds — wooshes, rough chimes, muffled beeps — atop a whisp of a song, a beat that barely registers as a trap set and a melody that sounds more like the steady tests of a piano tuner than the stuff of which radio dreams are made. With the distant echoes of trip-hop and the atmospheric syncopations of a Hollywood score, it’s a bit like EDM with all the amped-up arena drama siphoned out of it. It’s quite lovely.
Brombaer is based in Groningen, Netherlands. More from him at brombaer.com.
June 10, 2013
The 1:40 Sonic Movie (MP3)
Antiquated piano? Check. Deep echo? Check. Steady rain? Check. Bird song? Check. Creaky additional noises? Check? This is “殺す – destroy dreams..” by Cracow, Poland–based Mirrorgirl. In its brief running, just over a minute and a half, the track suffuses the atmosphere with a romantic sense of dread. It places movie-score elements in a movie sound-design schema, until the two become one whole thing unto themselves, a merger of equals. And if there is ever a chance that someone mistakes the piano as the “musical” element and the other material as something entirely extra-musical, then take note as the collected sounds get warped toward the end, turned back on themselves like some early Beatles tape-loop experiment in backmasking.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mirrorgirl.
June 9, 2013
The YouTube or Instagram of Sound
We’ve become more than accustomed, as time has passed and as social networks have increasingly emphasized digital photography, to be entertained/informed by passing glances at other people’s daily existence — not just the milestones, like birthdays and weddings and vacations, but the small ones, the passing ones: chance shadows on the sidewalk, a glass of water on a table, a pair of shoes in a closet. Instagram, for one, is a deep repository of metaphorical driftwood. There is much talk of SoundCloud being the “YouTube of sound,” but some of the more interesting estuaries make a case that it is also the “Instagram of sound,” a place where everydayness is given emotional and cultural meaning through framing and context. As SoundCloud continues to grow, if you follow certain user accounts, you get the sonic equivalent of Instagram’s quotidian documentation, brief sonic snapshots of other people’s lives. Here are two choice recent entries, which popped up in quick succession, field recordings of a passing train, and of the beach at night, both under two minutes:
Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/charlie_grant and soundcloud.com/craghead.
