Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 449
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.
June 8, 2013
The Sound of Vine.co
This current weekend’s Disquiet Junto project, the 75th, takes the Vine app (more at vine.co) as its subject. This isn’t just because the app’s six-second format allows for an interesting simultaneity of composing, performing, and recording. It’s also because audio has proved to be an under-appreciated aspect of Vine videos.
The undervaluing of sound on Vine.co is in part due to what is, admittedly, a necessary UX decision: by default, the sound is off when a Vine is triggered. You need to click a little speaker symbol with a red X, turning it into two little green signifiers of volume. (The traffic metaphor only goes so far — there is no yellow warning phase.) As a result, Vines are experienced silently at first, the audio perhaps kicking in midway through, after the user takes action and clicks the sound icon, and only experienced in full when the second run of the loop begins. (That is, depending on the circumstance. For example, in the Chrome browser on an iPad, the videos don’t autoplay. Instead, you have to hit play, and in this case sound seems to be on by default.)
The majority of Vines appear to be everyday field recordings and low-key stop-motion sequences. Some ignore sound, resulting in chance noise, while others embrace it. The decision-making, or lack thereof, is especially interesting to observe in the case of those videos that break the six seconds of allotted time into shorter stop-and-start segments. Most non-Vine filmmakers would use a single score to lend continuity to the fragments, but that isn’t an option in Vine, which allows for no post-production.
In turn, there are many Vines for which sound is, in fact, a conscious subject, if not the main subject. What follows are a handful of recent favorites:
Alexis Madrigal captured an ancient 8mm projector, not just its musty imagery but its noisy sound:
Richard Devine has been posting a lot of shots of his music production equipment, with an emphasis on modular synthesizers, often these intimate closeups in which the blippity sounds align with one or more blinking lights. The result suggests a hint of tech sentience:
Ashley Spradlin has posted a series of pieces that display the chance presence of daylight, such as this sequence of the sun playing against a wall, the background audio seemingly a shower. There’s an even stronger example amid Spradlin’s output — shadows of windswept trees filtering through curtains, punctuated by what seems to be an inopportune car honk — but I can’t seem to figure out how to share it. (It shows up in my feed in Vine on my phone, but beyond that I am at a loss.)
And here Craig Colorusso’s solar-powered ambient-drone “Sun Boxes” are given rhythmic texture thanks to quick edits:
Drumming While Thinking (MP3)
There’s a particular sort of beat that suggests thinking — the process of thinking, in addition to the underlying sense that considerable thinking went into the beat in question in the first place. This beat comes in various forms. The syncopated work of Max Roach on Money Jungle comes to mind, as does, more recently, the extraordinary effort of Adrienne Davies as part of the slo-mo drone rock band Earth. And it isn’t merely acoustic, this beat. There are moments in the crashing-by-design latter-day-jungle of Aaron Spectre’s Drumcorp, and old Spring Heel Jack, and particular segments of Roni Size, not to mention Amon Tobin, that all smacks of foregrounded drumming, drumming that is pushing for the role that melody serves, not the melody of a lead singer, but the supportive melody of a lead guitar or a backing piano. In any case, about halfway through the mid-tempo electronica that is the track “Marty” by the Québec City duo Allumettes, such a beat arises. (Allumettes is the duo of arbee and stopmotion.) The percussion comes late to the track, after pulsing midnight synths and swelling tones. A full half minute passes before a pneumatic give-and-take beat kicks in. It continues in its steady pace for a time, a secondary beat upping the momentum a little. And then, just as the two-minute mark is nearing, the beat gains nuance, the rhythm given a swagger, a deliberation, it had previously lacked. It’s a brief figure, and soon enough the entire drumming section is gone. The piece is left to swelter and melt, to give way to a slowly declining denouement. But the drum has had its rupture, and it lingers in the memory as the track recedes.
“Marty” is the opening track of five that comprise the Noms Propres album by Allumettes. The full set is available for free download at allumettes.bandcamp.com. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/allumettes.
June 7, 2013
Extraordinary Feedback Kalimba Drone Raga (MP3)
Highly recommended, easily one of my favorite things I have posted in months. This “Feedback Raga” is an intense, Fourth World rhythmic drone created on a makeshift thumb piano, or kalimba. The device was made by RP Collier of Portland, Oregon. By his own explanation, the thumb piano is “made from a metal clamshell box with hairpin tines attached to a flat metal dish resonator,” the dish acting “like a feedback antenna.” A piezo microphone transforms the notes into dense, overtone rich columns of noise, and the feedback bends notes into one another and develops this overwhelming undercurrent of electric activity — an undercurrent of current. The picture above is from Collier’s flickr.com set.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/rpcollier. More of Collier’s music at rpcollier.bandcamp.com. Collier sent me the links via email earlier this week, right after I had posted the Alarm Will Sound rendition of composer Asha Srinivasan’s chamber orchestra ragas.
June 6, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0075: 18-Second Vine Suite
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 6, 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 0075: 18-Second Vine Suite
This project is about the experimental use of a casual mobile app to compose, perform, and record music. This marks the 75th weekly Disquiet Junto project, and it is the second Junto project to focus on a mobile app. Last time the app was NodeBeat, for the 20th weekly project. This time it is Vine (available for free via the URL vine.co), which is available for many if not all Android and iOS devices. The hope is that if you do not have such a device you might borrow one from someone.
Vine allows users to create and share six-second loops of audio-video. The extent to which that audio and video can be manipulated is largely determined by the stop-motion-like start-and-stop system Vine employs; it allows you to pause the recording, adjust the camera, and then continue the recording process.
For this project, you will create three six-second Vine videos, for a total of 18 seconds, resulting in a Vine suite. Each movement will be based on a specified sound source and a specified approach to the stop-and-start edits.
Step 1: The audio-video source for the first movement is water running steadily from a faucet. Record the sound and image of the water and tap your device’s screen at a relatively slow, even pace, roughly 70 BPM. Feel free to have other sounds playing off camera, or to have items in the sink that might make noise as a result of the flow of water. Do this for the full six seconds. When you are done, you will have completed the first of your three Vine videos. Tag it as #vinejunto and #disquietjunto, along with any other tags you’d like, before posting.
Step 2: The second movement will be much more quickly paced. There are two audio-video sources, which you will alternate between, at roughly twice the pace of the video from Step 1. Start with an image of something that rotates and makes sound — a bicycle wheel may be your best bet — and alternate with an image of something static, like a picture of a face in a comic strip, while you make a low droning noise with your voice. Feel free to “prepare” the rotating object, as you see fit, in a manner that might influence the sound it makes. Do this back and forth until you have completed the six seconds. Tag it as #vinejunto and #disquietjunto, along with any other tags you’d like, before posting.
Step 3: The audio-video source for the third movement is whatever is going on outside a window. Divide the track up into six even sections. The first section should be a wide view out your window. The five subsequent sections should try to focus the center of the camera on one object. The sound is whatever happens to be going on outside your window, though you should avoid recording conversation. There should be no additional sounds beyond what is happening out the window. Tag it as #vinejunto and #disquietjunto, along with any other tags you’d like, before posting.
Step 4: Record the audio from the three videos and create one single 18-second track. Upload this to your SoundCloud.com account.
Deadline: Monday, June 10, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your track should have a duration of 18 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 “disquiet0075-vinesuite” 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 75th Disquiet Junto project, in which a three-part audio-video suite is created in the app Vine, at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/06/06/disqui...
More on the Vine app at:
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
More on Disquiet.com at HeroesCon
Major thanks to Craig Fischer and Ben Towle for spending some time this coming weekend during their Saturday, June 8, HeroesCon panel discussion on music and comics to talk about some of my work. I’m honored by the attention, especially because Fischer is drawing connections between my Pulse! comics editing and the current weekly Disquiet Junto projects. They were interviewed today by Tom Spurgeon of comicsreporter.com.
SPURGEON: Tell me a little about choosing Marc Weidenbaum as a subject, and what you feel is important people know about Marc. He was such a big figure for a while because of the high-profile PULSE! gig, but I’m not sure we’re not exactly at that point in history where that’s forgotten a bit but hasn’t been pulled out and re-examined yet.
FISCHER: Yeah, Marc’s legacy as a PULSE! editor is formidable: he got people like Jessica Abel, Carol Swain, Jon Lewis, Jason Lutes, Peter Kuper, John Porcellino, Keith Knight, Dave Cooper, Tony Millionaire and so many others to do those great back-page “Flipside” comics on musical topics. Justin Green’s Musical Legends book (2004) is terrific, maybe my favorite Green work after Binky Brown.
Marc also gave a lot of younger alt-cartoonists their first opportunity in a national venue; Marc commissioned PULSE! work from Adrian Tomine after seeing the earliest self-published issues of Optic Nerve.
As much as I respect Marc’s PULSE! tenure, though, I’m going to spend as much if not more time in my presentation talking about Marc’s Disquiet website, and the ways his activities and commentaries on ambient, electronic and experimental music intersect with comics. One of Marc’s “Disquiet Junto” projects, for example, encouraged musicians to “do a sonic version” of the first strip (the template strip) in Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story. As part of our panel, we’ll stage a “performan
More on Fischer and Towle’s panel here: “Disquiet.com at HeroesCon.” The above comic, by R. Sikoryak, appeared in Pulse! magazine, where I edited the comics from 1992 through 2002, in the October 2001 issue.
June 5, 2013
Orchestrated Ragas (MP3)
Alarm Will Sound follows, as do So Percussion and Eighth Blackbird, among other economically proportioned ensembles, along the admirable path that Kronos Quartet helped pave, in that it actively engages with composers to produce new works. Alarm Will Sound frequently posts the resulting audio, such as a series of pieces that had their live debuts at the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, part of the new music initiative at the University School of Music. Most recent among these is a 2012 performance of a piece by Asha Srinivasan. Composed for chamber orchestra, the work, titled “Svara-lila,” builds drama and portent out of Indian ragas.
The performance was recorded on July 28 of last year. Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor of Music at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. She writes of “Svara-Lila”:
The title, composed of two Sanskrit words, “svara” meaning musical note and “lila” loosely meaning play, refers to methods of manipulation of an 8-note pitch collection, which is derived from a conflation of two closely related Indian modes (ragas). More than just notes in a scale, a raga traditionally evokes strong emotions and moods. The exceedingly lovely and expressive ragas used to form my pitch collection are generally associated with sadness and longing. Thus, the piece begins with an expansive, slow progression of dissonant harmonic sonorities that explore various intervallic relationships within the pitch collection. Simultaneously, the top notes of the progression form the basis of a recurring modal theme that guides the entire structure of the piece. As the slow and dramatic growth unfolds, the modal nature of the pitch collection is gradually revealed through increasingly active melodic and rhythmic gestures. The piece remains harmonically driven to the very end when the previously unresolved main theme returns in full force only to have its final resolution undermined by achingly conflicting sonorities whose colliding dissonances linger in the air to the last moment, denying the much anticipated release.
That description comes from the website she shares with her composer husband, Andrew Seager Cole, twocomposers.org. Among the subjects Srinivasan teaches is electronic music, and if you look through the “works” section of the site you’ll be treated to samples of numerous works that employ a mix of standard orchestral instrumentation in addition to electronics, as well as an experiment with SuperCollider, among them a kickstarter.com tuba project that surpassed its $5,500 goal thanks to an impressive 113 backers.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/alarm-will-sound. More from Alarm Will Sound at alarmwillsound.com.
June 4, 2013
Ambient, Beats, or Both?
The invocation of categories immediately brings those very same categories into question. To build a wall is to question, to test, its solidity. Just this morning I turned on three categorized sets — “carousels,” I called them; fluid, iterative podcasts is how I think of them. The general concept of these carousels is that as I come across material of interest on SoundCloud, I can easily add a given track to one of the three distinct sets, each with its own theme: ambient, beats, and “other,” the latter a space for more concentration-demanding listening.
And then, just hours later, I stumbled upon a track, “The Digged Up Loop,” by a musician I’ve never heard work from before, Duns Scott. By Scott’s own self-definition, “The Digged Up Loop” goes into the ambient bucket; “ambient” is one of the tags he’s associated with the file. But as lush and hazy as the track is, it is rife with rhythmic material, rounds of pulsing tones that come and go in a series of gentle swells. On first listen, this was going into the ambient carousel, but then, on repeat listens, the beats came more and more into the foreground. In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter where the track goes. The filter for the carousels is less a matter of rigorous genre taxonomy than of context-through-collation: where does the droning Duns Scott track make natural, aesthetic sense? The beats may, with their light counterpoint, bring to mind the rhythmic experiments of Steve Reich, but in the end their collective effect simply adds texture and momentum to the overall droning sensibility. And so, I added it to the ambient carousel — thought quite likely down the road I will come upon tracks that make sense in two if not all three of these carousels.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/kanada-3. More from Duns Scott, who’s based in France, at dunsscott.tumblr.com.
Toward the 200th Anniversary of the Metronome
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More on this as the date nears, but on July 6, 2013, in and near Regensburg, Germany, a series of works will be debuted by artist, and frequent Disquiet.com collaborator, Paolo Salvagione. (Boon Design is handling the graphics aspect of the effort.) Three Salvagione projects will take place, and I’ve written an essay for each of them — the essays will appear here on Disquiet.com in the near future:
(1) There will be the start of a campaign to have Johann Nepomuk Mäzel, who perfected the metronome in 1815, inducted into the Walhalla, the Parthenon-like memorial to Germanic accomplishment.
(2) There will be a performance of György Ligeti’s 1965 “Poème Symphonique” for 100 metronomes.
(3) There will be an installation in the Walhalla that acknowledges the wives, husbands, and other significant others of the tinkerers, warriors, artists, and royalty who posthumously populate the building. (List of Walhalla residents at wikipedia.org).
There will also be a metronome-themed Disquiet Junto project the Thursday following the Regensburg event. More on Salvagione and Boon Design at salvagione.com and boondesign.com.
