Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 449

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disquiet Junto Project 0081: Cheap Generative

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 18, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 22, 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 0081: Cheap Generative

The theme of this week’s project is generative, an approach in which music is produced beyond the strict, immediate control of the composer-performer. The composition and performance are less a linear work than they are a system that is set in motion. We’ll use this approach to investigate pre-existing work. Your finished Junto project should link back to the pre-existing work for comparison’s sake.

Step 1: Choose a recent work that has isolatable parts, preferably layers, or at least distinct elements.

Step 2: Create loops from four of these distinct elements: one 2 seconds in length, one 3 seconds, one 5 seconds, and one 7 seconds long.

Step 3: Add a 3-second pause to one of the elements and a 1-second pause to another of the elements. The choice is yours.

Step 4: Record a five-minute swath of the four loops playing simultaneously. The sounds will rotate through at their own individual paces, create numerous chance intersections. The result is your finished track. Feel free to add a fade-in and a fade-out, though it is not necessary.

Deadline: Monday, July 22, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of 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 “disquiet0081-cheapgenerative” 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 — and to post a link to the track from which the elements were derived.

More on this 81st Disquiet Junto project, in which generative music is produced with four loops of differing lengths, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/07/18/disqui...

Original source track at this URL:

[insert link]

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Modest Beatcraft (MP3)

Another fine bit of slomo instrumental hip-hop from the Seattle-based musician who goes, simply, by Patrick. He’s a SoundCloud engineer, according to his brief bio, which may explain why his SoundCloud page has one of those snazzy personalized banners that are mostly reserved for big-league accounts. Big-league graphics aside, the track is reliably modest in scope, just a flutter of sub-downtempo beatcraft with enough bridge-like asides to keep things interesting. Ripe for repeat.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick/amethyst. More from him at patrick.bandcamp.com.

Where Beat and Background Merge (MP3)

Tore Honoré Bøe has posted four and a half minutes of a performance recorded live at Det Akademiske Kvarter in Bergen, Norway, back in 2001. It is an industrial drone that is interrupted regularly by a pounding, percussive element. This is self-evident in the waveform visualization of the track, what with all those ragged, saw-blade juts. The pounding at first is in stark contrast to the background sound, but as time passes what becomes clear is that the pounding is not so self-contained, that the sound of the percussive has a resonance that extends beyond its initial imposition of a beat. And as these attenuations come to the fore, the distinction between the background and foreground gets confused. It is often said that repetition is a form of change, but generally what that means is that repetition fuels the ear’s attention to previously unapparent variety; by contrast, in Bøe’s piece, as time passed it is similarities, rather than distinctions, that make themselves heard.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/origamirepublika. Bøe’s “acoustic laptops” were mentioned here back in May. More from him at origami.teks.no and twitter.com/origamiboe. He is based in Gran Canaria, Spain.

Return Engagement / “Sounds of Brands, Brands of Sounds”

This coming fall semester I will again be teaching a course on sound in the media landscape at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

The class meets Wednesdays from noon until 2:50pm. It begins on September 11 and ends on December 18. There are 15 weeks in all. The course is divided roughly into thirds. The first third is about listening, the second third (“Sounds of Brands”) is about how companies and products use sound to define themselves in the market, and the final third (“Brands of Sounds”) is about how sound-related companies (music social networks, record labels), people (musicians, bands), and products (headphones, record albums) define themselves. In the Academy of Art’s catalog (online at academyart.edu), the course goes by the title “ADV 499-30: Special Topics: Sound Branding.”

Previous posts about the course are collected here under the “sounds-of-brands” tag.