Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 453

Industrial Collage (MP3s)

The album Au​-​Delà by Usher and Zreen Toyz brings to mind the early industrial music of Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Psychic TV: underground beats undergirded with hushed portent. The set’s four tracks make steady beats seem unsteady by layering in found sounds and muffled vocalizing. As the album proceeds, beats give way, in “Ectoplasmes,” to an anxious haze of broken chimes, backward masked wisps, and shuddering near-subaural drones. The record was released by the Inner Cinema label, more from which at inner-cinema.com.

Au-Delà by Usher & Zreen Toyz

Get the full set as a free download at innercinema.bandcamp.com. More from Toyz at arcanewaves.blogspot.com.

Yesterday and Tomorrow from Kyoto (MP3)

The latest from Nobuto Suda still bears today’s datestamp, but he is based in Japan, where it is already well into tomorrow. Titled “Note of repose（sketch_13/06/25),” the track is a little over eight minutes of glistening stasis. There are a few notes consistently, if tentatively, eking out a semblance of a tune, but they are echoed and refracted with such attention to detail that they come to form more of a scrim than a melody, a kind of slow-motion shimmer.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/nobutosuda1101. Nobuto Suda is based in Kyoto, Japan. More from him at
nobutosuda.bandcamp.com.

Composing Material Culture

The metronome provides an invisible blueprint for music. That time-tested pendulum timekeeper is employed in analog and digital form by musicians of all stripes. Yet by the time those musicians perform live or in a recording setting, the metronome itself has been relegated back to the closet.

But now, as part of an expansive, highly engaging evening-length program, titled neither Anvil nor Pulley, the composer Dan Trueman has brought the metronome into an unfamiliar role as a performance instrument. Not that there aren’t precedents, notably including György Ligeti’s “Poeme symphonique” (1962) for 100 metronomes, and an even earlier work, “Music for Electric Metronomes” by Toshi Ichiyanagi. But as a testament to Trueman’s ingenuity, the metronome is employed both as object and inspiration: both as a sound source, and as a touchstone for a variety of metric and percusssive explorations.

And, furthermore, the metronome is simply one among numerous objects that are used untraditionally in the work. There’s the turntable that plays archaic fiddle music — or at least what appears to be archaic fiddle music, except that it’s actually original work by Trueman, to which he added the patina of vinyl surface noise. There are controllers (“tethers” as he calls them) that date back to a decade-old golf video game. There are speaker drivers attached to large acoustic drums (see image up top). There are the laptop computers, a tool that Trueman has actively pursued in PLOrK, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, which he and Perry Cook cofounded in 2005.

These matters of material culture are key to Trueman’s compositional efforts. As he has written in regard to the title of the work: “Unlike the anvil or pulley, the computer hides its purpose—to strike or yank will only break. What is this ‘tool’ we call a computer?”

In an extended interview-via-correspondence, Trueman discussed at length the role that these varied objects play a role in his compositioanl practice; about the collaborative give and take involved in working with So Percussion members Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting; about his teaching at Princeton; and about why the word “classical” just doesn’t cut it anymore.

This is a preview of the music from the album, which was released by the Cantaloupe label on May 28, 2013:

This is a video of the work performed live in full:

Marc Weidenbaum: This is an overly long opening question, but please take that as an expression of enthusiasm. I want to start the interview by focusing on the opening parts of four of the work’s five parts. All but “Feedback,” the Bach exploration, begin with very quiet sounds: the surface hiss of vinyl, the tiny tick of the metronome. I’m fascinated by the employment of these elements, because I have come to wonder — not just in your music, but in that of Arvo Pärt and Max Richter, not to mention people like Steve Roden and Carsten Nicolai — how much they represent a compositional approach that comes after not only the introduction of recorded music, but after the introduction of the CD and, later, digital audio files. Do you see that as “new,” somehow, the composer’s comfort with sounds that might, before 1980, or perhaps 1880, not have been inherently presumed to be audible to an audience?

Dan Trueman: Absolutely. My way into electronic music back in the day was through the electric violin, and the main attraction to me was not being able to play loud, but being able to play soft, and have the details magnified and audible. So, for instance, the noise of barely speaking ponticello or tasto on the violin strings with all the whispery harmonics, the gentle grit of the rosined horse-hair on steel; these were elements that were practically unavailable before amplification.

Which means that I’m not really answering your question! But, what I think it means is that my attraction to the qualities that the very soft sounds have, and the fact that they were now available through amplification, led to an interest in a whole world of sounds that wouldn’t have been practically available, or considered “musical.” So, record hiss, the drop of the needle, the minute click of a single digital sample (which sounds like a digital artifact, and is traditionally avoided in “computer music”), all of these are now part of a larger world of small sounds that are inherently technological. For me, these are part of the palette, the way traditional instrumental sounds are.

Weidenbaum: That’s great that the whole “microsound” aspect was something you had been so attentive to. Of course, I am not surprised, and the way you laid it out is very helpful. To follow up, I have another question. Allowing that much of this work is technologically facilitated, are there pre-electronic premonitions for you, works from the canon that set up what you are now exploring. I think Morton Feldman’s music, and some of Olivier Messiaen’s, play this role. The opening half minute or so of Mahler’s first symphony has long been a “classical ambient” touchstone for me. But I think I’m asking even further back.

Trueman: Feldman has long been a huge influence. Pieces like Piano and String Quartet and “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” in particular, with their incredible sonorities and intense quiet. But earlier, [Igor] Stravinsky’s Symphony of Winds has also been very important for me, with its “moments” that just seem to sit, or float. [John] Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts is another, the [György] Ligeti piano music (the Études, “Musica Ricercata”), much of [Louis] Andriessen’s music (“Hadewijch” comes to mind).

Now this is going to sound terribly old fashioned, but I just can’t get enough of Bach, even after all these years. So many things about his music, but in this conversation, I’ll mention one moment: well into the epic D-minor Chaconne, from the solo violin partita, he moves ever so delicately to D-major, and in some of the best performances I’ve heard, this move happens so quietly and delicately it can barely be heard.

Even earlier, renaissance vocal music like [Orlando de] Lassus; I actually grew up singing stuff like this, informally with my family.

But I really need to mention pre-electronic fiddlers that have been hugely influential, like Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, who is an absolute master at what I suppose we might call “microsound fiddle playing.” I’ve never heard a fiddler play more quietly and with more color and space than Caoimhín; it is astonishing and mesmerizing. His colleague the singer Iarla Ó Lionaird has a different but somehow similarly austere sort of expressivity in his voice; I can’t get enough of it. And then there is the glow and sparkle that Norwegian fiddlers like Hauk Buen have; it’s a sound that remains stuck in my ears and something I aspire to, often indirectly, but also directly.

Weidenbaum: Speaking of which, what does the term “classical music” mean to you? Do you engage with the term directly? I’ve been fascinated by its seeming decrease in prominence among a certain generation of young composers.

Trueman: I’ve mostly forgotten that term, and really don’t like it. I suppose I use it occasionally when under duress, in a conversation with someone who isn’t really into music much, but it really doesn’t feel useful, and has lots of baggage.

Weidenbaum: There is considerable thought evident in your broader writings about your work — so much interesting context that has informed my listening — on your website, in your tech overview, in the score itself. How do you decide how much information to put in the album’s liner note?

Trueman: Well, there is the program note and the liner note. I think of program notes as an extension of the piece, helping set the stage for the listener, offering them ways into the piece that reflect my own thoughts about what I was after. With some pieces this is more important than in others, and I think with neither Anvil nor Pulley, they are quite important, because of the scale of the work, the unusual things i’m asking the performers to do, the mysterious fiddle tunes, and so on. I find it hard work to write these notes (I prefer just to write music!), and am always frustrated with them, but i think not having them would be unfair, given that I’m asking people to give 45 minutes of their complete attention to something I’ve made, something that is, I think it is fair to say, unlike anything else they have likely encountered.

One specific aspect of this has to do with new technologies. I really don’t want my notes to turn into a geek-fest, drawing the focus of the listener into how I’ve done things, or trying to impress them with technological prowess. Of course, questions about how everything works are inevitable, and I welcome them, but I really hope they become fused into a larger, musical experience that is as compelling as possible. On the other hand, for other geeks like me who are interested, I like to make it known what’s going on; this is all part of the dialog that these pieces should inspire, I hope.

In this case, So Percussion made the decision about what to include in the actual liner notes, and these days with digital releases and PDFs, it’s really nice to be able to include a lot. I like what they’ve done, with the mixture of artwork, photos, excerpts of computer code, text, and so on. In fact, I’m amazed at how comprehensively they have looked at how to release something like this; the LPs, the speaker-driver, and the tether releases, are all really amazing, beautiful and thought provoking (and specially appropriate to neither Anvil nor Pulley), I think, and that really was all So Percussion’s work.

Weidenbaum: How did all those untraditional release formats come to be?

That’s all So Percussion’s doing. They did a really neat no-CD release last year — the Cage Bootlegs — where they really tried to mark the release in a special way without actually pressing a CD, something that seems increasingly pointless. I love how thoughtful they’ve been, and how their ideas really came directly from the piece. The LP-sized artwork is stunning, and then simply holding an actual old LP in your hands when first engaging with this piece, hearing the needle drop, will be quite something, I hope.

These three videos display the alternate physical versions of the So Percussion release of Dan Trueman’s neither Anvil nor Pulley. There’s a record album containing another album entirely. There’s a “speaker driver package” that requires the user to add another element — like, say, a piece of carboard. And there’s the tether (or “sound marionette”):

Weidenbaum: Did you explore using existing recordings of fiddle music before employing your own?

Trueman: No, I wanted to use those tunes in particular, two of which I wrote specifically for neither Anvil nor Pulley, because of their sense of time. The first one, which really locks into a foot-stomping 120bpm, gives way to the 120bpm digital clicks in a way I really love, and the last one has such a warped, physical sense of time that feels so different than what machines normally give us. And the lyricism of the second fiddle tune seemed almost needed — like a bit of ginger — between the intensity and abstractness of “120bpm” and “Feedback.” I also wanted to give them some old fashioned notes to play; I remember seeing Adam [Sliwinski] work on “Hang Dog” in an early rehearsal, before I had even decided to include the other two fiddle tunes, and was struck by how much he loves to shape phrases, and how good at it he is — I felt the piece needed more of that!

Weidenbaum: Were either of these pieces of music on your mind as you worked on “120bpm”: György Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique” or Toshi Ichiyanagi’s “Music for Electric Metronomes”?

Trueman: I wasn’t familiar with the Iciyanagi piece, but of course the Ligeti is almost just part of the atmosphere, no pun intended. I have another piece called “Four Squared for Ligeti” that is based on the same metronome instrument as “120bpm,” and directly references the “Poème” and also the “Ricercata.” I continue to be awed by Ligeti’s range and depth, that the person who wrote the Études would be the same to write “Poème.”

A page from “120bpm [or, What is your Metronome Thinking?]” one of the five parts of neither Anvil nor Pulley:

Weidenbaum: Clearly in a piece like “Another Wallflower,” significant effort goes into this lovely fade, this film-like transition from the recorded version of the melody to the one that is performed in the more traditional sense. How much are you also bringing the surface noise to life? It seems like the tonal material retains the gauzy quality, but that could just be wishful listening on my part.

Trueman: That’s interesting! Do you mean, was I specifically composing the tune from the record noise itself? The way that worked is I gave the recording to So Percussion and a very basic notation of the tune (two voices, since it’s double-stops, and the foot-stomping patterns), and then they worked out how they wanted to play it, and when they wanted to remove the actual recording (they could have played the whole first track with the fiddle if they wanted). Since they did this with the old, hissy version of the tune, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of what they did reflects the specific qualities of the recording itself, especially in Jason’s case; he has such a colorful touch with the drums, the snare in particular, and I’m sure, even without thinking, that some of what he does comes from the complete sense of that noisy recording.

Weidenbaum: How did this project originate, your composing this specific work for this specific ensemble?

Trueman: I had worked with So Percussion on another evening length piece, (Five (and-a-half) Gardens, a collaboration between So Percussion and my duo, Trollstilt) and I also play with Jason [Treuting] in a band (QQQ), so we have a long history of working together. So Percussion were putting together a program of new commissions for their first full show at Zankel and asked me if I would write them something new, just for them and possibly with laptops, for that concert. Since I had worked with them so much, and since I trust their abilities so much, I wanted to collaborate with them on the process, and this piece wouldn’t have turned out this way without that. “120bpm” is fully notated and composed in a traditional sense, but “Feedback” was a much more collaborative (and scary) creation, one where I had built the instruments for them to play and a rough outline of the work, but one that didn’t come to life until we workshopped together, extensively (once, in front of an audience at the So Percussion Summer Institute, which was particularly frightening!). And of course, the fiddle tunes as I described, where I really wanted them to find ways into those tunes themselves, the way “folk” musicians do.

Weidenbaum: Can you describe your academic mode? Are you tenured at Princeton? What courses do you teach?

Trueman: I’m extraordinarily fortunate to be tenured at Princeton, where I have some wonderful and inspiring colleagues and students. This is far more than you’ll want to see, but i recently took part in a symposium on what we do here and presented this paper, which does, I think, present a fair picture of our idiosyncratic, very open program. I’ve taught 16th- and 18th-century counterpoint here for many years, and then I teach a variety of other courses, like the PLOrk courses, graduate seminars in electronic music, instrument building, comparative coding, or non-electronic subjects like rhythm/meter/groove, theft by ear, or, this coming fall, intercultural music with Donnacha Dennehy, a good friend and visiting composer here at Princeton.

Weidenbaum: I find myself paying special attention to your emphasis on the computer-as-instrument. Because of its wide breadth of possibilities, its ability to multi-task, to network, the computer differs significantly from what was considered an instrument before it. How hard do you work to limit the computer’s role in a specific work, so as to find a balance with instruments that predate it? I feel like there is a parallel between the chance elements in “120bpm” and the way that PLOrk has helped pushed the laptop beyond synchronization.

Trueman: Right, such an important question. With PLOrk, I’ve found that the most important challenge is calibrating the “player’s” level of engagement and effort with the computer. Obviously, they can just press a button and then sit back and let it do its thing (and there are times for this!, not unlike striking a gong and listening to the glow for minutes), or they can be asked to try to master something that takes hours and hours (or years and years) to master (this is actually quite hard to reach, frankly, and possibly pointless). For me, I want the player to be deeply engaged in the musical experience, sometimes to break a sweat, sometimes to be seriously challenged, sometimes to simply enjoy the process of engaging with sound in a straightforward but new way (the “tethers” in “120bpm,” for instance). And while I do often think of these things that I make for people to play as “instruments” I also often think of them as “machines” that we are trying to harness, not unlike, say, a race car. You think of a race car driver: they aren’t physically making the car go, but rather they are trying to control it in virtuosic ways, making it go as fast and as nimbly as possible, and in turn the driver is taken on a ride that would simply be impossible with the “machine.” We should have more musical “instruments” that are like race cars! And, in this case, I had the Andrettis of the percussion world to drive.

The “sync” issue that you bring up is interesting, and I can’t say that I was thinking of it explicitly when working on the aleatoric sections in “120bpm,” though it does make perfect sense. One of their main roles as players is to sync and de-sync the digital metronomes on their individual laptops, and these aleatoric sections willfully ask them to de-sync and to partially repress the metronomes.

The interface for the software that interacts with the video game “tethers” employed in neither Anvil nor Pulley:

Weidenbaum: The next step beyond syncing is the network, computers reacting to each other — computers working in symphony, as it were. Do you do any network-based composition and performance?

Trueman: Absolutely, quite a lot. I use it some in the “Four Squared for Ligeti” I mentioned, and others like “Clapping Machine Music Variations,” but that usage is really embedded in the fabric of the piece and is not foregrounded. Several years ago, when PLOrk first started, I explored this a lot, in particular with this piece [see: turbulence.org. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of LANs and music making (as opposed to distance networking), whether dealing with actual time sync or simply sharing of information of various sorts while performing. That said, I’m still figuring out how to calibrate when to use it; in neither Anvil nor Pulley I don’t use it at all, and I really do prefer to have the players do the syncing, and have the syncing be fluid and part of the musical performance process. This is of course especially true with a group like So Percussion, who have such an incredible relationship with sync and time.

More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com. More on the album at bangonacan.org. More on Dan Trueman at manyarrowsmusic.com and princeton.edu.

Anime Sound Design Remix (MP3)

The artist who goes by johnny_ripper on SoundCloud refers to one of his latest tracks, “Cat Soup,” as a “love letter” to the Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa. Ripper goes on to explain, “95% of this song is music and sounds from the movie *Cat Soup*,” a decade-old Japanese anime that Yuasa created. The anime itself, an abstract and psychedlic journey into sublime weirdness (still image above), had little in the way of score (at least in its first third, which is shown streaming below), depending instead on much in the way of sound desgin elements like wind chimes (see screen shot below), insects, and other everyday noises — as well as on the unintelligible voices of massive spiritual forces and strange beasts.

Ripper has taken these sounds and managed to both keep them recognizable from the source material, and yet construct from them a jittery, glitchy instrumental pop song that captures the original film’s more cheerful aspects.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/johnny_ripper. The musician is based in Montréal, Canada. More from him at twitter.com/johnny_ripper
and johnnyripper.bandcamp.com.

Here, for reference, is the opening part of the Cat Soup, which appears to be much more oriented toward sound design than score, though Yutoro Teshikai has a credit for music:

A Sardinian in Berlin (MP3)

A Sardinian musician living in Berlin the past two years, Stefano Ferrari records and performs as Menion. His new album, the self-titled Menion, was released earlier this month by the excellent La Bél netlabel, and what follows is the fourth of its ten tracks. The piece runs the gamut from gentle vibrating ambience to glitched-out guitar effluvia. It sounds more like a teaser collection of sample segments or a mini-suite of short-attention-span bits and pieces than a standalone track, but that is what it is. Among the several things that make it hold together splendidly is an interesting contrast, in that the vibrant passages are austere while the mellow ones are warm and enveloping — which is to say, it cools down when it heats up.

Get the full set for free download at labelnetlabel. More from Menion/Ferrari at menion.org and soundcloud.com/menion.

O’Rourke + Haino + 7 Others (MP3)

The great record label Important Records — which has released recordings by such musicians as Pauline Oliveros, Acid Mothers Temple, Eleh, Ellen Fullman, Eliane Radigue, Matmos, Kid 606, and Merzbow — now has a Tumblr account, at imprec.tumblr.com. The account is so new, having begun this month, that as of this writing there are precisely two posts on it. One is a link to an hour-long streaming drone video on YouTube by Amelia Cuni, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Werner Durand.

And the other, ready for download and repeat listening, is an extravagantly restrained nonet featuring Keiji Haino and Jim O’Rourke, among a heap of equally stellar performers. The lineup is as follows, and the Tumblr post is actually a link to cellist Claus’ johakyu.com site. The work is deeply dramatic, reminiscent of a Heiner Goebbel or Robert Wilson production. The full cast is as follows: Gaspar Claus (cello), Eiko Ishibashi (Voice, Piano), Kazutoki Umezu (bass clarinet), Kakushkin Nishihara (Voice, Satsuma Biwa), SachikoM (Sine waves), Jim O’Rourke (electric guitar), Tomokawa Kazuki ( Voice, Guitar), Keiji Haino (Voice, Rudraveena, Percussion), and Leonard Eto (taiko).

Track downloadable for free at johakyu.com. More on the label at ImportantRecords.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0077: Netlabel Splice

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 20, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 24, 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 0077: Netlabel Splice

This is a shared-sample project. Create a single new piece of music by employing the selected material (see below) of each the following three tracks. All three were initially posted to the Internet with a Creative Commons license encouraging derivative reworking. This project — one in an ongoing series of netlabel remixes undertaken by the Disquiet Junto — is intended to address the unfortunate popularity of “ND” (i.e., “no derivatives”) licenses among netlabels. Please only use the following material in your piece; you can transform in any way you choose, but do not introduce any new source material. The music originated on the netlabels tecnonucleo, Split Notes, and Tonstube.

1: The first 30 seconds of “20 200 2000 20000” off the album Sean but not Heard by Sean Archibald:

http://goo.gl/HqRY6

2: The final 30 seconds of “Aftermath” off the album Transmission by Unicode:

http://goo.gl/85ql3

3: From 3:00 to 3:30 of “C2” off the album Cràter by Adrià Bofarull and Joan Saura.

http://goo.gl/W8Y4T

Deadline: Monday, June 24, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of between two minutes 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 “disquiet0077-netlabelsplice” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Due to the nature of these releases, you must employ 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 77th Disquiet Junto project, in which the music from three different netlabels was combined to create one track, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/06/20/disqui...

This track is composed from material extracted from three pre-existing tracks: Adrià Bofarull and Joan Saura’s Cráter, Sean Archibald’s Sean but not Heard, and Unicode’s Transmission. More on Adrià Bofarull and Joan Saura’s album at http://www.tecnonucleo.org/index.php?.... More on Sean Archibald’s album at http://www.split-notes.com/011/. More on Unicode’s Transmission at http://archive.org/details/TON006.

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Panel Discussion: Future of Music

The recent San Francisco MusicTech Summit held, on May 28, a panel on “The Future of Music Creation Tools,” featuring Daniel Walton of app developer Retronyms, Sam Valenti of the Ghostly label and new Drip.FM platform, sound designer Dot Bustelo, and musician Dweezil Zappa. The panel was moderated by Billboard magazine writer David Downs. The panelists come at it from various, complementary directions, from iOS apps to guitar gear to distribution platforms, and there’s a heavy emphasis on practical applications, which in this heady field can be usefully grounding.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/sfmusictech. More on the panelists at zappa.com, retronyms.com, dotbustelo.com, and ghostly.com.

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.

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.