Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 453

Scanning the Radio Waves (MP3)

Jesse Eric Schmidt does not use the scan button on his radio to search for something to listen to. He uses the scan button to compose something to be listened to, something that collectively he has called a “rhythmic modular inventory” of what is on at that moment, the moment that is in fact an expanse of contiguous moments, the chance moments that occur between the start and end of his performance. The result is something that emphasizes the ephemeral nature of a radio signal. Much radio scanning by casual listeners has to do with finding a song worth lingering on — and in the vast majority of cases, that means to have temporary access to something that one knows is firmly available elsewhere: on YouTube, encased in a CD, in a box of 7″ singles at the back of one’s closet. Schmidt never lingers for long, instead allowing each audio element to commune with what preceded it and with what one anticipates will come next, each chess move enacted with the white noise signature of radio static.

Track originally posted for free download at theradius.us. More from Schmidt at jesseericschmidt.com. The image below is a grid of his varied activities:

Cues: Sound Motion, Book Audio, Dr. Eno, …

◼ Sound Motion: Three videos of materials responding to sound:

First up, mercury: “The higher the frequency the more ‘nodes’ will appear along the outer edge of the mercury,” via io9.com:

Second, what a speaker looks like when a 61 Hz tone plays at 60 frames per second, via laughingsquid.com, via Max La Rivière-Hedrick:

Third, “Non-Newtonian fluid meets subwoofer,” an experiment by Natasha Carlin (a student this semester in the class on sound I teach at the Academy of Art in San Francisco):

Note: the project was for an earlier class Carlin took, but she used as part of a student presentation in our class.

◼ Generative Fiction: This is a paragraph from early on in the novel You, written by Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible). The novel is set in the world of video-game development. The paragraph is told from the point of view of the book’s main character and narrator. He’s a newb game designer who at this moment in the story, toward the end of chapter seven, is trying to sort out a bug in the software. The paragraph also seems to work as a playful metaphor for composers working in generative environments:

They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.

More on the novel at austingrossman.dreamhosters.com.

◼ Reading Sound: This immediately movied to the top of my to-read list: Justin St. Clair‘s Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening, just out from Routledge. From the description:

This study examines postmodern literature— including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon —arguing that one of the formal logics of postmodern fiction is heterophonia: a pluralism of sound. The postmodern novel not only bears earwitness to a crucial period in American aural history, but it also offers a critique of the American soundscape by rebroadcasting extant technological discourses. Working chronologically through four audio transmission technologies of the twentieth century (the player piano, radio, television audio, and Muzak installations), St. Clair charts the tendency of ever-proliferating audio streams to become increasingly subsumed as background sound.

More from St. Clair at soundculturestudies.net. He’s an assistant professor of English at the University of South Alabama.

◼ Sound Matter: The publisher Noch bills itself as having a focus on “expanded listening.” Its first volume, What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?), features 16 new writings (ranging from music criticism to short fiction, from visual poetry to art writing) by Cheryl Tipp, Chiara Guidi, David Toop, Francesco Tenaglia, Helena Hunter, Ivan Carozzi, James Wilkes, Luciano Chessa, Mike Cooper, Patrick Farmer, Salomé Voegelin, Sandra Jasper, Simone Bertuzzi, Stefano Scalich, Steve Roden, Tone Gellein. It’s edited by Noch founders Daniela Cascella and Paolo Inverni. Details at nochpublishing.com.

◼ Dr. Eno: The BBC has some audio (one minute and six seconds) of Brian Eno’s The Quiet Room, an audio-visual healing installation at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, England: bbc.co.uk. It is very Thursday Afternoon. That’s a good thing. … While on the subject, the Soundcheck show from WNYC has been interviewing musicians about their guilty pleasures; Eno provides a welcome context to his answer: “I’m not really embarrassed about any of my tastes.” (Latter link thanks to Mike Rhode.)

◼ More Children: Nice little review by the Seattle Stranger‘s David Schmader of The Children Next Door, for which I did sound design with composer Taylor Deupree, at thestranger.com: “it’s a masterpiece — smart, tough, fearless, and miraculously compact.” Directed by Doug Block, produced by Lynda A. Hansen. The film is playing there at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival 2013.

◼ One Liners: Keep an ear out for cicadas. ◼ There’s now a page on Google+ for a fledgling Disquiet.com presence: gplus.to/disquiet. ◼ Various Microsoft content projects apparently have an “electronic dance music” component (adweek.com). ◼ 19 musicians made tracks from just two tones and three beats in the 70th Disquiet Junto project, which ended last night.

The Acoustic Laptop (MP3)

It’s all scraped, noisy metal and these tones that echo in seeming slow-motion. The track, “acoustic laptop ‘xen’ (edit)” by Norwegian musician Tore Honoré Bøe, teeters at the place where microsound meets European free improvisation, where attention to sonic detail is enacted with a freeform, narrative-in-progress spirit. It manages, in turn, to be both reflective and invigorating. The title of the track refers to a series of “acoustic laptops” that he has developed, a collection of “wood boxes with various tiny objects attached; springs, stones, metal, rubber, string, needles, memorabilia – amplified by contact mikes (piezos).” Each is a kind of sonic wunderkammer. View a gallery of them at origami.teks.no.

Bøe is based in the Canary Islands. More from him at origami.teks.no and twitter.com/origamiboe.

Weary Decadence (MP3)

With its lulling melody, ominous overtones, and the fragments of lightly tweaked vocal elements, “The Parting,” credited to Michael Ash Sharbaugh and Adrian Hallam (the latter aka Blue Room Green), could be a lost Angelo Badalamenti track. It has the enjoyably coy longueurs of weary decadence. Hallam is credited with guitar, Oberheim synth, and found sounds, and Sharbaugh with vocals, synthesizers, found sounds, and sound manipulations:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/michael-ash-sharbaugh. More from Hallam, who is based in Australia, at twitter.com/BlueRoomGreen. More from Sharbaugh, who is based in Decatur, Georgia, at twitter.com/MDSharbaugh.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

My essay on the wall at @root_division in SF, accompanying art by @salvagione, design by @boondesign. http://t.co/VXsT3WeRgc ->



So many chimes, so many chime puns to avoid. http://t.co/BIVVQFRd9z ->



Instagram self-doubt. http://t.co/IzgpkLa9Sq ->



This is when I start photographing screenshots of my tweets and posting the photos to Instagram rather than vice-versa. Cc: @TheLionAltered in reply to TheLionAltered ->



Generation GPS: raised listening, from day one, to computerized voices give directions. ->



Eno’ Syndrome: pathology suffered by those who seek treatment at Montefiore Hospital to take in his installation: http://t.co/Fph4wlWf2y ->



An hour of music by 12 musicians, each piece in 4 parts, each part for a season built from a field recording: https://t.co/lkXGqcBW72 ->



My 2.7-year-old sang/hummed along with the bathing-suit drying machine ("water extractor") at the Y this morning. ->



What an earthquake sounds like. From the "share your story" board in quake exhibit at Academy of Science in GG Park…. ->



Been Monday dad for a year and half, spending each solo with my kid. Starting now I'm Saturday dad. Benefit: more open museums/galleries. ->



“My echolocation mechanism will get a fix on your reaction.” —The @GreatDismal, on reading from his new novel: http://t.co/l6MjanYFmE ->



Increasingly fascinated by the acoustics (the sonic UI/UX) of conference calls. That and text-to-speech are my obsessions. ->



Tomorrow's newsletter includes a contest to win CDs of recent scores by Cliff Martinez &
Nick Urata. Subscribe: http://t.co/bJzuaEu8Lj. ->



Parenting Protip: Think before teaching your toddler about the concept of human beatboxing. ->



RIP, rave promoter Paul Shurey (53): http://t.co/qCycF0oBRT ->



New Disquiet e-newsletter ( http://t.co/bJzuaEu8Lj ) out later today. Includes contest for CDs of scores by Cliff Martinez and Nick Urata. ->



New @sopercussion album, due out at the end of May, is tremendous: maximalist, minimalist, roaring, subtle. Preview: https://t.co/24xIp6rVUs ->



A first for Disquiet: an exclusive stream. For the next week, http://t.co/tkA4fVwB80 is the only place to hear @peterkirn's Music for Dance. ->



Today in sound class: online social networks & digital retail. How audio travels through connections & commerce. Three weeks of class left. ->



Student presentations: calls-to-prayer, Gibson v. Fender, Daft Punk campaign, “non-Newtonian fluid meets subwoofer” ( http://t.co/lyJniTa4rR ) ->



Tomorrow's @djunto, the 70th weekly project, involves just 2 tones & 3 beats. And the 71st is shaping up to be a true first for the group. ->



Belated Tuesday noon siren mention: I was in the shower at the time. Echo echo echo … ->



TV music so differs from movie music. So much produced so quickly, it’s more patterning than narrative. Which is to say, I often love it. ->



3D-Printed Bionic Ear Can Hear Radio Waves: http://t.co/8Cw6FEgObn A little early to award headline of the day, but this seems hard to beat. ->



Text appearing below Spotify link in Google search: “Spotify coming soon. Thanks for visiting Spotify. To us, music is everything.” Soon? ->



Thanks! MT @peterkirn: "Dance can't be stored" http://t.co/Lg0fwfJ8zS hear & read, my music for choreography. Loved doing this w/ @disquiet ->



When people who followed me due to my @peterkirn interview about abstract music for modern dance learn my favorite TV show of 2013 is Arrow. ->



Trio for outdoor drones on a hot day: airplane, rooftop HVAC, laptop fan. ->



text-to-speech-to-text: http://t.co/UgnlnkZrjO. Thanks to @tobiasreber for the laugh. #faceoff #amplification ->



"Facebook is no longer supported in TweetDeck, on 7th May your Facebook account and Facebook columns will be removed." #oy ->



OK, this week's Disquiet Junto project is, I think, the most minimalist yet, yet nonetheless requires a not insignificant amount of effort. ->



The 70th @djunto project, making music from 2 tones & 3 beats, has gone live at: http://t.co/Uprfjjv8ON http://t.co/4GjGanKdHp ->



So glad you dig. RT @GuyBirkin: .@disquiet just got this week's @djunto project – a wicked convolution of simple elements. Great stuff. ->



RIP, Jeff Hanneman (b. 1964), founding guitarist in Slayer (my wife and my first concert together). ->



Greg Ginn plays theremin on the new (somewhat Fugazi-ish) Black Flag song, “Down in the Dirt”: http://t.co/BB8WEIydWK #yesnew #freedownload ->



Every unformatted plain text mass email now looks like it came from @thelistserve. ->



Not everyday I find myself making a Slayer reference and a Black Flag reference. Turbonegro's Vans deal isn’t enough to make it a trifecta. ->



20th anniversary of Mosaic browser a month away. That it isn't the defining anniversary of 2013 is a testament to the innovation's ubiquity. ->



Fireworks? #94121 ->



Of that I have no doubt. RT @thelistserve: @disquiet hey we are THE canonical modern day plain text mass email. :) ->



If you're in/near Cleveland, Janet Cardiff is talking about the Forty-Part Motet @ClevelandArt on Sunday: http://t.co/HWxacXWJJf ->



Thanks! MT @notrobwalker: Motherboard on "YouTube's Rap Instrumental Subculture" (cc: @disquiet if you haven't seen.) http://t.co/7BwZCtMrI4 ->



“The internet is positive about doom metal.” http://t.co/sxBFoZzF3K ->



Ha! RT @KenMcCandless: .@disquiet "The Internet is negative about dubstep." There's hope yet. http://t.co/yOnu59zB3n ->



Music for 2 tones & 3 beats: https://t.co/oeypqrjHg6. The most minimal Disquiet Junto project yet. Four tracks so far. Just getting started. ->



The biggest change to Valencia Street's soundscape since I moved to California in 1989 is the constant presence of construction. #415 ->



Sending a test post via Buffer. ->

Brian Reitzel on Music for Film (MP3)

A while back, Brian Reitzel (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, Boss) talked with the Echoes radio show’s John Diliberto about his scores for film and television. Their discussion had a particular emphasis on the way his efforts as a music supervisor overlap with his composing (MP3). It’s especially interesting to learn how Reitzel’s editing/remixing provides a Venn Diagram overlap between his composing and his music selection — it comes across as almost seamless. Shortly after the broadcast, Boss was cancelled, and unfortunately the interview doesn’t cover his work on Hannibal. Reitzel’s latest film score is for the new Sofia Coppola movie, Bling Ring.

Download audio file (EchoesPodcast-Reitzel.mp3))

Download at podbay.fm.

Disquiet Junto Project 0070: 2 Tones, 3 Beats

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 afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 2, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, May 6, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0070: 2 Tones, 3 Beats

This week’s project is a minimalist enterprise. It is an attempt to probe the place where beats and tones merge.

Step 1: Determine the two notes (along the chromatic scale, from A to G#) that will be the focus of your recording. You can do this in one of two ways. It’s your choice which approach you employ. You can use a random-number generator, such as the one at http://goo.gl/1ZoEi, to provide an integer from 1 to 12. (You’ll need to do this twice; if you get the same number the second time, roll again — as it were — until you get a different number.) Or you can convert your own name into notes, using the first letter of your given name as one note and the first letter of your family name as the other note. To convert a letter higher than L, simply cycle through the scale again (i.e., L = G#, M = A, etc.). (And if your given and family names begin with the same letter, then continue through the letters in your family name until you come upon one that is different from the first letter of your given name.)

Step 2: Record those two notes separately. You can use a digital or analog instrument. It’s preferable that you use a different instrument for each of the two notes. Edit each recording so you have a version of it that is exactly one minute long (this might require some looping).

Step 3: Play back one of the notes and listen closely for its inherent pulse, to the shape of its waveform. Then layer a beat atop the note that matches the note’s pulse.

Step 4: Repeat the process in Step 3 for the other note.

Step 5: Combine the two tracks that resulted from Step 3 and Step 4 into a single track.

Step 6: Play back the combined, single track and listen closely for a pattern in the way that the waves and beats combine. Now record a third beat that highlights the pattern that you find most appealing or otherwise intriguing. This pattern might be a consistent rhythm, or it might be a series of select events.

Step 7: Combine the third beat with the track that resulted from Step 5 above. Your piece is now complete. Feel free to lightly edit it to allow for fade in and fade out. Do not add any other elements.

Deadline: Monday, May 6, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

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

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 “disquiet0070-2tones3beats” 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 70th Disquiet Junto project, which involves creating a single piece of music from two tones and three beats, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/05/02/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

“Dance Can’t Be Stored”

Before moving to the interview, something really special: From May 1 through May 7, this stream of Peter Kirn’s forthcoming album, Music for Dance, will play exclusively here on Disquiet.com. Below, Kirn talks at length about the album, which collects music he wrote for choreographers between 2002 and 2011:

Many thanks to Kirn for sharing his music with this website’s readers.

It isn’t so much that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. It’s that on the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog, as well as a philosopher, as well as a notary public, as well as an expert in early forms of Egyptian currency.

Someone at Make magazine once said that there are many regular readers of the website who didn’t fully understand there was also a print magazine, so deep were those particular readers in the digital projection of that multi-faceted publication.

This goes for individuals as much as for institutions. There are users of MeeBlip, the open source digital synthesizer, who don’t fully get that it is the work of Peter Kirn, best known as the founder of the music-tech website CreateDigitalMusic.com, whose readers might not fully get that he is also a performing and recording musician. Kirn was for a long time based in New York, but recently relocated to Berlin, adding a layer of geolocative dispersal to his already broadly distributed portfolio. A forthcoming record album from Kirn, Music for Dance, will add another dot to that constellation of activity by focusing on his collaborative work, specifically his decade-long history in the world of contemporary dance. It’s a beautiful recording, opening with snippets of broken whispers amid poised tones, and proceeding, true to its montage sensibility, through percussive experimentation, plectrum psychedelia, ominous drones, and otherworldly stasis. Kirn conversed at length about the album and the work that went into it, as well as his other activities. The result of that discussion appears, lightly edited, below.

A side note before moving on to the interview. I asked Peter about the elegant shapes that are superimposed on the photographs that accompany the album, and he provided the following explanation from the album’s graphic designer, Anette K. Hansen (anettekhansen.com), who was born in Oslo and shares a workspace with Kirn in Berlin. She said:

“The graphics are taken from graphic dance diagrams from a specific type of dance called The Hey, defined as ‘the rhythmical interlacing in serpentine fashion of two groups of dancers, moving in single file and in opposite directions.’

“I wanted to juxtapose the type of music and the type of dance that may come from that specific music with a completely different form of dance. I’ve done projects before where I’ve tried to ‘visualize music’ and love sound wave diagrams, etc. Visualizing dance graphically is equally as difficult. But I love how something so fluent can be represented by something so stationary and organized.”

Marc Weidenbaum: Dance and electronic music have a long association, both in the experimental art world — I’m thinking initially of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and of Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass, among numerous others — and, of course, in the populist realms of house, techno, and more recently EDM. Do you draw more from one of those traditions than the other?

Peter Kirn: Well, my training came mostly from the experimental art music world, so that’s my original bias. Now, living in Berlin, I’ve been soaking up more of what happens in clubs. It’s as much fun to me to do a techno set as a fully ambient set, if I can. And populist or art aside, it’s exciting to be in a venue where the audience dances.

What’s nice about Berlin at the moment, too, is how blurred these scenes are. I’ve played a gallery and then run into audience members and danced until dawn; there are classical concerts at big clubs like Berghain and techno out in the park. I remember in school people regularly saying they weren’t making “beat-driven” music, a meaningless contortion that I presume meant they were rejecting those popular forms. And on the flipside, I’ve known plenty of people weirded out by more experimental work. It’s refreshing to see so many people being open minded.

I mean, to me, all of this stuff is a lot of fun. I don’t want to sound un-serious, but it’s such a deep, sensual, emotional experience listening to music, whether it’s some out-there experimental sounds or a four-on-the-floor dance track. And this technology easily adapts to each, so I’d be missing out if I didn’t get to embrace both, as a musician and listener.

Coming from experimental sound, it’s also wonderful to hear those timbres, performance techniques, and technologies go from the domain of labs and schools to being something approaching folk art. So, I’m always insatiably hungry for more of each.

Weidenbaum: The album appears as one long track, a little under 34 minutes in length. How did you decide on this presentation format?

Kirn: For me, it’s a cinematic approach, a sense that once you enter this environment, everything is continuous. It’s also an extension of the process I had built with the dancers, particularly working with Kathy Westwater for over a decade, where I would constantly be making a montage from previous materials.

Weidenbaum: The person to whom you dedicated the project, Viola Farber — say a bit more about her.

Kirn: Viola was a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Company, and later of her own company. I studied with her as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College from 1996-98, where she ran the dance program until her passing during my junior year. (See her wikipedia.or page.)

Viola was an extraordinary teacher and individual, full of indescribable energy and discipline. She constantly demanded greater effort and ingenuity of her dancers. I was at an advantage as a musician in that I think she was more patient with us, but I also adored her toughness. (I sometimes imagine that drive when trying to get myself to work harder, even now.) She was never distracted or unfocused; she was always fully present. And she seemed to take endless delight in new ideas.

Through John Yannelli, who ran (and runs) the electronic music studio at the college, I wound up as a sound tech for dance shows, doing music improv with the dancers, and eventually scoring dance pieces. (Some of this was electronic; I also did some music as a singer and as a pianist.) I was also in a class she taught on dance and music that was in progress when she became ill; it was one of her last classes. But that was I think the greatest pleasure for me, because, being a musician rather than in the dance program, it was the one chance to work with her directly, making experimental choreography and sounds and music.

One of the things I loved about Viola is that musicians were never just off to the margins. I did several pieces where music was onstage with the dance; in one work I even had a graphical score for performance and movement for myself and other singers. Eventually one of the choreographers got the idea of using non-trained dancers, and so I found myself in a concert as a dancer and not a musician. Being in the middle of the action as Viola led warm-ups across the floor before those performances was a singular experience. She was somehow terrifically lucid in a series of grunts and instructions, bounding across the floor while working against the limitations of her damaged hip.

Part of why I think Viola was so present in her work was that she was able to focus on this ephemeral quality of performance, this sense that dance can’t be stored, that it vanishes — like the rest of us — in time.

Weidenbaum: Talk a bit about the performances that are associated with the materials that served as the source audio for this album. Can you annotate it, perhaps, say with time codes that single out the different subsections?

Kirn: They’re collaged in this way partly in that for me there is a continuous narrative, so I actually find I can’t do that so precisely. Listening again, it’s a bit like you feel in a dream — fragments from different times and places can merge together in a way that isn’t so historically accurate. But they come largely from the Dark Matters cycle I did for Kathy Westwater. There’s Christopher Williams’ incubus, starting around 14:50, working with convolved flute and breath samples with Margaret Lancaster. At the very beginning the materials come from a work called Palinopsia I made with Elise Knudson and Pauliina Silvennoinen. And that’s my voice there at the start.

Weidenbaum: Please take one example of the music we hear here — preferably one that resulted from the most collaborative engagement, in which there was back and forth between you and the choreographer in the music’s development — and talk about how it came to be.

Kirn: A lot of the sound is from working with Kathy, and that is just an endless process of collaboration on the Dark Matter series. It’s actually hard to pick out one example, because we worked in cycles, baking the old into the new. When we first started working in 1999, I would meticulously assemble these pre-recorded scores — the old days — using tools like SoundHack and MetaSynth to make sounds and assembling them into Digital Performer. And I’d go a bit mental, as Kathy would constantly change the length of the piece — sometimes by as much as ten or fifteen minutes — because she had this organic process with the dancers. But what came out of that was that I eventually developed a kind of rhythm I knew would fit with what she was doing — sometimes contrasting, sometimes matching, but that would feel right. And even if there was five minutes of silence at the end, maybe that’d work.

By the time we started Dark Matter, I’d switched to loading sounds into Live (though still often using a lot of convolution, as I was fully addicted). And the back and forth was certainly endless. We’d talk about ideas; Kathy would bring images, which ranged from astrophysics to violence and torture. I’d try to somehow absorb and forget these at once, as I built a sound palette. And I’d spend lots and lots of time in the studio. Often, I’d just watch — ideally whole pieces or sections, but sometimes even spend time watching as they worked on phrases, how they pieces together gestures. And then eventually I’d come in with the laptop and play along, work with texture and sometimes even do sound design as they danced. To make the sound portable, we’d work with boom boxes and CDs at some point. But it was always organic, as the dancers also got to know me and I think we were playing off one another, even as scores were being set.

Somehow, on this, the result you hear now is all of those pieces, and none of them. Two pieces are sometimes playing at the same time; events are out of order. It’s a textural echo of what was.

I hope someone dances around to it, even in their head.

Weidenbaum: What are your mental associations with the album?

Kirn: What’s moving for me as I listen to this is that I remember the dancers, the people, the time we shared in rehearsal studios and venues. Working with Kathy, in particular, I was often making stuff in Ableton Live on the fly while sitting in studios, sometimes recording the sounds of the dance against the floorboard (even with an internal mic), once I started using Live in dance scores in 2002.

The city feels like a backdrop for this music to me. So that’s how I came to assemble these film photos I took, all from right before I moved to Berlin. Ultimately, that felt right, choosing these sort of abstract textures — in the same way the scores were abstract textures made to go with the choreography.

Weidenbaum: It seems like your music education benefited from cross-contamination, as it were, from another field. This question may be going nowhere, but I’ll give it a try: do you have a sense of how musicians reared in a music-only environment, a traditional concert-oriented education, might have to struggle more these days than those with collaborative, transmedia experience?

Kirn: Well, heh, they may be better musicians. I can’t really speak to that just because I’ve always had cross-contamination. The people I know with more focused educations have sometimes found their way to other influences themselves.

Weidenbaum: It would be a missed opportunity not to ask you about your websites, in particular CreateDigitalMusic.com. I have three of these questions. First, how do you divide up your day, or week, to balance your personal compositional and performance work and your online activities?

Kirn: Ha! I wish I had this answer. I’ll let you know if I ever sort it out.

Honestly, I feel like it’s getting better this year in Berlin. I have three spaces: home, a workspace (with Anette, the graphic designer, and two other creative types) in Neukölln, and a studio in Friedrichshain. So that spatial separation helps a lot. And then I don’t touch the Internet in the studio. I’m also fortunate to have gotten to spend some time in the studio of Benjamin Weiss, a collaborator. And increasingly, I’m blurring the two — using that creative time as a way to fuel the work on the site and visa versa. Somehow, hopefully, the discipline of running the site and the synth helps inform creative discipline.

Writing is on a schedule, by virtue of having a daily site and being my main source of income. Very often creative time is more sporadic and comes in bursts, but then, that suits the way I find creative energy.

Weidenbaum: Second, given your dual roles as journalist and musician, what have you observed about how musicians working today differ from, say, when you first launched the site?

Kirn: There’s a great deal more diversity in tools. It was still a DAW-dominated world when I started, though we had people already pushing away from that, using Game Boys and Palm and the like. Now, it really is all over the place, with more of everything. The number of people using vintage tech (even computers), using hardware, using drum machines, using modular, using mobile (iOS in particular, of course), and using DIY tools like Max and Pd and SuperCollider just keeps expanding. I think it’s healthy. More people are working with technology than before, and so they’re making that realm more flexible and diverse in keeping with their diverse musicality.

Weidenbaum: Third, given your history, there is less dance in your CreateDigitalMotion.com coverage than perhaps one might have imagined. Do you think there is a gap yet to be bridged between contemporary dance and the digital arts?

Kirn: That’s an unfortunate oversight on my part, certainly. Motion has had fewer resources, too, and I devote less time to it than I’d like because it’s a labor of love rather than generating financial support. So I wouldn’t say this is disproportionate entirely because of the scene.

At the same time, the dance world definitely moves more slowly. That’s okay — it takes more time to tailor something like live and interactive visuals to dance than it does to experiment with VJing in a club.

I’d love to talk more about this, though. It was great, for instance, to lead a panel with Mark Coniglio, at Platoon here in Berlin last fall, one of the major pioneers of this field, from Isadora to Troika Ranch — and someone who mentored me while I was at Dance Theater Workshop.

Weidenbaum: You said the release will get a “Creative Commons BY-SA” license. That’s great you are allowing derivative works. Was that a decision you gave much thought to, weighing pros and cons, or was it a natural inclination? I’ve been fascinated of late with people who pursue the Creative Commons option but neglect the opportunities provided by allowing for derivatives.

Kirn: I do give it some thought. Just as you have to make sure the packaging and mastering and duration fit a release, you should think about each release’s license.

That said, I value these sorts of licenses generally; it’s part of my life and my livelihood. My site runs on open source software, and the MeeBlip synthesizer we produce relies on the GPL and Creative Commons to allow people to share hacks and modifications. The site’s content, too, depends on free licensing — we regularly rely on CC images from Flickr, for instance, so it makes sense that the site and our media are generally published under the same license. It means we give back, hopefully. And also I think it can clarify what is fair and non-fair use in the Internet age. I wish more sites were smarter about licensing options, clear license information, and — especially — clear attribution.

As far as Music for Dance, the whole purpose of the release was to set this music free. So giving it a permissive license makes sense.

Not everything I think needs to be Creative Commons-licensed — sometimes traditional copyright makes better economic sense. But when a free license is the goal, I think ShareAlike is the logical restriction to add. Derivative works then have to be shared in the same way, so it avoids exploitation. But unlike non-commercial licenses, it’s clear and unambiguous.

Who knows when something is truly non-commercial — maybe on Star Trek where there’s no money. And if you’re trying to avoid it showing up in a car ad without you getting paid, well, let’s see a Volkswagen ad under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license! That’s be kind of amazing.

Weidenbaum: You mention in the liner note that this was a chapter in your life, this work, and the sense is that chapter is in the past. Have you not been exploring further choreography-based efforts now that you are in Berlin?

Kirn: The chapter was definitely New York; Berlin has been a profound change. I have stepped away from working from dance for a while, which I think can be healthy, particularly after some collaborations that lasted years. But I know that won’t last for long; I’ll come back to it and I’m making some of those connections here. And I was surprised to discover Sarah Lawrence has a presence in Berlin, too, so it was great to talk to other alumni who are here, including one of John Yannelli’s more recent students. Life seems to come in cycles like this.

I also have these websites I write every day, and a synth to manufacture, so there is a bit of juggling there, for sure!

But with or without directly working with choreographers, I think somehow dance and movement have to be part of the DNA of anything you do in music. There are always feelings of gestures. In this score, there are a number of made-up instruments that sound as though they may be acoustic but are entirely synthetic. And in (club) dance music you have similar ideas — you imagine a human playing or dancing to a line, or maybe a robot. But you move around. And on the technology side, this is why I’m so interested as a writer in looking at how people are connecting gestures and electronic music. Even if that gesture is as simple as turning a knob, there’s a link between movement and sound.

More from Kirn at pkirn.com.

Photo credits: The image of Kirn’s silhoette is by Brigitte Faessler. The image with his eyeglasses is by Elwira Wojtunik.

Anonymous Dawn Chorus

Even by its own relatively taciturn standards, the TouchRadio series has outdone — underdone? — itself with the latest entry in its ongoing free MP3 releases. Titled “Urban Dawn Chorus,” the nearly 70-megabyte file, just shy of an hour in length, is a field recording of the title subject, reportedly taped in London — specifically “Balham, south west London, from 0400 HRS 1st May 2013,” which would have been this very morning. No artist is specified, not on the podcast entry page, nor in the track’s metadata. It’s worth noting that TouchRadio regular Jez riley French used the phrase “dawn chorus” in a track’s description back in January, so perhaps that’s a clue. While consisting largely of birdsong heard from varying degrees of distance, the track also, true to its urban title reference, occasionally witnesses the intrusion of automobiles, though their light whir could have, had even less information accompanied the track, been mistaken for a nearby river (MP3).

Download audio file (Radio94.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk.

John Parish on Film Music (MP3)

Resonance FM’s OST show — that’s original soundtrack — broadcast has posted an audio interview with John Parish, alumni of PJ Harvey’s activities, on the subject of his film score work, recently collected by the Thrill Jockey label, a project mentioned here back in early March. The music, much of which is sampled over the course of the interview, has touches of Angelo Badalamenti, Jon Brion, and Ennio Morricone, but also charts its own course, navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of instrumental pop and sound design (MP3). Parish talks about the instrumentation that helps him achieve his sounds, and the benefits of minimal recording settings in film music (“it becomes nothing because there’s everything there,” he says of over-stuffed Hollywood movie scores).

Download audio file (OST13thApril2013JohnParish.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at resonancefm.com.