Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 454

Cues: Turner Query, InstaJam, Sound Videos

◼ Shorted Shortlist: The shortlist for this year’s Turner Prize has been announced. The artists are Laure Prouvost, Tino Sehgal, David Shrigley, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. A writeup at blouinartinfo.com refers to Sehgal as a “first” for the Turner (“the first time an artist producing no object is included”), but I wonder if Susan Philipsz, who won for a sound-based work in 2010, doesn’t count in that regard. Charlotte Higgins, among others, noted this back in December 2010; Higgins wrote of Philipsz, at guardian.co.uk, that she “is the first person in the history of the award to have created nothing you can see or touch.” Then again, perhaps what the Blouin story, by Coline Milliard, is getting at is that even though ephemeral, the Philipsz piece in question — Lowlands, which involved multiple versions of the same 16th-century Scottish song — was still a self-contained work, unlike with Sehgal, whose “objectless practice involves events performed by participants.” For the record, I’m not remotely focused on art horse races — in “art competition” in general — but I am interested in how art horse races shape and illuminate things, like institutional conceptions of the role of sound in art.

◼ What Sound Looks Like: That’s a visualization of the song of a humpback whale up top, below left crickets chirping and below right a Northern Cardinal. These are the work of Mark Fischer, who combined his interests in computer programming and marine acoustics. More at his website, aguasonic.com (via dailymail.co.uk, via io9.com).

◼ App Developments: You can now connect your instagram.com account to your thisismyjam account, and “use any Instagram photo as your jam image,” according to an email announcement from the latter service late last week.

◼ Unsilent Eno: “[H]aving invented the future, shouldn’t he be allowed to live in it?” — that’s composer Phil Kline (Unsilent Night) on Brian Eno returning time and again to particular themes and concepts (wqxr.org). … Speaking of whom, Eno’s latest installation is at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, England (via longnow.org). This will, no doubt, lead to Eno’s Syndrome, a pathology suffered by those who seek treatment at Montefiore Hospital to take in his installation.

◼ Past Isn’t Past Dept.: The further ahead we progress, the deeper into the past we can delve. Technology continues to let us listen to things that were, until recent years, unlistenable, such as a recording of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone: ibtimes.com:

◼ Live Film Sound: “The film has drifted into obscurity for one simple reason. … ‘The sound doesn’t exist.’” — that’s from Susan King’s piece in The Los Angles Times about the resuscitation of The Donovan Affair, a 1929 Frank Capra film (“the first all-talking motion picture he directed for Columbia Pictures”). There’s now a live theatrical version of the film, with actors and musicians and others providing audio to the projected movie. How did they get the script? There was a copy in the archives of the New York State Board of Film Censors — “but it was only 60% to 70% accurate.”

◼ Voice Overacting: “It’s going really well but you don’t have to add your own sound effects” — that’s fight-training advice given to actress Hayley Atwell, who plays Peggy Carter in the recent Captain America films, at metro.co.uk (via io9.com).

◼ Sounds of Brands: “Live Music and a Canned Patron” — that’s the title of Ben Sisario‘s piece in The New York Times about the Red Bull Music Academy (nytimes.com). The academy began in 1998, 11 years after Red Bull was founded. The event in New York this year includes work by Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and Giorgio Moroder, among many others. Flying Lotus is an alumni; he participated in 2006, when the event took place in Melbourne — that’s the year of his debut album (1983, titled for the year of his birth). Red Bull is an essential case study in this class on sound in the media landscape I’ve been teaching.

◼ Sound Designers: There is a deep well of sound-design mini-documentaries about film over at soundworkscollection.com. Below is an eight-minute overview of the sound and music in the David Fincher version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with commentary from composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, sound re-recording mixer Michael Semanick, and re-recording mixer, sound designer, and supervising sound editor Ren Klyce (thanks for the link, Max La Rivière-Hedrick of futurepruf.com). The discussion at one point focuses on an especially fine moment in the film, when the droning of a floor cleaner in a nearly deserted office building melds with the movie’s score:

◼ Orchestral Stasis: What follows are the fourth and fifth movements from the world-premiere performance of Markus Reuter’s “Todmorden 513,” a beautiful example of orchestral stasis. It was recorded at the King Center Concert Hall in Denver, Colorado, on April 18, 2013 (cinematographer and sound recorder Scott “Gusty” Christensen, music director/conductor Thomas A. Blomster):

◼ Interface Agnostic: “Be skeptical of the name and GUI of all your plugins.” — Excellent advice, both practical and metaphorical, from Brandon Drury in his column “I’m A Sound Designer: Game Changer #8″ at recordingreview.com.

The Sonic Tourist (MP3)

In due time, aural snapshots will match their camera equivalent in frequency, in commonplaceness. The microphone embedded in so many devices — most notably cell phones, but also tablets, laptops, gaming devices — will be used casually, as well as expertly, to capture a moment by an ordinary tourist, or student, or business traveler. We’ll share these with friends and relatives, and thanks to the means by which tools such as Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, and, of course, SoundCloud have trained us, we’ll share them with strangers as well. These aural snapshots will be routine expressions of everyday mundanity and they will pay welcome witness to majestic documentary wonder.

And, of course, for some this future is already an accepted habit, or at least a habit in the making. Old Clone, a U.S.-based musician, recently posted this following montage of a trip to Chicago. It consists of 10 clips (“made on a little portable recorder”) stitched into a singular whole. In part that whole is simply a matter of it being one single track, a sequence with beginning and middle and end, but Old Clone also augmented the original material (“Stretched and bent, but mostly just shuffled around”), retaining its real-world-ness, but in turn providing a singular patina to the overall undertaking:

Old Clone credits an experiment by Robert Rizzi of Kolding, Denmark, with inspiring him. This appears to be the Rizzi track being referred to:

Old Clone track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/oldclone. Rizzi track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/rizzi.

The Ambient Hip-Hop Trade (MP3)

Another lovely beat-and-haze piece by Patrick Ellis. Like the one written up here earlier this month, “Sheffield Park” bears the “ambient hip-hop” tag. It’s more hip-hop than ambient this time around, flipping the emphasis from the earlier track, what with its more prominent beat, and more varied sectioning (despite being shy of a mere four minutes, it could qualify as a mini-suite). There are distant church bells, and a swaggering rhythm, and a lush hovering spaciousness, as well as, toward the end, what appears to be a quote from the book The Unicorn Trade by science fiction legend Poul Anderson and his wife Karen Anderson: “They talked quietly, until at last Gus reminded them that even here they were not masters of time. Eternity, yes, but not time,” the last word echoing and fading into the instrumental foundation.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick. Ellis is based in Seattle, Washington.

Disquiet Junto Project 0069: The 4 Elements

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, April 25, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 29, as the deadline.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0069: The 4 Elements

This is a shared-sample project. Its theme is “The Four Elements.” The goal is to create a new piece of music by employing the following four source recordings, each of which is intended to represent one of the elements: earth, water, air, and fire. (Alternately, you can record your own source audio for any or all of the elements.) Your track should be be divided into four segments of roughly equal length, one for each element. Any two consecutive segments may overlap, but only briefly, up to three seconds. You can manipulate the source audio in any way you choose, but you cannot add any other source audio.

Earth: http://www.freesound.org/people/ABouc...

Water: http://www.freesound.org/people/aesqe...

Air: http://www.freesound.org/people/Bosk1...

Fire: http://www.freesound.org/people/suonh...

Deadline: Monday, April 29, 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 “disquiet0069-4elements” 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. Of course, edit/omit the source-audio text, should you decide to produce your own source recordings:

More on this 69th Disquiet Junto project, which involves creating a single piece of music from samples that represent each of the four elements, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/04/25/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

All the source audio is from Freesound.org. The earth sample is by ABouch, the water by aesqe, the wind by Bosk1, and the fire by suonho:

Earth: http://www.freesound.org/people/ABouc...

Water: http://www.freesound.org/people/aesqe...

Wind: http://www.freesound.org/people/Bosk1...

Fire: http://www.freesound.org/people/suonh...

Image via wikimedia.org

Disquiet Junto F.A.Q.

This was last updated on 2013.04.25. New and edited information is marked with a delta symbol (Δ).

Q: What is the Disquiet Junto?

A: The Disquiet Junto is a group based on Soundcloud.com where musicians respond to weekly, fast-turnaround assignments to compose, record, and share new music. The idea is to use restraints as a springboard for creativity.

ΔQ: How long has the group been around?

A: The first Junto project began on the first Thursday of January 2012, and the series has continued weekly since then.

ΔQ: Is there a list of all the projects?

A: Yes. Here: “Disquiet Junto Project List.”

ΔQ: Is there an email list for announcements?

A: Yes. To subscribe and unsubscribe, go to: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto.

ΔQ: How does the group work?

A: A project is announced each Thursday — usually in the afternoon or early evening, California time — and it is due the following Monday by 11:59pm (that’s 11:59pm wherever you happen to be). You upload your track to your Soundcloud account. Then you associate it with the Junto group. And you include the appropriate tag with the track, as delineated in the project’s instructions, and include that tag in the name of the track (the tag is the word “Disquiet” followed by a four-digit number followed by a hyphen followed by a keyword, such as “Disquiet0003-glass” — again, the number and keyword are provided as part of the assignment). Be sure to click the “Add to group” button below your track’s waveform, and select the Disquiet Junto group.

ΔQ: Why isn’t my track showing up in the Junto group?

A: Read the previous question and follow those directions. If that doesn’t work, get in touch with the group’s founder and moderator, Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

Q: Should I provide any additional information?

A: Yes, please. Please include with your uploaded track some description of both (1) the compositional approach you had undertaken, as well as (2) the equipment and process you employed to achieve it.

Q: Do I need to participate every week?

A: Gosh no. There is no intent to pressure anyone to do any more than they have time for.

Q: Do I need to do this alone?

A: These can be group projects, certainly. You needn’t work by yourself, though that appears to be the most common approach by Junto members. (And there will be some projects in which collaboration is actively required.)

Q: What is a “junto”?

A: The word comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.”

Q: What is “electronic music”?

A: Anything you want it to be. Drones, beats, drones with beats, abstract, melodic, tuneful, discordant, phonographic, synthesized. Go for it.

Q: Does my track have to be “ambient”?

A: No, not by any means. That mode, broadly defined, will likely be a not uncommon approach for participants, but it won’t be the only one.

Q: Is there any restriction on length?

A: Not necessarily. It depends on the project. Some will stipulate length. Others won’t.

Q: Do I have to set my track to be downloadable?

A: You don’t have to, but it would be appreciated. Also, some assignments may involve remixing previous project entries, and if your track isn’t downloadable, it won’t be easily remix-able.

Q: Can I post more than one track for a project?

A: No, please. Just focus your efforts on one track. (That said, there may be occasional Junto projects for which you will be asked to do more than one track, but that will be part of a specific assignment.)

ΔQ: How can I communicate with other Junto people off of Soundcloud?

There’s a lot of Junto activity on Twitter. There is also a discussion tab at the group’s Soundcloud page. There will likely be a forum added to Disquiet.com in the near future.

Q: Are those really the only questions?

A: So far.

Q: What if I have more questions?

A: Get in touch with Disquiet Junto founder Marc Weidenbaum, at marc@disquiet.com.

Music for Drum Machine and Modular Synth (MP3)

At first, the beat is like a pack of Pick Up Stix that have been set loose in zero g and left to jitter and bounce around in a compact, three-dimensional space, the tiny emanations of their myriad chance collisions resulting in a constant pitter patter that hints at chaos but, in fact, reveals a logical system at work. Deeper material, more tonal than percussive, appears, but it seems more like an echo of the drum, a sonic shadow. It’s a sonic shadow. The beat is the main event. In time the rhythm congeals, gravity sets in, and the beat reduces to a singular enterprise. The track is “Since It Happened” by the Vancouver, Canada-based A Scanner Darkly.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/scannerdarkly. A brief liner note mentions that the project was completed on two instruments, the drum machine MachineDrum and the modular synth BugBrand. More on the tools at hand at elektron.se and bugbrand.co.uk.

Update (2013.04.25): Subsequent to this post, the musician added more information to the track’s page about the music’s development, including this: “Feedback based patches tend to be stubborn beasts as different things all influence each other in a non linear way, so it was really just trying to steer it in the direction I wanted rather than me actually controlling it.”

Tape to Tape (MP3)

Even were it not titled “Summer Chords,” the gossamer overload of this track by Wixel would summon up aural images of mid-year ease. It’s all gentle pulses loping like sodden sine waves beneath a lightly strummed guitar. The looping quality is inherently nostalgic, and not just for the individual listener’s memories. It also touches on a collective awareness of how the the mixed background haze and foreground guitar bring to mind some of the early collaborations of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. The song is a single from a release titled Revox Tapes by Wixel, about which he says the following on the website of the releasing record label:

With a little bit of luck my wife found me a dusty old Revox B77 tape recorder. Despite its rickety state, it was love a first sight. Getting it to play a tape was, to my surprise, quite a daunting task, let alone use it to record sounds. But after some loving and some serious cleaning, the record head started moving the magnetic particles of the tape again, sound was stuck onto that glorious piece of moving plastic film.

I started experimenting and recording, with the goal of composing songs especially for it. That ambition got killed rather abruptly when the B77 caught fire after an intense jamming/recording session. All I was left with was strips of sound, of which I was able to compile the some lovely results. Rather than burying it in my shelf of unfinished ideas, I thought a small cassette was a fitting salute to that wonderful machine, where music really became magic again.

The release is cassette-only (along with a download code), making this a contemporary recording both created and distributed on tape.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jordskredmusic. Wixel is Wim Maesschalck, who’s based in Brussels, Belgium. More from him at soundcloud.com/wixel. The label is Jordskred, more from which at jordskred.com; it’s based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Arcka’s Beat Deck

Arcka, the Philly-based rhythmsmith, continues his run of 52pickUpbeetz, a compilation-in-progress of homemade, sample-based percussive riffs, each tied to a different card pulled from a deck. The effort, which just expanded to include its ninth consecutive track, bears Arcka’s trademark use of lesser-known snippets of soul, hip-hop, and other favorites as the raw material from which he constructs his avant-hop experiments. This time around, he is heard using more vocal samples than listeners may be accustomed to. Recent highlights include the post-rock interplay of “ad: Mos’Flow 2” and the loungey exotica of “10s: We Dont Need”:

ad: Mos'Flow 2 by Arcka

10s: We Dont Need by Arcka

Get them all for free download at arckatron.us.

“Whining Train Carriage Chassis at Stratford Railway Station (SRA)”

Dizzy Banjo, aka Robert Thomas, has made countless iOS devotees appreciate the musicality, the sonic essence, of everyday noises through apps like RJDJ, as well as prominent developments associated with the film Inception and the last of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. In those apps, quotidian noise gets transformed into rhythmic, tonal, often melodic explorations that highlight the musicality of the source material. And then, sometimes, Thomas simply posts unmediated raw recordings of everyday sound to his soundcloud.com/dizzybanjo account, such as the recent “Whining Train Carriage Chassis at Stratford Railway Station (SRA).” That could be the title to a lost Raymond Carver short story. And in a manner it is, in that by focusing on the electric whine of the transit system, Thomas emphasizes the droning anxiety of the commuter’s routine.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dizzybanjo. More from Thomas at dizzybanjo.com and twitter.com/dizzybanjo.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

More anechoic-chamber porn: How to gauge quiet computers: http://t.co/SpcJveddW0. Via @ioflow ->



Bonobo album poster uses "DNL" to refer to "download." Is that a common usage? ->



Bleeker Bob's in NYC closing. Someone cursed Froyo in comment. Thought it an oddly phrased anti-Google line, but a yogurt chain's moving in. ->



Radio in this café has played Amel Larrieux’s “No One Else” for almost two hours straight. No one seems to have asked them to turn it off. ->



Was concerned the great battery life on my gen-2 iPad had spoiled me, but the Nexus 7 is holding up remarkably. ->



RIP, Italian ambient musician Oöphoi (b. Gianluigi Gasparetti, 1958), founder of the magazine Deep Listening: http://t.co/U6LLJBLGqd ->



24.9 seconds: The average length of @djunto tracks this week, as we use text-to-speech to frame fragments of Homer’s Odyssey. ->



That recurring dream in which you're running running running and you swipe up — and the Google Now interface appears. ->



The cover to @austin_grossman’s new novel, You, is by @the1console. Does this mean we should listen to @jampants’ music while reading it? ->



Tuesday noon siren, clear as the day, like there's a speaker on my roof. ->



Thanks for this. RT @brendanaanes: @disquiet I happened to be half a block from one of the speaker poles today and measured it at 100db. ->



William Basinski is packing his new @SoundCloud account with ambient tracks: https://t.co/gNigKqONtQ. Dozens since the first, 21 days ago. ->



The fire extinguisher that protects the hub of the 84 miles of cables at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House:… ->



A detail of the patch bay in the sound room at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House: http://t.co/HnDSFGgGut ->



Excited to see @DavidLasky, one of the first comics creators I edited, at @MissionComics tomorrow night! https://t.co/sGL5MbmJpX ->



Been awhile, but an email newsletter goes out to the Disquiet (.com) list shortly. You can subscribe here: http://t.co/bJzuaEu8Lj ->



Today in sound class we tour the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco to observe the technology that undergirds acoustic performance. ->



Apparently at some point Pacific Telephone & Telegraph ran out of covers with insignias and improvised. http://t.co/fDx6a5JJqe ->



One good thing about the term “electronic dance music”: it freed up the term “electronic music” to be more broadly interpreted. ->



RIP, Scott Miller (b. 1960), of Game Theory. I have been reading his book Music: What Happened? on @majortominor's recommendation. ->



Underscore trifecta at San Francisco Kabuki: music by Patton (Place Beyond Pines), Martinez (Company You Keep), Underworld's Smith (Trance) ->



Company You Keep (directed by Robert Redford) is third movie by Lem Dobbs with Cliff Martinez score, after Soderbergh's The Limey and Kafka. ->



Listening to “Turn Me On Dead Man” on repeat in honor of the late Scott Miller. (Also playing it “forwards” having reversed it in Audacity.) ->



RIP, designer Storm Elvin Thorgerson (b. 1944), best known for his Pink Floyd work (Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here) ->



RIP, Gary Biddles, singer with the new wave band Presence (also featured Lol Tolhurst and Michael Dempsey); former Cure roadie ->



It's likely that @vuzhmusic will like this week's @djunto. Just saying. ->



To ND or Not to ND, that is the subject of the @djunto noting @vuzhmusic’s deriv.cc netlabel: https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L http://t.co/Ddv7ZcnAbm ->



Note to @djunto: MT @vuzhmusic: The full album download has mp3s at higher bitrate than the oggs you point to. [See: http://t.co/BI9zWoiwPZ ->