Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 456

A Software Dry Run (MP3)

One person’s experiment with new gear is another’s background listening — one’s focused subject of hands-on attention, another’s office-filling atmosphere. Such is “Dry Sun Anode,” a gently torqued drone that contorts in one direction while it moves in another. It’s the work of Ken Mistove, aka Kenzak, who lives in Simi Valley, California. The tool he was fiddling with is Atomic Shadow’s Panoramic Wave Generator for Kontakt, which the developer calls “an experimental sound generating sample library.” He talks over at his website a bit about what he was up to:

I explored the first two presets this weekend. I turned off Kontakt’s effects and routed each patch to its own buss. Each used a unique delay line (Fxpansion’s Bloom and ValhallaUberMod). These were then both sent to an instance of ValhallaVintageVerb. Both tracks made extensive use of pitch and modulation wheels.

In the end, it was a quick experiment resulting in a filter swept drone. The resonant filter on Bloom really colors the first Kontakt patch (Android Sine). The second patch (Atomic Yak) is not very prominent but does peak through the background every now and then.

Will I be exploring this library more? Absolutely…

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ken-mistove. More from Mistove at kenzak.com. More on the source tool at atomicshadow.com.

Junto x Brickman, Together Again

The project that is currently underway, the project that ends this evening, is the 66th in the Disquiet Junto, a series of weekly communal music projects that explore restraint as an engine for creativity and productivity. It’s a tribute to, to my knowledge, the first regular Junto participant, Jeffrey Melton (aka Nofi), to pass since the group was formed back in the first week of January 2012. The project from the week prior, the 65th, was a less bittersweet, if no less reflective, communal activity. For the 65th project, we broke a single, hour-long composition of “ambient piano” by Jared Brickman into pieces, and then randomly assigned each piece to a different participant, ending up with 55 different parts. After the project was complete, Brickman generously offered to then stitch those 55 parts back into one long piece, which can be heard here:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jaredbrickman. More on the original project at disquiet.com

The browser-based tool that segmented the Brickman track for this project was coded by Disquiet Junto member Ken Mistove, more from whom at kenzak.com. More on Brickman’s source audio at soundcloud.com/one_hello_world.

Like a Loop Machine

Feedback comes in many forms, but the two essential ones may be (1) that moment when a frisson of time-warping, near-simultaneous-state echoing occurs, and (2) that moment when the noise overwhelms the system, when the sonic equivalent of matter and anti-matter seem to collide, resulting in broad sensory overreach. The track “2013-04-04 tape loop+mixer feedback+doepfer” by Passerby flirts with the second while keeping things in check well enough to largely adhere to the first. Passerby’s system is complex, as laid out in an accompanying liner note:

Two contact microphones attached to a Otari MX-5050 tape machine on the left and right sides. Those signals were fed into a Doepfer modular analog synthesizer, then into the tape loop, then from the tape loop to analog delay and reverb to separate channels in a mixer, which was feeding back both on itself and through the contact microphones.

The result is a constant state of self-adjusting balances, noises edging to the fore, then fading back, eruptions sensed more as premonitions than actual occurrences.

A piece by Valerio Tricoli is credited for inspiration. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/passerby. Passerby is Nicholas Davis of Chicago, Illinois. More from him at twitter.com/mosspassion and numbers.fm.

Post-Human Hard Listening (MP3)

Ephraim Wegner and Cem Güney have their ear to mid-distant future, specifically the one in which technology has manifestly altered human nature. Now, it may be argued that technology is merely an extension of human nature, that by our very nature everything we do is natural, and that all human-created technology — right back to rudimentary tools, even to the tool called language — has in turn altered what it means to be human. But it doesn’t seem an act of generational hubris to sense that something is going on with networked communication, with outboard memory, with ambient awareness, and so on that does raise the species stakes. What Wegner and Güney are up to in their 20-minute sound work “How to Survive in the Post−Human Era” is to explore those resulting circumstances in sound. In the work we hear Morse code, snatches of encoded verbiage, snaggles of wire dragged through the muck, signals aligning, data being parsed — yes, some of these are objective, and other are associative, but the strength of the piece is precisely how the boundaries between them blur (MP3).

Download audio file (cronicast107.mp3)

In a framing essay, Wegner and Güney talk about countervailing tendencies in depictions of the future, from global-beneficent singularity to dark, dystopian malaise. They pursue this with a focus on artificial life, on the machine as a music-producing mechanism enacting indirectly the will of the machine’s creator, making the creator a meta-creator. They term this an “AI-DSP” (an artificially intelligent digital signal processor). They describe their process as follows:

Musically the topic was implemented in various ways: The composition is divided into three parts: Design, Test and Launch. Design begins with pure sine waves which generate different interferences. Thereafter, a more complicated structure, consisting of voice, feedback and bit errors develops. Test starts with processed voice recordings played in the form of a canon. Different tones and words simulate sounds already existing in our surroundings. Bit by bit the machine takes over the action of the musicians and manipulates the voice recordings by means of a logical defined structure. Launch is based on Christian Wolff’s techniques for structured improvisation. Digital noise processed with different filter settings is played according to a call & response scheme. Lastly, sounds are generated with spatial movement according to a score.

The piece was performed live and debuted at the Festival for Applied Acoustics in Köln, Germany, on November 6, 2011, in an eight-channel format. The music was originally posted for free download as part of the Crónicaster podcast series at cronicaelectronica.org. More from Wegner at anti-matter-plant.org, and from Güney at impulse.tumblr.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Weird. My automated weekly Twitter aggregator decided, all on its own, to post on Sunday rather than Saturday. ->



The week’s @djunto has 31 pieces, with two full days to go. Here's a helpful 320kbps MP3 of the massive AIFF source: http://t.co/Fg8T8FPXQD ->



It was darker before the dusk this evening, the storm breaking at land’s end, sky overhead stormy but in the distance lit by the waning sun. ->



RIP, Robert Zildjian (89), of the namesake centuries-old Turkish cymbal-making family; founder of rival Sabian Cymbals. ->



I get Bcc'd on soul-retrieval SKU requisitions. RT @Le_Berger: @disquiet It's like you have a direct link with the grim reaper or something. ->



RIP, composer and educator Edward Charles Mattila (b. 1927), via @jcharney ->



Very sad. Learned via @vuzhmusic that Jeffrey Melton (@nofi), who participated in many @djunto projects, including the first, passed away. ->



Here's something I wrote about @nofi in 2011: http://t.co/w5wnsFc9mT. And here's more of his sounds: https://t.co/csnM59i7bI. ->



Man, @naotko has reminded me that the late @nofi was the compiler of the main @twitter list of @djunto participants: https://t.co/QzF3jON9pe ->



"I did not believe I could be so sad to learn someone I'd never met passed away." From a fellow admirer of @nofi. ->



Indeed. MT @happypuppyrecs: sad to learn of @nofi's death. at least his musical creations will be available for us to remember him with. ->



It's not that it's odd that I am saddened by @nofi's death despite having never met him; I am sad in part because I never met him. ->



Dang you, April Fools. Totally fell for the "Nick Cave is Nick Cave" joke: http://t.co/ZClHt6Qzl7 ->



This is the page for @nofi's funeral home: http://t.co/POwZBX3On4. It includes a button to "Leave Audio Memory." ->



Tuesday noon siren does battle with Steely Dan on the radio. ->



Next class in course on sound that you teach is about iconography, what sound looks like, and two Christian Marclay exhibits open. Perfecto. ->



Space is the place. MT @janeshin: Feel like I'm writing my letters in outer space as I listen to this set: https://t.co/71fpkl55qb ->



All afternoon thought a mouse was under the house. Then realized I'd left my iPod in my jacket playing a collection of @alln4tural tracks. ->



That waning period after April Fools' Day where so much music PR seems like a failed prank attempt at writing failed PR. ->



Cool. @Dalkey_Archive published William Gaddis' letters. Seems he wrote one lifelong letter with no paragraph breaks addressed to "everyone" ->



Due to death of @nofi (aka Jeffrey Melton) the week’s @djunto (#66) is a tribute to him (not the scheduled riff on #-of-beast backmasking). ->



This week’s @djunto tribute to the late @nofi has gone live: http://t.co/XjWrMj8rJr http://t.co/mOP3ucVNnL. And it went to the email list. ->



Thanks. It feels right. RT @vuzhmusic: @disquiet @nofi @djunto I'm glad you're doing this – I'm glad we're doing this. ->



Psyched to see that SoundSelf passed its fundraising goal on http://t.co/ZJOFFl41bQ ->



In the week’s @djunto project, we play live alongside a live tape of our recently deceased comrade, @nofi. Listen: https://t.co/bNdn5FZTiu ->



You get an email with the phrase “markdown madness” and you think it’s a about a writing/coding app. ->



Cliff Martinez appears to have scored Nicolas Winding Refn’s new Ryan Gosling film, Only God Forgives: http://t.co/Y12j2192eu #extravagant ->



Yeah. Drive x Oldboy x Kill Bill x Triad Election – Hangover 2. RT @dizzybanjo: @disquiet oh awesome, more Drive :D ->



That police siren was way close to the house before I realized it had nada to do with the Ephraim Wegner / Cem Güney music I'm listening to. ->



I've already read three of the five novels nominated for a Hugo (Grant, Robinson, Scalzi). This surprises me. ->

Steady State Drones (MP3)

The drones are thick, lengthy tubes that pass overhead, riddled with indents, flush with strange liquids, vibrating to some indiscernible rhythm. They move in odd ways, slowing suddenly to let Tesla-coil sparks fill the space. They rumble like a dead field reacting to sudden pressure change. They are the material from which the album Steady State by nojoined is made, six tracks of these menacingly beautiful, arterial explorations. Beats make themselves present, but the strongest work may be that, like the third track, “Steady State 3.2,” which is more about pulse than percussion (MP3). Steady State was released for free download by the arewrecordings.com netlabel. There are six tracks in all. Nojoined is David Priestley of Leicester, Britain, more from whom at soundcloud.com/nojoined.

Download audio file (3%29%20steady%20state%203%202.mp3)

Get the full set at archive.org.

Disquiet Junto Project 0066: Communing with Nofi

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 mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 8, 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 0066: Communing with Nofi

This week’s project is a tribute to the late Jeffrey Melton, the talented musician, best known on SoundCloud and Twitter as @nofi. Melton passed away a few days ago, on March 30, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lived with his wife and seven-year-old son. He was 42. Melton had been involved with the Disquiet Junto since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012, and he early on volunteered to create a Twitter list of the handles of participating Junto members.

The theme of this project, the 66th in the weekly Disquiet Junto series, is “posthumous collaboration”: communing through music.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Download the following live session of Jeffrey Melton performing. It was recorded in June of last year. Warning: it’s fairly sizable, at over 350 MBs:

http://nofi.org/media/2012-06-15-Unwi...

Step 2: The track is quite long, so select a segment of between 2 and 5 minutes. The best way to go about this might be to do it at random (just put the needle down, as it were), but of course feel free to listen at length and select a favorite section.

Step 3: Once you have your extracted segment, set the opening of the track to fade in.

Step 4: Set the ending of the track to cut out suddenly.

Step 5: Listen to it several times, to get to know it.

Step 6: Record yourself performing live along with the segment you have selected. Any instrumentation is fine. Just no voice. Be sure to play alone for approximately 10 seconds after Melton’s performance cuts off.

Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be the length determined in steps 2 and 6 above.

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 “disquiet0066-nonofi” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please set your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution). I’d like to potentially combine all the pieces into a single composition, and this license would allow me to do so easily.

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

This track is a posthumous collaboration with Jeffrey Melton, aka Nofi, who passed away on March 30, 2013. It was recorded live in April 2013 atop a June 2012 Melton live recording.

More on this 66th Disquiet Junto project at:

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

More of Melton/Nofi’s music at:

http://www.nofi.org/

Read Melton’s obituary here:

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/fort...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

A Sonic Journey Through Cork (MP3)

If you’ve read mention of the great Chicago-based broadcast/podcast Radius here quite often, but haven’t quite cracked its sonic code, given how informedly abstract its audio can get, then a comfortable place to start might be its current edition, number 38. This one is by Gavin Prior. Titled “Babbleon Cork,” it is a 20-plus-minute excursion into the sounds of Cork, Ireland, where Prior wandered about, recording device in hand, and captured the sounds of the city. As the title suggests, these sounds are largely a matter of human speech, thick regional accents making opaque what seems tantalizing in its near-familiarity, at least to a fellow English-speaker. It’s fascinating how a fair amount of dialect and slang can have the transformative impact of a digital audio tool. In addition, Prior employs those very tools, subtle electronic effects, the result of which he likens to a collage, one in which foregrounded noises and looping are engaged to produce something not fantastic or abstract so much as it is hyperreal.

He writes, in part:

“The emotional content of the direct speech is soundtracked and enhanced by the abstract, “instrumental” elements in the collage. The result is a short album which captures the energy of the city mixing layers of abstracted sounds and the fluent, irreverent utterances of the Corkonians themselves.”

Track originally posted for free download at theradius.us. More from Prior at his gavinprior.wordpress.com website and at the record label desertedvillage.com, which he co-founded. The above image is from a set of collages he created, available from his flickr.com account.

Beats from Moscow

William Gibson’s oft-quoted maxim “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” is an Internet-age corollary to perhaps the most cited line by William Faulkner, Gibson’s fellow novelist born in the American south. The Faulkner line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Both statements come to mind regularly when something from the great netlabel Dusted Wax Kingdom is spinning. Dusted Wax regularly posts music from the former Soviet Union, and related countries, that sounds like it was recorded in the Bronx shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall. The majority of Dusted Wax’s music is instrumental hip-hop, voiceless lines of artfully shambling beats. The beats may benefit from digital tools, but they bear all the marks of oldest-school hip-hop: vinyl surface noise, lightly reconfigured samples, a menacingly sedate pace. Among the latest from Dusted Wax is Urban Soul from “Russian beatsmith” Bruks Production, based out of Moscow. Among its key tracks is “Latin Thugs,” its brief horn sample echoed above slow rolling percussion (MP3):

Download audio file (Bruks_Production_-_04_-_Do_Not_Give_Up.mp3)

Album originally posted for free download at dustedwax.org.

Fetal Dissonance (MP3)

The cognitive dissonance in some of Prophecy Sun’s music can be significant. In the song “Killing Game,” for example, a discernible lyric communicates words along the lines of the title — does it go “kill and make havoc”? — words that for all their formidable threat still have a gentle, lulling aura. This aura is because Prophecy Sun layers her voice, amid blankets of sonic haze, with such a phalanx of echoes that it can be difficult to locate where the starting point of a given digital roundelay. In other words, this dissonance is not in error; it’s intentional. The haunting is like that of a rough dream or a hallucinatory reality, and the effect can bleed from one track to the next. The song that follows “Killing Game” on Sleep Fever, her album on the No Type netlabel, is “Give Me,” which while no less pleading, can be mistaken as threatening, because the phrase “give me” can sound a lot like “killing,” especially in circumstances such as these. Particularly recommended is the opening track, “Follow Me,” in large part because the soft consonants in the words allow them to be all the more lost in the processing (MP3).

Download audio file (pan075-prophecy_sun-1-follow_me.mp3)

A brief liner note explains that Prophecy Sun recorded the album in her living room: “sampling her voice and clips of a fetal heartbeat taken from her belly.” Kristen Roos is credited with additional processing.

More from Prophecy Sun at prophecysun.ca. The collaborative pair’s work was covered here previously, on the occasion of their Hex album, back in late July 2011. More on Kristen Roos at kristenroos.com.