Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 457
March 30, 2013
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Sick to my stomach that this 1909 Maxfield Parish mural done for the Palace Hotel has been removed for sale: http://t.co/Z0tNP5DlGR ->
The Palace Hotel bar should replace its Maxfield Parish with local artist's work, or rotating gallery of local work: http://t.co/Z0tNP5DlGR ->
Learned that the two-hour guest broadcast I did on @KUSFinExile last November went offline, so I uploaded it here: https://t.co/cLLRbv7Xvd ->
Done! #palace #parish #petition RT @tobiemarx: @disquiet You & everyone who cares about this should sign the petition http://t.co/dlaclTPYyo ->
The Disquiet Junto is now 25 tracks shy of its 2,000th, in less than a year and three months: https://t.co/eK4AFScM6I ->
You hit CTRL/⌘ V hopeful that whatever you suddenly can't remember happens to be currently residing in your laptop's clipboard. ->
Atmospheric data at the Conservatory of Flowers: http://t.co/r3ZmCGTnKM ->
RIP, trumpeter Derek Watkins (68), who reportedly played on every James Bond score, Dr. No thru Skyfall: http://t.co/edNaTff7dP ->
Hopeful that the Jobs manga trans/scanlations will be gateway drug for English readers to 7-Eleven manga and Cup Noodle manga. ->
Wonderful news. The Palace Hotel in SF is no longer selling its 1909 Maxfield Parish mural:… ->
Apparently Brian Eno plays keyboards on this song, "Day Before We Went to War," off the new Dido album: http://t.co/JE2WcXz8GP ->
Tuesday noon siren mixed with the sound of my stomach urging me to eat lunch. ->
Late evening sounds: refrigerator hum, click cascade of typing, creaking house, rumble of bus. ->
Today's sound class: the public voice: voice acting in Italy/Japan, student projects, Nina Power on gender in British public transportation ->
RIP, Scott Hardkiss (43), longtime San Francisco house/techno figure: http://t.co/trbnNfZ1qK, via @supermarke ->
Anyone have luck getting @bluestacksinc on OS X to run the Android version of Google Keep? ->
The theme of the 65th weekly @djunto music project will be asynchronous collaboration. ->
Christian Marclay signs his new book, Things I've Heard, 3/30 at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco. Exhibit runs 3/29 – 5/25. ->
Shelley Hirsch would do the singing. MT @steinbruchel: @disquiet i first read: marclay "sings" his new book :) that would be something new! ->
Excited for today's @djunto project, a randomly segmented asynchronous collaboration based on an original piano piece by @JaredBrickman. ->
This week's @djunto project is the 65th. And yes, next week's, the 66th, will involve backward vocals. ->
Too eager. We'll do it twice! RT @jmmy_kppl: @disquiet @djunto i'm excited but you couldn't've waited, like, eleven & ½ years? ->
Been deep in text editors. Loved Mou, but it's too slow after 15k words. Sublime Text 2 is solid, but right now I'm in TextMate 2. ->
65th @djunto project is live: https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L http://t.co/HyjIH8Ezau. Compose for randomly assigned segment. Due Monday midnight. ->
GoodReads page to export your library as .csv: http://t.co/JuzGxVcgva. LibraryThing page to import it: http://t.co/UcUv08iGl5. ->
RIP, Crawdaddy! magazine founder Paul Williams (b. 1948), executor of Philip K. Dick’s estate: http://t.co/qHbU9qnPQ2 ->
My 2.5-year-old is singing "Crazy Train" from the back seat. ->
For @djunto participants who'd prefer 320 kbps MP3 of source file, this is 810 MB smaller than the AIFF original: http://t.co/Fg8T8FPXQD ->
Morning sounds: laptop whir, fog horns, passing cars, typing. ->
Cliff Martinez scored the new Robert Redford movie, The Company You Keep. I still need to watch Arbitrage — er, and Spring Breakers. ->
The fog horns in the San Francisco Bay sound like they're tuning up for an all-weekend concert. ->
After long week of writing, have convinced myself that the fog horns are a slow-motion Morse Code. Trying to decode now. ->
The Disquiet Junto is now 2 tracks shy of its 2,000th: https://t.co/eK4AFScM6I. Technically we're well past 2,000, but accounts come and go. ->
The @feedly folk are on the ball: http://t.co/CXdpXOXA2U. #rss ->
March 29, 2013
Higher Calling Calling (MP3)
Part of the underlying strength of the spoken word, of the word intended to be spoken even more than of the word intended to be read, is its rhythm. The pace of words, of syllables, of phrases, the criss-crossing of reference points, is as much a matter of rhetoric as are the words themselves: grammar, metaphor, anecdote, even the message may not be as powerful as the rhythm with which they are expressed. Alan Morse Davies pushes at this a bit in his tidy seasonal sonic experiment, in which he took one of the most recited texts and converted it, so to speak, into Morse Code:
Download audio file (01.%20How%20to%20Contact%20God%20When%20He’s%20Out%20of%20Cellphone%20Range.mp3)
What has been encoded is The Lord’s Prayer, and the endeavor is titled, by the ever wry Davies, “How to Contact God When He’s Out of Cellphone Range” (MP3). Additional recommendation, according to Davies: “Use a good ground wire and a good length antenna.” Needless to say, when you make experimental music of the electronic sort, and when your middle name is synonymous with a particularly outmoded proto-codec, it is inevitable that you would employ it in your work. It is fascinating to listen to something hallowed be translated into a technology, a language of sorts, that itself has an aura of antiquity.
Track originally posted for free download at Davies’ alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com website. More from Davies at at-sea.com.
March 28, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0065: Piano Overlay
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.
Every Disquiet Junto project is about restraint, and yet every Disquiet Junto project is also about risk. Specifically, it’s about musicians taking the risk of sharing work that might not fit their overall impression of their own musical approach, and it’s about musicians taking the risk of sharing work that might not feel complete, given the nature of the given assignment and of the tight deadline. But the Junto is a risk from a broader vantage, too; in my role as administer of the group, I occasionally take risks by challenging my philosophical sense of the group’s defining characteristics. I’ve been hesitant, for example, to introduce a project that might in any way give the potential participant concern based on their work having some role beyond its own completion. This has been because, in the end, the Disquiet Junto is about being an engine to get people to make music and to challenge themselves, and one way to accomplish that is to limit any opportunities for them second-guessing themselves. But as the Junto has grown, the nature of the collaborative effort inherent in it has become more clear to me, and I’ve come to realize that the collaborative goal of a project like this week’s — in which I will likely combine all the finished pieces into one longer piece — might serve as a form of encouragement unto itself. In any case, like every Disquiet Junto project, this week’s is an experiment.
Major thanks to Ken Mistove (of kenzak.com), a frequent Junto participant, for coding the browser-based tool that assigns segments of the source track for this week’s project. We’ll be employing a variation on his tool again in the near future.
This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 28, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 1, 2013, as the deadline. (Given that the deadline occurs on April Fools’ Day, I will go the extra step of stating that this event has nothing to do with April Fools’ Day.)
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0065: Piano Overlay
This week’s project’s theme is asynchronous collaboration — in other words, making things together separately. We will make new compositions based on short, discrete, randomly assigned segments of a single, 60-minute piano composition. Collectively these will form a longer, collaborative suite.
These are the steps:
Step 1: You will be making a piece of music by adding new sounds to a pre-existing track. You can download that pre-existing track, an original piano composition by Jared Brickman, here:
https://soundcloud.com/one_hello_worl...
Step 2: When you go to the following URL, at kenzak.com, you will be assigned, immediately, a specific section of the longer Brickman piece. This kenzak.com URL will randomly pull up two pieces of information. The first piece of information is the start point of your segment. The second is the length of your segment (which will be between 1 and 4 minutes):
http://kenzak.com/disquiet/disquiet00...
One note: There will be overlap between assigned pieces. This was a conscious decision, informed by the overall theme of overlaying, which is explained further in step 4, below.
Step 3: Extract your assigned segment from the pre-existing track.
Step 4: Compose a new piece of music by adding elements to the pre-existing track. You can add anything you choose, with the exception of voice. Limit yourself to two additional elements. The original track should be audible throughout your new composition.
Deadline: Monday, April 1, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be the length determined in step 2 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: The title of your track should begin with its start point. Also include the term “disquiet0065-pianoverlay” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track. Your track might be titled “05:35 My Song (disquiet0065-pianoverlay)” or “34:30 Dueling Keyboards (disquiet0065-pianoverlay)” — just to provide two examples.
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:
More on this 65th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/03/28/disqui...
More on the source composition by Jared Brickman at:
https://soundcloud.com/one_hello_worl...
The browser-based tool that segmented the Brickman track for this project was coded by Disquiet Junto member Ken Mistove, more from whom at:
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
March 27, 2013
Indian Storm (MP3)
Into each field recording artist’s portfolio, a little rain must fall. In the case of the latest podcast from the Touch Radio series, the artist in question is R Martin Seddon, who participated in an educational trip to India with Chris Watson, as organized by the Wildeye, an international school of wildlife film-making. Watson is a famed audio ecologist and Touch reecording artist. Sneddon has posted an opportunistic portrait of a nature reserve, captured in the middle of a storm MP3. The detail is spectacular.
Download audio file (Radio92.mp3)
As Sneddon describes it, in part:
[W]e settled down to the sound of distant thunder. Our hosts advised that we took shelter before the rain started and soon after the short walk to my hut the first spots were falling. Recording equipment was hurriedly set up under the veranda and my hut-mate and I settled down on deck-chairs. After only a very short wait, with skipper frogs calling from the nearby pond, the rain started. Very soon the only sound was of rain and distant thunder and everyone, even the monitor lizard that lived in the thatch of our roof, stayed put until the storm passed.
Over at his website, at rmartinseddon.co.uk, there is a host of of other audio recordings he has made, all streaming. These include the elevator at the Imperial War Museum, a sonic portrait of Venice, and a wonderful document of a wire fence, captured with contact microphones.
Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org. More from Seddon at rmartinseddon.co.uk. More on the Wildeye program, whose other tutors/staff include Jez riley French and Piers Warren, at wildeye.co.uk. Map image via indianwildlife.com.
March 26, 2013
White Noise or Techno or Both (MP3)
At about 13 minutes in — that is, 13 minutes into its nearly 25-minute running length — the track glitches out like a restaurant CD player caught in a digital groove, the skipping a fast-motion mantra, a bit of pointillism psychedelia. That the track, “Lobe,” needs to achieve near stasis for the glitch to truly overwhelm says much about how gentle and effective it is up to that point, because it is constantly reconsidering its direction, fading out before veering left, the slightest bit of percussive detail suddenly emerging as the cornerstone of the metric approach, the whole notion of a downbeat seemingly up for grabs at all points. Right from the opening, its pneumatic percussives like tiny little steam-release valves, the track teases how much it is white noise disguised as techno, and how much it is techno disguised as white noise. The rhythm emerges slowly, like the head of a particularly anxious tortoise from its shell. At its best moments, and there are many, it is like a pause tape made entirely of static.
Lobe by Lapa
Track posted by João Ricardo, of Porto, Portugal, under the Lopa pseudonym at a “name your price” rate at opcabpol.bandcamp.com. More from Ricardo at joaoricardo.org and twitter.com/ocpptvu.
Cues: Jozef Van Wissem Per Rosanne Cash, Mike Patton Scores Derek Cianfrance
◼ Part two of the two-part history of Celluloid Records is now streaming online, via strut-records.com:
◼ Mike Patton’s score to The Place Beyond the Pines is streaming in full at pitchfork.com. The film stars Ryan Gosling, Eva Mendes, and Bradley Cooper, and was directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine). There’s also an interview a the site. In addition to 12 original cues from Patton, the film features by Arvo Pärt and Ennio Morricone, among others.
◼ The soft launch of music critic Michael Azzerad’s new website, The Talkhouse (at thetalkhouse.com), included Laurie Anderson on Animal Collective and Vijay Iyer on Flying Lotus. Rosanne Cash describes Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem’s The Mystery of Heaven as sounding “like Ennio Morricone and Brian Eno got in a fight while writing the music for a spaghetti western.” According to press materials, “The Talkhouse will feature one piece on one album written by one musician each day, five days a week. On weekends, the site will feature a long-form music feature piece written by artists across many genres: film, comedy, literature, etc.” Azerrad is the author of Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 and Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. The site is still listed as being in beta.
◼ In his occasional email newsletter, Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Red, Gun Machine) talked a bit about the excellent Spektrmodule podcast (“ambient, sleepy and haunted musics,” in his description) that he concatenates. The latest episode, number 17, includes music by Pausal and Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices.
◼ There’s a three-day ambient-music convention/conference, titled AMBIcon, to be held from May 3 – 5 in San Rafael, California. It is taking place to note several milestones for the Hearts of Space, which began in 1973 at KPFA-FM in Berkeley and celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The show began national syndication in 1983, and earlier this had its 1,000th broadcast. There will be eight surround-sound performances by Hans Christian, Stephan Micus, Jeff Pearce, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Stellamara, and Tim Story, a Q&A session moderated by Stephen Hill (the series’ host and co-founder), and a presentation by Mark Prendergast, author of the book The Ambient Century. More details at hos.com.
◼ There were 19 tracks produced for the 64th Disquiet Junto project, which ended last night at 11:59 pm. The project involved the theme of “composing from memory.” … Also, I finally put together a set of the 25 extant tracks from the 14th Junto project, which involved sonic versions of the comic that served as the starting point for Matt Madden’s Oulipo/Oubapa comic, 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style.
March 25, 2013
Haiku Music (MP3s)
Five, seven, five. These are the incremental dimensions known as the haiku. In written and spoken language, these numbers translate into syllables, forming a collective literature of single-serving reflection. When those numbers are stretched to represent minutes rather than syllables, their relative size diminishes in terms of its self-evidence, but in the hands of the musician named Mystified, the matter of reflection remains. The netlabel Subterranean Tide has released a three-track collection by Mystified, each track taking its length and title from a line of haiku, in this case a work whose central subject is sound: “Night cicada; / having slipped upon some dew / to the moon he cries.” The first track is five minutes long, the second seven, the third five again. Each is a mix of what might, in other contexts, be thought of as ambient industrial music, except that the notion of the cicada transforms the background hiss into the imagined constant whir of insectoid activity (at times what appears to be an actual cicada is also heard). There is a variety of droning, lightly percussive sonic material, and the highlight may be around two thirds of the way through the second track, when the combined rhythmic elements form something that might even be considered a groove.
More from Mystified, aka Thomas Park, at mystifiedmusic.com. More from the netlabel at subterraneantide.com.
March 24, 2013
Outer Space Wake-Up Call (MP3)
Asked in a SoundCloud.com interview, “What is your favorite sound and why?” the musician Jared Brickman responded, “The bottom octaves of a piano. You can make the entire harp shimmer by suppressing the sustain pedal and playing a few choice chords. There’s no sound like it.” That low-level sound serves as the foundation for the slow-motion stimulation engine that is his hour-long piece of what he has described as an “ambient piano suite,” one with the appropriately extended title of “Every Day We’re Dying and Outer Space Does Not Give One Single Fuck.” Despite the non-safe-for-work final syllable of the piece’s title, the music is more existential than nihilistic, as one of his self-selected tags makes clear, over at soundcloud.com/one_hello_world, where it was posted for free download in the past few days. It is a lulling, introspective work, the scintillate patterning of the loose-jointed piano bringing to mind La Monte Young’s compositions, a matter reinforced by the trademark purple that highlights the standalone website Brickman made for the piece, over at everydaywearedyingandouterspacedoesnotgiveonesinglefuck.com.
Brickman is best known for his One Hello World project, which involves people leaving him a voicemail, at (316) 247-0421, for which he then writes a soundtrack. More from Brickman at onehelloworld.com and twitter.com/OneHelloWorld. The interview with Brickman is at blog.soundcloud.com.
March 23, 2013
Archival Heathered Pearls (MP3)
There can be vocal parts without vocals, as when an instrument fills in where words were intended to appear, or when words seem to have been transformed, technologically, into something other than words, something with the shape of words, as if heard through a thick wall — something with the shape of words, even the impact of words, yet without the meaning implicit in specific words. The dark, serrated, chord-like structures that occasionally make themselves heard amid the mid-tempo aurora that otherwise is the 2006 track “Emperor Moth” by Heathered Pearls bears the impression of words thus transformed, and for that reason the full piece bears this vague, passing resemblance to a song, a song struggling to be heard, a struggle belied by the music’s seeming placidity.
Track originally posted, this week, for free download at soundcloud.com/heathered-pearls. Heathered Pearls is the Polish-born, Brooklyn-based Jakub Alexander, more from whom at ghostly.com and twitter.com/heatheredpearls.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Quiet time at the Oakland Zoo. http://t.co/JhBfCQipRq ->
"Night Chorus": Sign from insect hall at Oakland Zoo. http://t.co/bE4QQ58NNx ->
12 tracks so far of a Gregorian chant recording played back in a reverberant space and then transformed further: https://t.co/BNTZNeWMky ->
I'm a total @sublimehq noob. Can one mimic Mou's multi-size font treatment in Sublime 2? ->
You think SoundCloud kicked up an unusual "related" track but the laptop's on mute and it's just café mechanisms, traffic, and conversation. ->
Noise: A Human History. A 30-part documentary being presented starting tomorrow, March 18, on BBC 4 by @DavidJHendy: http://t.co/9wOy6miDK1. ->
Was the gag line about the Nazi sub in the March 8 episode of Nikita a dig at the canceled Zero Hour? ->
This BBC 1 broadcast about Roland 808s, 303s, and 909s is only online for another 22 hours: http://t.co/sMPNOp2iBW (as of 5pm Pacific 3/17). ->
Was beginning Three Stigmata by PKD but think I may reread Stross' Accelerando for the third or fourth time instead. ->
I really need to rethink or just jettison the "Elsewhere" (i.e., links) page on Disquiet. ->
Final hours of project where Gregorian chant recording is played back in reverberant space, including a church: https://t.co/0L1lCLjFWy ->
Tuesday noon siren while on phone, and then phone disoconnects. ->
Google text-to-speech is great except to the extent that it is cutting into my music-listening time. ->
Not a speaker (large pipes). http://t.co/1xmbHUz8c8 ->
Not a speaker (small pipes). http://t.co/5btPcE1KfM ->
Weird coverage of eMusic merger with ebook company mentions company's founder, Ray Kurzweil, but not his music past: http://t.co/k7UJYCOpeP ->
Google Drive releases API allowing realtime access from third-party apps. Could this mean a cloud music player that bypasses Google Music? ->
That's when I left. MT @jbutlerjbutler: @disquiet I used to love eMusic until they added major labels and raised their prices. ->
That thing where you find someone you know on Twitter you didn't know was on Twitter. It's like realizing they live on the same block. ->
Restaurant in my 'hood closed after three weeks and resulting discussion is like Parallax View meets No Reservations: http://t.co/qmo13cZGhG ->
Weird: 3 eMusic merger stories note Kurzweil, not his music background: http://t.co/VJf5uPy4h5 http://t.co/AjNcVv1aKO http://t.co/KUfddqBXJm ->
Removed headphones to confirm that half the drone I'm listening to is barista vapor trail. ->
For the record, @sex[girl's name][integer] is not my new jam. #spam ->
That's a good idea. Let's work on it. Shoot me an email. RT @gr3gjsmith: @disquiet Has there been a spam Junto yet? ;) ->
Today in sound class: Audacity software tutorial, constructing sonic mood boards, the rising culture of casually malleable audio ->
3-day ambient event in San Rafael, CA, with Micus, Rich, Roach, others. Part of @heartsofspace's 40th anniversary: http://t.co/VeaHxoZD6Y ->
Digging Google Keep on my phone. Need to see what the desktop experience is like. ->
Evening sounds, near to far: electric toothbrush, clothes dryer, fog horns. ->
Great to see/hear @otolythe's entry in the @gifbites (scores for animated GIFs) series by @therourke on @soundcloud: https://t.co/yPW64QdjW3 ->
Paused reread of Stross' Accelerando as Macx wanders around in two bodies to watch Dollhouse episode in which Topher is in two bodies. ->
My @djunto chores got a little simpler, as the new @soundcloud mobile app update appears to have turned on sets management. ->
This week's @djunto project's theme is "composing from memory." ->
Th 64th weekly @djunto project has gone live at http://t.co/IdTwdeyO8Y and http://t.co/4GjGanKdHp. It involves composing from memory. ->
"The national song." http://t.co/Nb979ntdpD ->
I love that Time makes sure to give photo credits to its gadget/tech writers who take their own screenshots. ->
Would all the companies not building smart watches please raise their hands? ->
"Dance music geography" (at Amoeba in SF). http://t.co/84tc9pdII7 ->
5 tracks thus far in the "composing from memory" project — https://t.co/dTNoJ1nVUe — which ends Monday night. ->
