Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 458

GIF in the Wind (MP3)

The GIFbites series continues to seek to locate the sonic equivalent of, the sonic score to, the phenomenon known as the animated GIF. The latest GIFbites entry, as always 15 seconds long, is a guest piece by friend-of-Disquiet otolythe. The uncharacteristically subdued GIF in question, shown above, could be a piece of toilet paper caught in a Levolor blind. The otolythe score is all television static, video-game sound effects, and distracted mastication — perhaps the very sounds of the living room that the Levolor in question guards from the harsh, suburban sun.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/gifbites. Animated GIF via whtebkgrnd.tumblr.com. Rules on GIFbites submissions are at gifbites.com. GIFbites is orchestrated by the insightful and curious Daniel Rourke, more from whom at twitter.com/GIFbites and machinemachine.net.

Cues: Roden Interview, 33+ Drones, Nicolai Book, …

In Brief: Great interview with Steve Roden at acloserlisten.com, and there remains a full second part, due in a week. ¶ Some albums keep on growing, even after their initial release. 3m33s, organized by Montreal-based Le Berger, contains 33 drones, each three seconds over three and a half minutes in length, and each by a different participant (among them Grzegorz Bojanek, Scott Lawlor, Cinchel, Nils Quak, Matthew Barlow, Guy Birkin, Katie Gately, Ted James, subnaught, and the OO-Ray). Purchase a copy and you will also get any additional tracks that are produced: leberger.bandcamp.com. The music is excellent (it streams in full below), but that aside, the model is worth emulating.

3m33s by Various

¶ Lasers made from sound (wired.com), and resulting discussion whether phonic-based lasers are “phasers.” ¶ New book from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), syn chron, “brings art, architecture, and music together in one inventive project” (gestalten.com). Sample image:

¶ The 63rd Disquiet Junto project, which was completed yesterday evening, resulted in 24 tracks of a surreptitious Gregorian chant recording being played back in a reverberant space and then transformed through digital approximations of echo. The weekly project series is nearing its 2,000th track, and has had well over 300 participants. ¶ Just the occasional reminder that there are Disquiet.com outposts at twitter.com/disquiet and app.net/disquiet and instagram.com/dsqt and soundcloud.com/disquiet and thisismyjam.com/disquiet and facebook.com/disquiet.fb and bandcamp.com/disquiet, and (as @disquiet) on the recently released Vine.co six-second video-loop app. Among other places.

Tactile Ambience (MP3)

The musician gaapiiiii, aka G P, of Kobe, Japan, has posted a compact, six-minute track with no explanatory text aside from the broad-strokes “experimental electronic” tag and the piece’s more opaque title: “reflexive. antisymmetric.” It is, nonetheless — or perhaps in part thanks to the tabula-rasa delivery system — especially recommended. Structurally, it is a series of evenly paced, pad-like gestural sounds. It is as if the audio includes not only the intended music but also the live performance aspects: the documentation of tactile activity on the part of the musician. The seeming causality between the subdued push-button material and the tonal material grounds the track, lending it a sense of purpose despite its sub-downtempo pace and exquisitely limited palette. Halfway through, it veers in another direction, as the music is reduced to a mere whisper of static before touch-tone phone sounds appear. Even on its own, those phone sounds in this context would be a nice touch, since they embody the place where tactile and tone meet. But better yet, the track uses them as the starting point for short explorations of their sonic content, extending the tones, glitching them lightly, letting them echo. It’s a pleasure that no one on the other end ever answers.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/gaapiiiii.

Cues: Deaf Gaming, Twang Bar Noise, Tank Preservation, …

¶ Deaf Gaming: Interesting anecdote from a recent gamasutra.com piece on the late video game creator Kenji Eno, written by Brandon Sheffield. The “Eno” in this is, of course, Kenji (not Brian), and the Saturn is the Sega game console from the mid-1990s:

“For his next game, Sega wanted to make it an exclusive — whatever it was. Eno had recently met with some sight-impaired folks who liked to play action games, and he asked himself, “What if you made a game that the blind and the sighted could play equally?” So he created the game Real Sound, which is an audio-only retail game, and made Sega promise that if he made the game exclusive to them, they would donate 1,000 Saturns to blind people, and he would supply 1,000 copies of the game. Again, this was an unusual idea for 1996, but he felt the stagnancy of the industry, and went to great lengths to shake it up.”

Surround Sound: The Tank is a 60’ x 30′ vessel — a “rusted steel water tank” in the words of its caretaker, Bruce Odland, who has made use of its inherent 40-second reverb since 1976. He’s set up a kickstarter.com campaign to ensure its future use:

The campaign ends March 31, 2013. More on the project at kickstarter.com. (Thanks for the tip go to Joshua Izenberg, whose film Slomo just won the Documentary Short prize among the Short Film Jury Awards at the 2013 SXSW festival. Jeremiah Moore, the sound designer on Slomo, is apparently also involved in this Tank project.)

¶ Electretymologies: There’s a hair’s-breadth matter of word choice in today’s “playlist” by Jon Pareles in the New York Times. In a single column he reviews six records. For Suuns’ Images du Futur he mentions “the repeating synthesizer tones of early electro.” For How to Destroy Angels’ Welcome Oblivion he mentions both “dank electronic sounds” and how “the electronics mostly give way to the acoustic.” And for Draco Rosa’s Vida he mentions “dipping into new wave, Caribbean styles, electronica and, at the end, hard-rock blasts.” The emphasis is mine. Those are four distinct terms, all variations on a core root prefix, all used in close proximity: electro, electronic, electronics, and electronica.

¶ Twang Bar Theory: This is pretty great. Over at youtube.com, Adrian Belew (King Crimson, Talking Heads, Nine Inch Nails) as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival back in 2011, discussing the “history and future of guitar noise”:

The event opened with a guitar solo, to set the tone, as it were, for the event, and there’s a third section as well.

¶ Docusound Platform: Promotional video for the site docusound.org, “a platform for producing and distributing audio documentaries”:

¶ Sonifying Auckland: Sound designer Tim Prebble, along with filmmaker Denise Batchelor, is a 2013 artist in residence of the Auckland regional parks system. Details at scoop.co.nz. Here is description from the announcement: “He’ll record local native birdcalls, slow the recordings to allow notation and then ‘play with this as the DNA of music’, embellishing and orchestrating it. On completion, his music will be played at a local venue and a CD, tentatively called The Bird Song Preludes, will be available after his residency.” More from Prebble at musicofsound.co.nz.

¶ Celluloid Heroes: The first of two parts of a documentary about Celluloid Records, over at youtube.com, featuring among others Bill Laswell, DXT (formerly Grand Mixer DST), and label founder Jean Karakos:

¶ Re-scanning: Great interview at thequietus.com with Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud, about his range of activities. He goes project by project, talking about his early work with the technology from which he took his name (“The scanner was connected directly into a tape deck the whole time. This was ’91, ’92, this was anticipating an idea of the internet, there was no access to this kind of networked world that we’re so comfortable with today. These voices and accessing them suddenly took you into a very private place that you could never otherwise be in.”), collaborating with filmmaker Derek Jarman and artist Mike Kelley, and “re-soundtrack[ing]” the final two minutes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, and much more.

¶ In Brief: There’s a 30-part audio documentary titled Noise: A Human History being presented starting tomorrow, March 18, on BBC 4 by David Hendy of the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex: bbc.co.uk (via bl.uk). ¶ The palmsounds.net provides a brief overview of a talk Rob Thomas (of Reality Jockey) gave in London about mobile music. ¶ In the Field: The Art of Field Recording is a new book containing interviews with artists whose work employs field recordings. Among those are Andrea Polli, Christina Kubisch, Francisco López, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jez Riley French, and Lasse-Marc Riek. (Thanks for the tip, John Kannenberg.) ¶ “Why Do People Use ‘Nope’ Even Though ‘No’ Is Shorter?” (at slate.com, via Quora). The short version is that “no” may have half as many letters but the hard stop at the end of “nope” arguably makes it more succinct. The author, Marc Ettlinger, has other theories as well, including an informative bit on “sound symbolism.” ¶ Robert Henke, aka Monolake, is coming to the San Francisco Bay Area as a visiting instructor at CCRMA, the computer music department at Stanford University. In a warm-welcome gesture, the department made the page announcing his course look just like a page from Henke’s own monolake.de website. ¶ That White House petition to make unlocking cellphones legal, mentioned here recently, has gained President Obama’s support. ¶ The 62nd Disquiet Junto project had 44 participants, each making music from three sine waves. ¶ Here’s a recording of Steve Reich’s “Radio Rewrite,” his new adaptation of Radiohead’s “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” and “Everything in Its Right Place”: youtube.com. (Note, it’s audio only. Found via the indispensable rgable.typepad.com.)

An Ambient Monolith

It might seem that the manner in which ambient music seeps into the background, the way it often rouses little in the way of an emotional reaction, nor is necessarily intended to, might mean that it is best experienced in small amounts, in tiny portions commensurate with its remote, modest, economical stature. But the opposite might also be the case, as evidenced by Yes, the massive new collection by Saito Koji. The press materials for the album explain that the collection, downloadable for free, is no less than five hours in length: “16 titles with a duration of 4:33 minutes each and five long forms with 39 minutes to 48 minutes.” It is rare that I write about anything at Disquiet.com without having listened to it several times, but in this case I made an exception. Despite having only dipped a pinkie toe in its vast expanse thus far, I highly recommend Koji’s immersive wonder.

What follows are but two examples of how the album’s overall sensibility of grey-flanel white noise takes on a different affect with each succsssive track. The “Yes 7″ track has the vibrations of an oscillator designed to communicate with insect life (MP3). The “Yes 11″ track sounds like a guitar being slowly strummed during an intensely tone-attentive pre-concert sound check (MP3). These two are among the 16 on Yes that have John Cage–ian length of 4’33″.

Download audio file (07-Yes_7.mp3)

Download audio file (11-Yes_11.mp3)

More on the release at the netlabel that produced it, restingbell.net, where the full set is available for free download.

The Music of Dieter Roth

The great resonancefm.com podcast has posted “Rarely Heard Music by Dieter Roth,” the avant-garde art figure, as part of its ongoing Wavelength series. It features rambling, chaotic mixes of everyday noise like shuffled paper and dog barks and more familiar musical elements, like guitar strumming (MP3). There’s also some biographical material, excerpted from the book Dieter Roth, Books and Multiples (Hansjörg Mayer), including the first-hand experience of a collaborator about Roth’s early, instinctual use of a multitrack personal recorder.

Download audio file (wavelength05Aug11.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at resonancefm.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

This is when I remember that the gen 1 Kindle Fire lacked Bluetooth so while putting Android 4.2.2 was neat it can't connect with a keyboard ->



RIP, Yes guitarist Peter Banks (b. 1947). His work on Beatles cover "Every Little Thing" was an early fave of mine http://t.co/m6VtTKAdYj ->



This week's @djunto project will involve Gregorian chant and the sounds inherent in architectural spaces. ->



Tuesday noon siren heard against loud street repaving. Municipal anxiety meets municipal mundanity: https://t.co/HUjYU68FHl ->



My whole house is reverberating like the inside of a harpsichord as outside massive machines pave our street. ->



The foghorns are randy tonight. ->



"It was also the first time that 'Misery' was added to a set that did not include a full performance of The Black Album." #metallicadata ->



Today in sound class: the retail space as aural space: Ray Oldenburg, commodifying/porting the third place, playlists versus jingles. ->



There are plenty of alternatives but I am sad about the end of Google Reader. Anticipating phantom pain. http://t.co/j4288PnMH5 ->



What's the http://t.co/pobd7CBqdg of Reader? ->



So far in my post–Google Reader search, @feedly looks nifty, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to sort feeds alphabetically. ->



"The thought of refurbished earbuds may be a little off-putting." Sentence of the day, from @cheapskateblog: http://t.co/0zWZbPzBLD ->



Morning stream: James Blake working with Brian Eno on the downtempo, maudlin "Digital Lion": https://t.co/oYJh8zI9XM ->



So @feedly allows for alphabetical order of feed groupings. You need to do it manually in Organize. In the lead for my post-Reader life. ->



Ooh, better yet, you can just move the folders up and down in the left bar in @feedly. This is in the browser service, not the mobile app. ->



Yeah, I have de-@flipboard'd the options, too. MT @lownote: @disquiet Taking @feedly for a run. Turned off most of fancy bells/whistles. ->



Been watching Dollhouse. At first it seemed egregiously Skinemaxy, but man does it kick in. Whedon had a serious long view on that series. ->



I guest blogged on @SoundCloud about the ongoing audiobio(graphy) project: https://t.co/KTIQTopQFw. I highly encourage people to record one. ->



The 63rd @djunto project will involve Gregorian Chant. It goes live in a few hours. #whitesmoke #echo #architecture ->



This is my occasional "Is anyone I correspond with here also on http://t.co/pobd7CBqdg?" mention. I'm @disquiet over there, too. ->



Google: keep Google Reader running. Sign the petition here: https://t.co/M6yK9Bv4Mu via @change ->



Veronica Mars strikes me as a Google Reader user. Just sayin'. ->



This is me being anxious that short-sighted product managers will see Reader's demise as a cue to ankle RSS: http://t.co/TNyYbGbU68. ->



63rd @djunto project involves rerecording Gregorian chant to explore echo and architecture: http://t.co/Q3lciIzPCN + https://t.co/dyolJ29o1L ->



#gregorianorianian #echo #reverb #looping #reflection #architecture #djunto ->



Adding echo-related effects to echo-laden Gregorian chant: https://t.co/BNTZNeWMky. The first in this week's @djunto is by Rizzi (Denmark). ->



Thing I'd like to turn off in @feedly app is the "cover" treatment in a feed's list view. False prominence, even when pretty, isn't good UX. ->



If you have access to the British Google Play store, could you shoot me an email at marc@disquiet.com? I'd like to check something. Thanks. ->



Silly fun monitor test: Macbook Air running external 23", 7" tablet + 4.7" phone (Android) via iDisplay, iPad via AirDisplay. Back to work. ->



The folks who bought @delicious should buy @googlereader and amp up the whole social bookmarking thing. ->



"Twitter/ADN replaces RSS" is the new "Facebook killed email." And, no, I don't believe either. ->



That thing where you take a screenshot of your phone, then touch the screenshot and don't understand why the controls aren't responding. ->



Your diet's rich in science fiction if you come upon the term "post-colonial" and start thinking about Kim Stanley Robinson and Ray Bradbury ->



Yo all you "Twitter beats RSS" people: tell me how to use Twitter (w/o RSS) to search for the word "sound" in full posts from 100 art blogs. ->



Judging by the exuberant screaming in the neighborhood, I assume spring break just began. ->



This nine-stage reduction of Gregorian chant to mere overtones is stunning in its elegance: https://t.co/2awIBHK3I8 ->



This track was an inspiration for the 63rd @djunto. RT @inky: "Jo Burzynska plays a space back into itself" http://t.co/RjXo231Q3g ->



Say what you will about Microsoft Silverlight — it can go full screen in OS X without turning the other screens blank, unlike native apps. ->

Ambient Noise (MP3s)

Reportedly the blissful white noise of Fragrant Hoof Carvings by Black Thread is the result of layers of simultaneously played cassette tapes. It has the slurry, effluvia-laden richness of the world seen on a gray day through smudged glass from a high building. A lot of ambient music can sound like the sonic equivalent of store-bought vellum. Far better than that, this is the sonic equivalent of threadbare, dirty sheets hung out to dry and moving in the intermittent breeze. Thoughts will turn to the disintegrating loops of William Basinski, and that’s a useful comparison, but this is something apart from that, with its own textures and rhythms. The collection’s three tracks are best experienced as a set due to how they comment on each other. The title track, for example, is tenderly abrasive in a manner that helps the opening cut, “Orchid’s Inky Vapor,” get its due for its subtlety by comparison.

fragrant hoof carvings by black thread

Get them at “name your price” at turmericmagnitudes.bandcamp.com. Thanks to Matt Davignon for the recommendation.

Disquiet Junto Project 0063: Gregorian-orian-ian

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, March 14, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 18, 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 0063: Gregorian-orian-ian

This week’s project involves the role of architectural spaces in the composition of music. It is a shared-sample project that takes a piece of Gregorian chant as its source material.

These are the steps:

Step 1: Download this OGG audio file that contains a recording of monks singing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Italy:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...

Step 2: Play back that recording loudly in a highly reverberant space and record it. Your best bet may be a bathroom.

Step 3: Create a new piece of music using the recording you just made as your primary source material. You cannot add any new source material. You can manipulate the audio recording as you please, but restrict yourself to effects that simulate echo, such as delay, reverb, and looping. You may also use the original OGG file, but only in addition to your own recording of it being played back in the reverberant space.

Background: For additional thinking on the role that architecture has played in the evolution of music, this 2010 talk by David Byrne is recommended:

http://blog.ted.com/2010/06/11/how_ar...

Deadline: Monday, March 18, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 4 minutes in length.

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: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0063-gregorianorianian” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Consider setting your track in a manner 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 63th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/03/14/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The source of this piece is a recording of monks singing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Italy:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...

The image of the Abbey is from wikimedia.org.

RIP, Reader?

Google Reader, the great RSS service, is shutting down, it was announced yesterday by Google. I don’t think there is a single web site or service or, on Android, a mobile app that I have spent as much time in as Google Reader, and I can’t really do justice to how essential Reader has been in the collating of material that has, subsequently, appeared on Disquiet.com and in my writing and projects elsewhere. At times people would ask where I’m going on vacation and I’d say, “Google Reader.”

My friend Rob Walker over at Yahoo! News agrees with the hopeful assertion of Marco Arment (Tumblr, Instapaper, The Magazine) that Reader’s end will inspire alternate services, yet I am anxious that the end of Reader will allow short-sighted product managers to ditch RSS from current and future websites. RSS to me is one of the key defining characteristics of the music phenomenon known as the netlabel. In allowing for easy redistribution of material, it is, to me, the very pavement of the Creative Commons, as I touched on in my 2011 list of proposals to new netlabels.

I’ve been looking around this past half day or so at alternatives. Feedly.com is quite lovely and has both an app and a web service, but the absence of an automated alphabetized view is confusing — not just confusing to navigate, but confusing in its absence; based on initial experience, it feels like one of those semi-belligerent UI/UX moves such as Gmail’s initial lack of a delete button, or OS X Mountain Lion’s version of TextEdit.app, in which the unchangeable default when creating a new file is to save it not to your computer but to iCloud. If you find Feedly promising, as I do, and want to promote the implementation of an alphabetal view, this appears to be where you can vote it up. The Feedly app, at least on Android, feels more like a design portfolio piece than a reader-oriented service, but it’s still promising. And it does appear that you can move feed-grouping order around to achieve alphatetization in the Organize tab or just in the left-column view (on the web, not in the app), but that is time-consuming, and why it’s not automated is unclear. At a buck a month, newsblur.com seems reasonable, but I’m just beginning to understand its UI eccentricities. A lot of folks have recommended theoldreader.com; a reader service without an Android app would be a stretch for me, but I’m not entirely against it.

There’s a petition to save Google Reader at change.org that I have signed. I also signed the one at keepgooglereader.com. This is what I wrote at both those sites:

RSS is among the key sources of my research. It may not be valuable for casual reading, but it is essential for information gathering. And information gathering is the basis of much that is published, including casual reading. I understand it may not have caught on with the vast majority, but the vast majority is a worthless threshold to employ as a gauge of utility. I didn’t ask you to save Wave, and I didn’t ask you to save iGoogle. I am asking you to save Reader.

As we await the potential pardon, suggestions appreciated for alternate services in addition to the ones listed above.