Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 460
March 8, 2013
John Parish Cue
The title of John Parish’s forthcoming compilation album, Screenplay, has various meanings. A collection of music he has written for the screen, it toys with industry terminology. By borrowing the language of the narrative and applying it to the score, he is staking a claim for the role music plays in film, the extent to which it has its own story to tell. By bringing together cues from several films, rather than releasing the full scores of any of them, the album is exploring the extent to which music for films has any life beyond the films themselves, beyond matters of narrative. The films included on Screenplay are Nowhere Man, Plein Sud, Sister (aka L’enfant d’en Haut), and Little Black Spiders. The last of these has had its end credits made available for free download, courtesy of the Screenplay record label, Thrill Jockey. It’s a stylish mini-suite, opening with looped vocals whose evident seams make the results sound more like notes played on a keyboard than sung by a choir. In time, strings and other instruments kick in, all with the studio ingenuity and slow-burn drama that Parish has brought to his work with PJ Harvey, Sparklehorse, and others in the past.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/thrilljockey. More details on the album at thrilljockey.com and johnparish.com.
Here is a trailer for Little Black Spiders, featuring different music:
March 7, 2013
Disquiet Junto Project 0062: Life of Sine
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, February 28, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 11, 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 0062: Life of Sine
This week’s project involves making music from the basic building block of sound: the sine wave.
You will compose and record a piece of music using just three different sine waves, and nothing else — well, nothing else in terms of source material, but the waves can, after the piece has gotten underway, be transformed by any means you choose.
These are the steps:
Step 1: Devise which three sine waves you will employ. They should be different from each other in some evident way.
Step 2: The track should open with just one of the sine waves.
Step 3: Add the second sine wave at 5 seconds.
Step 4: Add the third sine wave at 10 seconds.
Step 4: Only at 15 seconds should you begin to in any way manipulate any of the source waves.
Deadline: Monday, March 11, 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 “disquiet0062-lifeofsine” 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 60th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/03/07/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet...
Image via wikimedia.org.
March 6, 2013
Urban Reverberation (MP3)
There are various sorts of answer songs. There is, for example, the classic mode, in which someone picks up the mic to respond to a previous taunt or otherwise opposing view. Then there is the remix, which stakes a claim for psychological ownership of the source material. And then there is the correlative track, when someone posts a pre-existing bit of audio as a means of commenting on something. The latter category is where to file Guy Birkin’s “Urban Reverberation,” which he posted as a welcome reply to my recording of the Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco. It is a stellar example of repetition being a form of change, as the sound of the alarm alters ever so slightly with each pulse.
He writes, in part, of the track:
After initially being annoyed by this very loud noise, I noticed small fluctuations in its timbre and especially in the reverberations off the rows of terraced houses on the street. I recorded it to capture these effects, because I am interested in the ways in which sound is altered by travelling through the air and by reverberation from the surroundings. … Notice the way in which different aspects of the sound stand out at different times – sometimes following the beat of one tone, then the other, or focusing on the attack of the notes or the initial echo, both of which keep changing. What at first might appear to be very repetitive and dull turns out to reveal interesting variation through its repetition.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/notl. More from Birkin, who lives in Nottingham, England, at twitter.com/guybirkin.
Stems: Android Eggs, Tape Loops, Martinez/Skrillex/Korine
¶ Android Music: There is a heap of Easter Eggs hidden in the holding page for the upcoming Google I/O developers’ conference, at which various Android subjects will be unveiled. These Easter Eggs are accessed by clicking the I and O on the page to yield various results. For example, clicking 10001000 yields a wave generator, as pictured above, and 11011011 yields a touch-based music toy. This being Google, there are Easter Eggs within the Easter Eggs — that is, the binary code isn’t entirely random. For example 10000001 yields a game of pong, the sense being that the 1 on either end symbolizes a paddle. It’s not immediately clear what the meaning of the two music-related codes is. (Found via the helpful comments on the post at theverge.com.)
¶ Tape Ops: The Dutch musician Wouter van Veldhoven has posted remarkable footage of old-school tape machines deployed to make minimal techno music:
More on van Veldhoven at woutervanveldhoven.nl. Found via laughingsquid.com. Hat tip to Max La Rivière-Hedrick of engine43.org.
¶ Spring Drop: The score to Spring Breakers, the new film by Harmony Korine (Kids, Gummo), was largely composed by Skrillex and Cliff Martinez, often working together. The pairing is certainly interesting, since it is fair to say that Skrillex, the showboating EDM figure, and Martinez, the composer of subtle scores to such films as Solaris and Traffic, represent polar extremes along the continuum that is contemporary electronic music. Almost the entire Spring Breakers soundtrack album is streaming is currently at pitchfork.com. Of the album’s 19 tracks, all but 5 feature either Skrillex or Martinez. Three are collaborations, 7 are Skrillex solo pieces (one a remix), and 4 are Martinez solo pieces. The album comes out March 18 on Big Beat/Atlantic Records, and the movie on March 22. The Pitchfork stream includes all but two of the tracks (numbers 8 and 19 in the list below). The movie stars James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine. More on the film at springbreakersfilm.com. Here’s the track listing:
“Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” – Skrillex
“Rise And Shine Little B***h” – Music by Cliff Martinez & Skrillex
“Pretend It’s A Video Game” – Cliff Martinez
“With You, Friends (Long Drive)” – Skrillex
“Hangin’ With Da Dopeboys” – Dangeruss with James Franco
“Bikinis & Big Booties Y’all” – Music by Cliff Martinez & Skrillex
“Never Gonna Get This P***y” – Cliff Martinez
“Goin’ In (Skrillex Goin’ Down Remix)” – Birdy Nam Nam
“F**k This Industry” – Waka Flocka Flame
“Smell This Money (Original Mix)” – Skrillex
“Park Smoke” – Skrillex
“Young N****s” – Gucci Mane (feat. Waka Flocka Flame)
“Your Friends Ain’t Gonna Leave With You” – Cliff Martinez
“Ride Home” – Skrillex
“Big Bank” – Meek Mill, Pill, Torch & Rick Ross (feat. French Montana)
“Son Of Scary Monsters” – Music by Cliff Martinez & Skrillex
Big ‘Ol Scardy Pants – Cliff Martinez
Scary Monsters on Strings – Music by Skrillex
Lights – Ellie Goulding
March 5, 2013
Outdoor Public Warning System (San Francisco, CA)
Every Tuesday at noon the Outdoor Public Warning System (OPWS) rings out around San Francisco. It has two stages. First there is a siren. Second there is a spoken announcement: “This is a test. This is a test of the outdoor warning system. This is only a test.”
As of October 2012, there are 111 speakers set up throughout San Francisco to broadcast the message. The majority have the message in English, but there are 2 in Cantonese and English and 17 in Spanish and English. See the above image for a map of the OPWS speakers.
Because of the city’s famously hilly terrain, as well as the speed at which sound travels, and the apparently inexact timing of the system’s triggers, the sirens and announcement can often be heard to overlap, creating an artificial echo effect in addition to the actual echo. Also, because it rings at noon, the sound of the warning often overlays with another form of announcement: the bells of churches and other institutions.
I made this recording on Tuesday, February 26, 2013, in the backyard of my home in the Richmond District of San Francisco. This was an especially clear day. It was made on an H4n, recorded directly to a WAV file. At five of the hour I placed the H4n in the backyard and set it to record. Only after the announcement had fully trailed off and been replaced by the bird song and church bells did I approach the H4n and turn it off. Then I trimmed the length of the recording to focus on the runtime of the OPWS.
And has happens occasionally in the wonderful world that is SoundCloud.com, someone shortly after the posting of the recording made their own remix of it. This is by rawore, aka Bob Phillips of Portland, Oregon:
More on the OPWS system at the website of the City and County of San Francisco Department of Emergency Management: sfdem.org.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/disquiet.
Stems: Autechre Crowd, Reich/Radiohead, Sonic UI/UX
¶ Exai Excel: Just beautiful, this shared Google doc in which the trainspotting crowd collectively identifies the tracks that appeared in Autechre’s two free live streaming events on mixlr.com/autechre earlier this weekend, via twitter.com/pauladaunt. Autechre’s latest album, Exai, was released in digital form at the start of February and will appear in physical form this coming week. Here’s a detail of the tracklist document, which at this stage is unsurprisingly unwieldy to navigate, but still worth parsing for its line items and interesting segues, such as moving from the radio rock of Steve Miller Band to electronica of Seefeel:
¶ Reich Head: At classicfm.com, Max Richter, who expertly reworked Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” this past year, interviews Steve Reich about reworking Radiohead. The audio is less than eight minutes long, and well worth a listen. They cover how Reich came to Radiohead’s music, what he did with/to it (“A lot of people will say, ‘Well, where’s Radiohead?’”), and the broader means by which other music has made its way into his work. It’s only the third time that Reich has consciously reworked another composer’s music, the two previous being Pérotin and Stephen Sondheim, though as Richter says, “A lot of music as well as what it purports to be about is also about other music.” One thing they do not touch on that would have been good to hear about is Reich’s take on remixes of his own work, of which there have been many. Reich’s re-use of Radiohead is titled “Radio Rewrite” and it will be premiered March 5 in London by the London Sinfonietta. The work was co-commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and Alarm Will Sound. The U.S. premiere will occur at Stanford on March 16.
¶ Fit to Hear: Just to follow up on the New Republic’s inclusion of an audio version of articles in its website redesign, there’s increasing evidence of Slate.com having audio editions of its stories that originate as text pieces. The project has not taken root in the site’s formal navigation sidebar, which includes things like a single-page version, a print version, and so forth, but take a look at the page for a recent write-up Hugh Howey’s novel Wool and you’ll see a prominent SoundCloud embeddable player in which someone reads the article.
¶ In Brief: The announcement by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer that ended work-from-home has been getting a lot of attention, but I’m more interested in her criticism of Yahoo’s on-hold music, which she reportedly called “garbage”: sfist.com. ¶ More than slightly off topic, but I reviewed the new Wayne Hancock album, Ride (Bloodshot), for the Colorado Springs Independent: csindy.com. It’s easily his strongest record since his 1995 debut, Thunderstorms and Neon Signs. This isn’t as off topic as it may seem, because Hancock, a yodel-friendly country blues singer, is a prime example of how matters of genre and modernity get all mixed up, and how hard it is to innovate, or develop one’s own voice, in a form not just predicated on but posited in the past. As I say in the review, “Ride is so old-school it feels downright groundbreaking.” ¶ If you’re in New York and have the cash, the venerable institution the Kitchen is holding its spring gala in honor of Brian Eno. It takes place May 7: thekitchen.org. ¶ The 61st Disquiet Junto project ended last night at 11:59pm, and ended up with 45 contributors, for over an hour and a half of music. The theme was a riff on — a follow-up to — the Instagr/am/bient compilation of sonic postcards from late 2011. This time around, rather than using Instagram images as source material for ambient tracks, the participants used tweets from the great @textinstagram Twitter account, such as “branches against a colorful background,” “a rusty old door,” and “warped picture through a glass.”
March 4, 2013
The Waiting Room (MP3)
The waiting room at the doctor’s office is self-enclosed. It contains a handful of chairs and is lit by two large windows, their blinds tucked just below a high, generically tiled ceiling. No one else is in the room. A tiny speaker sits on the windowsill, nearly a dozen stories up from the busy city street. The speaker emits barely perceptible music, a tinny whimper of sodden melodicism, as if the Whoville Pops is being overheard. What the speaker itself fails to do service to is further muffled by the incessant drone of the building’s ancient HVAC system, and the whole resulting thick ether of white noise is punctuated by the thuddish tic of an unseen clock.
In the audio recording made on a cellphone, the noise-like elements are greatly emphasized. They are far more prevalent and evident than they had been in person. It is as if the texture of the open road, so uniform when seen through the windshield of a fast-moving car, has been cast in high relief.
Track recorded on my Nexus 4 cell phone using Easy Voice Recorder Pro on Friday, March 1.
Image via pixabay.com.
March 3, 2013
An Italian Drone (MP3)
Following up on yesterday’s beautiful drone by Darren Harper, here is another that builds a slow and singularly beautiful melodic exploration from what is, for stretches, easily mistakable for pure background tone. It’s “Elektra” by Dr. Guilty, and that so-to-speak mistake is, in fact, a willful intent, as “Elektra” ekes its sonic transitions precisely from, and within, the sort of acoustic ephemera that is so pervasive as to become virtually inaudible. It moves from prayer-bowl ripples to knife-blade glistens to near-choral density, occasionally making steep crescendos both up and down, yet never losing the sense of something hovering slightly above and beyond conscious perception.
Track posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dr-guilty. Dr. Guilty is Gabriele Quartero of Biella, Italy, more from whom at bandcamp.com.
March 2, 2013
The Fate of a Drone in the Age of Drone Warfare (MP3)
With the slow but steady rise of public concern about the development and utilization of drones for military and police purposes, the rise of a form of music coincidentally called “drone” is, quite simply, small potatoes. I in no way would make a contrary case. All I would say on the matter is that the latter drone can help us comprehend the implications, especially at a psychic level, of the former.
Part of what makes the sonic drone, the music drone, trenchant is the manner in which it explores, inherently, the notion of pervasive technology, especially as pervasive technology becomes synonymous with invasive technology. Gordon Hempton, author of One Square Inch of Silence, has referred to such a buzz in the real world — the buzz of power lines, for example — as the “American mantra,” and it could be argued that for all his anxiety on the subject, he is underestimating its far broader geographic ubiquity.
Putting aside means by which the composition of drones might help us appreciate the cultural impact of the military drone, the parallel is especially disappointing for the simple reason that the music drone has been coming into its own, after decades of exploration, traced in western classical music at least as far back as Terry Riley’s 1965 work “In C,” but dating back far further at a cultural level, to the bagpipes of Scotland and the ragas of India and the throat singers of Tuva, among countless other practices.
A recent strong example of the aesthetic potential of the drone is “A Brief Reprieve from a Weary Heart,” a nine-minute piece composed by Darren Harper for the Sequence5 compilation. Very much in line with the understanding of ambient music as a genre, the piece can be heard both as background music and as foreground music. The drone, as a form, is arguably more succinct in that regard, in that it can be mistaken for, appreciated as, pure tone, or listened into for both vertical (overtone-laden) and horizontal (melodic) content. Harper’s is especially rich in the horizontal regard. It has the shape of a beautiful, reflective piece for orchestra, even if it sounds throughout like its raw materials are the sort of tonal wallpaper that makes hospitals and hotels feel insular and hermetic, even threatening in their own right. There is, as well, a touch of musical reference in the work, as the drone from which this music is formed sounds at times like two key drones in popular music: the held chord at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and the opening chord of Yes’ “Roundabout.”
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/darrenharper. Purchase the full Sequence5 album, all 42 tracks, at bandcamp.com. More from Harper at darrenjh.blogspot.com.
Drone image up top via wikimedia.org.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Yeah, I'll definitely be doing so. MT @Le_Berger: @disquiet Will you participate in this particular Junto? Would seem beffiting somehow. ->
So glad you made time. RT @ethanhein: New @djunto track: my audiobiography. http://t.co/LOatfBvobW ->
IRCAM should start a nightclub called IRCPM. ->
This made my morning, to be sure: RT @iIRCAM: @soundblog @disquiet :) ->
The single piece of computer equipment I have used the longest is the $99 CanoScan LiDE 600F scanner I bought in 2002. ->
Man, this past week's Person of Interest was something. I'm much more interested in parallel narratives than musical episodes. ->
Almost 40 musicians talk about themselves and their work: https://t.co/nmTVAhqFRo The 60th @djunto project. ->
Somehow it took 60 weeks, but I just posted my first track to the @djunto group: https://t.co/KCYrcHCJ6J ->
And you look up and an hour has gone by during which you have just been playing with nominally 5/4 beat patterns in DM1. ->
"the super-swively neck further enhances the power to sample the ambient soundscape" — Owl science at http://t.co/iFxgbnAjWj ->
Giving a guest talk this afternoon, on sound, to a class on writing for radio at the Academy of Art here in S.F. ->
Movie commentary tracks ripped to MP3 are my new jam. ->
Had foresight to set out my digital audio recorder four minutes in advance of the Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco. Uploading audio now. ->
lowercase numerals #ambientypography ->
em-elipsis #ambientypography ->
exhalation point #ambientypography ->
en-elipsis #ambientypography ->
air quote #ambientypography ->
demicolon #ambientypgraphy ->
Recording I made of the Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco: https://t.co/HUjYU68FHl ->
Nice. RT @taylordeupree: @disquiet implication-mark #ambientypography ->
After 3 weeks of deep-listening bootcamp, today in my course on sound in media landscape we begin with roots of music + commerce: the jingle ->
Definitely. When we get to product design. MT @matr77: @disquiet you doing a bit about Brian Eno's Windows 95 sound? http://t.co/QagxI5bRv4 ->
Dance remix of the San Francisco Tuesday siren I posted earlier: https://t.co/x26eOT231M. Thanks, @rawore! ->
This week's @djunto project will be based on @textinstagram. ->
textinstagr/am/bient ->
This week's @djunto is pretty straightforward but ended up with about 8 steps. It goes live shortly. Shortly means "after I eat lunch." ->
Okey doke, if you're on @AppDotNet, I'm now @disquiet over there, too. (Thanks, @qdot.) ->
In @djunto 61 we'll interpret random @textinstagram tweets as covers of singles: http://t.co/WFrQLliKhX + http://t.co/XjWrMj8rJr ->
Watching Zero Hour, but mostly looking forward to the @io9 post-mortem. ->
"For an auditory neuroscientist … reviewing this book was not unlike an arachnophobe reviewing a book about breeding spiders." ->
Previous tweet is @SethSHorowitz on @katherinebouton's new book on hearing loss: http://t.co/5Px0UrMbKi ->
The pointy hill was, for moments, visible through the thick mist that accompanied the transition from February to March, a sneak peak. #test ->
Obama's comment was a trial-balloon critique of JJ Abrams' unwieldy galactic power in advance of sci-fi franchise regulation. ->
Portable foghorn: http://t.co/qHQssBSLV8 ->
Instructions for portable foghorn: http://t.co/zyBjewRplo ->
There are 5.4+ million search returns on Google for "Hello would you mind letting me know which web host you're working with." ->
