Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 470

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Update

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame back in early October produced the shortlist for this year’s inductees, the list was worth investigating for its technological orientation. Rock in recent years has developed a complicated relationship with technology, as I outlined in an article last week on the website of The Atlantic, a consideration of the forthcoming documentary film directed by Dave Grohl about a defunct recording studio, Sound City. Rock has slowly had to come to grips with losing its most-favored-genre status. It now sits alongside country, hip-hop, dance, pop, and other genres, and is increasingly the provenance of musicians who see it primarily as an antiquated, if venerated, form, not as a crucible for artistic progress.

In turn the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has broadened its sense of what “rock and roll” means. When the Hall of Fame announced its shortlist, I broke it into four categories. There were the electronically sympathetic (N.W.A, Public Enemy, Donna Summer, Chic), the fellow travelers known as prog rock (Rush, Deep Purple, Procol Harum), a group whose contemporary fame can be traced in large part to a revival thanks to widespread sampling of their work (the Meters), and six acts for whom any electronic affiliation would be tough to trace (the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Heart, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Albert King, the Marvelletes, and Randy Newman). Of the final six inductees announced this morning, a full half come from that list of acts unburdened by strong electronic sensibility (Heart, Albert King, Randy Newman), Rush was selected to represent prog rock, and two acts were chosen from the “electronically sympathetic” crew: Public Enemy and Donna Summer.

The two producers due for awards this year are Lou Adler (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Carole King’s Tapestry) and Quincy Jones (who’s produced everyone from Ray Charles to Michael Jackson), both of whom turn 80 in 2013. At this rate, it will be another 15 years before Brian Eno is voted in.

All in all, it’s a less-rock-heavy list than I might have imagined, commendably so. It’s a list one might have had a hard time foreseeing in the hall’s early years. Of course, the Hall of Fame’s first inductees were named way back in 1986. The institution has had more than a quarter of a century to catch up with the early years. Now it must wrestle with the recent past — and, by extension, the present.

More on this year’s and past inductees at rockhall.com/inductees.

Holiday Drones (MP3)

The manner in which sonic shimmer can serve as end-of-year holiday music is summed up each such season by “Unsilent Night,” the communal boombox project by composer Phil Kline. The musician who goes by Le Berger, aka Samuel Landry, has himself embraced this aesthetic approach each of the past few years with what appears to be an ongoing accumulation of seasonal drones. The latest is “War Encore,” available for free download. Forgive these ears for thinking the pulsing arpegions that appear toward the end, emerging from the thick fog of tone, could be mistaken for a curt loop of “Carol of the Bells”:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/leberger. The compilation of previous tracks in the series is at leberger.bandcamp.com. More from Le Berger, who’s based in Montréal, Canada, leberger.org.

Discussing Change at and on SoundCloud

An icon has been making itself seen around SoundCloud.com, as various users have replaced their individual account icons with a collective one: a white-on-black appropriation of the SoundCloud logo that has been altered to look a little weathered; it reads “Save SoundCloud Classic.”

That particular term, “classic,” refers to the version of SoundCloud that existed prior to this past week’s interface overhaul. As a protest to the recent changes, many of these accounts have now posted individual recordings of people bemoaning the new SoundCloud interface, while others have reproduced a single track, titled “Revolution Will Be Audiovised.” (As of this writing, at least 101 people have.) This “Audiovised” track originated at the account soundcloud.com/shores-1. While many of the protest recordings are fairly general in their complaints, the “Audiovised” one provides a line-item list of various concerns, and the author of the text lists them in the body of the track’s page so they can be read as well as heard.

Examples of these protests were made at such SoundCloud accounts as
moody-alien, markjbennett, stephenrandall-1, and der-himmel-uber-lyon. One user, Peter Koeller, posted a JPG of proposed revisions at his peterkoeller.de site.

One thing that’s interesting about the current SoundCloud protest situation is that the service, being in the content-infrastructure business, has literally provided the foundation of its own critique. That said, this isn’t an anti-SoundCloud movement, to the extent that it is a movement. It’s people who care about SoundCloud discussing what they wish the service would remain, and what they are concerned it may be leaving behind.

To be clear, I’m writing not because I have a certain sense of the situation, but because I don’t have a full grasp on it. Perhaps this is because, for all my use of SoundCloud, I do so as a highly active listener — a community organizer, as it were — not as a musician, certainly not in any conventional sense of the term “musician.” Perhaps it’s because I signed up for the preview version, so I saw the “next” SoundCloud as it was iterated, and didn’t find myself suddently faced with it, as many people were.

I don’t know. And that I don’t know is why I am asking. As a heavy user of SoundCloud, and because of the Disquiet Junto a heavy participant in SoundCloud, I’d be interested in learning more about people’s concerns about the shift — or, perhaps, just peoples thoughts about people’s concerns about the shift. The “discussion” tab on the Groups pages at SoundCloud is a bit difficult to navigate to right now, in the current state of the service, so if you want to, please consider weighing in in the comment space of this post, down below. (I’ve been thinking about adding a proper discussion section, a forum, to Disquiet.com, and situations like this one help convince me it’s a good idea.) I’m as interested in hearing from folks who are happy, or non-plussed, about the changes at SoundCloud as I am by folks who are not in any way pleased.

And lest it go without saying, discussion here is intended to be done with mutual respect for differences of opinion. Trolling, ad hominem attacks, and rudeness will get the attention they deserve, which is none.

Much appreciated.

Disquiet Noted in Guardian Podcast

SoundCloud made its new version go live this past week, and it was an honor to have Disquiet projects like the Junto included in the rollout. This exposure spilled into unexpected coverage when my little spiel about SoundCloud was included in a segment by Aleks Krotoski for the excellent Tech Weekly Podcast from the British newspaper, guardian.co.uk.

Download audio file (gnl.tech.121204.jp.tech_weekly_ads.mp3)

If it were just the brief mention, I wouldn’t be posting this as a standalone entry, but the podcast (MP3)is worth a list for its interview with SoundCloud investor Fred Wilson, who singles out the tool’s broad definition of sound as a core part of its popularity. By last count, it had over 180 million user accounts. Wilson describes SoundCloud as “a service for all kinds of sounds — not just music, not just podcasts, not just remixes or not just sound effects, it’s everything. It’s a hodgepodge. It’s chaotic, it’s messy, it’s fun.”

Audio originally posted for free download at guardian.co.uk.

Pre-Junto Harmonic Study

There are various reasons that SoundCloud has worked well as a base of operations for the Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects, projects that are designed as purposefully restrictive compositional prompts. Key among these reasons is the manner in which SoundCloud has presented itself not as an online version of a record store, like Bandcamp among other servies does, and more as a space where people can share looser, less finished work. As a result, not only can we as listeners follow musicians and listen to their work progress, we can also revisit early versions once time has passed.

Much of the work performed during the four Disquiet Junto concerts that occurred this year across the United States — Chicago in April, Denver in August, Manhattan in November, San Francisco this past week at the start of December — appeared first as posts on SoundCloud. This is certainly true of the assignments for each concert, the works the performers all did based on the same constraints (this past week, for example, in San Francisco that meant work based on samples of superstorm Sandy). But it’s also true of the additional pieces they performed. Take “Pitch Study” by Oakland, California’s subnaught, who played the second set this past Thursday at the Luggage Store Gallery on Market Street in San Francisco. (He followed Cullen Miller and preceded Jared Smith.) In the work, a set of contrasting pitches are allowed to proceed, so that their distinctions are brought into sonic view:

I hope to have audio from the San Francisco event posted soon, for comparison’s sake. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/subnaught. More from subnaught at subnaught.org.

Disquiet Junto Project 0049: Deck Duet

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.

The assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, December 6, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 10, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0049: Deck Duet

This week’s project explores the unique sonic attributes of what has come to be thought of as tape cassette culture. Specifically, we’ll be focusing on the sound of the tape cassette deck: the rhythm inherent in its motor, its gears, its rotation. This project will require access to a tape cassette deck — preferably, but not necessarily, one that records as well as plays.

There are three steps to this project. The third step has two options.

Step 1: Record the sound of your tape deck in play mode. Make note of the rhythm inherent in your tape deck: at what BPM does it progress?

Step 2: Create a short new piece of music — simple, atmospheric, lightly rhythmic — that has the same BPM as the tape deck.

Step 3: Make a recording that combines your new piece of music and the sound of the tape cassette deck at close to equal volume. Almost certainly, the rhythm of the deck and the rhythm of your composition won’t match up exactly. (You can accomplish this in one of two ways. You can simply combine the two recordings into one — or, more complexly, you can record your track to a cassette and play it back on your deck, in order to record the music and the deck simultaneously; adjusting the volume in this scenario will be complicated, but the rhythmic discrepancies might end up with more nuance.)

Deadline: Monday, December 10, 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 “disquiet0049-deckduet” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow for attributed 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 49th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/12/06/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Photo by Chris Dlugosz, via flickr.com.

Talking About, and Within, the “Next” SoundCloud

The SoundCloud.com service has gone live with its “next” version, which I’ve been watching develop in recent months thanks to beta access to changes as they iterate. Though the service’s new version is now fully public, it isn’t fully implemented. For one thing, iteration is continuous. More specifically, though, certain things have gone missing, like the discussion space in “groups” pages. SoundCloud groups provides the infrastructure for the weekly music-project community that is the Disquiet Junto, so I pay particular attention to how it is changing. Here is the current state of the Groups page:

And here is the previous version — note the use of tabs, which have now gone away:

There is a lot of change evident in the new SoundCloud, but one thing that stands out in the design is the increased attention to the role of listeners. This is particularly evident in the “repost” tool, which lets listeners take a track from someone else’s account and slip it into their own stream. The SoundCloud interface has long suffered from a situation in which the pages of listeners haven’t had much to them; the repost tool changes that. The reposting is just the start. There’s also a new version of “sets” in SoundCloud. It used to be that one could only create sets of one’s own tracks, but now anyone — notably those who listen rather than upload — can create sets of any tracks they want. This recognition of listening as an active means of participation is important to the growth and maturation of SoundCloud.

But perhaps the weirdest thing about the redesign of SoundCloud is the presence of my face — see the bottom right:

Over at soundcloud.com/creators, the service has begun rolling out a series of interviews with people who use SoundCloud. So far there are three of these interviews, and they’re quite different from each other, which works well in making it clear that SoundCloud isn’t just about uploading one’s finished record (a la Bandcamp) or amassing “adds” (a la the original MySpace). There’s a bit about a university that uses it for its multifaceted podcasting; they discuss the move from merely uploading lectures to “shorter, documentary-style podcasts with researchers,” to a more formal, fortnightly news podcast, to documentation of the university’s music events, among other endeavors. And there’s an interview with a singer-songwriter, Cyra Morgan, who does a good job of summarizing the manner in which the casual communal aspect of SoundCloud has allowed her to take risks: “It feels safe even though the music isn’t perfect, even though it’s in its most vulnerable state.”

And then there’s me, yapping about the way the SoundCloud service helped give birth to the Disquiet Junto:

These interviews are being posted at the company’s own, recursively titled soundcloud.com/soundcloud account. I knew this was coming, of course, because I submitted to the interview, but I wasn’t sure when it would pop up. I happened to learn that the interview had gone live this morning when Peter Kirn mentioned it in his detailed analysis of the new SoundCloud interface at createdigitalmusic.com.

Technological Extinction at TheAtlantic.com

There’s a certain beauty to the fact that the writer of a documentary about an endangered mammalian species, the dolphins of The Cove, has now tried his hand at a documentary about an endangered species of technology: the recording studio.

The writer is Mark Monroe, who worked with director Louie Psihoyos on The Cove and has now teamed on Dave Grohl’s directorial debut, Sound City, an institutional biography of the fabled Los Angeles recording studio Sound City.

I wrote about technological subtext of the film’s trailer — concerns about the “human element,” echoes of Grohl’s comments about computers in his Grammy speech earlier this year — for the website of The Atlantic: “Recording Studios May Die, But the False Mythology Around Them May Not.”

Here’s the film’s trailer:

Read the full article at theatlantic.com.

Beats Slip in Japan

Warning, this starts with a quick-draw beat, a Casio castanet on hyperdrive. It slurs a bit, and elements intrude upon its speedy delirium. The battered, slipped-disc beats of “WavWavWav” by Himuro Yoshiteru run like a vinyl dance track that’s been on the shelf long enough to be squeezed by the countervailing pressures of all the adjacent records. Its grooves reduced to nubs, the beats give way at times. Snatches of a neighboring jazz record impress themselves while the rhythm does its best not to trip all over itself. A vocal is heard briefly, and then gets subsumed. The splendi sense of imminent chaos lingers throughout.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/himuro-yoshiteru. More from Yoshiteru, who is based in Tokyo, Japan, at twitter.com/Himuro and himuro-yoshiteru.bandcamp.com.

Resting Bell Rests

The thick wave is almost visible in the air, so slow is the pace at which it moves. This tonal mass is “Numazu” by Summons of Shining Ruins. It is the opening track off Shiho, the first of two albums with which the excellent netlabel Resting Bell will close out the year. The shimmering density of “Numazu,” and of Shiho in general, was produced entirely on digitally mediated electric guitar. It is all nanobot fireflies and glorious circular saws and tinsel made from razor blades.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/restingbell. Get the full release at
restingbell.net.