Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 474

Score to a Quotidian Experience

When the track reaches 22 and a half minutes, there is a brief piano figure, very brief, just a few notes. These few notes trace a downward arc. There’s a pause afterward. It’s long enough to make the listener wonder if the sound of piano was overheard from somewhere else, somewhere apart from the recording, somewhere unrelated to the underlying sound that had preceded it — perhaps through a wall, or an open window, maybe emanating from the listener’s own memory. But repeat it does, and then again, and then there’s a modulation at some stage of this repetition of the piano, enough to a suggest formal compositional approach and not merely sound for its own sake, which has been the effect up until now. Up until now it has been a low-level drone. The piece shifts as time passes, it grows. The piano is exchanged for a deeper, orchestral swell. This is “Score to a Quotidian Experience” by Collin Thomas. It’s an hour-long piece recently released on the always excellent restingbell.net The description here can come across as breathless, because the unanticipated developments, ones that both challenge and reinforce the concept of ambient music (challenge by veering from stasis, reinforce by providing a non-invasive framing structure), are so promising and enjoyable. The track is anything but breathless — it’s slow, subdued. It’s sonic breath.

Download audio file (01-Score_to_a_Quotidian_Experience.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at restingbell.net. More on Collin Thomas at collinthomas.net.

Enough!!! Trio’s World Premiere Performance (MP3)

There are many ways in which abstract electronic music is more inherently familiar than songs are, key among them the ways in which abstract sounds mimic — or at least appear to mimic — the real world. It is far more simple to draw comparisons between the whir of cicadas and that of certain rudimentary synthesis techniques, for example, than to find something remotely like verse/chorus/verse, let along /bride, in the natural world. Nonetheless, abstract electronic music is widely perceived as alien.

The sounds in the world premiere, one year ago, of the trio Enough!!! contain numerous noises that should be more than familiar — static like rain, throbbing drone like blood in the ear, crunches like feet in snow — and not just from the natural world. There is the whine of low-level electrical activity, the echo of long corridors, the rotations of hovering helicopters. The combined effect is what’s alien, a level of drama and intensity far beyond, one would certainly hope, a listener’s personal experience. Enough!!! is CM von Hausswolff, Jason Lescalleet, and Joachim Nordwall, working together in perfect dissonance (MP3). The recording was made at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, New York, on December 20, 2011.

Download audio file (Radio85.mp3)

Performance originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More on the event at issueprojectroom.org.

When Sandy Met Fugazi

When you write a website about music that, in terms of commercial units, often sells in the low three figures, there are better things you might do with your time than look at pageviews. Still, sometimes above-average occurrences are worth a look at. This is the chart of pageviews of this site in the past 30 days. Clearly, it is consistent with the exception of two instances:

The peak labeled “Sandy” correlates with appearance on this site of a post collecting, the morning after superstorm Sandy hit the East Coast, various field recordings of the rain and wind (“What Sandy Sounded Like”). The peak labeled “Fugazi” correlates with the appearance of a post about an album constructed entirely of samples of instrumental parts of Fugazi songs (“Sieve-Fisted Compositions”).

There are numerous reasons why this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison: nature versus songs, bad news versus good news, prominent Twitter activity versus Boing Boing coverage (thank you, Xeni!) yielding even more Twitter activity. I just post it here for reference.

When Sandy Hit Bedford-Stuyvesant (MP3)

irenemoon.blogspot.com.

Radius (in the) Mix

The latest from the great broadcast/podcast Radius is an hour-long mix credited to IO.SOUND. The project’s descriptive text is fabulist, to the point of being occasionally opaque, though then again the depiction isn’t entirely out of line with the music. What might play to the reader’s eye as misdirection and unalloyed associative description (“An aural invitation into the occult loop of undead machines, caressed & broadcast with the return of the 12th planet”) might play, by contrast, to the ear as inherently strange, but pleasingly so — not evasive but intriguing, not hyperbolic but dramatic. The track list is as follows:

* = unreleased

TTLD = Tactical Tape Loop Division (Unearthed from Airwaves / IO/001)

Scant Intone – earos [rmx of TTLD] – IO/001

Yves De Mey / I Am a Photograph [rmx]*

Jeff Carey – Cut 0.3 [rmx of TTLD] – IO/001

I8U – ‘til death [rmx of TTLD] – IO/001

E. Domnitch + D. Gelfand / sans (I Am a Photograph [rmx])*

C0H – Blow Up (I Am a Photograph Cut)*

s* – Quiet [excerpt]*

s* + kk / eclipse – IO/002

Frank Bretschneider / An Awaiting Room*

Richard Chartier / EVP.RE [rmx of TTLD] – IO/001

a.j. cornell / 1981 – IO/003

s* + kk / hypnosyne (psonn) – IO/002

s* + tomas phillips / body*

pinkcourtesyphone / I Am a Photograph (sleazemix)*

tomas phillips / flore [TTLD rmx] – IO/001

s* / 1999 – IO/003

s* + kk / ix chel (dead s* dub) – IO/002

s* + kk / she dreams of isis – IO/002

Scott Simon / I Am a Photograph [rmx]*

souns / waves [rmx of Mario van Horrik & Petra Dubach]*

s* + MVK / Thunderklap (Side B) – IO/004

coingutter / a little night music [rmx of TTLD] – IO/001

Martijn Comes / Memory Field*

Martijn Comes / Neptune Federation of Light*

a.j. cornell – sorgue [rmx of Mario van Horrik & Petra Dubach]*

Martijn Comes / Electric Field*

Martijn Comes / Silent Field*

Martijn Comes / Mirrored Field*

Mix originally posted for free download at theradius.us. One warning: the downloadable WAV files is half a gigabyte in size. More on IO.SOUND at iosound.ca.

Piano & Synth, a Tumultuous Love Story (MP3s)

The piano echoes the modular synthesizer, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Either way, there’s a vapor trail of synthetic noise that hovers about, that emanates from, the roiling piano in the third part of a “Piano/Modular Synth Improvisation” by San Francisco musician Clarke Robinson. And then, just as a certain hierarchy seems to present itself, the synthesizer presents its own not insignificant flurry of sonic gusto, a brash field of constrained chaos. This play back and forth between modular and piano, between abstract and traditional, between amorphous and familiar, is the core of Robinson’s work here, in which the elements, so distinct from each other, are allowed to circle each other, to serve varying roles: shadow, peer, guidepost, antagonist. Bracing stuff.

Parts one, two, and three of “Piano/Modular Synth Improvisation” originally posted for free download at Robinson’s soundcloud.com/robinsomniac account.

Sieve-Fisted Compositions

It’s a fierce object, many-layered yet taut as could be. It’s a dense field made of raw materials so rarefied that even in combination the resulting effect is singular, tensile. The album in question is Fugazi Edits, for which Chris Lawhorn took the extensive discography of the hardcore band Fugazi and combined multiple songs into new hybrid compositions. The opening track combines parts of five Fugazi songs (“Nice New Outfit,” “Greed,” “Walken’s Syndrome,” “Facet Squared,” “No Surprise”) and every other one of the album’s 22 cuts combines four. The album was produced with the approval of Fugazi and was released yesterday, October 30.

With perhaps a few minuscule, split-second exceptions, Lawhorn focused entirely on the instrumental portions of the Fugazi songs, just the tight rhythmic play of bass, guitar, and drums. Among other things, lyrics would have made the specifics of the songs self-evident, while the played passages are aggressively restructured to make the most of parallels and contrasts. The songs on Fugazi Edits range from momentum-charged ragers to extended surveys of tone and other sonic nuances. The result isn’t just a reconsideration of Fugazi’s work, but a valuable document of music-making in the early 21st century, a moment when matters are splendidly confused in regard to tensions between copyright and originality, between fan fiction and homage, between consumption and production.

In an extended back’n’forth email correspondence in advance of the album’s release, Lawhorn talked about the pleasures of cutting things up, about the varying density of the resulting material, and about pondering with Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye the discrepancy between the words “edit” and “remix.” What follows is a lightly edited transcript of this email discussion:

The full album is streaming on SoundCloud at Lawhorn’s account.

More on the record at chrislawhorn.com.

Marc Weidenbaum: Which of these tracks came most immediately to you, which was the most difficult, and why?

Chris Lawhorn: As for the most difficult, it’s tough to say. There was a whole stretch in the middle of production wherein I’d gone through all the main ideas with which I’d come to the project — and had to start pushing into new territory. So, that was tricky. But, it also led to some of the most challenging, adventurous mixes.

As for the most immediate, it was probably the final track on the album. It was one of the last ones I did. It fell into place really easily. And it had the right … arc, for lack of a better term, to close the album.

Weidenbaum: Which track exemplifies “the main ideas” with which you had “come to the project” and how would you describe those ideas?

Lawhorn: If any track gets close, it’s the last one. That’s probably got the best mix of quiet stuff, experiments, and riffs.

Weidenbaum: I may be mistaken, but even though the album is built from instrumental parts, I’d swear I can hear bits of vocal in the opening track, “Nice New Outfit – Greed – Walken’s Syndrome – Facet Squared – No Surprise.” Are there fragments of vocal in there, or am I hearing my memory of the song?

There is one track, I can’t remember which, that I think there might be a vocal in the mix. It’s just a little burst — I’m not sure if it’s a person or feedback. But, it’s buried in the mix — and I notice it every other time I listen to the album. But, I’ve not noticed anything in the opening track.

Weidenbaum: Can you take one track and talk through the production process? This is as much a matter of technique and process as it is of technology.

Lawhorn: They were all different, really. And, I was trying to approach each one from a different angle. Having said that, I used [the software package] Ableton Live throughout. And one of the things you can do there is move individual beats forward or back a bit. It’s ideal for music made by live musicians — because even the tightest band will have some idiosyncrasies. In the context of a single song, that’s not really an issue. But, if you’re layering passages of one song over another, you’re effectively making the band jam with themselves. Usually, that’s a bit of a train wreck. So, you can use Ableton to move bits and pieces — even a single snare hit — around so that everyone stays in time. In a club, you’d use that to transition between two songs seamlessly. Here, it’s the same principle. But, instead of one track giving way to another — the tracks all come and go.

Weidenbaum: How did you decide which segments to combine? Were the tracks largely planned in advance, or did you mix and match and experiment?

Lawhorn: A lot of it had to do with tempo. Namely, if you mix a fast song with a slow one — and force them into the same tempo — it changes the pitch of the music. You can use effects to mask this or override that. But, I wanted the album to have a somewhat coherent feel. So, I tried to group the tracks with other songs from the same tempo range.

Weidenbaum: Was it a conceptual challenge to try to use each song once, and to make sure you used every song on every record? What exactly was your selection process?

Lawhorn: Honestly, I just needed a way to make the project finite. With access to the whole discography, there are an infinite number of variables on each track. So, for me, the easiest way to make that manageable was to use every song — but not on more than one track. Technically, there are still infinite possibilities. But, it gave me a limitation set within which I could work.

Weidenbaum: You mentioned “effects” in a way that suggests you avoided them. What tools did you allow and not allow yourself when putting this music into effect? And in particular, what tools did you consider employing and then decide against?

Lawhorn: Originally, I didn’t think I’d use any effects at all — as I didn’t want to fiddle with their sound too much. But, I ended up using them to highlight elements that might otherwise get lost in the mix, and to shake things up a bit — as I started to feel like I’d gone as far as I could with just sampling and editing. I didn’t, though, add any new elements — no beats, no synths, etc.

Weidenbaum: I was wondering which track is the most dense with material?

Lawhorn: Track eight — the one built around “Last Chance for a Slow Dance” — is probably the densest. It might not sound that way, as it’s got a fair amount of dead space. It also sounds like it’s got a ton of effects on it. But, it was made almost entirely by layering very small samples over each other.

Weidenbaum: Did the music end up sounding like you’d expect it to sound, or did it take you in an unexpected direction?

Lawhorn: More or less. I had no idea each track would sound like, as I started it. But, I was trying to make something that was straightforward some of the time and experimental some of the time — not unlike a Fugazi album.

Weidenbaum: I like that assessment of the Fugazi approach: sometimes straightforward, sometimes experimental. What appeals to me about this record is its success is based in what long appealed to me about the band, which was its rhythmic intensity and the beauty in its sonic material, even putting aside the band’s ethos, its collective songwriting skills. What did you learn about the band’s music given all the time you spent studying it and working with it?

Lawhorn: I noticed a lot of little things — insofar as the way tracks were panned. I’ve probably spent more time listening to Fugazi on a stereo than with headphones. So, this gave me a chance to hear the songs more closely — without any distractions. Just me and headphones and samples for weeks on end.

Weidenbaum: How did you get this opportunity? Did you know members of Fugazi? Did you submit rough examples of what you intended to do?

Lawhorn: I’d been the resident DJ at Marie Claire magazine. And, when that wrapped up, I was trying to decide what to do next. I’d had something like this in mind for awhile, so I got in touch with Ian, made him a demo, and went from there.

Weidenbaum: What does that entail, being resident DJ for Marie Claire?

Lawhorn: Mostly writing — about what songs are popular in the club and what ones are good for working out. Things like that.

Weidenbaum: Whose idea was the charities, and how were they decided upon?

Lawhorn: The band was very generous — in letting me use their music and all. So, giving away the profit seemed like an easy way to both pass on that generosity on and simplify the accounting.

Weidenbaum: What’s going on in the album cover? What was the source material?

Lawhorn: It’s a picture of the band, digitally rearranged.

Weidenbaum: You were in a band, Cataract Falls, that you’ve rightly described as being “admittedly Fugazi-influenced.” I’m really intrigued by the extent to which when bands first form, they are in many ways, perhaps self-consciously, a kind of cover band, maybe a meta-cover band, in that they’re working on subsuming a whole lot of influences. Can you compare your experience playing in a Fugazi-influenced band and making these “edits”?

Lawhorn: I’m not sure how much of Fugazi crept into the sound of Cataract Falls. But, they were huge influence on the way we did things. Ethical stuff aside, I just didn’t realize how much of this stuff you could do yourself until Damian [Hade] — who started Cataract Falls and went on to play in Dead Letter Auction — started loaning me Fugazi albums and telling me about them. Prior to that, I think I was just writing songs and dreaming about getting a record deal. But, after I started listening to Fugazi and reading about them — I started buying recording gear, booking tours, and putting out CDs. None of this went very well. Everything lost money. But, it was an education. And, after about a decade of that, things started turning around.

Also, on a more practical, musical basis — the last half of the Cataract Falls album is all edits, field recordings, remixes, isolated tracks. It’s stuff with which I’d been fiddling, after the album was done, trying to add some kind of context to the music. And, all of that cutting and pasting was a precursor to the DJing I eventually started and, in turn, this album.

Weidenbaum: You’ve mentioned that this project let you explore two areas of interest at once: the music of that post-hardcore era and the cutting and pasting of sound inherent in hip-hop. What parallels do you hear between those two areas?

Lawhorn: There are lots of parallels you can draw — culturally, sonically, etc. But, mostly, I just like cutting things up and rearranging them. I like the sound of things overlapping. I don’t know why this is.

Weidenbaum: I’m intrigued by this idea of an “edit,” in contrast with a “remix.” I have my sense of what you’re getting at, but please describe it in your own words.

Lawhorn: Originally, I’d planned on calling the album Fugazi Remixes. And, Ian — from Fugazi — pointed out that they weren’t really remixes — in the sense that I wasn’t taking the original tracks and remixing them. It’s a fair point. So, after discussing a few other titles, I picked Fugazi Edits.

Weidenbaum: Can you think of precedents for this sort of work? Were any on your mind? I think a bit of the way the Who’s music was refined for the opening themes of the CSI shows, which use elements of Who songs, and more recently of the way Daft Punk edited Junior Kimbrough for a recent Yves Saint Laurent fashion show. I think of a lot of things, but I wonder if anything was on your mind in this regard?.

Lawhorn: I can’t really think of anything. I’m sure there are other cases where folks have done stuff like this. But, I’m just not aware of them. So, rather than a single album inspiring me, it’s probably just the convergence of a bunch of disparate experiences playing in Cataract Falls, making a rap album, listening to Brian Eno albums in college.

Disquiet Junto Project 0044: Sandy 2012

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, November 1, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, November 5, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0044-sandy2012. (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 0044: Sandy 2012

This is a shared-sample project. The theme is “the calm after the storm.” Terrible weather hit the East Coast of the United States earlier this week in the form of Superstorm Sandy, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Many Disquiet Junto contributors live in the area that was damaged by Sandy, and this project has their best wishes in mind.

The goal of this week’s project is to turn these fierce sounds into something peaceful, to produce sonic calm after the storm by using sounds from the storm itself.

For this project, we’ll employ two audio documents of the storm, both recorded in Brooklyn, New York, by Michael Raphael — known to SoundCloud regulars as Sepulchra. Both tracks are high-fidelity WAV files that represent well the fierce winds that Sandy brought to the East Coast.

The project instructions are simple:

Step 1: Download the Zip file containing two field recordings of the storm Sandy recorded by Michael Raphael in Brooklyn. The files are located here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oia1nt7kso7...

Step 2: Create an original track that makes a transition from stormy to placid over the course of its duration. Your track should open fiercely and then slowly give way to calm. You can use additional instruments of your choosing, but the original field recordings should serve as source material both for the stormy and for the placid portions of your track. In other words: the calm part of the track should be built in large part from audio of the storm.

Deadline: Monday, November 5, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 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 “disquiet0044-sandy2012” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

License: Please set your track explicitly for non-commercial use only. The original recordings belong to Michael Raphael.

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

The source audio from the 2012 storm Sandy was documented by Michael Raphael, an SFX recordist who maintains the field recording blog Fieldsepulchra at http://sepulchra.com/blog. His sound effects can be found at Rabbit Ears Audio, http://rabbitearsaudio.com.

More on this 44th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/11/01/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The Cello in Service (MP3)

It’s a single cello, but heard numerous times, simultaneous instances of bow pulled slowly across strings, the combination of materials creating moirés patterns. It’s common enough for moirés to result from coincident elements, both in terms of the contrapuntal tendencies of percussion and the beading that results from sonically proximate yet meaningfully distant tones. When those materials are all drawn from the same instrument, there’s an additional layer of sonic illusion: it becomes geometrically difficult to trace exactly where one performance ends and another begins, because of the absence of the inherent textural nuances that would help the ear distinguish parts in, say, a cello quartet. This is the marvel of Anton Lukoszevieze‘s tribute to the late artist Fred Sandback (MP3), in which he interpreted the above painting as a musical composition. Explains Lukoszevieze of his approach: “The painting was used as a template for a musical score, which I performed several times on the cello, using different pitch material. This was overdubbed resulting in the piece.”

Download audio file (AntonLukoszevieze_forFredSandback.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. More on Fred Sandback at fredsandbackarchive.org. More on the exhbit that inspired Lukoszevieze at kettlesyard.co.uk.

More on Lukoszevieze, who earlier this year was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society’s award for outstanding contribution to Chamber Music and Song, at antonlukoszevieze.co.uk.

Sandy & Fringe: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of October 2012

As mentioned a few months ago, the software that for a long time automatically tallied the most popular (i.e., read, commented-upon, linked-to, etc.) posts on this site has gone to the great cron job in the sky. So, as will remain the case until a proper replacement has been located, the following is, instead, a list of 10 key posts from October 2012, during which there were 43 posts:

(1) Field recorders captured Superstorm Sandy’s sonic presence up and down the East Coast, (2) the TV series Fringe laid out its underlying thesis of sound, (3) the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame came closer to embracing electronic music’s influence, (4) Paolo Salvagione prepared to debut his new artists’ book (for which I wrote a series of essays, which have been letterpressed for the project), (5) Natalia Kamia found unusual sounds in the piano, (6) the Disquiet Junto project came up with some serious dirty minimalism, (7) Darcy Jean and Jeff Morton committed some Ameritronic music, (8) Rick Tarquinio paid tribute to John Cage one letter at a time, (9) Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) sampled “God Save the Queen” and decelerated it to Olympian effect, and (10) Brian Biggs (aka Dance Robot Dance) milked a ukulele for all its ambience

The most popular searches of the month included: distinction, brian eno, dome, license, admire, fringe, gauzy, mashup, mixes, query, year’s best 2010, borderland, Buddha, C-scape, collaborated, communal.