Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 479

Eno & Retail: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of August 2012

As mentioned two months ago, the software that for a long time automatically tallied the most popular (i.e., read, commented-upon, linked-to) posts on this site has gone belly up. So, as will remain the case until a proper replacement has been located, the following is, instead, a list of 10 key posts from September 2012, during which there were 31 posts:

(1) What the new Brian Eno album, Lux, his solo debut on the Warp label, will likely sound like, featuring video of the music as installed in Italy, and a related lecture by Eno. Overviews of (2) the first and (3) the second (“A Brief History of Listening”) weeks of the class on “sound” that I am teaching this semester at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. The two Disquiet Junto projects thus far that are being employed to develop audio for the exhibit As Real as It Gets, organized by Rob Walker for the Apex Art gallery in Manhattan — (4) one field recordings of retails spaces, (5) the other faux field recordings of such spaces created with foley sounds). Free downloads of (6) a Lary 7 performance at a Touch Editions concert in New York City (he was opening for Eleh), (7) Nils Frahm performing piano minus one finger, (8) four loops from the score to Looper, (9) Jason Richardson‘s closely mic’d children’s toy, and (10) and J. Soliday‘s sonic salute to his former club, Enemy.

The most popular searches of the month included: distinction, dome, xenakis, youtube, aaron, arcka, elian, ionizer, junto, kikapu, southland, steely.

New Beats

There is much to marvel at, to revel in, on the new, five-track collection (The Opinion in the Room) of abstract beats by Arcka, aka Young Architect, aka Whyarcka, aka Shawn Kelly of Philadelphia. Perhaps it’s simply the framing benefit of its title, but “Put the Mic Down” is a great place to start. As its title suggests, this isn’t hip-hop production in search of a vocalist; it’s hip-hop production with the concept of a vocalist put aside. After an extended bit of tightly looped throbs — vocal snatches, strings — at the opening, the beat that is “Put the Mic Down” surfaces, its arrival delayed just enough that it never truly kicks in. To Arcka’s credit, the beat arrives, its solidity more a matter of retrospect than sudden announcement. It’s a swaggery thing, a deep, bassy sequence that occasionally drops out, occasionally swells up, gets haunted by smatterings of echoed vocals, but never loses sight of its sharp snare.

The Opinion In The Room by ARCKATRON presents…

Other highlights: how the beats willfully stumble on top of each other as “Let Go! (Free Me)” gets underway, the running of the bulls reimagined in hightop sneakers. The use of old-school girl-group vocals as the source material on “Listen to the Whole Record.” The percussive detail on “Get Your Chops Up!”

Get the full set at arckatron.us. More on Arcka at twitter.com/whyarcka. And here’s a 2009 interview with Arcka: “Young Communicator.”

Four Loops from Looper

Nathan Johnson is a composer best known for his work with director Rian Johnson, his cousin, on such films as Brick, The Brothers Bloom, and, most recently, Looper. The Looper soundtrack album is up for download in the regular spots (iTunes, Amazon), and there’s a special physical edition (limited to 3,000 units) at lalalandrecords.com. The physical version includes seven additional tracks, on top of the 19 that are part of the downloadable version. Two of those additional tracks, and two from the main set, are available for free download at the La-La Land website. (All four max out at 1:30, while the album versions go longer, one of them for over five minutes.) These include a solo piano version of the movie’s haunting theme (MP3), two different versions of the “Closing Your Loop” (MP3) cue (the alternate version referred to as a “film mix” [MP3]), and “A New Scar” (MP3).

Download audio file (Demona.mp3)

Download audio file (Demona.mp3)

Download audio file (Demona.mp3)

Download audio file (Demona.mp3)

Tracks originally posted at lalalandrecords.com. More on Johnson at , nathanjohnson.tumblr.com, and twitter.com/ntjohnson.

And for a bonus, here are three short videos Johnson put together on his composing process for Looper:

Videos originally posted at vimeo.com/nathanj.

Piano-Viola Duets from Kenneth Kirschner

Forgive longtime listeners to the work of Kenneth Kirschner if they (we, really) mistakenly think the title of his new, three-piece album on the SHSK’H netlabel is September 21, 2012. That’s how it appears to be on the netlabel’s website (see detail of screenshot above), and as Kirschner listeners know, he titles almost all his work with the date of its production. In fact, that simply is the date of release, and the album’s actual title is merely Shsk’h Vol.07. No matter, the appearance of new work by him is multiply enjoyable: First, because it exists to begin with. Second, because, by definition, this being a netlabel release, it is free to download. Third, because it is a duet — a work for him and his colleague, viola player Tawnya Popoff.

And fourth and foremost, because a certain amount of attentive listening will be required to tease out where his piano ends and Popoff’s viola begins. The tonal congruities are as much a matter of sympathetic playing as they are of compositional approach. There’s barely a plosive evident in either’s efforts, long held tones echoing pixel vapors, moiré patterns extrapolating from chance encounters of layered drones. Due to how the work is posted on the netlabel’s website, there’s no easy embedding of it here. Get the release for free download at shskh.com. More on Kirschner at kennethkirschner.com, and on Popoff at afarcry.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

I only follow two TV characters on Twitter: a fictional person and a fictional version of a fictional person. #
From Last Resort’s island to Myles’ cameo in Person of Interest, the shadow Lost casts on today’s television is expansive. #
Sacramento tomorrow. Anything art-ish I should check out, lemme know. #
Fear of How Music Works #
I have two art-dot-sy (art.sy) invites, if anyone wants one. #
Read far too many reviews of Looper, wrote a check to myself to transfer funds, got a big headache. #
“All these bottles thrown into the sea eventually found recipients.” —Nowaki netlabel on benefits of Creative Commons: http://t.co/0goDom2I #
For folks involved in the @djunto this week, a beautiful thank-you from the netlabel: http://t.co/0goDom2I. #
Playing catchup. Set of 40 tracks from the @djunto project when we remixed the theme of the Radius broadcast/podcast: https://t.co/podzQny2 #
RIP, Half Sack. #
Dredd isn’t great, but at least the 3D was considered as part of visual design. And it really looked 2000 AD to me (the comic not the year). #
The 39th weekly @djunto project has begun at http://t.co/ncvd9ZaD http://t.co/XdREURGZ. Remixing three netlabel releases. #
A bit of netlabel activism is the modus operandi for this week’s @djunto, the 39th in the weekly series. #
“Look at all of those no-deriv licenses (grumble grumble). What’re you afraid of?” That’s @vuzhmusic asking netlabels what’s up. #

Ignore that last comment/question. PDFs are transferring fine. The doc in question turned out to have been an HTML file. #
Is it possible to send PDFs from GoodReader to iAnnotate PDF on the iPad? #
Listen to music by Brian Eno from the exhibit that spawned his forthcoming Lux album: http://t.co/jVmWlLoa. Post updated thanks to @wifsten. #
Listen to music from the installation that inspired the forthcoming Brian Eno album, Lux: http://t.co/jVmWlLoa Plus a lecture. And diagrams! #
Anyone know who did the cover art for the forthcoming Brian Eno album, Lux (Warp, Nov. 13)? It looks Tom Phillips–ish. #
Today in sound class: surveillance in The Conversation, sampled submarine sounds in Last Resort, and Lucille Ball emulates Charlie Chaplin. #
Odd whistle sound while in shower. Any other time of day I’d assume it’s a distant siren, but in the morning, maybe a neighbor’s tea kettle? #
Night sounds: dishwasher rumbling, TV creaking as it cools down, rattle of an occasional passing car, whine of MUNI bus coming to a stop. #
Design-oriented Apple sends Rothko Chapel visitors to a house down the road. http://t.co/pryA0IlN #
Tomorrow in sound class, week 3, “The Score”: Conversation/Murch, sound design, foley, (un)silent film, laugh tracks, Southland, Last Resort #
Manhattan Disquiet Junto concert is now on the calendar: http://t.co/CVlqXHAT. November 27 @apexart. Details to follow. #
Are these newly legal driverless cars are allowed to respond to text messages? #
Side view of Tilden Park sound tube. http://t.co/DLLDOlZW #
Not a shower head. One of two sound tubes in Tilden Regional Park playground. http://t.co/3gVZE2u9 #
Afternoon audio stream: the lo-fi, low-key guitar/loop/din hush of Josh Mason’s forthcoming Jeremiad: http://t.co/bmq4FHEI #
Sentence I didn’t foresee myself typing: “Just signed up for MySpace invite.” #
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco, heard through closed windows on a cold, windy day — the sound the clearest it’s been in recent memory. #
Testing @SurteesStudios‘ OS X Bartender Bar beta. Smart that a clutter-minded app has icon selection, rather than forcing its icon on you. #
“violist at musician” / The unintentional performing-arts commentary of LinkedIn. #
So many hybrid cars in Berkeley, parking lots here have a very different vibe from the norm. #
Train, unseen, echoed through Tilden Park. #
RIP, Sam Sniderman (b. 1920), founder of the Canadian record store chain Sam the Record Man: http://t.co/zGiocNpw #
Found sounds. Sidewalk cassette. Cult jam. http://t.co/1hXiXrzl #
Kabuki version of Woman in the Dunes at Precita Park. (Really just overly sunscreened toddlers in sunken sand box.) #
“Signal sweeping for transmitters. You’re just a party animal.” Enemy of the State is no The Conversation, but has fun with whence it came. #
The Ripping Point: The moment when number of downloaders at the café manage to slow the Internet access to near-zilch. #
Information flows through this. http://t.co/dgQkr5qa #
Waking to Lethem/Chabon parallels paralleling DeLillo/Auster parallels. #
“A Brief History of Sound.” Notes from the second week of my sound class: http://t.co/AcyarrTD. #celebritydeath #synaesthesia #phonography #

Disquiet Junto Project 0039: Netlabel Derivations

Each Thursday evening 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 to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 27, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 1, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0039-remixingnowaki. (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 0039: Netlabel Derivations

The netlabel phenomenon is a tremendous force in contemporary music, with hundreds of these small organizations around the world actively distributing for free the music of willing musicians. In many ways, the concept of the netlabel is at the forefront of the Creative Commons — except for one lingering issue: Many netlabels set their tracks to a license that doesn’t allow for derivative works. On a label-by-label basis, that’s likely an informed decision. But from a broader perspective, it arguably stunts the promotion of shared culture.

In order to encourage the employment of licenses that allow for derivative works, such as remixes, the Disquiet Junto will focus its collective attention this week to a netlabel that allows for derivative works. We’ll take three tracks from three different releases from the Nowaki label, based in Paris, France, and combine them into remixed celebrations of the label’s vibrancy.

So, the assignment this week is simple. Please download the following three tracks from the netlabel Nowaki and combine them into a new track. You can process the sourced audio in any way you choose, but you can’t add anything to it:

“Irese” from this Barascud’s Summit:

http://www.nowaki-music.org/#album151

“Sumatra” from André D / Christophe Meulien’s Archipel

http://www.nowaki-music.org/#album153

“She Likes to Look at the Sky” from Kluge’s No Love, Please.

http://www.nowaki-music.org/#album130

Note: You will likely have to download the full albums to access the source audio.

Deadline: Monday, October 1, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 5 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 “disquiet0039-remixingnowaki” 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:

This Disquiet Junto project was done as a celebration of the efforts of the Nowaki netlabel, and to support its employment of licenses that allow for derivative works. This track is comprised of three pieces of music: “Irese” by Barascud, “Sumatra” by André D / Christophe Meulien, and “She Likes to Look at the Sky” by Kluge. More on the Nowaki label, and the original versions of these tracks, at

http://http://www.nowaki-music.org/

More on this 39th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/09/27/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

What the New Brian Eno Album, Lux, Will Likely Sound Like

News came this morning of a forthcoming Brian Eno album, simply titled Lux, due out November 13 from Warp Records. Somehow seven full years have passed since Eno’s first solo record for the Warp label, Another Day on Earth, which put him on a roster alongside Autechre and Aphex Twin, among many other notables, electronic and otherwise. In the interim, Eno has released two other full-length records on Warp, Small Craft on a Milk Sea with musicians Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams and Drums Between the Bells with poet Rick Holland, as well as the Panic of Looking EP that came out of the Drums Between the Bells sessions. Pre-release build-up isn’t exactly the Disquiet.com métier, but since just about everything posted today about the yet-to-be-released record seems to simply be lightly rewriting the press release, this post is intended to round up some additional tidbits.

To begin with, up top is a video from YouTube that is annotated as “Music for the Great Gallery” and as an “installazione sonora di Brian Eno per la Galleria Grande.” As of this writing, the video has only 738 views, even though it’s been online since July 24 of this year. The video appears to be an official posting from the arts institution that organized the exhibit that is depicted. The brief press release from Warp on the Lux record described Lux as “a 75-minute composition in twelve sections that evolved from a work currently housed in the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria in Turin, Italy.” This aligns with the description of the work in the video (more details toward the end of this post). The album has four tracks, each about 20 minutes long, and by all appearances they will be drawn from the systems that produced the music heard in the above video.

The same YouTube account from which that video originated also posted a brief talk about the exhibit by Eno. This second video also appeared on July 24, and yet has only 444 views so far (again, as of this typing):

In the lecture, Eno doesn’t talk about the specifics of the Great Gallery installation so much as provide background for how this sort of work came to be. Throughout he employs an overhead projector to use graphics to depict what he’s describing. He discusses the influence of Terry Riley’s “In C” on his awakening, 40 years ago, and on his emerging development of ambient music. He describes the “self-constructing” nature of Riley’s work, which he diagrams in a colorful manner, and mentions how it applies not just to music but things in general:

“It’s an idea that’s very appealing to lifelong anarchists, like myself,” he says. He also discusses “It’s Gonna Rain” by Steve Reich (“One of the simplest pieces of music that has ever changed anyone’s life,” he calls the great work). He diagrams this as well:

Part of the role of these diagrams is to explain how the works function, how those simple elements in the Riley work are intended to be repeated at the musician’s discretion, and how the Reich consists of loops that phase in and out. The diagrams also serve the purpose of distinguishing the music from that which would be traditionally depicted as a series of notes on staffs. And, finally, the diagrams allow him to move into a second set of images depicting how organizations are structured.

He reflects on the role of cybernetics (“people came to grips with the idea that systems operate differently from the parts of the system”); he calls it the first language he found that could “talk” about “this kind of music.” He discusses top-down organizations, making comparisons between the orchestra and the Vatican and the military, and he diagrams that structure as follows:

This he distinguishes from the generative relationships he aspires to in his ambient work (“the composer was a seed and the seed grew into something”), which he diagrams as follows:

At around the eight-minute mark Eno brings this all around to his own compositional style, which he presents as a series of individual, self-contained musical elements that overlap in unique manners (“From a very simple system you get rather beautiful and complex new relationships”), and he diagrams it as follows:

In closing he mentions the roles of genetics and cellular automata in his compositional awakening. He singles out “autopoiesis,” or “self-making,” as the mode in which he is engaged, something that produced music he had “never imagined.” He lists Music for Airports as an example of the music that has resulted from this practice.

As of this writing there is just one comment on each of the two YouTube videos: a peculiarly dismissive one on the lecture (“Uh… didn’t John Cage do this like 40 years ago?”) — peculiar since the whole point of the lecture is looking back 40 years to the origins of what Eno is up to — and one on the installation excerpt that connects it to the forthcoming album (“Just ordered Lux cant wait to hear full version”).

A few additional points:

1. More on the Eno album Lux at brian-eno.net/lux and bleep.com.

2. The press release today describes the forthcoming Lux as follows:

It finds him expanding upon the types of themes and sonic textures that were present on such classic albums as Music for Films, Music for Airports and Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Eno sees it as a continuation of his ‘Music for Thinking’ project that includes Discreet Music (1975) and Neroli (1993).

It’s intriguing that the list doesn’t include Thursday Afternoon (1985), which like Lux originated as music from an installation.

3. This detailed description of the project, including Eno’s own explanation, appears on the lavenaria.it website:

The great Brian Eno, the undisputed contemporary master, music theorist, acclaimed producer, the inventor of ambient music and the brilliant innovator of the language of modern music has made a very special gift to the Great Gallery, the 18th century masterpiece by the architect Filippo Juvarra and the symbol of the splendor of Venaria Reale: an original soundtrack.

I started writing “12 Seasons. Music for the Great Gallery” in my studio in London. I had seen pictures and plans of the Reggia di Venaria and I was confident I had found the right approach: I worked for a few weeks on a track that I brought to the Reggia for testing in May 2012.

When I listened to it in the extraordinary context of the Great Gallery, however, I realized that it was not right. What I had composed – in my studio in London, wrapped up in England’s grey climate – was introspective and somewhat dark. There was not doubt in my mind that it was an “interior” track. What is most striking about the Great Gallery – and you realise as much only when you step into it – is that it is soaked in light and space: nothing further from an “interior” feeling. Juvarra had designed it to invite the world to get in, so it seemed appropriate that music should exist inside as well as outside of space, almost like a cloud or an atmosphere that would envelop the construction from the outside.

Conceptually, this music is similar to other works I did around forty years ago (e.g., Discreet Music, 1975). I am still deeply fascinated by the range of transformations that are possible starting with a limited “stock” of original notes, and this piece is a perfect example in this sense. Nevertheless, there is also a new starting point. Building on the Reggia’s “classical” imprint, I wanted to make sure that the track was made up of several “movements” rather than a single block. Thus only 4 or 5 or 6 of the original 7 sounds I had decided to work with will eventually be used in each section. This means that the emotional quality of each section is slightly different, and as it progresses, the piece evolves and takes on different overtones.

I love the Great Gallery of La Venaria, it is a sort of secular cathedral, and I hope that my music will encourage more people to spend time in the Gallery than it is normally the case. Brian Eno

12 Seasons. Music for the Great Gallery of the Palace of Venaria, in its final version, is made up of two 1-hour tracks consisting of 12 sections each.

Only four speakers are in place, two at the entrance and two at the end of the Gallery, all facing the center of the hall. Visitors walking down the Gallery are wrapped into two distincts sound flows: as they approach the center of the hall, echoes of the sounds behind turn into a memory that blend in the soft reverberations of the sounds that lay ahead.

The two movements that are complete when they meet at the heart of the Gallery. The sound tracks are made of melodic cores that are sketched and whispered, with the warmer sound of real violins in place of samplings. Pauses and silences play with the peculiar reverberation effect. The sounds are remarkably persistent before dissolving into the space, each engaged in a potentially endless chase, floating in the air, altering the perception of the Great Gallery, expanding its volumes and filling it with a different light.

Music thus becomes an “essential constituent” of the Gallery, like a color, a scent, almost a newly crafted decoration – after the ones designed by the architects Juvarra and Alfieri. Music as a complement to space”.

4. And, finally, it’s unclear who created the Lux cover art, but it certainly has a certain kinship to the work of Tom Phillips, who has done numerous pieces of art associated with Eno — notably the cover to Another Green World, which this resembles.

Junto Byproduction Edit (MP3)

The most recent Disquiet Junto (“Zola’s Foley”) project was about conglomeration, about the creation of a sense of place and space using far-flung source material. It wasn’t one of the more popular of the weekly composition-project series, but it yielded some fine work — not just in the final productions but in the byproduct. Zedkah, who hails from London, put humorous effort into his entry, which imagined a retail space: “Carla Stores is on the outskirts of NE London, accessed by one of the last stops on the Makebelieve line.” And subsequent to posting that, he shared one of the work’s constituent parts, under the title “Creakfoot mix [ for your creative use].”

In the Junto track he noted that “several footmen constantly pace the panel wood reception in a surprisingly rhythmic way.” Here we hear just the pacing itself, as he recorded it for use in his Junto piece. He posted this excerpt with hopes of hearing it sublimated into others’ musical efforts: “This is offered as download to anyone who might like it to do something with it. Would love to hear some musical use of this.” Here’s hoping someone takes him up on it.

Visit Zedkah’s soundcloud.com/zedkah page to download “Creakfoot mix [ for your creative use]“ and his Junto effort that resulted from it.

Environment Jamming (MP3)

There are field recordings, and there are field recordings. There are audio documents of the soundscape, and there are regionally indigenous musics archived thanks to portable gear.

And then there are hybrids. There are compositions that make use of the physical environment to perform something tuneful or rhythmic or otherwise musical in real time. Such is “Construction Container” by Joshua Wentz, in which simple percussion prefaces, then aligns with, and overall frames the sound of a passing train. The very brief liner note associate with the track is simply: “Felt mallet on an overturned metal construction container, as the El passes by.” That’s El for elevated train — Wentz is based in Chicago. The distant train is heard coming into sonic view, as it were, though the looming presence may not be self-evident on first listen. It passes quickly, and once it’s passed by, the percussion slows, a denouement that artfully echoes the vehicles diminishing presence.

Wentz track originally posted at soundcloud.com/joshuawentz. More on Wentz at joshuawentz.com.

The urtext of such experiments in realtime environment jamming is arguably “Ear to the Ground” by the great David Van Tieghem, once upon a time a stalwart of the nascent New York downtown scene, and today a major force in theatrical sound design and composition (upcoming projects include August Wilson and Clifford Odets revivals). Here, for reference, is a video of it:

The Electronic Voice (MP3)

Miulew is Björn Eriksson, of Sollefteå, Sweden. It’s unclear if his track “Electric Voices in Happy Cloud – experiment 1″ is voice processing or electronic voice phenomena. That is, it is unclear whether it is voices clipped and truncated and splintered and filtered until they sound abstract, or if it is the semblance of voices arising from within electronica’s effluence. Is it noise from signal or signal from noise? Either way, it’s a granular pleasure. Here’s how Eriksson describes it:

So this was a tryout of seeing if I could capture some voice-like sounds in a feedbacked granulator setup. At first I found some rather “voicy” things, but when I started to work deeper onto it I lost it. So this must be considered an experiment more than a worked through track/piece. Anyway; i was rather happy about some of the sound textures and frequency behaviours of the feedbacked loops so this is something I am happy to share with whoever might be interested! This is definitively something I will go for another round with soon. After when listening to this I was having the image of being inside a “happy cloud” – hence the title. In a cloud drifting over landscapes, dreamlike – ((which in some some way also must be a reference to that track by 801 I liked so much when I was young))

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/miulew. More on Miulew/Eriksson at ruccas.org and miulew.blogspot.com.