Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 488

Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life

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 6, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 10, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0036-cstillconcerto. (There are no translations this week.)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project was inspired by a visit to the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver during last month’s Denver Junto concert trip.

Disquiet Junto Project 0036: Still Life

The painter Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was one of the great practitioners of abstract expressionism. The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, not only houses a wealth of his works, it also has on display artifacts from Still’s daily life and practice, such as his smock, his old paint cans — and his record collection. These records, displayed behind glass, include pieces by Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, among others, and they’re accompanied by a small note: “Clyfford Still was passionate about music, particularly classical music. Shown here are several samples from his record collection.” In this week’s project we’re going to take that word “sample” literally.

There’s an interesting question inherent here about matters of aesthetic influence: how it is that the man who painted such massive and graphically evocative works was, in fact, listening to music far more figurative than the art he himself produced? The goal of this week’s Disquiet Junto project is to take a shared sample of the sort of music that Still loved — a 78rpm recording of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante — and turn it into something that might be deserving of the term “abstract expressionism.”

So, the instructions for this week are as follows:

Step 1. Please select part of this MP3 of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante:

http://goo.gl/XqBvb

Step 2. Then transform that sample, through any methods you desire, into something that you feel meets the definition of “abstract expressionism” provided by the Clyfford Still Museum: “marked by abstract forms, expressive brushwork, and monumental scale.”

You cannot add any sounds to the sample, but you can manipulate the sample in any way you see fit.

Deadline: Monday, September 10, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 10 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 “disquiet0036-cstillconcerto” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

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

This track is a transformation, in honor of painter Clyfford Still, of a sample of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, II. Andante, culled from this recording:

http://archive.org/details/J.S.BachBr...

More on the Clyfford Still Museum at clyffordstillmuseum.org.

More on this 36th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/09/06/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The example of Still’s work up top is an untitled piece dated 1957 from the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern art (sfmoma.org).

Reflecting (on) Noise

J. Soliday hosted the Disquiet Junto concert this past April in his Wicker Park, Chicago, home venue, aka Enemy, which he ran from 2005 until it closed this past July. (“We could still keep going,” he told the Reader back in July. “I need a break.”) Among those on the Junto Chicago bill were Soliday himself and Jeff Kolar, who runs the excellent Radius broadcast/podcast series, the opening sound cue of which served as source material for a recent Junto project (“Disquiet Junto Project 0034: Radius Joint”). And now Soliday is himself the subject of a Radius episode, number 30, in which he works through numerous variations on the same performed noise, a screech that is heard at times like an insectoid whorl, at others like a stuttering glitch. The versions are all to be considered part of a broader whole, explains a brief liner note: “Line and room recordings of the performance were sped up, slowed down, chopped, looped, replayed, and reprocessed through the system in which they were originally generated. The resulting works should not be considered definitive versions, neither individually nor as a whole, but merely as windows into an ongoing continuum.”

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/radius-14. More at theradius.us. More on Soliday at jsoliday.com.

Sounds from an Imagined Belgium (MP3)

The rhythm is disjointed, overlaid, an experiment in disorienting counterpoint: a rough mix of pizzicato strings and occasional sawing on the one hand, and what seems to be a particularly adamant church bell on the other, the whole thing, this combination of beat-like punctuations that decline to align, given context by an underlying drone. And then it shifts, the drone coming to the forefront like a fog horn that has mastered circular breathing. The sounds are sourced, reportedly, from a place in Belgium that holds special meaning to the musicians whose work this is: Peter 7 Paelinck and Yves Bondue. They explain, “It is an historcal place with ancient history of death and war – Yves’ playground when he was young, a place druids, a gathering point of nature sourced by its sounds of trees and birds.” Then again, the duo appends to this notice a caveat: “nothing is true / everything is permitted.” Perhaps their geolocative sonic experiment is entirely fictional (MP3); either way, its amalgams are entrancing.

Download audio file (Radio82.mp3)

Track originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk as part of the great Touch Radio series from Touch Editions. The above photo, by Luc Vanhoucke, accompanied the MP3 at the Touch Radio post.

Aphex + Sci-Fi: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of July 2012

As mentioned last month, the software that for a long time automatically tallied the most popular posts on this site has gone belly up. So, as was the case last month, the following is, instead, a list of 10 key posts from August 2012, during which there were 35 posts:

(1) a listen to the score-meet-sound-design of a short sci-fi film titled Loom (with addendum information provided via email by one of the movie’s composers), (2) a Disquiet Junto project in which the participants interpreted polling data from the ongoing U.S. presidential election as if it were a graphically notated score (see image above), (3) a revised version of a Disquiet Junto remix of a Shostakovich chamber symphony by Kent Sparling (composer of, among other things, the score to Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska), (4) my interview with sound artist Christof Migone about his excavation of Ray Bradbury‘s The Martian Chronicles, (5) my 1993 interview with Depeche Mode (online for the first time ever) from the period that culminated with the Songs of Faith and Devotion album, (6) one of the seven performances from the recent (August 19) Disquiet Junto concert held in Denver (more audio will be posted live soon), (7) the announcement that I’m writing a book for the great 33 1/3 series on Aphex Twin‘s landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol II, (8) a Disquiet Junto project in which almost 30 musicians in just over four days interpreted an incendiary Yoko Ono Fluxus work from 1955, (9) an abstract exploration of the film-sound nugget known as the “Wilhelm Scream,” and (10) my all too close encounter with a massive swarm of bees.

The most popular searches of the month included: dome, distinction, aaron, junto, soundwalk, 3D music, autechre, cocteau, free, ngngngngngngng.

Diffusion Over Sublimation

They may break champagne bottles over the bows of ships to inaugurate their voyage, but Benjamin Dauer took a plosive-free approach when he tested out his newly rebuilt studio. He reconstructed the studio “from the ground up,” and then set about an initial work, built much like his studio largely from pre-existing pieces but experienced in a new light. In other words — his words — the track, titled “Driving Stage,” is “a little remix.”

The result is four minutes of gentle meander, the melody less a matter of sublimation than of diffusion. The low-level presence is not so much a concern of inherent tension as it is of lovely, widely distributed spaciousness, abetted by an enticingly slow pace. Writes Dauer of the effort, speaking in particular of some of the newly installed equipment, “I realize it’s very naive to say, but it was really great being able to approach the mix by hand – turning actual EQ knobs instead of virtual ones on a screen.”

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/benjamindauer. More on Dauer, who is based in Washington, D.C., at benjamindauer.net.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

SFO -> LGB #
Don’t judge me by the titles of my ebooks. Phone loaded with Kadrey’s Kill the Dead and Suarez’s Kill Decision. #
Previous tweet should have ended “whir and buzz.” #
Joyce Hsu’s tough-lovely mechanical bugs at SFO’s international terminal. Always disappointed they don’t whi http://t.co/6utjuW0S #
That’s the “Time Passing Remix.” MT @dirtydemos: @disquiet dusted off SAW Vol II; still sounds fresh despite being a bit scratched & crackly #
Morning sounds: refrigerator hum, occasional passing car, vague low-level electrical whine. #

Downloading the new @arckatron. Free, via the beat artist himself, as a Zip file: http://t.co/VSyklWLc #
In this week’s @djunto series we’re doing a group read (laptop circle?) of Beck’s Song Reader. Three tracks so far: http://t.co/kekZlIvt. #
Somewhere there’s a very complicated joke about Conlon Nancarrow, an empty piano bench, and Clint Eastwood’s movie scores. #
If you’re in Denver, catch Gary Emerich’s video installation “Contact” at Robischon Gallery. Show ends tomorrow, Sept. 1. #
RIP, Spanish film music composer Bernardo Bonezzi (b. 1964), who scored movies by Pedro Almodóvar (Verge, Desire) among others. #
So excited about SFEMF next week: Basinski, Moebius, Galindo, Leonard, Negativwobblyland, more. I’m going all 6 nights: http://t.co/yo9wFDlE #
Reminder, if you’re in/near Long Beach: I’m moderating a panel at @FingerprintsLB tomorrow (Sept 1) on sound art, part of @SoundWalk 2012. #
On heavy rotation for the next year. http://t.co/MQinWMlB #
I’ll be writing the 33 1/3 (aka @333books) volume about Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient Works Vol II. Very excited. #
Today’s a great day for several reasons. 1: My kid turns 2 years old; 2: A new @arckatron album is due out this evening (at 8:31pm). And … #
May need to start a new Instagram project called “Nothing says quiet like an exclamation point.” #
Long unused phone booth. http://t.co/VlnSsdys #
The non-built (aka “natural”) environment is so foreign to me, I think more of Star Trek than of Edward Abbey when working in the backyard. #
35th weekly @djunto project (info at http://t.co/XdREURGZ + http://t.co/d4FoS32j): interpret sheet-music page from Beck’s Song Reader. #
The Curiosity JPL tag on Mars brings to mind the “goldsworthy” landscape art that pervades Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel 2312. #
New @arckatron album comes out tomorrow: 8/31 at 8:31pm (#philly time). #
Now this is detail. MT @bldgblog Turns out the tire treads of Curiosity rover are leaving behind a track of Morse code http://t.co/eA2NwhUV #
The 35th @djunto will explore: a recently revived form of music distribution, communal participation, and matters of canonical recording. #
Celebrate Cage’s 100th by celebrating musicians he celebrated. In Berkeley Sep 8 6pm, catch Satie’s day-long Vexations: http://t.co/DaarmL4l #
Initial details on the @SoundWalk panel I’m moderating in Long Beach this Saturday: http://t.co/IEMmqwmB #
Seems against the spirit of 4’33″ to take pleasure in the antagonism of those who dismiss it angrily, and yet I sometimes do. #
Today is the 60th anniversary of John Cage’s 4’33″: http://t.co/zeNlatjw (via @stevesilberman) #
Hoping for volunteer Chinese + Korean translators for @djunto weekly music projects. Have up to 7 languages regularly. Would ♥ to add those. #
Ramen break. #
The fog horns are just showing off today. #
7pm Sat., 9/1, in Long Beach I’m moderating a panel (Performed Art: The Fluid Roles of Spectator and Artist in Sound Art) at SoundWalk 2012. #
Is there a Cecilia Giménez PhotoShop plugin? #
The brief sonified scene of Gary on Alphas reading nature’s signals is my favorite thing on TV in some time. He’s like a mutant John Muir. #
Giménez’s Law: The road to meme is paved with good intentions. #
That Denver intersection was so lonely and quiet, and yet now 110 listens of an old man’s piano improvisation: http://t.co/dqm1SxQQ #
Sensing that we San Franciscans don’t have the vocabulary to discuss heat and instead do so through modulation, melisma, tone, inflection. #
Tuesday noon siren at Bush and Kearny in San Francisco has almost operatic effect, thanks to echo, during closing spoken section. #
The @gaffta project we proposed on Urban Prototyping wasn’t approved but at least two have sonic underpinnings: http://t.co/XxSRJ9Gw #
The 36th @djunto (week after this one) will explore Clyfford Still, abstract expressionism, classical music, aesthetic influence. #
The 35th @djunto will explore: recently revived form of music distribution, communal participation, matters of canonical recording. #
Morning press release that will haunt my day today: “Iggy Pop Limited Edition Bobblehead.” #
Belated RIP, Jay Parker (b. 1925), who designed the Sun Records logo (via http://t.co/bn5hhO6u) #
I don’t even like the song that much, but man it’s good when the theme to Damages kicks in. (Now starting season 4 on DVD.) #
Crate digging, sidewalk edition. http://t.co/dSm52PnX #
Realized my nearly-two-year-old is singing “Victoria! Victoria!” from the car’s back seat. #
Gas leak seems to have been the cause of neighborhood helicopter action. May have been news crews: http://t.co/BYD3BKV6 #richmonddistrict #
Whole lot of helicopter action above the fog in the Richmond District right now. #
Could swear the Tuesday noon civic siren just rang at 3:45pm Sunday in Potrero Hill. #
Tempo instructions on a piano roll. Must obey. http://t.co/UBHeUWza #

SAW2 for 33 1/3

Prepare for an uptick here in mentions of Aphex Twin for the coming six months to a year. I’m signing on to write a book about Aphex Twin’s landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol II, for the excellent 33 1/3 series.

If all goes according to plan, the book should be out in time for the album’s 20th anniversary.

The opportunity to write this book for 33 1/3 is a very welcome one. The series has a great following, and tremendous contributors. I am blown away by the opportunity, really, given both the ranks my book will join, and the rigors of the application process. There were, apparently, 471 book proposals submitted to Bloomsbury, the publisher of the 33 1/3 series (it was previously handled by Continuum, and maintains the same editor, David Barker). Those were whittled down to a “short” list of 94 (initially it was suggested the shortlist would have “around 125″ or so entries). For the past few weeks, Bloomsbury has run a contest to see who could guess which 18 would make the cut. And finally, today, August 31, 2012, Bloomsbury announced the 18 books that 33 1/3 will publish. The full list of 18 titles is as follows:

• Andrew WK: I Get Wet, by Phillip Crandall

• Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Vol II, by Marc Weidenbaum

• Beach Boys: Smile, by Luis Sanchez

• Björk: Biophilia, by Nicola Dibben

• Bobbie Gentry: Ode to Billie Joe, by Tara Murtha

• Danger Mouse: The Grey Album, by Charles Fairchild

• Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, by Mike Foley

• Devo: Freedom of Choice, by Evie Nagy

• Gang of Four: Entertainment! by Kevin Dettmar

• Hole: Live Through This, by Anwyn Crawford

• J Dilla: Donuts, by Jordan Ferguson

• Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, by Kirk Walker Graves

• Michael Jackson: Dangerous, by Susan Fast

• Oasis: Definitely Maybe, by Alex Niven

• Richard Hell and the Voidoids: Blank Generation, by Pete Astor

• Serge Gainsbourg: Histoire de Melody Nelson, by Darran Anderson

• Sigur Ros: ( ), by Ethan Hayden

• They Might Be Giants: Flood, by Alex Reed and Philip Sandifer

The proposal process for this Aphex Twin book included several steps, among them a request for a rough draft of the introductory chapter. I’m posting mine here (at the bottom of this post), with the understanding that it’s the introduction to a book that it is yet to be written. Almost certainly the introduction to the finished book will read differently.

A bit about the application process: This isn’t the first time I’ve submitted a proposal to 33 1/3. I did once a long time ago for a book on the eponymous debut album by the Latin Playboys, a quartet consisting of two members of Los Lobos (David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez) plus Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake. That proposal didn’t even make the shortlist. This time around I thought about a variety of options, including Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ, and albums by Monolake (Hong Kong) and by Oval (94 Diskont). They were all quite tempting, but the Monolake and Oval fit into another long-term, long-form project, and I couldn’t convince myself that, much as I love Gabriel’s Passion (as the album was titled), it was the best subject — either as a focus on his work, or on the sort of film music it helped exemplify. Also, Peter Gabriel was a strong mutual favorite of a very close friend since high school who died several years ago, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me at this stage to explore that emotional terrain. (And very very briefly I considered Boxhead Ensemble’s Quartets and DJ Krush’s Kakusei, which are, along with Gabriel’s Passion and Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, the albums I have most often given as gifts.)

As documented on my goodreads.com/disquiet “author” page, I have had pieces in a variety of books (and a vast number of magazine issues and website posts), but this will, barring some unforeseen SNC (i.e., sudden novel contract), be my first book as sole author. I kind of like that my first book will be listed as “volume II.” That feels fitting. I also like that, down the road, I might publish a collection of previous writings and — who knows? — title it Selected Ambient Works Volume I. Or, heck, Volume III. Just kidding. Well, partially kidding. (Speaking of titles, I was a bit concerned by how the long title might work on a 33 1/3 volume, as the design is admirably standardized — but heck, the publisher has handled the significantly longer The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.)

I almost certainly won’t be starting a separate Tumblr for this project (which is what I did at sound.tumblr.com for the class I’m teaching at the Academy of Art this autumn), just posting here at Disquiet.com on occasion, and of course on various existing social-network satellite operations (twitter.com/disquiet, facebook/disquiet.fb, etc.). I’ve added the tag “saw2for33third” to Disquiet.com track the book’s development. There’s a good chance I’ll be visiting England at least once if not twice to research this book, so if you’re there and want to meet up, let me know. I haven’t been to England since 2009, and I will try to schedule a Disquiet Junto concert during my visit.

The writing process will be an engrossing one. In the meanwhile, here’s a link to my mid-1990s interview with Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin: “Eponymous Rex.” And here is the introductory chapter that was the core of my proposal to 33 1/3:

The application process to submit a proposal to 33 1/3 included several steps, key among them “A draft introduction/opening chapter for the book, of around 2,000 words.” Here’s what I submitted (with two minor post-submission edits):

At the near midpoint of Aphex Twin’s 1994 collection, Selected Ambient Works Volume II, a wind chime peeks through the album’s lush and pervasive haze and makes itself heard. The chime appears as a sequence of routinized figments in the final track on the first of the album’s two sides. That’s track 11 of 23, for those listening along at home to one of the U.S. editions of the album’s post-vinyl era. With just one exception, the works that constitute Selected Ambient Works Volume II are untitled, and this wind chime track is not the exception.

We hear the wind chime, but we don’t hear any actual wind. There is a brief, passing moment of whizzy, slipstream, sci-fi ether; it’s like something that might accompany the jettisoning of waste — or of a fallen colleague — in deep space by the Starship Enterprise. This ethernoise is synthesized, fleeting, “false.” The wind chime, by contrast, sounds “real,” even in the absence of wind. It’s a wind chime resounding in a closed chamber, a specimen on clinical display.

The chime introduces its characteristic rhythm. The device itself is nothing special. It’s standard issue. It’s the same wind chime that dangles from a neighbor’s porch, situated fittingly right between a dream catcher and a flycatcher: between the mystic and the functional.

The chime introduces rhythm, but the rhythm is loose at best. It’s a rhythm-less rhythm, in that it lacks a discernible downbeat. The chime cycles through, its pattern a marvel of a unique phenomena: the very pattern-less-ness reveals itself as pattern. There is no beat in the traditional sense of a beat. What there is is a series of beat-like segments that collectively suggest a kind of whole: in place of meter we have a metric temperament. The track depends on a droning, slowly developing tonal center for any sense of compositional structure. Yet in its beat-less-ness and its tonal drift, the track still feels like a song. And like any proper song, it has a vocal, but such as it is, the vocal is merely snippets of voices in plausible conversation, “plausible” because the voices are garbled, as if heard through the wall from a neighboring room. Even when this strange music agrees to speak, it muffles its message. Such is the nature of the remote pleasure — and an often delirious pleasure it is — of Selected Ambient Works Volume II.

The wind chime originates from a distant time, a time even further back than 1994. The wind chime was known to the ancient Greeks as an aeolian harp. The harp was named in honor of Aeolus, the god of the wind. The wind chime is, by most accounts, the original “generative” instrument. It is the original device that serves dual essential purposes: as composition and as tool. To create a wind chime is create a musical composition in physical form: it is to set down rules (the relative number and frequency of notes) that when enacted by a player — by the wind or, if you tend toward the mystic, perhaps by Aeolus himself — result in something sonorous, something melodic, something song-like. The remoteness of this something is, to borrow from another Greek myth, tantalizing.

The wind is just half of the beat’s equation: the wind creates the rhythm as a pattern-like sequence, but it’s the human imagination recognizes that pattern-like sequence as a beat. In one of his Oblique Strategies cards, Brian Eno informed us that “Repetition is a form of change.” The wind chime tells the opposite story. If the chime had its own Oblique Strategies card, it might read: “Change is a form of repetition.”

Eno, born 1948, is the man who named and codified ambient music, a form — generally from the realm of electronic music — that works intentionally as both foreground and background. Aphex Twin is one of several monikers employed by Richard B. James, born 1971, and James is the man who resuscitated, who re-envisioned, ambient music for our beat-pervaded time. His is ambient music for the digital era, an era of countless synchronized millisecond metronomes. Selected Ambient Works Volume II, released at the outset of that era, is his masterpiece.

When we speak of masterpieces, of canonical record albums, we speak frequently of them as being “timeless.” But in the case of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, this timelessness is as much a factual matter as it is one of collective, consensual, received affection.

That there is something “timeless” about the music of Aphex Twin on Selected Ambient Works Volume II is a matter of authorial intent: it was a compositional goal, a functional goal, a practical goal. It was a compositional goal born of a desire to explore the ambient quality of the beat, to take that which was considered anathema to ambient-ness and to subsume it in an ambient milieu. (The piece of music that follows the wind chime one has a consistent, static pulse, pixel-wide and pixel-deep, as if someone had forgotten to remove the production click track before sending in the tapes for mastering. The beat is so repetitive it becomes invisible if not inaudible while the music, otherwise gauzy as passing clouds, proceeds.) It was a functional goal in that, as ambient music, it sought to create an illusion of time, or better yet to illuminate time as an illusion. And it was a practical goal in that the music had a specific utility: it was intended to be played in “chill rooms” at raves, safe sonic spaces for the exhausted, spaces set apart from the intense sounds that dominate such events.

Selected Ambient Works Volume II may be timeless music, but it is still very much a product of its time. I will, in this book, try to simultaneously celebrate its timelessness, and also to delineate the time period in which its creation was predicated.

In this book we’ll listen closely to the album, and we’ll listen closely to those who have themselves listened closely. We’ll benefit from their concentrated imaginations and their diverse perspectives. The book draws from interviews I have done with Aphex Twin himself, and with musicians closely associated with him. These range from electronic musicians who have remixed his work to classical composers who reverse-engineered the record’s texture so they could be performed by chamber musicians on “traditional” instruments. It also checks in with filmmakers and with DJs who have infused Aphex Twin’s music into their own work, and with various of his labelmates (from Warp Records, which has released the majority of his music, and Rephlex Records, which is his own concern) who witnessed firsthand the era, the time, during which this music took shape.

As an album, Selected Ambient Works Volume II persistently evades the sort of consensual understanding that is usually accorded full-length recordings of note. There is no agreed upon favorite track. There is no remotely satisfying cocktail-banter pithy summary. It’s a monolith of an album, but a Kubrick-style monolith, one that reflects back the viewer’s impression.

As a sonic artifact, the album isn’t truly silent, but it is extravagantly vaporous. Unlike Kubrick’s monolith, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II is built from thin air. It is an intense album of fragile music. This book is an attempt to document that very fragility, to collate its fuzzy meanings, to make note of the shadows cast by its unapologetically loose forms. The music is messy, blemished, and muddy, and often feels incomplete. The album’s absence of track titles (with one exception) means that its abstract sounds are not even abetted by the associative meanings that titles might provide. In the place of those titles are images, but the images vary by the manner in which the record was released: in the U.S. versus in its native United Kingdom, in digital versus physical form, on vinyl versus on compact disc. Like an especially delusional conspiracy theory, these images offer more questions than answers when they are probed. The cover depicts a logo, a stylized A, more militaristic than corporate. It looks like the markings on a spaceship discovered in the desert.

For a largely instrumental album whose limited verbal material is more syllabic than verbal, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II tells many stories:

For one it is a tale of the populist flowering of British occultism, a rave-era echo of the Summer of Love. When I interviewed Aphex Twin in 1996, he described the Cornwall of his youth: “It’s got a really sort of quite mystical sort of vibe to it: Lots of sort of folklore and folk tales and it’s full of stuff like that, and there’s lots of strange people, lots of sort of weird hermit people who live out in the middle of nowhere and there’s a lot of witches and sort of magic, black magic, and stuff like that.”

For another, it is a tale of unintended consequences. Electronic music is often depicted as antagonistic to the natural environment, but by Aphex Twin’s own telling, it was the very cultural remoteness of his youth that necessitated his electronic endeavors: “There were no record shops when I was growing up,” he said, in the same interview. “There were like two and they were pretty basic, and there were no clubs or anything, so we had to make our own clubs, make our own music.”

And those are just the stories in which Aphex Twin, in which Richard D. James, is himself complicit. Like any record, great or otherwise, even one as formally intentional as this one, Selected Ambient Works Volume II tells stories beyond its own intention. To understand the moment in which the record was released, it’s essential appreciate how at that moment the record industry was betting on electronic music as the “next big thing,” and it’s essential to note how despite the quixotic nature of that quest (“quixotic” may be an indelicate term, because this was a quest born of nothing but commercial self-interest) electronic music managed to become the ubiquitous cultural force it is today. It’s essential to note how uncommon, how unfamiliar, the term “ambient” music was at the time of the Aphex album’s release. It’s essential to understand how the then-nascent World Wide Web was not the dynamic communal discographical engine it is today, and how the nature of online communications at the time assisted in Aphex Twin’s murky self-mythologizing. And it’s important to focus on the pre-MP3 world of music, and what it meant for such ephemeral sounds as those that comprise Selected Ambient Works Volume II to have been encased in the cultural Carbonite of vinyl and compact disc. These are just a few of the things I’ll be digging in to.

And with some two dozen tracks as sprawling as they are remote, lush as they are reticent to reveal themselves, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II is an album that readily serves as background music to its own telling.

Disquiet Junto Project 0035: Reading Beck

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.

One of the underlying tenets of the Disquiet Junto is the exploration of music as something that is not simply listened to or performed — that the divide between audience and artist is more porous than the modern traditions of the music industry tend to suggest. The term “modern traditions” is intended here in contrast with older traditions, such as the campfire sing-along and the parlor piano. Add to those older traditions the way that songs once were transmitted primarily as sheet music, interpreted free of any doctrinal/canonical audio recording. It’s an idea that never went away — sheet music continues to be prepared and sold, and “guitar tabs” for popular songs are traded online with no more or less regard for copyright than are MP3s — but one that recently gained additional attention thanks to Beck’s announcement that he will release this December an “album,” titled Song Reader, solely as a set of sheet music.

An advance promotional image from Beck’s Song Reader (shown up top) will serve as the source material for this exploration. The fact that sheet music provides its own sort of content shift — changes that take effect unintentionally as a result of copying, transmission, transcription, dispersal, and translation — is explored here in that the source material is of low resolution, and appears to simply be a portion of a complete song.

The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 30, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 3, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0035-becksongreader.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into Croatian, German, Japanese, and Turkish, courtesy of Darko Macan, Tobias Reber, Naoyuki Sasanami, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively:

Disquiet Junto Project 0035: Reading Beck

The project this week is to perform a rendition of a piece of sheet music. The sheet music in question is a single low-resolution image from the forthcoming “sheet-music album” to be released by Beck this December. The image was provided by the publisher McSweeney’s when it announced the Beck collection, which is titled Song Reader. You’ll find the sheet-music image here:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

You can use whatever instrumentation you like. Feel free to interpret the sheet music as literally or abstractly as you choose, perhaps even interpolating the low resolution of the image into your piece. More on Beck’s Song Reader at:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

Deadline: Monday, September 3, 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 “disquiet0035-becksongreader” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

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

This track is an interpretation of a sample of the sheet music from the Beck collection Song Reader. The sheet music can be seen here:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

More on Beck’s Song Reader here:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

More on this 35th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/30/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

. . . . .

Project in Croatian:

Disquiet Junto Projekt 0035: Čitanje Becka

Ovotjedni zadatak izvođenje je glazbenoga komada po notnome zapisu. Notni zapis o kojemu je riječ je slika niske rezolucije iz skorašnjega “albuma notnih zapisa” što će ga Beck objaviti ovoga prosinca. Sliku je dao nakladnik McSweeney’s kad je najavio tu Beckovu zbirku, naslovljenu Song Reader. Sliku notnoga zapisa naći ćete ovdje:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

Instrumente možete koristiti po volji. Notni ste zapis slobodni interpretirati onoliko doslovno ili apstraktno koliko poželite, a u svoj komad možete uplesti čak i nisku rezoluciju slike. Više o Beckovu Song Readeru možete doznati na:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

Rok: Ponedjeljak, 3. rujna, minutu do ponoći po lokalnom vremenu.

Trajanje: Neka vam snimci traju između 1 i 4 minute.

Informacije: Kad stavljate svoj snimak na SoundCloud, molim vas dodajte i opis procesa planiranja, komponiranja i snimanja. Taj opis je ključan element komunikacijskog procesa koji je u srži Disquiet Junta.

Naslov/Tag: Kad stavljate svoj snimak na Disquiet Junto grupu na Soundcloud.com, molim vas da uključite “disquiet0035-becksongreader” u naslov snimka te u njegov tag.

Downloadiranje: Kao i uvijek, ne morate omogućiti download vašega snimka, ali mi je draže ako to učinite.

Linkanje: Kad stavljate konačni snimak, molim vas da dodate sljedeću obavijest:

Ovaj snimak interpretacija je uzorka notnoga zapisa iz Beckove zbirke Song Reader. Notni zapis može se vidjeti na:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

Više o Beckovu Song Readeru na:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-...

Više o 35. Disquiet Junto projektu na:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/30/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at/Više o Disquiet Juntu na:

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

. . . . .

Project in German:

Disquiet Junto Projekt 0035: Beck interpretieren

Im Projekt dieser Woche geht es um die Interpretation eines notierten Musikstücks. Bei dem Notentext handelt es sich um ein niedrig aufgelöstes Bild aus dem im Dezember als “Noten-Album” erscheinenden Album des Musikers Beck. Das Bild wurde im Rahmen der Ankündigung des Albums mit dem Namen “Song Reader” vom Verlag McSweeny’s veröffentlicht. Du findest es hier:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

Du kannst für deine Interpretation eine beliebige Instrumentierung verwenden und die Vorlage so streng oder frei umsetzen wie du willst – vielleicht inkorporierst du sogar den Aspekt der niedrigen Auflösung? Mehr über Becks “Song Reader” erfährst du unter:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-...

Deadline: Montag, 3. September, 23.59 Uhr in deiner Zeitzone.

Dauer: Das Stück sollte zwischen 1-4 Minuten dauern.

Information: Bitte füge dem Stück eine Beschreibung deines Arbeitsprozesses bei, wenn du es auf Soundcould veröffentlichst – mit Planung, Komposition und Aufnahme. Diese Beschreibung ist ein zentrales Element im kommunikativen Prozess innerhalb der Disquiet Junto.

Titel/Tags: Versehe deinen Track mit dem Tag “disqiet0035-becksongreader” wenn du es der Disquiet Junto-Gruppe auf Soundcloud.com beifügst.

Download: Wie üblich wäre es schön wenn du deinen Track downloadbar machen würdest, aber es wird nicht erwartet.

Links: Füge deiner Track-Beschreibung bitte auch die folgende Information bei:

This track is an interpretation of a sample of the sheet music from the Beck collection Song Reader. The sheet music can be seen here:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

More on Beck’s Song Reader here:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

More on this 35th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/30/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

. . . . .

Project in Japanese:

Disquiet Junto Project 0035: ベックを読む

今週のプロジェクトは楽譜を読んで演奏します。その題材の楽譜とは、来る12月にベックがリリースする『シート・ミュージック・アルバム』に収録される一枚の低解像度画像です。この画像は“ベック・コレクション”が発表されたときに、出版社であるMcSweeney’sから支給されたものです。”ソング・リーダー”とタイトルが付けられた今回の題材曲の楽譜は以下にあります：

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

あなたの好きなどんな楽器を使ってもいいです。楽譜を字義道理そのまま解釈して演奏してもいいですし、あなたの選択した方法で抽象的に解釈してもかまいません。低解像度画像を補完して曲に使用した場合はさらに別の画像がこちらにあります。

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-...

〆切：9月3日月曜日11:59pm あなたがどこに住んでいるかかわらず

長さ：1～4分の長さにしてください

情報：作品をサウンドクラウドのグループに投稿する際には、あなたの採用した構想、作曲、録音の過程についての説明をつけてください。この記述がこのグループの本来の目的であるコミュニケーションに大事なものとなります

タイトル／タグ：Disquiet Juntoグループに作品を投稿する際には“disquiet0035-becksongreader” という言葉をタグとしてタイトルに追加してください

ダウンロード：いつものように必ずしもダウンロード可能にする必要はありませんが、望ましい

リンク：投稿する際には以下の情報を追加してください

This track is an interpretation of a sample of the sheet music from the Beck collection Song Reader. The sheet music can be seen here:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

More on Beck’s Song Reader here:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

More on this 35th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/30/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

. . . . .

Project in Turkish:

Disquiet Junto Projesi 0035: Reading Beck (Beck’i Okumak)

Bu haftaki proje, bir nota kağıdını yorumlamak hakkında. Bahsedilen

kağıt, Beck’in Aralık’ta çıkacak olan nota kağıdı albümünden düşük

çözünürlüklü bir görsel. Bu görsel, yayıncı McSweeney’s tarafından,

Beck’in “Song Reader” isimli albümünün duyurusuyla birlikte

paylaşılmıştı. Nota kağıdının görselini burada bulabilirsiniz:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

İstediğiniz enstrümanları kullanabilirsiniz. Notaları olduğu gibi ya

da dilediğinizce soyutlayarak yorumlamakta serbestsiniz. Hatta

görselin düşük-çözünürlüklü olma durumunu da parçanıza

yansıtabilirsiniz. Beck’in Song Reader albümü hakkında daha fazla

bilgi için:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-...

Son Teslim Tarihi: 3 Eylül Pazartesi, 23:59 (bulunduğunuz ülkenin saatine göre)

Uzunluk: Çalışmanızın uzunluğu 1 ila 4 dakika arasında olmalı.

Bilgi: Yaptığınız parçayı paylaşırken, lütfen bu parçanın planlama,

besteleme ve kayıt süreciyle ilgili bilgi de verin. Bu açıklama,

Disquiet Junto’ya içkin iletişim sürecinin önemli bir parçasıdır.

İsim/Etiket: Parçanızı Soundcloud.com’daki Disquiet Junto grubuna

eklerken, lütfen “disquiet0035-becksongreader” kelimesini hem parçanın

isminde, hem de etiket (tag) olarak kullanın.

Download: Her zamanki gibi; parçanızın indirilebilir olması

gerekmiyor, ama öyle olması tercih edilir.

Linkler: Yaptığınız parçayı paylaşırken, lütfen şu satırları ekleyin:

This track is an interpretation of a sample of the sheet music from

the Beck collection Song Reader. The sheet music can be seen here:

http://disquiet.com/wp-content/upload...

More on Beck’s Song Reader here:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-....

More on this 35th Disquiet Junto project at:

http://disquiet.com/2012/08/30/disqui...

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Drone Versus Beat

The core parts of “Darvaza” are a study in contrast: a thick, wooly drone and a microscopic, chattering beat. Whether the drone subsumes the beat or the rhythmic ticking cuts through the voluminous sonic tapestry is up to the listener. It was posted by Lords of the Last Man, aka Kav, hailing from Birmingham, Britain, whose SoundCloud account includes the brief description of modus operandi: “sonic experiments around ambience and ideas of signal degradation, noise and entropy.” The question becomes one of which is more entropic: a cloud slowly settling or an energetic element tunneling its way through, unabated.

Track originally posted by soundcloud.com/lordsofthelastman.

Disquiet.com @ SoundWalk.org (Saturday, September 1)

This Saturday, September 1, is the ninth annual SoundWalk festival. It’s to be held in downtown Long Beach, California. As always, works of sound art (somewhere in the range of 40) will be located throughout the area (that would be “the area encompassed by 4th St, Linden Ave, 1st St, and Elm Ave”). The soundwalk.org website lists the following as the participants:

Alan Dunn / Noise 4 (the) Common Man / Alan Nakagawa & Joseph Tepperman / Brien Engel & Douglas Lee / Clowns & Fetuses / CSULB Laptop Ensemble / Dirty Chaps / Eric Strauss / F. Myles Sciotto / Francene Kaplan / Gary Raymond / gintas k / glenn bach / Harrison Adams / Impossible Moon / Inouk Demers / Jordan Hill / Joshua Dickinson & Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli / LavishWomb / Marc Weidenbaum / MLuM / Paula Mathusen / Pedestal & the All Girl Band / Philip Stearns / phog masheeen / Roy Anthony Shabla & Nader Ghassemlou / Sander Roscoe Wolff / Seth Shafer / Talking So Much Plastic / Tom Zear / Tom McDermott / wheels / wikiGong

I’ll be moderating a panel at 7pm at the record store Fingerprints (fingerprintsmusic.com), which is located at 420 E. 4th St. The subject is “Performed Art: The Fluid Roles of Spectator and Artist in Sound Art.” We’ll be discussing the concept of “performance” and how it relates to sound art. To take just two examples among many: What makes a concert a work of sound art, and what are the roles of the “audience” and “performer” in installation art? We’ll draw examples from the works at SoundWalk, notably those produced this year by the panelists, among other pieces. The goal is to illuminate telling parallels and resonant dissonances between the various participants’ conception of matters of performance in sound art.

The panelists will include:

• glenn bach (glennbach.com)

• Inouk Demers (inoukdemers.com)

• Marco Schindelmann (redlands.edu)

There’s a PDF listing all the locations, and here is a map of the event:

View SoundWalk 2012 in a larger map.

More details at soundwalk.org and at facebook.com.