Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 494
July 14, 2012
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
I don’t live there anymore, but someone’s staring a new comic store in my hometown: http://t.co/qzPOuY6e Cc @escapepodcomics #
If memory serves it was in Feb (aka V-day) issue. MT @mmaddencomics: Via @jccabel, rare collaboration between me n wife http://t.co/vWTAE3zi #
RIP, Norman Sas (b. 1925), inventor of electric football, progenitor of video games: http://t.co/2unmjHB0 #
Thanks @dpnem for inspiring this week’s Disquiet Junto project. Details just went to the email list & are available at http://t.co/QNC4M2Ql #
Details on 28th (!) weekly Disquiet Junto go out shortly. Themes: #netlabel #remix #creativecommons (Apologies for the delay.) #
Woo hoo! That USB light item I chipped in on at @kickstarter made its goal. In three days, at that: http://t.co/fsWfgK92 #
Has no memory of the first Total Recall being particularly good. #
It was, indeed, nice to wake to my Dropbox account having doubled in size. #
Apparently one benefit of playing a harp in a waiting room is the ability to take bathroom breaks without fear of someone stealing it. #
Be safe, comrade. MT @DETXL: When I put my bike helmet to my ear I can hear the ocean! And an eerie whisper that portends manner of my death #
A bit more on the “alternative musical interfaces” panel I’ll moderate @gaffta on Sept 19: http://t.co/hVGVjdyB #
Mobile/tablet-responsive http://t.co/Yh8y3liM now live. If you have a chance, give it a go. I’ll post an overview in the next day or so. #
Missed the noon siren today in San Francisco, but enjoying the 5pm digital carillon at Sonoma State. #
It’s about time. MT @stephentotilo: Going forward, Kotaku writers will pen the majority of the gaming reviews in the @nytimes Arts section. #
The Internet has been a whole lot less eerie since I installed Do Not Track Plus in Chrome. #
Whatever you’re listening to on your Mac, the second you start taking screenshots it automatically becomes Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film.” #
I’d like to see a sonic version of this, by the way: http://t.co/fsWfgK92. Or hear it, that is. #
Just @kickstarter‘d this USB light ping, per @pheezy‘s tip. It’s USB version of the in-glasses thing I hoped for 2 weeks ago. #
The DC Comics email list appears to have sent out news of a Singin’ in the Rain 60th anniversary event. Corporate synergy. #
RIP, British saxophonist Lol Coxhill (b. 1932): http://t.co/hXydP5rz #
Received email spam from the account of a friend who died a year ago. #
Keeping http://t.co/Fjk1qo9m on its own. Durex/Spotify playlists seem off http://t.co/Yh8y3liM’s charter. Will re-blog key items. #
Mobile/tablet-friendly responsive version of http://t.co/Yh8y3liM is now in effect. There are some kinks to work out, but it’s pretty close. #
My 22-month-old counting: “1, 2, 3, 7, 1, 1.” It’s the Toddler Conet Project. #
At the Crocker seeing the Mel Ramos exhibit for the first time since Sactown Magazine published my lengthy interview. #
Was the third Transformers film an investment in making the first two look good by comparison? #
Excited to see how our epic Autechre discussion group looks when new http://t.co/Yh8y3liM comment template kicks in this weekend:… #
13 tracks so far in the 27th Disquiet Junto project (text -> sound), 2 of them from 1st-timers: http://t.co/9tsXKgVB #
Was listening to new @vuzhmusic EP. Stopped listening, but it seemed to keep playing. Sound was washing machine several walls/rooms away. #
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When the Undercurrent Is the Current (MP3)
Another fine piece from Savaran, aka Mark Walters of Wales, whose work has been featured here in the past (a Delphic drone back in 2011, and an experiment with the Animoog app more recently). The new track, “Mithraeum,” is a filmic bit of synthesized mood, a tone narrative with a pulsing rhythm, shaft-of-light fissures, and a swelling undercurrent that reveals itself, slowly, as the full substance of the work — it’s undercurrent as current, a piece in which the full extent of it never edges beyond the level of suggestion, like a shadow play minus any sharp edges that might actually distinguish the figures let alone render them recognizable.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/savaran. More on Savaran/Walters at savaranmusic.wordpress.com, soundcloud.com/savaran, and twitter.com/savaran_music.
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July 13, 2012
Alan Morse Davies on the Verge Between Song and Sound (MP3s)
Alan Morse Davies has been posting some his earlier recordings, most recently Adrift, a collection of work from 1990 through 1994. It alternates been dreamy lo-fi folk pop that’s lost in a haze, favorably akin Robert Wyatt or Syd Barrett, and these little snippets of song-less ambient experimentation. The highlight is “Indigo Carmine,” a spine-tingling layering of female singing, slight beading of adjacent tones and weird sense of echo-induced premonitions and instant hindsight (MP3); for longtime Davies listeners, it’s a fascinating preview of the work in later years he’d do with indigenous folksong. “Salvia” is a slow procedure of cyborg humming (MP3), and “Drone Thing” a splendidly peculiar mix of attenuated chords that are broken up with rhythmic gaps (MP3). There’s great material throughout, and the pop songs show evidence of the inventive sonic tinkering that is the focus elsewhere, like the raspy feedback that comes across like a lost Robert Fripp guitar solo on the dolorous “Sunshine Life”
Download audio file (02_64kb.mp3)
Download audio file (08_64kb.mp3)
Download audio file (11_64kb.mp3)
Get the full album at archive.org. More on the musician at at-sea.com.
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July 12, 2012
Disquiet.com 3.1: Now Mobile/Tablet-Friendly
The Disquiet.com site has this week experienced its first major design revision since December 2011 (“Welcome to Disquiet.com 3.0″). Consider this one as version 3.1. If you’re reading this on a laptop or desktop, or on a large-format tablet, most of the improvements will be initially invisible. The majority of the update is focused on mobile phones and smaller-size tablets.
Among the major improvements:
¶ Below left is what the home page of the Disquiet.com website looked like on a mobile phone (in portrait mode) before the new design was implemented, and below right is what it looks like today.
Much if not all of the site was essentially illegible on a phone, since it was simply showing the full desktop/laptop view on a tiny screen, requiring continuous zooming and panning and scanning, like an old widescreen flick reformatted via pan and scan. Now the site resizes and rearranges its various sections depending on the screen on which it is viewed. For smaller tablets and for mobile phones, the left sidebar material scoots down to the bottom of the page, and the home screen only displays one full post at time, presenting the earlier posts with header and subhead. This design approach is called “responsive design.”
¶ In phone/tablet view, when the sidebar shifts to the bottom of the screen there’s one column of information in the phone size, and two columns in the tablet size.
¶ Thanks to the responsive-design mode, there’s just one URL per article — there’s no “m.disquiet” or “.com/mobile” version to confuse matters. And each page loads once, so if you rotate your mobile phone from portrait to landscape and back again, the design should adjust in your browser accordingly.
Additional minor touches:
¶ There’s been a further winnowing of typefaces. There are, aside from the logo and the display face, just two typefaces, and each appears in only two sizes and three colors (black, grey, blue).
¶ Pages that result from category view and tag view are noted as such up top above the first post in the return.
¶ Speaking of tag view, I’ve retreated from the term “topic” and acknowledged “tag” as the near-universal word for taxonomy. This is a situation in which the site’s design was catching up with its content, as I’ve long championed the idea of tags, especially as an improvement on the mistaken concept of genre. I just hadn’t implemented that thinking here.
¶ Subhead descriptions of categories appear on the category view pages (i.e., “interviews” brings up the phrase “Talks with musicians/artists/coders”).
¶ Comments have been fully overhauled. The design is much more clean, and there’s no longer any pre-screening moderation of comments. If you do write something obnoxious or off-topic, I’ll delete it, but I’m no longer reading each comment before posting. The problem in the past hadn’t been overheated conversation; it had been spam, and a handful of plug-ins and an in-page math test have fixed that (at least for now).
¶ Bullets for list pages, like the weekly automated summaries of twitter.com/disquiet, now fit in the confines of the body copy of a post, rather than sitting oddly outside the grid.
There will be some refinements in the coming weeks (especially in the loosely defined “smaller tablet” zone), and I’m looking at various additional plans, like possibly adding a discussion forum. This week’s design improvements cap a series of recent additions to the site, including Instagram sidebar implementation, and sidebar spots as well for upcoming events and for Disquiet Junto projects. Major thanks to futurepruf.com, which also produced the December 2011 refinement of the longrunning Disquiet.com theme.
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Disquiet Junto Project 0028: Netlabel Net
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 late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 12, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 16, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0028-netlabel.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):
Disquiet Junto Project 0028: Netlabel Net
This week we’re going to collectively reworks tracks from a netlabel release — in part to recognize the inspiration that netlabels provide, and in part to encourage a particular type of netlabel.
Netlabels provided one of the strongest inspirations for the origination of the Disquiet Junto. Netlabels offer up the music of their participating artists for free, and they exist in a loose constellation of mutual support. It’s a pretty dense constellation. There are estimated to be between 400 and 500 netlabels in existence, all building on the model of the Creative Commons.
While netlabels give away music for free, a surprising few do so under the license that allows for derivative creations — that is, for remixing and reworking. To encourage that sort of license, the Disquiet Junto assignment this week is to remix one of two tracks selected from a recent album on the great Audiotalaia netlabel, all of the releases on which allow for derivative works. The album is Gently Annoying by Xesús Valle. You’ll find the music at the following two URLs. Please select one of these two tracks to remix: “Ochita” or “Tanku.”
http://audiotalaia.net/catalogue/at05...
http://archive.org/details/at053Gentl...
You can add whatever you’d like to the music in the process of making your remix, even combining the two songs into one.
Deadline: Monday, July 16, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Please keep your track to between 2 and 5 minutes.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, please 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 “disquiet0028-netlabel” 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 please include this information:
Source music from the album Gently Annoying by Xesús Valle, remixed courtesy of the Creative Commons “Attribution-Non Commerical-Share Alike” license:
http://audiotalaia.net/catalogue/at05...
http://archive.org/details/at053Gentl...
More on the Audiotalaia label at:
http://actsofsilence.com/album-review...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
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July 11, 2012
10 Seconds a Day for 6 Months (Again)
Back in July of last year, a sonic diary by Harold Shellinx was featured here. The single track concatenated 10 seconds of audio recorded every day over the course of six months, for a total of over half an hour of incidental sound. He’s done it again, and again it is featured as part of the Radius broadcast and podcast. The effect is varied. One strong impression is simply that of sound as itself the subject — rather, for example, than the day’s events being recorded. Were one to take a photograph each day or to draw something each day, it is unlikely that the result would seem to take photography or drawing as its respective subject, yet here the concept of sound never seems to recede. There’s music, and discussion of music, and recorded noise, and someone mentioning David Bowie in passing. There are other things, too, notably someone having sexual intercourse — perhaps Shellinx, perhaps someone in a movie — and snatches of attended lectures and listening to (presumably) radio broadcasts. It’s a wash of noise, with Shellinx, clearly, as its best audience; one envies what it will sound like to him in the distant future.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/radius-14. More information at theradius.us.
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July 10, 2012
“Alternative Musical Interfaces”: Disquiet @ GAFFTA (San Francisco, September 19)
On Wednesday, September 19, there’s a panel discussion in San Francisco at the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts on “Alternative Musical Interfaces,” and I’ll be serving as moderator.
The panelists include the highly talented trio of Michael Zbyszyński (mikezed.com), Peter Nyboer (see his bayimproviser.com entry), and Spencer Salazar (see his ccrma.stanford.edu page) — more on whom at gaffta.org.
It’s all under the auspices of GAFFTA’s Sound Research Group. GAFFTA is located at 923 Market St, Suite 200, which is between 5th and 6th Streets. The event runs from 7:00pm until 8:30. Tickets are $20, but GAFFTA has a solid “no one turned away for lack of funds” policy.
I’m excited to be headed back to GAFFTA. I last took part in a discussion there in August 2011, when I presented some thoughts on “Sound as Commentary.”
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Karriem Riggins Gets Alone Together (MP3)
The great Stones Throw record label has shared an MP3 teaser of the debut full-length from longtime sideman and producer Karriem Riggins, whose CV is absurd in its breadth, from support as a drummer to Diana Krall, Mulgrew Miller, and Ray Brown, to production work for the Roots, Slum Village, and Common. Those jazz and hip-hop threads have overlapped at times, notably in his projects with Madlib. The forthcoming Riggins album, Alone Together, will be a set of hip-hop instrumentals. The advance taste is titled “Moogy Foog It,” a bit of downtempo martial-drumming arts, the beat a flangy percussive riff, above which an 8bit snake charm melody noodles around lazily. The track ends quite suddenly, suggesting it will merge with the subsequent song when the full album appears.
Download audio file (karriem_moogy.mp3)
More on the release at stonesthrow.com. The notes on the album page are a little confusing, in that they list October 23 as the release date but state “Vinyl and digital will be released in two-parts over summer and fall 2012.” Perhaps this MP3 comprises the “digital” part of that release.
And for additional context, here’s Chet Baker covering the jazz standard, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, from which the Riggins album takes its name:
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July 9, 2012
The Voice in Instrumental Hip-Hop (MP3)
With a bit of piano that sounds like a tape loop that’s been soaking in bourbon all night, a vocal that suggests the r&b chorus as ethereal presence, and a beat that’s so downtempo it could be mistaken for the pace of distant traffic, Dustmotes has produced an enticing bit of instrumental hip-hop. Titled “For Nikola (leviculus),” it encapsulates the pleasures of the unintended genre within which it falls, a genre that is, in essence, a byproduct that has taken on a life of its own. Listeners to — admirers of — the instrumental backing tracks to hip-hop have proceeded, over time, to make music with no intention of having a vocalist muddy their effort. The only vocal that this track needs is the one that it has used as an ingredient.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker of London, England, at dustmotes.net.
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July 7, 2012
Reducing the Buddha
C. Reider has posted a two-track set of Buddha Machine reworkings, which he has titled Buddha Reduction. The music results from putting the machine’s now familiar loops of sedate ebbs and flows through a sequence of recursive sonic processings. What is left is splendidly similar to mininal techno, a dank, atmospheric effect resulting from echoed percussion and hazy pattern fields. Reider explains a bit about how the work came together:
“Buddha Reduction” was composed using a process I have been calling “reduction” in which a source sound is subjected to a series of repeated noise reductions using a type of processing that uses a sound sample selected by the user to reduce unwanted noise. The source sounds for this particular release were taken from the Buddha Machine and the Buddha Machine 2 from FM3.
I have used this same reduction process in the past, most recently for one of the Disquiet Junto challenges on soundcloud: “Bottle Reduction”. Before that, the process was used to “remove the drone from the drone” in a recording titled “Inconstant”.
Originally posted for free download at vuzhmusic.com/releases. More on his process at vuzhmusic.com/blog.
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