Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 86
September 11, 2023
Acoustic Drone Music from Sweden
The title track on Drone Positions by the Gothenburg, Sweden, group Trio Ramberget is a promising taste of the full set, which is due out on September 29. The ensemble consists of three horn players: Gustav Davidsson, trombone; Johanna Ekholm, double bass; and Pelle Westlin, bass clarinet. They are joined on the album by a half dozen guests playing, among other things, piano, guitar, vibraphone, and a tape deck, as well as singing. “Drone Positions” is a luxurious descent into deep deep timbre. The sounds are dense and glottal, rich and vibrant. There is an earthy sibilance throughout, and a steady — if glacial — sense of melodic development. It’s wondrous.
September 10, 2023
Rewinding Tape Recording
In 1965, a magazine publisher named Richard Ekstract — a Brooklyn-born army veteran — loaned a piece of recording equipment to the artist Andy Warhol. The device, a prototype of a Norelco video camera, appealed to Warhol’s ongoing interest in working with moving pictures as a tool of artistic expression. (The Norelco wasn’t Warhol’s only recording device, not by a long shot. He famously was known to frequently carry a tape recorder with him.) The mention of Ekstract’s history (in an obituary by Penelope Green in the New York Times, following his death on August 7) led me to far less productive ends, unless spending a lot of time down a rabbit hole counts as productive.
I went searching — online — for reproductions of some of Ekstract’s magazines, which included a weekly trade journal titled Audio Times and another print publication, Tape Recording. The internet is good at many things and one of them is making ephemera from the past readily available with the click of a button. It’s no surprise that what appears to be roughly half of the run of Tape Recording, from its first issue, in December 1953, through Volume 17. No. 6 in 1970, is available at an old-school website called worldradiohistory.com.
To flip — figuratively — through the PDFs of Tape Recording on the World Radio History website is to watch home audio become part of everyday life as time passes. The first issue promises, on its cover, to help the reader “Add Sound to Your Christmas Movies.” Gear fetishism took a while to come to the fore, as the image on that issue is simply of a smiling young woman. By June 1954, however, we see a different woman on the cover, dressed formally, holding a wired microphone up to the face of her puppy, as if to record its bark.
That 1954 issue, like all of them, is filled with advertisements that promise fidelity in the audio sense, and also to modernize and enrich your home and cultural life:
The product taglines vary in their ad copy premises. The “Podium Presence” tone of Ampro Corporation technology lets you “Hear music as the maestro hears it.” Other items are more prosaic in their self-description: the Tandberg, we’re told, “Combines HiFi Quality with Long-Play Advantage of Slow Speeds.”
And each issue has plenty of editorial coverage, from tips on starting a tape collection, to reviews of recent recordings, to an explanation of what “decibels” are. One article recommends that students record themselves performing the dialog from comic books: “each can take one or a handful of parts in domestic dramas from the Dagwood family circle to Terry and the Pirates and Orphan Annie.” The cover to the October 1956 issue shows stuffed animals — one a donkey, the other an elephant — to promote a lead article on how tape recorders are used by news media to cover political conventions. It opens:
The two hottest spots in the world for tape recording last month were Chicago, Illinois, and San Francisco, California, where the nation’s two great political parties convened to name their choices for president and vice president of these United States.
More than a quarter of a million feet of tape — nearly 500 miles of it — rolled through hundreds of recorders, day and night, to bring to the American people a more detailed, dramatic and documented account of democracy in action.
Fast forward to 1970, and the magazine has expanded its scope: The cover is about slideshows, and the first story is about video cameras. Nor is the coverage purely practical. That same issue has a lengthy photo essay about composer John Cage using 52 tape recorders (“concealed backstage and operate by Cage and an associate, Lejaren Hiller”) for HPSCHD, a work for harpsichordist Antoinette Vischer: “Cage recorded Miss Vischer at the keyboard. Then by dubbing from one recorder to another, the composer was able to build up tonal patterns unlike anything live musicians could possibly imitate.” And yet, this being Tape Recording magazine, there’s still the benefit of a technical angle: “By using Scotch 201 low-noise tape, the composer kept tape hiss to a minimum during the repeated dubbings.”
September 9, 2023
RIP, Charles Gayle (1939-2023)
It’s good to get these memories down, better at the time, but time has its own way of filtering information, so perhaps collecting and collating long after the fact has a unique value, too. Retrospect. Rashomon. Revisiting. Revising. Something.
In any case, the great jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle died this week, age 84. He was a powerful player, born in upstate New York in 1939. When I moved to Manhattan in 1988, a couple weeks after graduating from college with an English degree and a desire to write about music professionally, I was already used to visiting the Knitting Factory. Soon enough, by the end that year, I’d live a couple blocks away from the Knitting Factory’s Houston Street location, thanks to my then boss at a graphic design firm on Broadway, a few blocks north of Houston, having an empty bed in an alcove in his under-heated Crosby Street loft apartment, a couple blocks south (a stretch you’ve seen if you’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s film After Hours, released three years prior). That was in the autumn, when most of the New York sublets had dried up because their inhabitants had returned from summer in Europe, or at the east end of Long Island, or some other locale.
I’d heard word of this fantastic player, Gayle, who was reportedly homeless. Folks like the late Irving Stone (for whom John Zorn’s eventual club, the Stone, would be named) and his cheerful wife, Stephanie, who always had candy in her purse, would talk about Gayle at Knitting Factory concerts before and between sets. (Since I’m down Memory Lane, I might as well add that there was a guy we’d sometimes sit with who sold tape cassettes in Washington Square Park of Jack Kerouac readings and bootlegged jazz concerts. Maybe he’s still out there. If so, hello.)
One day I saw a little photocopied flyer affixed to a telephone pole. I can’t recall exactly where the show it advertised was, but it was on the east side of town, below 14th and above Houston. When I got to the address, the sun had long since set, and far as I could tell this was an abandoned building, undergoing on-and-off re-construction toward some indecipherable new purpose. Maybe I had the address wrong. Maybe the flyer did. Maybe the concert was canceled. Or had already ended.
The entrance was boarded up, but there was, somehow, a way in — light, sound, promise; dim, muffled, ambiguous. The interior was at first narrow, and everything was covered with dusty drywall. I handed a little cash to someone near the door (or “the door”), and made my way back. If memory serves — a big if — the only illumination was from bright bulbs connected to long, tangled extension cords. Gayle was already playing when I got there. What I had mistaken for normal boisterous New York City street noise was, in fact, his band — a trio, unless I’m mistaken, which is clearly quite possible — bleeding onto the street from the deep, windowless, interior space.
I no doubt later saw Gayle again at the Knitting Factory proper, but that show, at what I took to be a squat, was the first — and clearly most memorable — time I had the pleasure. He was in full force, playing free, with a ferocity that suggested John Coltrane channeling a hurricane, or Eric Dolphy at his least congenial. In many ways, I feel like I’ve been trying, ever since, to recreate — to relive, or in the context of the Disquiet Junto music community, to encourage — that specific concert-going experience the remainder of my life. It’s part of the reason that the graffiti-strewn steps at the Luggage Store Gallery performance space in San Francisco feel so welcoming. It’s part of why when I discovered a (now defunct) club in the Sendagaya neighborhood of Tokyo that was behind a building (and down some stairs) I felt so at home. And it’s part of why whenever I travel I seek out small spots and keep my eyes out for little flyers.
Scratch Pad: Roden, Gayle, Space
I do this manually at the end of each week: collating most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I take weekends off social media.
▰ Losing both Charles Gayle and Steve Roden on the same day hits really hard. So much music reverberates in their respective wakes.
▰ There’s a special irony to electronic musician Steve Roden and free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle dying on the same day. I’m spending the day after listening back to their music — some of the quietest ever and loudest ever, respectively.
▰ A previously unreleased Autechre album has been discovered by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory in the Chilean Andes. “Its light has taken more than 11 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old.”
▰ Anyone out there use Obsidian (the note-taking app) and, within it, use “graph view”? I use Obsidian a lot. The “graph view” is neat and all, but I’m not sure I have any sense of what I’d use it for.
Feel free to ignore this message if you have no idea what I’m talking about.
September 8, 2023
ABAB
Very much a fan of ABAB form
[image error]In the Latest Issue of The Wire
I reviewed an excellent Outsound Presents concert at the Luggage Store Gallery from a couple months back in the new issue of The Wire (October 2023). It’s behind a paywall, but here’s how it kicks off:
September 7, 2023
Disquiet Junto Project 0610: Speed Limit Pt 2
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, 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. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, September 11, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 7, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
These following instructions went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0610: Speed Limit Pt 2
The Assignment: Combine two or more pre-existing 60 BPM tracks into something new — at half the speed.
Step 1: In the previous Disquiet Junto project, participants recorded a variety of tracks at a standard pace of 60 BPM. Listen to the resulting material on the Lines discussion board and the SoundCloud playlist:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0609-speed-limit-pt-1/
https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0609
Step 2: Select two or more tracks from the provided ones, slow them to half their original pace — that is, to 30 BPM — and use editing techniques to combine them into one new piece of music.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0610” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0610” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0610-speed-limit-pt-2/
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, September 11, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, September 7, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 610th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Speed Limit Pt 2 (The Assignment: Combine two or more pre-existing 60 BPM tracks into something new — at half the speed), at: https://disquiet.com/0610/
About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0610-speed-limit-pt-2/
TWiS Listening Post (0012)
The Wednesday issue of This Week in Sound is usually for paid subscribers. I’d already intended to also share this week’s with all subscribers, and then I got news that great musician Steve Roden had died at age 59, and getting out that sad news became an additional reason to broaden this issue’s reach.
An annotated playlist of ambient (and adjacent) music, this is usually a weekly bonus — a thank-you to people who financially support This Week in Sound. It supplements the free Tuesday and Friday issues, which feature a broader array of material from the field of sound studies.
Today, we’ve got: (1) a video, (2) a sequel, and (3) a preview — and (4) a memorial.
1. A VIDEODARK STAR: The first video from the forthcoming solo record by Vince Clarke is so stark, so somber, it makes “Ghosts Again,” Depeche Mode’s tribute from earlier this year to the late Andy Fletcher (which took the form of an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal), seem almost like a pop pastiche by comparison. “The Lamentations of Jeremiah,” which has no vocals, shows a gaunt Clarke, dressed in black, striking various poses in a largely empty building. This is lockdown as solitary retreat — solo album as monastic reflection on mortality. Occasionally Clarke glances at the camera, challenging the viewer to not look away. The music matches the dire tone of the video, which was directed by Ebru Yildiz. It is primarily the cello of guest musician Reed Hays, playing against Clarke’s synthesized room tone of doom. There is reportedly no singing on the album; it is described as a “a 10-track lyric-less album of uncategorisable ambient beauty.” Apparently the album, titled Songs of Silence, should prove similarly intense as a whole: “Nobody in my household is particularly interested in what I get up to in the studio,” Clarke said in an announcement from Mute Records. “Even the cat used to leave after an hour or so of listening to drones.” Songs of Silence is due out November 17.
2. A SEQUELhttps://eivindaarsetjanbang.bandcamp.com/album/last-two-inches-of-sky
TWO OF A KIND: Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset and his countryman, electronic musician Jan Bang, strike out for elegant dub territory on Last Two Inches of Sky, the first song from which, “City Never Sleeps,” is now available in advance of the album’s September 23 release. This follows up Snow Catches on Her Eyelashes, the duo’s extraordinary 2020 album. It’s a gorgeous work of firmly rooted, slow-motion ease. Apparently there’s a sample of trumpeter Arve Henriksen somewhere in this song, as well as “treatments” courtesy of Erik Honoré. Nona Hendryx provides guest vocals on another of the upcoming album’s tracks, “Legion.”
3. A PREVIEWhttps://zimoun.bandcamp.com/album/modularguitarfields-i-vi
OBJECT LESSON: The kinetic sculptor and sound artist Zimoun has an album due out later this month, on September 22, on the 12k Records label. Titled ModularGuitarFields I-VI, it is, judging by the opening track, an extended exploration of tone. This first piece, “ModularGuitarFields I,” is a 12-minute meditation on slight fissures amid deep feedback. According to the press materials, Zimoun’s equipment on the album amounts to: “a Tenor Baritone Guitar, combined with select elements of a Modular Synth and a vintage 1960s Magnatone Amp.” Zimoun is best known for sculptures that use simple materials like cardboard, cheap motors, crumpled paper, and plastic balls to explore how systems can create structure and patterns in sound and visuals alike. Parallels can easily be drawn between that art practice and the impact of this hypnotic new recording.
4. A MEMORIALLOWERCASE STUDY: Just as I was putting this issue to bed, I got an alert from an old, mutual friend of the sound artist, musician, and visual artist Steve Roden that Steve had passed away — news announced on his Instagram account, @inbetweennoise. I last saw Steve in the summer of 2019, when the impact of his diagnosed Alzheimer’s was already becoming evident; he spoke spoke that August at the Los Angeles gallery Vielmetter, in conversation with Michael Ned Holte, and then he performed on his modular synthesizer. Steve was a wonderful human, and an incredible thinker about art and sound. I will cherish the meals we shared over the years, and the discussions we had. He was also a friend of Disquiet, having been part of the art installation we did for the San Jose Museum of Art back in 2014, and our collaboration with artist Jorge Colombo, LX(RMX), in 2012 — among other examples. Steve is particularly well known for “lowercase” music that ekes out beauty and meaning at a volume just above a hum. For many who followed in his footsteps, lowercase was an aesthetic pursuit. With Steve, it also felt like a reflection of his own presence. (Above, just by way of example, is a 2009 performance by Steve at the Schindler House in Los Angeles.)
September 6, 2023
This Week in Sound: Bats, Birds, and the Big Bang
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the September 5, 2023, issue of the Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound. This Week in Sound is the best way I’ve found to process material I come across. Your support provides resources and encouragement. Most issues are free. A weekly annotated ambient-music mixtape is for paid subscribers. Thanks.
▰ BATS, MAN: Ed Yong’s book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World Around Us is the gift that keeps on giving, because the more people read it, the more he is interviewed, yielding observations such as this one, from his conversation in New Scientist with Christie Taylor: “So, bats famously use sonar to get around. So, they echolocate, they produce these high-frequency calls, and listen out for the rebounding echoes and use those to navigate around the world, to find how far they are away from insects or obstacles. That’s, kind of, an advanced form of hearing, right, you’re just listening out for sounds. But the fact that the bat is always making the sound changes things. It means that echolocation is always an active sense, it’s always exploratory. Without the call, there is no echo for the bat to hear. And in that way, it’s a little bit like touch I think. It’s very similar to the way we use our hands to reach out and explore and grasp and manipulate and feel the world. Bats are sort of doing that with sound, and dolphins are doing the same thing with sound too.”
▰ SKY HIGH: There is a “city-builder” style game called Cities: Skylines, and it has a sequel, called Cities: Skylines II, and apparently the sounds are improved: “Some sounds only appear when you are zoomed in close to the city. Cars emit different engine noises at different speeds. Emergency vehicle sirens match the city theme you choose. And clicking on a citizen or animal will have a small audio cue, which may or may not be a literal bark.” It comes out on October 24 for the PS5, and I may have to give it a go.
▰ LISTEN UP: The excellent bird blogger Bob Dolgan affirms that the Merlin app’s ability to identify birdsong doesn’t serve as an existential threat to the value of birding: “I had a field identification experience that seemed to confirm that Merlin hasn’t completely altered the fabric of birding. There were quite a few raucous Blue Jays around (when aren’t they raucous), and they were making all sorts of calls as jays are wont to do. But there was another call—another species—mixed in. I had Merlin open and listening for birds, but it wasn’t picking up anything other than the Blue Jays. The call was something like a hoarse Red-bellied Woodpecker, which led me to conclude that I was hearing a Red-headed Woodpecker, an uncommon and delightful species in my neighborhood. I checked Merlin again, and it had nothing. Now, there were a few factors at play. The woodpecker was quite distant, so it’s possible it wasn’t in range of my phone and Merlin. The Blue Jays were indeed loud, and there were planes on the approach to O’Hare. But still, it took knowing Red-headed Woodpecker calls and experience with the species and this location to identify the bird. And when I lifted my binoculars toward a big dead tree in the distance, there was indeed a Red-headed Woodpecker at the very top.”
▰ SPACE MEN: “While listening with the antenna in May 1964, two young radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, picked up an eerie and persistent hum from the heavens. For a long time, they thought it was caused by pigeon droppings that had accumulated in the horn. Instead, they eventually learned, they had detected the beginnings of space and time. They were listening to the last sigh of the Big Bang, which birthed the universe 13.8 billion years ago and is detectable now only as a faint, omnipresent hiss of microwave radiation.” The New York Times (gift link) on the history of the Holmdel Horn Antenna in Monmouth County, N.J. (Thanks, Mike Rhode! And the public domain photo is from Wikipedia.)
▰ NIGHT LIFE: Scientific American has a great recent series of podcast discussions about migration and birdsong, which yields material like this from Benjamin Van Doren, a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology: “Some of the best nights of nocturnal listening that I experienced were when I was in college in Ithaca, N.Y., upstate New York at Cornell University. And so I remember calls from birds every few seconds that were migrating overhead. I found really thrilling because it felt like I was tapping into this vast mysterious pulse of the planet phenomenon that was just so much bigger than me. This was a whole ’nother level of experiencing something that was hidden to so many other people.” And this, from Jacob Job, Associate Director of Colorado State University’s Bird Genoscape Project: “In fact, it wasn’t until the late 19th century that we had our first documented evidence of nocturnal flight calls. In 1896 amateur ornithologist Orin Libby tallied nearly 4,000 such calls near his home in Wisconsin. Ever since then, scientists have been working night and day to decode this sort of nocturnal Morse code. What they’ve learned so far is that the phenomenon of migration is happening on a scale far larger than we once thought. But also that scale is shrinking as migratory bird populations decline to record low numbers.” (Thanks, Lotta Fjelkegård!)
▰ QUICK NOTES: Baby Steps: Mozart is, apparently, good for pain reduction “in relieving acute pain in term newborns undergoing minor painful procedures” (via proto.life) ▰ Fresh Hell: “a cutting-edge scam attempt that has grabbed the attention of cybersecurity experts: the use of artificial intelligence to generate voice deepfakes, or vocal renditions that mimic real people’s voices.” Dark Passage: William Denton revisits a 1947 episode of the radio show Suspensestarring Agnes Moorehead: “sounds drive a guilty woman to madness and confession.” Those sounds include then-contemporay chamber music. ▰ Canon Fodder: Are games like Starfield creating a new generation of classical music fans? ▰ Green Thumbs Down: West Sussex complaints about noise pollution from a nearby factory have a uniquely British quality: “so bad they have been unable to use their gardens in summer.” ▰ Bombs Away: Alerts about wartime explosions in Ukraine are aided by “infrasound sensors that can detect sound waves typically inaudible to humans.” ▰ Something Fishy: “There is a dam in the Netherlands where migrating fish get stuck, since it rarely opens in spring. The solution: an underwater camera linked to a website where viewers can press a button when they spot fish” (via Next Draft).
September 5, 2023
On the Line
That is Elizabeth Kolbert writing in The New Yorker about the sounds of sperm whales in her piece “Can We Talk to Whales.”
. . .
“Another fighter jet - more feedback than clear engine sound - arcing over the north against the forces of gravity - eight geese make low pass towards the sea. Strandline - a child's summer shoe - Frozen. Always Frozen.”That is an example of the fragmented, stream-of-consciousness writing that fleshes out the beautiful, dreamy illustrations of Maxim Peter Griffin’s elegant book Field Notes: Walking the Territory.
. . .
“The vibration started within the movie but is only translated to sound outside the diegesis. To whose physical universe does it belong?”That is Graeme Cole on the “leaky concept” of diegetic sound in film.
