Composer-pianist Michael Harrison’s new album on the Cantaloupe label, titled Revelation, is an extensive exercise in just intonation, the ancient tuning that applies whole number ratios to the spaces between notes, in contrast with the adjustments (compromises, some would say) …
News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) Art by Orb/KLF member James Cauty was removed by municipal workers in Brighton, England, when it was mistaken for graffiti (nytimes.com, ink-d.co.uk). … (2) The Guardian on noise abatement and urban …
The following is attributed to artist Joseph Cornell:
“the song of nature, the breezes, the fragrances of the grasses — like a great breathing, deep, harmonious, elemental, cosmic.”
It appears on one of the walls in a sizable exhibit of …
The room isn’t quite at capacity, but there’s a sizable audience. The band is mid-song, a young female vocalist on bass plus two men on keyboards facing each other. I remove my headphones for a moment. We’re …
There’s a substantial exhibit of boxes, prints, photographs, short films and other work by Joseph Cornell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit is titled Navigating the Imagination and a number of the featured items touch on …
The album Grains by Oakland, California-based musician Kristin Miltner is full of fidgety algorithmic chaos and patches of soft noise. The five succinct tracks that comprise the set manage to be rambunctious and sedate at the same time — for all that activity, when taken in stride, becomes a highly textured flow.
The ease inherent in Grains (released on the San Francisco label Praemedia) is due in no small part to Miltner’s voice, which informs several of the tracks. She sings tones that, for all the digital processing, maintain a loveliness that never gets too far from being recognizable as human.
Miltner studied music at Mills, but that was only the latest educational experience in lifelong studies that began with violin training and proceeded through two BFAs. Prior to recording Grains, Miltner teamed with musician Mark Bartscher; together, as Miba, they recorded an album, The Corplate Porblem, which, much like Grains, emphasized granular synthesis that located within samples tiny fractures of sound.
Miltner recently took time to discuss the differences between recording solo and as part of a duo, the ongoing effort involved in developing audio software patches, how her visual arts background informs her composing, and her day job designing sound for video games.
Marc Weidenbaum: The use of voice on the first song on Grains, “Grains Need Water and Sunlight,” is especially distinctive. In the course of recording that piece, did you alter the way you sang to fit the digital processing that you were applying to your voice?
Kristin Miltner: For all of Grains, I was using the software I built in Max/MSP. I know that I have set the buffers in my patch to record for 10 seconds, so if I’m singing into the patch, I try to time it so I sing a few notes or say a few words or whatever, and the whole improv lasts about 10 seconds.
Weidenbaum: Are the sounds on Grains ones you heard in your head and pursued, or ones that arose through experimentation and discovery?
Miltner: Both happen, and to answer that question specifically I feel like I should tell you about how I work. I use a specific piece of software that I wrote and am writing in Max/MSP that very much dictates, for better or for worse, the way I sound. I have been working on the same patch for at least five years and keep adding to it. I developed it to be very good at sounding a certain way — the stuttery, rhythmic theme that you hear on Grains. I like to think of it as something that cuts lacy patterns into samples and live input. There’s another abstract description of how it works by Jorge Boehringer — he describes it an an octopus opening and closing multiple doors in a very long hallway.
Anyway, inevitably, as a result of building it that way, as a result of choosing and eliminating, that’s the way I sound. We mutate each other as we grow symbiotically. I hear sounds out in the field in terms of what my patch will do to them. If another musician is playing an instrument or playing me a recording they made, or I am out in the world listening to a sound, I think about what it would sound like if I brought it into the patch.
The free EP Was Here by Teus on the Bump Foot netlabel contains five tracks of rhythmic atmospheric music. It’s the sort of tension-building underscoring that informs high-minded thrillers. You can hear echoes of John Carpenter’s haunted nursery melodies in …
It’s autumn, which means that leaves drop freely, as do new tracks in Monolake’s ongoing “Track of the Month” series, which was on hold for much of the summer. Up currently is a 10-minute burbling of elemental techno titled “Monolake …
Like yesterday’s Disquiet.com Downstream entry, the track “Frozen Resophonic” off Turkey-based Erdem Helvacioglu’s Altered Realities album may sound electronically mediated but it was recorded live. The two states are not mutually exclusive.
Helvacioglu has developed systems by which he alters …
Up at the 12k label is a sample track off the forthcoming album The Sleeping Morning by Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree, the latter of whom runs 12k. Together, a decade ago, Ysatis and Deupree recorded under several monikers, including …