Month: June 2009

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Gym music: zoned out to what turned out to be, accidentally, the @lastfm Godflesh station simultaneous w/ Cliff Martinez's Espion(s) score. #
  • So much good new music lately — new scores by Martinez & Mansell, and now there's a second Jon Hassell-related album in 2009, Siwan (ECM). #
  • Radiophonic streaming audio composition by Roger Mills this Sunday. More info at http://www.eartrumpet.org/ios/ — per (that is, RT) @menyui #
  • My Facebook.com URL shortcut is http://www.facebook.com/disquiet #
  • Taking of Pelham 123 = sound-porn. Great use of one of the few Jay-Z songs I like, plus helicopters, trains, and all manner of automobiles. #
  • Weekend: maybe Club Sandwich show tonight, fine-tuning pozole recipe tomorrow. Also reading, writing, transcribing, and some arithmetic. #
  • 11am sounds: typing; throat-clearing; air horn; lawnmower duet, one high, one low (despite no evident lawn nearby); voices below; motorbike. #
  • #followfriday on Twitter: boundary-pushing cartoonists @wcraghead & @mmaddencomics + knowledgeable music-heads @eleventhvolume & @earslend #
  • Taqueria Cancun for lunch. Something's different — oh, there's no blasting jukebox, just the grill and foot traffic and street noise. #
  • Afternoon visit to Prelinger Library, always inspiring. Gotta dig into Electron, an old Canadian electronics mag, & back issues of Cabinet. #
  • Morning gym music: Pixel's The Drive. #
  • Afternoon sounds: voices down below, ceiling-fan drone up above, typing and paper-ruffling throughout, radio set just at the edge of silent. #
  • Lugging a one-pound library book because I wanna finish its final 20 pages on the bus. #
  • I don't link too often to Disquiet.com but this @thegrassyknoll remix of late bluesman Junior Kimbough needs to be heard: http://is.gd/U8gU #
  • Cool new free iPhone app (rotating music, photo gallery) from @thegrassyknoll — http://www.feedtheenemy.com/?p=89 #
  • RIP, Soft Machine's Hugh Hopper: http://is.gd/TOqS #
  • A search for "tenori" (as in tenori-on) in the Audio section of Archive.org yields a null return? That seems unlikely, but it's what's up. #
  • Now at saxist Tony Passarell at Cafe Royal in SF. First guy to ever play me Live Evil & Agharta. #
  • Gym music: the recent Metallica, again. Yeah, I'm addicted. Anyone seen an instrumental edit of the full-length around? #
  • Morning sounds, back in SF: distant bus sounds like surf, laptop fan sounds like hair dryer, stomach sounds like it's time for dim sum. #
  • Home. London was freaking great. Arrive to sunny skies in SF. Almost done with del Toro novel (it's OK so far), and Burn Notice is on Tivo. #

Quote of the Week: Byrne on Edison’s Legacy

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

An excerpt of a recent journal entry by David Byrne:

    I’d read in a new book about recorded sound (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner) that [Thomas] Edison arranged demonstrations of his “perfected”wax cylinder recorders at various theaters around the continent. He’d have a known singer sing along with their own recorded voice, and then at some point the singer would stop and the recording took over. Testimonials claimed that the audience gasped and couldn’t tell the difference between the live singer and the recording (like “Is it real or is it Memorex?”for those who remember those cassette tape ads).

    This seems a little far-fetched, though it’s true that we do hear what we want to hear to a large extent, and the amount of hype Edison was capable of generating was considerable — and hype can affect what we see and hear. There was indeed some information that surfaced alleging that Edison had “trained”the singers to imitate the quality and sound of the recordings — slightly pinched and not very loud — to make the gag work. This seems likely, as any decent singer could sing far louder than the volume of those old machines.

    Although this may make Edison out to be a bit of a three-card Monte showman (as, like that game, the demonstration was rigged), it also shows what a talent he had for marketing and promoting his inventions. Coming up with an amazing idea and even patenting it was only half the battle”¦ at least as far as getting it out there goes.

    The rigged demonstration also gives an early hint at how performance is influenced by technology. Technology feigns neutrality — to simply record and capture (photography, audio, digitizing) — but not only does each technology skew the copy in some direction, the copy soon becomes the gold standard against which performance is measured. Even if the copy is not 100% faithful, in a weird backwards turn it becomes the “real”thing. While this seems almost comic — early singers imitating wax recordings or photographers imitating Impressionist paintings — with multi-track and now digital recording the worlds of recorded (and manipulated) sound and live performance drift ever further apart.

Full entry at journal.davidbyrne.com.

Melanie Velarde Found-Object Performance MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is rough texture, footsteps, animal noise, broadcast detritus, and voices. Voices in the background, on the edge of intelligible, just below a surface of friction and irritation, and a rising sine wave, so pure that it stands out, so quiet that it blends in. Plucked guitar, strings taut like barbed wire, enter. Then the flash of a camera — sound that connotes image — and then so much more, including a segment when the musician herself, Melanie Velarde, is heard explaining her process (gathering nearby materials, working by chance). It’s a self-conscious work (MP3), in a productive sense — the camera sounding earlier on, for example, is echoed later, more quietly, when Velarde is heard speaking. If the first camera appearance is a sound for its own sake, the second is a sound recorded, per Velarde’s own mode, by chance — a camera that is photographing her, while she speaks about and performs her own work.

[audio:http://www.binauralmedia.org/news/wp-content/uploads/MelanieVelarde_FinalPresentationNodar.mp3|titles=”Nodar Presentation”|artists=Melanie Velarde]

The work was recorded last month, when Velarde was an artist-in-residence sponsored by binauralmedia.org, which has more information on the event. More on Velarde at melanievelarde.com.