Month: December 2011

Operating on Operating Systems (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

What will happen when our computers are always on, or instant on, or so ubiquitous that we think of them less as objects, as accessories, or even garments, and more like soap or aftershave? Will we hang on to vestiges of their earlier days, much as we today add noises to electric cars in the name of comfort, safety, and security? If so, we’ll look back to work like that of Jeff Kolar, whose Start Up/Shut Down is, indeed, made of the noises of computers doing just that. His description is as precise as his working materials:

Start Up/Shut Down is a set of short iterations, remixes, and refinements of Window and Macintosh operating system event sounds. This project features remixed material sourced from Microsoft Windows (3.1, 4.0, NT, 95, 98, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Macintosh OS (10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, 10.2 Jaguar, 10.3 Panther) operating systems.

He has plumbed the less than recent history of the major two major operating systems for his noises. The result is an abstract play on sounds at once familiar and remote. It’s a bracing listen, and leaves one eagerly awaiting the Linux B-side.

Kolar is one of the people behind the grew Radius podcast and pirate broadcast, a frequent subject of this site’s Downstream department. He corresponded with Disquiet earlier this year about another kind of “start up” sound that serves as the opening theme of the Radius broadcast (see “Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum”).

Both of the set’s tracks are available for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/jeffkolar and at the netlabel notype.com. More on Kolar at jeffkolar.us.

Welcome to Disquiet.com 3.0

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Welcome to the third major visual iteration of this website. The back-end changes were just installed, as of 10:20pm Pacific Time. If you see any major errors in the coming days, please let me know. (There’s much to be done in terms of fine-tuning, but the majority of the site is in place. All the posts are up. There are fonts to be adjusted, category pages to be aligned, and some taxonomy to be attended to, among other things.)

Disquiet.com was founded 15 years ago tomorrow, December 13. The alpha version of this site was a port of some materials I’d housed under generic addresses in the years prior to December 13, 1996, when I purchased this URL.

From 1996 through the summer of 2007, the site was built in hand-coded HTML. The following is the earliest record of Disquiet.com in the Wayback machine at archive.org:

From 2007 until today, December 12, 2011, the site was managed in WordPress in a theme produced by with elegance and professionalism by Nathan Swartz of clicknathan.com. Swartz’s theme was a refinement of the original Disquiet.com design.

And as of today it is still managed in WordPress, but in a new theme produced by the great futureprüf.com. This new theme further refines the longstanding Disquiet.com design. Among the changes:

¶ the number of categories has been significantly reduced (much of the site has been consolidated under “field notes”), though all the posts remain

¶ one new category (“projects”) has been added

¶ the side navigation is now on the left side throughout the site (previously it was on the left side on the main page, and the right side in the rest of the site)

¶ a visual link has been added to the above-the-logo top bar section of prioritized posts

¶ the size of the page has been expanded horizontally — it’s still slim by most standards

¶ there’s a new motto: “Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.”

I’ll have more about the 15th anniversary of this site tomorrow. Now, it’s time to get to bug-checking.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Instagr/am/bient update: All images are in. There are 22 contributors. If you're involved & don't get an assignment from me today, email me. #
  • Two-hour warning. We have 18 official participants in the Instagr/am/bient project. At least one more expected. Deadline: 10:30pm, Pacific. #
  • RIP, Alan Styles, the Pink Floyd roadie after whom "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast" (off Atom Heart Mother) was named. #
  • RIP, composer Minoru Miki (b. 1930), who wrote the music for the film In the Realm of the Senses. #
  • iOS sound-app upgrades: Bebot got a sub-oscillator and more; Inception got a revised dream; RJ Voyager and Mixtikl are now iOS5-friendly. #
  • Chamber-music noise remix: hold music on my phone playing through its speaker while I wait for operator. #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

The Sonic Properties of Urban Protest, Bangkok Edition (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Triple Canopy site has just concluded its six-episode podcast on the sound of Bangkok. It’s a narrated study of the rhythms and noise, the speech patterns and technology, that define the political sensibility of urban Thailand (MP3). Car horns and megaphones, street-corner Ancient Mariners and thousands-deep crowds, are heard as Ben Tausig, the podcast’s creator, discusses the ongoing governmental transformation of the country, and how those infrastructural transitions play out in the street.

[audio:http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canopycanopycanopy/KemO/~5/5tKRbFuo1_o/Bangkok_Is_Ringing_6.mp3|titles=”Bangkok Is Ringing (Episode 6)”|artists=Ben Tausig]

The timing of the podcast, which appeared on the Triple Canopy website at the end of November, clearly aligns well with the rise of the “Occupy” movement, but the correlation isn’t merely a useful coincidence. One needn’t listen too carefully to hear the cry of “We are the 99%” amid the beeping horns and half-broken amplification equipment that comprise much of the podcast.

If any moment stands out from the rest of the excellent episode in a decidedly strong series on the sonics of urbanism, it’s when, toward the end of the recording, that increasingly prominent English-language battle cry is heard to suddenly end, mid-syllable. It’s unclear what has happened: was the speaker unsure of the wording, was a threat sensed in the immediate vicinity, was the recording equipment quickly shut off? The episode is as much about the tenor of protest as it is about the message, but at that moment, the two matters — texture and text — collide in one deeply ambiguous occurrence.

More on the episode at canopycanopycanopy.com. An earlier episode was covered here last year: “Sound, Class, and Sound Clash Over Bangkok.”

Treading on Political Terrain (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Bits & Pieces” by sound artist Timo Kahlen is an exercise in political noise. It’s an exercise not just in the sense that the word is often applied to actions whose initial parameters are succinctly defined, but also because some exercises yield unintended results, and thus the piece leaves open-ended whether or not the listener will come away with an impression of Kahlen’s stated intended subtext.

The track is a steady sequence of rattly noises, and by Kahlen’s description, that unsteady ground is meant to depict “an acoustic metaphor of current political and economic crises.” Whether it does or not is up to the listener, and whether it does or not is not simply a matter of whether or not the listener is made aware of the political intent. Even with full knowledge of Kahlen’s politics, the sounds of broken glass and stray debris being tread upon are so richly detailed that they can distract from any tangential or metaphoric meaning. They are, simply, beautiful in their roughness, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beauty distracted us from more pressing concerns.

More on the piece at the website of the great radio show and podcast for which it was composed: theradius.tumblr.com Kahlen is based in Berlin, Germany. More on him at staubrauschen.de.