Disquiet

Kris Sujata, who records as Valiska, got his hands on a Bontempi organ, and put it to drone use. The organ is distinguished by its sound-production process, which involves air being played through reeds. Valiska’s take on it is deeply tonal. The occasional modulations serve less as melodic formulations than as shifts intended to focus the ear on what has preceded and what will succeed. It is like shifting from plateau to plateau and getting a new sense of the vista with each change in elevation. Texturally, this is a maximalist sound, dense with overtones, and downright rivetting.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/valiska. More from Valiska, who’s based in Calgary, Canada, at valiska.com and twitter.com/thevaliska.

The sounds in Caroline Park‘s “field” are that of a piano stretched to the breaking point. That is not the instrument itself, but its tones. And that is not in the real, physical world so much as in an abstract zone, where space bends and algorithms are allowed bountiful time to work their fractal, generative beauty. Tones flare and thread, splinter and regroup, dwindle and emerge. At times it sounds like a jumbo jet has suddenly appeared overhead, but the sounds get gentle, even genteel, at other times. It isn’t just in the realm of metaphor that the piano is unreal. In fact, Park’s source instrument is the MIDI piano. Her aim is, in part, to work that simulacrum until it passes a kind of textural Turing test. As an accompanying liner note puts it: “executing human, repetitive strokes as an imperfect, but constant signal.” That effort is made on a MIDI device, so in fact there is a “human” element directly involved with the performance (the recording was made live), but the source of the playing is only half the equation MP3. There is still the MIDI sound itself, which Park has warped and twisted until it sounds like the tack piano on your neighbor’s side of an aging plaster wall has had a rough night.

Track originally posted for free download at the devinsarno.com/absenceofwax netlabel. Get the AIFF or Ogg, in addition to the MP3, at the release’s archive.org page. More on Park at blanksound.org.

Back in 2010, for much of the year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ran an exhibit titled Let Them Eat LACMA, curated by Fallen Fruit. Food served as a means to sift through the museum’s massive collection, and LACMA engaged artists to produce new work. Among them was Yann Novak, who on the final day of the exhibit, November 7, was among 50 artists who descended on LACMA for a festival. Novak’s piece, a 20-minute music performance, was done in coordination with Robert Crouch and Sublamp. Under the rubric of Music for Restaurants, he played a lush background tone, like a bell ringing in slow motion.

There is a short bit of video from the event at youtube.com:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/yann-novak. More from Novak at yannnovak.com. More on the event at eatlacma.org. More on Fallen Fruit, the collaborative art project of David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young, at fallenfruit.org.

Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This week’s Disquiet Junto project is our first to employ video. It’s long been on my mind to do a video project, in which the participants would provide a score to pre-existing footage. I am sure this won’t be the last.

This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, May 9, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, May 13, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0071: Wind Music

This week’s project is straightforward. It is an exercise in scoring for video. The video is one minute and four seconds long. It is the trailer to a film now in development. The title of the film is Sense the Wind and the director is Christine Knowlton. The subject of the film is blind sailors. The fact that film is about people for whom hearing is especially important made it very attractive. The director is excited to hear, and see, what we come up with. As her @SenseTheWind Twitter feed states of the film: “Blind sailors race across open water, learning not to fear what they cannot see — on boats or on land.”

The source video is here. It has all the audio, but no music:

http://vimeo.com/65429113

Rules: The only restriction is that you should not employ any copyright-protected audio (i.e., source material), because the intent is for the director to select one of the tracks, potentially, to serve as the backing music for the trailer. And yes, you may certainly employ audio from the trailer as source material for your music.

Considerations: When working on this project, it is encouraged that you map out the trailer in advance of scoring, and take into consideration emotional/narrative beats, and the way its momentum builds.

Video Upload: If you have time, please also add your finished music to the trailer and upload the video to Vimeo (or another service of your choosing). Given the time involved, should you chose to upload the video, there is no firm deadline, though it would be nice if you could get it done by Wednesday, May 15, two days after the music is due.

Deadline: Monday, May 13, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track will be equal to or less than the length of the trailer, which is four seconds over one minute.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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: Include the term “disquiet0071-windmusic” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

I give the director permission to use my music in the trailer for the film Sense the Wind for promotional purposes.

More on this 71st Disquiet Junto project, which involves creating a backing score for the trailer to the film Sense the Wind, about competitive blind sailing, directed by Christine Knowlton, at:

http://disquiet.com/2013/05/09/disquiet0071-windmusic/

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

More on the film at

http://www.sensethewind.com/

There are few pleasures like hearing the song removed from a song. After Pete Swanson has finished with Ashley Paul‘s “Soak the Ocean,” what is left is like the skin of a snake after the snake has gone on to shadier pastures. The original song is a mix of gestural near-microsonic composition and lightly layered vocals, more intoned than sung. It is a pleasure on its own, Paul’s tremulous voice moving amid the fragile plectrum geometries of the accompaniment. True to the snakeless-skin image, Swanson has largely excised the vocal — the inhabitant has moved on — and left the instrumental bed, which he has in turn made more motoric. There are hints of her voice, a syllable allowed to repeat here and there, a phrase even less robust than the ethereal original, more a vestige, a memory, of the song than a new rendering of it. The beat gains momentum as the track proceeds, memories left behind, as it moves forward into a deeper, richer, harsher, welcoming noise.

For comparison, this is the original version, from the Paul album Line The Clouds, which came out on REL Records in late March:

Swanson was half of Yellow Swans (the other half having been Gabriel Mindel Saloman), whose Going Places was one of my favorite commercial albums of 2010. The magazine xlr8r.com covered the remix back in February. More from Ashley Paul at ashleypaul.net. More from Pete Swanson at twitter.com/pete_swans.