Disquiet

[ May 11, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Steampunk Sequencer

This is the Sequential Resonation Machine, created by Joseph Casbarian:

According to the post at oddmusic.com, the machine is a kind of mashup of a sequencer and a pipe organ. Three MP3s on the site provide brief examples of what kinds of music it can make: MP3, Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style note accrual; MP3, eerie horror shuffle; MP3, dopey cartoon waddle. (Via makezine.com.)

[ May 10, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Roots Maneuver

From the title track of the brand new Roots album, Rising Down:

Look at technology they call it downloading
I call it downsizing somebody follow me
Does a computer chip have an astrology?
And when it fuck up could it give you an apology

The most accomplished rap act that consists of a traditional rock band lineup, the Roots are the rare group in hip-hop to generally forsake sampling in favor of live jams. Given hip-hop’s basis in non-traditional musical equipment — tape loops long ago, then beat machines, now digital sampling — it’s often interesting to listen for critiques of technology in their music.

In the liner notes to another song on Rising Down, “Becoming Unwritten,” Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the band’s drummer and producer, penned a critique of densely produced hip-hop: “Unless you’re working on a Bomb Squad production for the 20th anniversary followup to ‘[Public Enemy’s album It Takes a Nation of] Millions [to Hold Us Back’ then the rule of ‘100% Power!’ need not apply. Sometimes as a musician you have to play the back and supplement your main subject.”

[ May 4, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Tales of Hofmann

This is the face — and, more to the point, those are the eyes — of Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who first synthesized LSD.

Hofmann passed away this past Monday, April 28, at the age of 102. According to the Telegraph obituary (telegraph.co.uk), which the above photo accompanied, he was “the first person in the world to experience a full-blown ‘acid trip.’” That would have been on April 19, 1943. (The photo, undated, is credited to the European Pressphoto Agency.)

[ May 3, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Gann’s Horoscope

This is the sort of sentence that Kyle Gann says he used to fantasize inserting into his music criticism:

Don’t bother attending Nic Collins’s Roulette concert this Friday, Mercury is retrograding over his midheaven, and it’s a sure bet his equipment will malfunction.

The context of the quote is that Gann, the critic and composer, recently completed work on his longest composition, The Planets. “It’s just over 70 minutes long,” he writes on his blog, artsjournal.com/postclassic, “a 346-page score, in ten movements, my own personal Turangalila.” In the post he explains his long fascination with astrology: “I never defend astrology, nor proselytize for it, nor say I ‘believe’ in it. I have no idea why astrological transits sometimes seem startlingly relevant, but, like the I Ching, it is an ancient worldview containing a wealth of psychological insight that greatly widened my understanding of human behavior.” Gann traces his interest in the I Ching back to reading John Cage as a teenager. (And OK, this isn’t quite the quote of the week — it’s dated April 20.)

[ April 30, 2008 / bookmark ]

DJ Spooky/MIT Book Review in Nature Magazine (May 1, 2008)

My review of the new book Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (MIT Press), edited by Paul D. Miller, is in the latest issue of Nature magazine, dated May 1 — founded in 1869, Nature is now by far the oldest magazine to which I have ever contributed. (The next eldest would be Down Beat, which was founded in 1935.) For the time being, the full Sound Unbound review is up at nature.com, though at some point it will be placed behind a paid-archive wall. Miller is better known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Included among the book’s 36 chapters are “The Ecstasy of Influence” by Jonathan Lethem (the piece originally appeared in Harper’s last year) and the essay on bells that Brian Eno wrote for his 2003 album January 07003. Other highlights are a piece by Daphne Keller on legal challenges in the age of sampling, as well as an interview with legendary album-art designer Alex Steinweiss.

The MIT site lists the complete contributors as David Allenby, Pierre Boulez, Catherine Corman, Chuck D, Erik Davis, Scott De Lahunta, Manuel DeLanda, Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Ron Eglash, Brian Eno, Dmitry Gelfand, Dick Hebdige, Lee Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Ken Jordan, Douglas Kahn, Daphne Keller, Beryl Korot, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Lanza, Jonathan Lethem, Carlo McCormick, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Moby, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alondra Nelson, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline Oliveros, Philippe Parreno, Ibrahim Quraishi, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Nadine Robinson, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alex Steinweiss, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams, and Jeff E. Winner. Just to be clear, some of those contributors are, in fact, the subjects of interviews that appear in the book. An added CD features everything from Sun Ra to William S. Burroughs to Terry Riley. More on the book at mitpress.mit.edu.

In case you’re wondering, according to the Nature website, the magazine’s cover image shows “RNA granules (blue) at the tip of a cell protrusion, which has also been stained for actin filaments.”

[ April 27, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week : Grandmaster Flash Back

As the April issue of Wired is being replaced on newsstands by the May one (an Apple cover story giving way to Steve Carell’s mug), here’s a shot from the former:

Photographed by Nick Waplington, it shows 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, where DJ Kool Herc lived and where Grandmaster Flash was pioneering turntablism back in the early 1970s. The photo is part of a series on “Unlikely Places Where Wired Pioneers Had Their Eureka! Moments.” Says Flash in the interview: “I was told that I ruined needles, ruined styluses, ruined records, and also that placing my fingers on the vinyl was something DJs never did because I’d make the record filthy. But I knew that I had to do it to have full control over the vinyl.” His innovation is timestamped 1973.

Also included in the photo essay, the Idaho field where Philo Farnsworth imagined television in 1921 and the Northeastern University building where Shawn Fanning developed Napster in 1999. More at wired.com.

[ April 26, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Furby-tronics

This is Thomas Fang speaking about circuit bending in advance of the Bent Festival, to be held this weekend in Manhattan:

The spirit of circuit bending is random effects — fucking with the electronics system until you get something you never anticipated.

Fang’s specialty is mashed-up Furby toys. More at nypress.com.

[ April 19, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Record Store Day

The following statement is attributed to Ben Watt of Everything but the Girl, in support of Record Store Day, Saturday, April 19, 2008:

it is hard to underestimate the role of independent retail in the music industry. as the world continues to try and cram every purchase they make onto their computer, turning music into binary digits and artwork into pixelated packshots, we can only sit and wait for them to wake up from their dream and realize that ultimately human interaction in shops, with informed good people, handling cherishable artefacts is good for the soul. in the meantime we need to support the people who keep this world alive for the moment we all realize we need it again.

More details at recordstoreday.com.

[ April 13, 2008 / bookmark ]

Aero-Mic’d @ Meridian Gallery (San Francisco)

Due to some impending travel, I could only stay for the first set at Friday night’s Meridian Gallery triple bill in San Francisco. Meridian co-founder Anne Brodzky opened the show by commenting on how the evening’s performances served as kind of a fourth partner in the current exhibit that Lawrence Rinder, Dean of the College at the California College of the Arts, had curated for the gallery’s three narrow floors: on the entry level, abstract illustrations by a half dozen area artists; on the second floor, anonymous tantric drawings from the collection of French poet Franck André Jamme; and on the third floor, an array of small, postcard-sized mirrors with koan-like text, by Jamme, written on them in white. Brodsky also mentioned that the night served as a kind of anniversary for the Meridian, which moved into its Union Square location this time last year (after two decades at 545 Sutter Street, it’s now at 535 Powell Street).

Rinder meta-curated the evening’s music, titled OF + OM + OR, having sub-contracted the duties to local artist Dean Smith, whose illustrations are part of the ground-floor exhibit. On the bill were Joshua Churchill playing processed guitar with a light show by Paul Clipson (whose show with Robert Rich I saw at SF Camerawork a month ago, but I haven’t had the opportunity to post here at Disquiet.com on it yet), a solo performance by Greg Kowalsky, and, for the opening set, the trio Aero-Mic’d.

Aero Mic’d is Wayne Smith on triggered samples and synthesis, along with Cliff Hengst on percussion and Scott Hewicker on electric guitar. Their half-hour piece, a kind of multi-part suite, opened and closed with edited audio from the game show Jeopardy — just the answers, like “Who is [this]?” and “What is [ that]?” spliced into a rapid-fire trivia spew. Those cathode-hearth incantations served to bookend a kind of modern-primitive tribal music, with Hewicker pushing cycles of fuzzed-out chords and Hengst pounding repetitive patterns, the simplicity of which belied the sensitivity and expertise he brought to their implementation. At times the trio’s playing suggested the art-brut rock of the band Savage Republic and the dervish-like trance-pop of the Feelies, though Aero-Mic’d contributed its own unique vision to this mode. In particular Hewicker’s guitar was carefully amplified so that for all its sublimated ferocity, his strumming against his strings was also fully audible.

This all occurred against a quiet backdrop, by Smith (Wayne, not Dean), of field recordings, some transformed into distant drones, others left to let bird song, car noise, and the like fill the gallery. At one point a skateboard could be heard coasting across the stereo spectrum.

I wish I could have lingered longer, in order to hear the other sounds that were to fill the gallery. Clipson’s 16mm projections at SF Camerawork a month back were a beautiful stream of images that drew from a broad range of photographic schools, and Kowalsky’s performance promised to use small tape recorders and radios that had been set along the floorboards for spatial diffusion (see photo below), much as Steve Roden had done to fine effect at last year’s Activating the Medium festival at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.

Related links: Meridian Gallery (meridiangallery.org), Aero-Mic’d (aeromicd.com), Scott Hewicker (scotthewicker.com).

[ April 12, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Millhauser’s “Next”

From Steven Millhauser’s short story “The Next Thing” in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine:

And I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a screen door, a thrum of insects.

I turned back into the Under. It was very bright. There was a steady sound of goods dropping into bins, and all up and down the aisles you could see people lifting items out of the bins and putting them in their carts. Then it seemed to me that I was about to understand something, as I stood there watching the shoppers and listening to the unheard sounds of an invisible town.

A Twilight Zone episode tailored for a symposium on New Urbanism, the story tells of a small town where a large superstore is built, and of the social transformations that result as the town and the superstore slowly merge. (To say anything further about what’s meant by “Under” in the excerpt above would give too much away.) “The Next Thing” has echoes of David Foster Wallace’s fascination with everyday economics, George Saunders’s focus on the intersection between simulacrum and closed social systems, and Charles Stross’s extrapolative fantasies.