Disquiet

[ September 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Top 10 Posts & Searches from August 2010

By far, the most viewed story this month was (1) a piece I wrote about the acoustemological memory of John Lurie, drawing from Tad Friend‘s story about the Lounge Lizard jazz musician from the New Yorker (“Incident Far From South Street: John Lurie’s Tragic Acoustemology”).

Also among the most read, non-free-download entries were (2) the MP3 Discussion Group conversing about Thomas Köner‘s glacial album Permafrost, (3) “On the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound” (connecting Justin Bieber and Inception, and pondering what’s next), (4) a consideration of the word “digital,” (5) the latest in the Sketches of Sound series (this time drawn by Italian artist Hannes Pasqualini), (6) instructions on “How to Submit Music (& Apps) for Review on Disquiet.com,” and (7) one of the weekly roundups of twitter.com/disquiet tweets (which considered, among other things, Chris Dedrick, MySpace, fog horns, China Miéville, Bill Millin, Steve Reich, and Twitter’s often inaccurate geo-location tool).

Rounding out the top 10 were three Downstream entries of freely downloadable music: (8) “What the New Brian Eno Album Might Sound Like: Video, Free Jon Hopkins MP3,” (9) the full score to the indie film thriller Determinism, and (10) the electronics + string quartet “Glitch” by Daniel Wohl.

The top seven searches of the month were Alan Morse Davies, Aairria, Autechre, topic, sketches, Mohne, and Nanaqui — after which there were an enormous number of ties.

[ August 28, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• Next Buddha Machine "Chan Fang" 禅房 is Chinese classical instruments: "Pure melody: no heavy reverb, layers of delay or any other processing" #
• 1,000 Buddha Machines, sitting in a grid: http://is.gd/eIrDu #
• Excellent scrap paper at the San Francisco Public Library: http://ow.ly/i/3sxZ Christian Marclay would approve. #
• RIP, Keith Barr (b. 1949), Alesis founder and developer of ADAT (digital audio tape) http://is.gd/eHrSY #
• Reminder: 9/5 is last day of Shanghai exhibit @asianartmuseum in SF; neon sound art "Landscape" (2007) by Shen Fan (申凡) is a must-see/hear. #
• In the past 24 hours, both the Ghostly Discovery (1.50) and Buddha Machine (2.1) iOS apps were updated to allow for background play. #
• Marvin Hamlisch named conductor of Pasadena Pops. Does this mean we'll have an orchestral night of the music of Steven Soderbergh films? #
• Nostalgia can be measured. It equals the length of time between when one attends a concert & when one begins to look for a bootleg thereof. #
• #ff @fieldnoiseaudio @dubfiction @sfemf @soundtrackerdoc @whyarcka @my_fun @davidholmes (not the one you think); off-topic: @twart1st #
• Vaguely remembering pager slang. #
• Zorn/Riley@Yoshis: great. Four songs, improvised, the third with Mike Patton joining in. Riley sang as well as played piano; Zorn beamed. #
• Headed to Yoshi's for 8pm Zorn+Riley duo. How it's (reportedly) not sold out, I dunno. The 10pm Zorn+Frith+Patton reportedly has sold out. #
• Ghost of record-retail's past: http://ow.ly/i/3qX4 #
• RIP, literary critic Frank Kermode (b. 1919), a cornerstone of my college education. #
• Music by Philip Glass, Jonathan Coulton, Moby in geometric-remix game Chime (for charity) . Clear summary: http://is.gd/eFiTP (via bradonnm) #
• Bill Laswell's Method of Defiance (w/ Kondo, Krush, Worrell) has signed up at http://soundcloud.com/methodofdefiance #
• Great zombie-hand-in-pixel-sea cover art by Hannes Pasqualini for Plain Flavored's netlabel frelease Chipmusic in G Minor http://is.gd/eEYkm #
• Caught the Glasshouse gallery-as-home exhibit by Lital Dotan & Eyal Perry at Marina Abramović West tonigh; lots of sound, not all domestic. #
• When wherehouse.com fulfills an online order, the email confirmation receipt tells you how much it'll pay to buy back previous purchases. #
• Near-silence in library suddenly dispelled by loud, and quite hi-fidelity, ringtone of Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)." #
• Slonimsky would have even RT'd John Stuart Mill: "I was seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations." #
• More Nicolas Slonimsky: "Musicians do not manufacture material goods and therefore, like poets, must subsist parasitically." #
• Twitter's digital liquefaction has me in Hayward again. Odd, 'cause I see the Pacific Ocean & Golden Gate Park where I'm standing @support #
• Twitter was made for Nicolas Slonimsky. On conductors: "convenient to have a leader whose function is to give the signal to begin the music" #
• Still convinced #dubstep is a successful rebranding of #illbient Great free hour-long mix by Matta at http://j.mp/9aSzuD (via @adnoiseam) #
• Testing the photo-posting option in Android Hootsuite: http://ow.ly/i/3pp1 #
• Hot: 80 degrees inside. Odd night, sleeping with window open — rarity in these parts. Fell asleep to insect chatter; woke to passing geese. #
• Oddly fixated on whether or not the favicon for Google Calendar will switch from 31 to 30 when August gives way to September. #
• Neat web-based "DJ player" for Soundcloud (includes modest little looper) http://soundcloud.musikame.com/ via @davidholmes @haynes_dave #
• RIP, songwriter George David Weiss (b. 1921; "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Wonderful World," "Lion Sleeps Tonight") #wimoweh #
• ♫ Morning sounds: initial release, all low-lying techno by Bartek Kawula, on the brand new netlabel http://basicsounds.ca (via @ario et al.) #
• When I read Eno collaborates with Jon Hopkins, I think Johns Hopkins, meaning Baltimore, meaning Matmos, which unfortunately isn't the case. #
• The music last night on Rubicon ("Connect the Dots") was its best yet. Is Peter Nashel still on the show, or is it a new composer? #
• There's gotta be a nearby alternate universe where the manga Gantz and the Webkinz company Ganz are one and the same. #
• Seems ironic: audio-book version of Gordon Hempton's One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Search for Natural Silence in a Noisy World. #
• RIP, inventor Robert W. Gundlach (b. 1926), leading figure in development of Xerox http://is.gd/ezp95 #copyleft #
• Zimoun will have piece @_TheLab_ (SF) group show 9/17-10/9, 2010, w/ Koski, Chapple, Bowen, Haynes/Parker, Crofton, Jorritsma, Thwaites … #
• Brian Eno signing with Warp Records is as if Miles Davis had left Columbia not for Warner Bros. but for ECM. #
• Sometimes I have to remind myself that when someone describes something as "dissonant noise" it's intended as a pejorative. #
• Morning sound: 1st evidence of birdsong in weeks. Like someone added a vocal to the standard instrumental track of hard drive, bus, & plane. #
• Passing boombox, a floor below, raspy as all get-out: an FM station through busted speakers on draining batteries powering rusted wires … #
• Twilight:Shojo::True Blood:Yaoi. #
• Me & 10 ancient ladies buying dim sum. Hard to believe the steadily percolating background chatter would be foreground if I knew Chinese. #
• Whenever I am inundated by news about Vin Scully, I am momentarily surprised by the popularity of architectural criticism. #
• Just realized you already can subscribe to comments on individual posts on my Disquiet.com site. Guess I can check that off my to-do list. #
• Firemen walk in & out of Toronado to deal with fire in basement, while bar remains full of people drinking. Outside kids stare at the trucks #
• Morning sounds: passing cars resounding like waves, hard drives buzzing like insects. Everyday tech is a sound menagerie. #

[ August 22, 2010 / bookmark ]

Tangents: Copyright Dialog, White Noise, Classic Rock …

The Social Politics of MP3 Blogs, in Real Time: Extended comments section to a blog post, in which sound artist Hans Peter Kuhn has it out with a blogger who had posted MP3s of his recordings: 433rpm.blogspot.com (via twitter.com/robinrimbaud). Here’s a very brief condensation: Kuhn: “I am one of the two copyright owner I know that I never granted you the rights to do so. Please delete the download button from your blog.” Blogger: “I have no idea why after 26 years you don’t want any one to hear this, are you ashamed of this work?” Kuhn: “I am not talking about big moneys but to click a link is too little. … I am proud of it, that is why it is not free, it has a value. That does not always means only money, but money is the easiest way to trade and unfortunately money is the term we have to live with.” As for me: I remain fascinated that the blogger’s instinct, in his/her very first reply to Kuhn, was immediately to respond obnoxiously to the musician whom he/she purports to admire.

Chompin’ at the Bit: Always worth seeing how the intersection of music and gadgets is interpreted by the gadget press, though the response by gizmodo.com wasn’t particularly appreciative of Tristan Perich‘s elegant 1-Bit Symphony (pictured above): “It’s hardly music, and I very much doubt you’ll get your money’s worth in terms of plays per dollar.” Here’s my initial take, from November of last year: disquiet.com; somewhat anticipating the gadget press, I wrote it up in the classic tech-fetishist mode: the “unboxing.” Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal says, “The music initially calls to mind robot language from a 1960s sci-fi movie, or perhaps Pac-Man gone minimalist, yet it’s not a gimmick. The oscillations have an intense, hypnotic force and a surprising emotional depth” (wsj.com).

Meddle Orb: David Gilmour, guitarist of Pink Floyd, is teaming with the techno production outfit the Orb (Alex Patterson and Youth — via pitchfork.org, via twitter.com/0pn). The album is titled Metallic Spheres and is due out October 4. How will it compare to Youth’s work with Paul McCartney as the Fireman (Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest, 1993; Rushes, 1998; Electric Arguments, 2008) — or, for that matter, Eric Clapton‘s Retail Therapy (with Simon Climie as TDF, 1997)?

In Brief: Program for this year’s Ars Electronica: aec.at, first week of September in Linz, Austria. … Belated belated 10th-birthday wishes to Little Sound DJ (the-palm-sound.blogspot.com). … Are there enough white-noise apps yet that one could be called Yet Another White Noise Generator? This one is called SimplyNoise: simplynoise.com (via appscout.com). … Peter Kirn picks up my (disquiet.com) discussion of his talk about the meaning of the word “digital”: createdigitalmusic.com.

Site Maintenance: Doing a little interface experimentation. Added a “tweet” button to posts (Twitter is the first, and in many ways only, social network I’ve actively participated in, at twitter.com/disquiet), as well as the ability to subscribe to comments from individual posts via email. Not 100% sure I’ll keep either (it’s not that difficult to tweet in the first place, and the comments feed is available from the RSS icon in the browser nav bar), but we’ll see.

[ August 21, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• RIP, Chris Dedrick (b. 1947) of Free Design: Enoch Light alum; influenced Stereolab, Cornelius (reissued them on Trattoria); screen composer #
• One of those days when I realize I've 4 cameras on various objects w/ me, & that's in my (truly) light bag. Would be 5 if iPod Touch had 1. #
• First Nolan/Zimmer's Inception theme, then Bieber at 800%. What will be the next slo-mo sound phenomenon? http://is.gd/erQxk #
• Morning sounds: hard drives whirring, heater coming on, city buses rattling. The fog horns have abated. #
• Recent Disquiet.com email contest for new Books CD asked readers to name fave recent novel. Interesting list, largely lit-fic and sci-fi. #
• Transformers 3: Rise of the Makers #diyfilms #
• Use MySpace? (Jokes aside, tons of musicians do.) Act on newly simple apps-blocking options in updated privacy settings: http://is.gd/erFoL #
• #ff brick-layers: @sfemf @icainboston @vinylathletes * brick-makers: @mapmap @gregdavismusic @markemorse @mariplasma @greg_pond #
• Foghorns especially garrulous tonight. Me thinks they've been reading some China Miéville in the off hours. #
• Forget the #webisdead silliness in the September @wired — the issue has not one but two Moog stories, including a gorgeous prototype pic. #
• RIP, Bill Millin (b. 1922), the Scottish bagpiper whose D-Day role was immortalized in the film The Longest Day. #sonicweapons #
• The device in Mad Men ep4 this season (the secretary can hear the phone but can't be heard) is called a "mother-in-law" http://is.gd/ep6gp #
• Entire house vibrating as the apartment complex down the street undergoes a pneumatic intervention. Think "Steve Reich meets Consolidated." #
• Great @gregdavismusic modular analog last night, + tangerine dreaminess (myspace.com/moholynagymusic ) & folk drones (myspace.com/aures00). #
• Netlabels without RSS feeds are arguably more confusing than art museums without @flickr accounts. #
• Update: the Sep30/Oct1 yarn I'll be spinning about serial + visual storytelling (aka comics) has moved to Denver from Boulder #planningness #
• Looking forward to @gregdavismusic tonight at the Hemlock. #
• Sad day for crate diggers: Fat Beats closing its NY & LA stores http://ow.ly/2rtUr via @shocklee #
• A little pre-noon James Blackshaw … #
• New Aronofsky looks like Center Stage mashed with X-Men. (I'm especially happy it means a new Clint Mansell score.) via @popcandy @brubaker #
• ♫ Afternoon movie score: "Self Defense" cue by Ranju Majumdar from indie thriller @determinism streaming on @soundcloud http://is.gd/emc8r #
• Mistook passing airplane for weekly noon-Tuesday San Francisco emergency-warning siren; briefly thought it was two hours later than it is. #
• Thanks, Hannes Pasqualini (papernoise.net), who drew my Twitter background this month. More on the Bolanzo, Italy, artist http://is.gd/elRYd #
• Many thanks again to @dylanhorrocks for providing the original illustration for my Twitter account last month (7/20-8/16) http://is.gd/elS8E #
• RIP, Robert Wilson (b. 1957?), Gap Band bassist. Check out 37 tracks that sample 'em (Snoop, Paris, Nas): http://is.gd/el9qv via @shocklee #
• New Disquiet.com email newsletter Wed. includes contest for Books' recent CD, The Way Out. Subscribe here: http://disquiet.com/subscribe/ #
• "I Am Sitting in a Room Podcasting" http://is.gd/ekNMI RT @rootstrata live loop fail #
• Having nothing to do with this, but very pleased that it exists: http://www.myspace.com/weidenbaummetal #
• There have been many great developments in music e-tailing. Searching for an 11-track release before @emusic rolls over is not one of them. #
• Happy 1st anniversary to @new_people in SF's Japantown. Impressive that its Superfrog Gallery y'day could block loud street-festival bands. #
• When mashups happen in "real" life: right now Social D & Nas playing separate stages @sfoutsidelands — listening in distance for the merge. #
• Great free composed-field-recording release by @landrecorder at http://is.gd/ejhs3 I wrote the liner notes. Thanks for the invite, @sbtrmnl #
• For the record, I'm not in Hayward, California, despite what the weirdly inaccurate @twitter auto-location service often seems to believe. #
• The 1/2 quarter-speed / 1/2 hyper-speed dub of Mala's "Don't Let Me Go" (new Soul Jazz 12", flip of Four Tet) is killer http://is.gd/ejgnH #
• I'm closer to @sfoutsidelands physically than @twitter-ly. Don't think I've seen one Tweet on it this entire weekend, though it is trending. #
• I do realize I have conflated some Internet colleagues into one imagined individual, whereas other multiple avatars are in fact one person. #
• Unlike Gilbert&George, I have no political issue with church bells. But when they ring other than on hour or half hour they're disorienting. #
• Impressive. Over 300 active netlabels (free, legal) listed by @displatypus http://is.gd/eiT0Z … My list (merely 114) http://is.gd/eiT4w #
• Morning sounds: shower, dryer, hard drives, plane, and (likely imagined, as it's still early) rumbling of the nearby Outside Lands Festival. #
• Think I'm going this morning to hear Kitaro play in Japantown @new_people — never sure if he's Japan's Jean Michael Jarre or its Mantovani. #
• Enjoying the modern silent film that is driver after driver talking on speaker phone (or Bluetooth earbud) behind windshields. #tati2010 #
• Enjoying the 8bit Steve Reich that is standing in line amid multiple beeping cash registers. #
• Boston alert: @callithumpian doing Gavin Bryars' Sinking of the Titanic on Aug 20 @icainboston #

[ August 21, 2010 / bookmark ]

How to Submit Music (& Apps) for Review on Disquiet.com

This site’s been experiencing a significant uptick in correspondence about how to submit music (as well as apps) for review. I just updated the Disquiet.com F.A.Q page (i.e., Frequently Asked Questions, at disquiet.com/faq) in this regard. Here are the key sections:

4. Can I send you music for review consideration?
I would love to hear your music. However, just to get this clear from the outset, I am a horrible correspondent. I simply don’t have the time to engage in ongoing back and forths via email about whether I plan on covering your music. I get an enormous amount of music from musicians and their record labels, and that doesn’t count all time I spend seeking out music (and sound-related art), so I can’t promise to write back in a timely manner. Honestly, I can’t promise to write back at all. What I can promise is the following: I will listen to what you send to me, and I will consider it for coverage. So, how do you send me music? My preference is that you email me a link to a Zip file containing 320kbps MP3 files. If you feel the need to send me a CD (or vinyl, or some other physical format), you can email me (visit the Contact page) to get my address in San Francisco, where I live. Do not send MP3s as attachments: they clog up my email, and I just delete them. In closing, I do want to hear your music — but I also want to hear other people’s music, and the less time I spend in correspondence, the more time I can spend listening.

5. Do you review sound/audio/music-related apps?
Yes, certainly — apps as well as applications. The intersection of sound and interactivity (aka games) is an important one. Since at least July 2000, I’ve been tagging such content on the site with the term “audio-games.” I can currently review apps written for Apple’s iOS operating system (I have an iPod Touch) and for Android (I have an Android mobile phone), and applications written for the Apple and Windows operating systems (I really should have a proper Linux set up, but currently do not). Just get in touch with me via the Contact page.

Full F.A.Q. at disquiet.com/faq.

[ August 17, 2010 / bookmark ]

Sketches of Sound 5: Hannes Pasqualini

This is the fifth occurrence of a relatively new little Disquiet.com project, called “Sketches of Sound”: inviting illustrators to sketch something sound-related. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.”

The above drawing was done for me for this project by Hannes Pasqualini, who lives in Bolzano, Italy. During the day, Pasqualini works as a communications designer. At night he thinks, writes, draws, and assembles noise into sonic sequences. His love for the unsettling, the macabre, and the absurd can be found in his comics and illustrations (which he has published in Italy and abroad, in books, anthologies, and magazines) and in his musical ramblings. What he likes most is to combine the two disciplines: as a comic artist he’s recently published a book about jazz in Italy during the ’50s, and he has created short comics and illustrations dedicated to acts like Pere Ubu, Bauhaus, and Soap&Skin.

Like a lot of visual artists, Pasqualini also makes music, and he describes his “Sketches of Sound” illustration as “a surreal representation of what I have on my studio desk.” Here, for reference, is a photo of his desk:

And here’s the video trailer (vimeo.com) for the comic Gietz!, which Pasqualini drew; it was written by Andrea Campanella and published by Tunué:

 

If you click through to Pasqualini’s vimeo.com channel, you’ll also see this circuit-bent music tool that he created by using a fan to modulate the sound of the Michael Una’s Beep-it optical theremin:

 

For more on Pasqualini, check out his online portfolio at papernoise.net, his blog at weblog.papernoise.net, his music at soundcloud.com/rumpelfilter, and his comic Spiracle at fav.me.

[ August 16, 2010 / bookmark ]

My Liner Notes to the New Landrecorder EP

The Lisbon, Portugal, netlabel feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com just released a great three-track set by Landrecorder, the British phonographer. FeedbackLoop proprietor Leonardo Rosado (aka twitter.com/sbtrmnl) invited me to write the mini-album’s liner notes, based on his sense that its mix of composed sound and field recordings would entice me. He was by no means mistaken, and he was patient as I took my time to work through Landrecorder’s narrative construction, based around phases of the waking day, as the album’s title, morning | afternoon | evening, suggests. Here is what I wrote:

Reportedly, that would be a music box, not an ice-cream truck, coasting into (aural) view early on during “Evening” — those tinkling notes immediately summoning up (mental) images of childhood, despite their objectively terse, metallic timbres.

“Evening” is the third and final track of Landrecorder’s lovely, daylong, slo-mo odyssey. We know it is a music box because of some brief liner notes provided by Landrecorder, but without that insider information, we might not be entirely certain. This is because Landrecorder mixes field recordings and instrumentation in a way that artfully confuses any preconceived notions of scale.

In that one track alone, we hear mournful piano chords, the delicately wound music box, and a variety of field noise, including birdsong and street sounds — often at the same time. By and large, Landrecorder’s approach is to maintain such sounds at the same relative volume level, and the result is that the piano and the music box, the avian calls and some random bristly disturbance, are all set alongside each other, like so many ducks in a row.

Occasionally he modifies these sounds — there’s some backward masking on “Morning” that mimics the seep of a half-lost thought, and during “Evening” the piano at one point is echoed majestically — but his primary technique is deeply, and creatively, curatorial: combining unassociated sonic elements into something new.

Landrecorder announces the importance of framing in his technique at the album’s outset, when “Morning” begins with an acoustic guitar part on repeat, as if a needle has been set down more than once at the same place on an old piece of vinyl. A similar sense of nostalgia is infused in all three tracks, from the mournful harmonica on “Morning” to the distant chatter of children on “Afternoon,” to the way the sound of a car driving past brings “Evening” (and, hence, the full set) to a close.

This compositional technique mirrors the process of memory, things combined in unlikely combinations, and in unlikely proportions: sometimes warped, sometimes laid bare. And both approaches, in Landrecorder’s hands, lead to tantalizing results.

And, more importantly, you can listen to (and download, for free) morning | afternoon | evening here:

Get the full release at feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com or feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com. More on Landrecorder at twitter.com/landrecorder and landrecorder.wordpress.com.