Disquiet

[ March 14, 2010 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Cassette Tape Loop

The word “tape” has long since moved from specific physical reference to metaphor. Most tape loops and mix tapes and tape recordings today are entirely digital, and the word “tape” serves as an aura-enhancing vestige of a time and place way back when and where those metaphors originated.

In the past year, the cassette tape has seen something of a resurgence, in large part thanks to the development of dedicated cassette-tape record labels. It’s also popped up in furniture design and illustration (and even as a Marc Jacobs USB-hub gadget), but in most cases when the cassette appears it’s as a totem of a time long gone.

Below is an image of an elegant cassette-tape loop constructed by Marc Fischer, a member of the duo Unrecognizable Now (whom I wrote about last month: disquiet.com).

As he explains it, it’s based on an earlier design, and his attempt involved using as much of the interior cassette space as possible. It’s lovely how the familiar mechanisms of a cassette tape appear in a slightly unfamiliar setup, how the looping device retains the structural integrity of the original, and simply builds upon it. This isn’t nostalgia, and nor is it ironic; it’s a logical step forward for a device that time hasn’t quite forgotten.

More on Fischer’s tape-loop experiment at unrecnow.com/dust. He’s promised audio examples in the near future.

[ March 13, 2010 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Gann on Cage’s Silence (First Impressions)

From the preface to Kyle Gann’s new book, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ (Yale University Press), which I’m reading right now:

“I had to consciously remember that not every music lover out there has 4′33″, as I do, in his blood.”

What’s striking about the book is that it is, indeed, written by a music lover, as Gann describes himself, even though that music lover is also an accomplished composer, a teacher, and most prominently, a music critic — perhaps as best known for his nearly 20 years as a critic for the Village Voice, and more recently for his blogging at artsjournal.com/postclassic. It’s arguable that for a generation of music listeners (and writers, and perhaps even composers), Gann has an influence somewhat along the lines of that which his former colleague, Robert Christgau, has on rockist critics. That comparison comes to mind because No Such Thing as Silence is, in many ways, a book about influence. Gann is quite open from the start about how Cage’s prominence in new music caused Gann to, in effect, listen elsewhere for a long time: to wrestle with lesser-known subjects, rather than to heap more meaning onto someone, something, that had long since been codified.

This slim book, though, results from his realization that even that which within a subculture might be understood as having certain inherent meaning, might to the broader culture be misunderstood — or, more dangerously, to have come to take on an entirely different meaning. In the case of Cage’s 4′33″, in which a pianist sits at a closed piano for that length of time, inviting the audience (forcing them, some might say) to pay attention to the sounds that would otherwise be considered the equivalent of a tabula rasa, it seems that Gann’s biggest concern is that it has come to be thought of by some as a prank.

And for anyone concerned that this excellent primer on Cage’s thinking might be too “academic,” too culturally remote, for general reading, just give a few moments to its preface, in which Gann affectionately recounts how he performed 4′33″ as part of his high school piano recital back in 1973.

[ March 13, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• Apologies for the dead week of post-less-ness at Disquiet.com. Coming out of a major cold. #
• Headlines that don't mean what I think they mean: "Primus buying distressed U.S. property" http://is.gd/ahMde #
• The show Dexter is pretty darn good but it seems to have far fewer score cues (by Daniel Licht, theme by Rolfe Kent) than do most TV dramas. #
• Never had the flu before. "Flu" isn't the right word. It needs more hard consonants. And maybe some high-pitched headache-inducing vowels. #
• Obama hired Edward Tufte? Next state of the union's gonna have awesome info graphics. Now get Cliff Martinez for sound design. #
• RIP, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse (b. 1962), indie-rock standard-bearer; Danger Mouse + David Lynch collaborator on Dark Night of the Soul. #
• Boris Karloff on drive-in movie experience, from Peter Bogdanovich's great Targets (1968): "Strange not to hear any reactions, isn't it?" #
• Sounds when you have the flu: digital thermometer's beep, pounding heart beat, throbbing skull, every sudden loud noise, tea kettle. #
• Best Oscars story on sound I've read so far: Virginia Heffernan — aka @page88 — on sonic effort evident in Hurt Locker: http://is.gd/9TF4q #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Sundays = bells of the many Richmond District churches ringing at noon slightly out of sync. #

[ March 6, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Saturdays = an absence: the lack of an alarm clock ringing. #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Fridays = the way, when evening comes along, the city seems to wake up. #
• Music/arts publicists have a lot of fun with my last name. Latest bit of humor to appear in my post office box? "Marc Weidenboom." #
• RIP, bossa nova founding figure Johnny Alf (b. Alfredo Jose da Silva, 1929) http://is.gd/9N7vN #
• RIP, Robert Crafton III (b. 1962) of '80s heavily electronic hip-hop group Newcleus. http://is.gd/9GkY1 … Wikki wikki … #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Thursdays = it's sound art hidden amid ambiguous gallery listings in SF Chronicle's 96 Hours. #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Wednesdays = contrast between crowd noise at comic shop & Civic Center farmers market. #
• The puddles this morning are more MC Escher than usual. #
• Tremendous dubby beatmaking featuring samples by Haitian drummers, from @beatsantique http://is.gd/9zuHF … Funds go to disaster relief. #
• Dub45 is a great new online label from @timprebble … http://dub45.com/ #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Tuesdays = the noon air-raid siren, and subsequent recorded announcement. #
• RIP, T-Bone Wolk (b. 1951): accordion, Laurie Anderson's "Strange Angels"; bass, Kurtis Blow's "These Are the Breaks"; zillion more credits #
• If there's a sound for each day of the week, Mondays = the morning arrival of garbage trucks outside the front of the house. #
• Shutter Island score includes Nam June Paik, Max Richter, Brian Eno, Ingram Marshall, Penderecki, Adams & Scelsi? http://is.gd/9nSlw #
• Hive is powerful. Fact posts white-label Autechre megamix at http://is.gd/9kD24 & hive sorts out tracklist at http://is.gd/9kCWV #
• 011001000110100101110011011100010111010
  101101001011001010111010000100000011000
  100110100101101110011000010111001001111
  001 #

[ March 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Top 10 Posts & Searches from February 2010

Eight of the top 10 most-read posts during February were what amounts to a globe-spanning list of Downstream entries — that is, of legal freely downloadable recommended listening. These included (1) a Japanese turntablism blowout, (2) Bulgarian-tinged British instrumental hip-hop, (3) truly minimal techno from Switzerland, (4) field recordings made at the South Pole, (5) Brazilian electronic music circa 1970, (6) the Gristleism a la Herbie Hancock in Russia (the cover of which is pictured above), (7) tessellations of bass loops in Nottingham, and (8) ambient-leaning post-rock (or vice versa) from Portland, Oregon.

Also making the top 10, (9) a summary of recent news, including mentions of Michael Gordon’s return to Miami, Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” (as referenced in Don DeLillo’s recent novel, Point Omega), and a display of album covers by Josef Albers, and (10) some thoughts on iPad software bloat. In all, there were 35 posts in February on Disquiet.com.

The most popular post of the last 60 days was an MP3 of sound art produced from recordings made at an Indian call center.

The most popular post of the last 90 days was an overview of the, in my opinion, 10 best iPhone/iPod Touch music/sound apps of 2009.

The most popular post of the last year was a streaming playlist of electronica built by various artists, all made from field recordings.

The 10 most searched-for terms on Disquiet.com during the month of February were, in declining order of popularity, with some ties in there: “brian” (as in Eno), “topic,” “laptop,” “commercial,” “fm,” “ito,” “buddha machine,” “pleasing,” “unyo” (an artist on the Hexawe netlabel), and “wilkerson” (as in Phillip) — and for what it’s worth, number 11 was “Autechre,” who have a new album out, Oversteps (Warp).

[ February 28, 2010 / bookmark ]

Images of the Week: Household Music Wares

Examples of work by Dutch artist Dennis de Bel, including his Sew-O-Phone and Vacumonium:

Another example of contemporary artists making good on Erik Satie’s idea of furniture music.

More on de Bel at his website, danos.nl. Found via everydaylistening.com, which links to audio of the Vacumonium.

[ February 27, 2010 / bookmark ]

Quotes of the Week: Quote Reality

Reading the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is a sure way to raise my blood pressure, but I don’t necessarily expect the same from its book reviews. In the February 22 edition of the newspaper, Sam Sacks (an editor at openlettersmonthly.com) weighed in on David Shields’s latest effort in literary activism, the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010). The review is an almost entirely negative response that focuses on Shields’s book as seen mostly through the lens of writing, but Sacks’s apparent near-dismissal of the artistic value inherent in collage cuts too close to home for anyone who spends a lot of time listening to music that is largely comprised from pre-existing material. As he writes of Shields in his review at one point:

And while he also shows a playful awareness of John Barth and other forerunner advocates of experimental fiction, Mr. Shields’s proposed forms are best likened to the collages of Robert Rauschenberg (duly quoted in “Reality Hunger”), which mix self-portraiture, pages torn from books, defaced photographs and other “available material.”

Sacks takes issue with what he describes as Shields’s lack of interest in “any artifice that is not outspokenly aware of its artificiality.” Yet he fails to recognize the artificiality, let alone the humor, inherent in the book’s packaging, which wraps the cover in blurbs from various writers. Sacks seems to think he’s uncovered some sort of logrolling scandal (“Of the 14 blurbers, excerpts from work by fully half of them appear in the book itself, meaning that these esteemed authors are in effect heaping praise on themselves”), and in the process misses out on how the exaggerated presence of those blurbs on the cover is intended to draw attention to them — and to provide a model for what is inside.

Most prominent among the book’s blurbers is Jonathan Lethem, who produced an essay-length riff along the lines of Shields’s Reality Hunger back in the February 2007 issue of the magazine Harper’s. Titled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” it is built almost entirely from pre-existing text, yet reads as a fully formed work. Shields’s book, by contrast, is a string of loosely connected fragments, sort of like the book-length equivalent of a Tumblr blog.

There’s a telling video feature on Shields at the book’s Amazon page (amazon.com). In it, Shields references the poet Fernando Pessoa, which brings his artistic process full circle for this website, which is named for Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. But more of interest are these following two comments by him:

It’s an ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who, living in an unbearably artificial world, are breaking ever larger chunks of quote reality into their work.

I don’t feel any of the guilt normally attached to quote plagiarism, which seems to me organically connected to creativity itself. The history of art is the history of appropriation. All art is theft. And so much of the laws that we have now protect the lawyers and hamstring the artists.

I couldn’t help but hear — and, subsequently, after transcribing them, to then read — those uses of the word “quote” as an object of the sentences, rather than simply as verbal accentuation meant to highlight the words that immediately follow them, the spoken-punctuation equivalent to finger-quotes. For in Shields world, which is to say our own, “quote reality” is the reality that is constructed from pre-existing material. And “quote plagiarism” is the act of consciously utilizing chunks of material that already stand on their own, be they written phrases, or musical riffs, or image details.

It’s worth noting that those two chunks of what Shields says appear in immediate succession in the video, and when yoked together serve as a single statement, but they are clearly (at least in the video) sourced from different events.

Sacks’s review at wsj.com. More on Shields at davidshields.com. His book Remote (1996) was a prescient reflection on an information-mediated existence, published just before the Internet made that a widespread reality. Remote was published the year after B.W. Powe’s superb Outage: A Journey into Electric City, and I recommend reading them in tandem. Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” is at harpers.org.

Update March 16, 2010: In his Sunday New York Times Book Review essay on Shields’s Reality Hunger on March 14, Luc Sante has a very different take on the book than did the Wall Street Journal’s Sacks. In the piece, Sante weighs in quite favorably, makes note of the Lethem connection, and draws the comparison to the role of appropriation in music — going even a step further, to touch on the aesthetic value of the fissures inherent in sampling (electronic fans, note the use of the word “glitch”), rather than merely focusing on the collage-like aspect of art-by-accrual.

Here’s a key section of the review:

So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise.

Full review (“The Fiction of Memory”) at nytimes.com.