Disquiet

[ July 5, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: R2-D2’s Descendents

Sound designer Ben Burtt on his work on the film Wall-E:

Eve is a very high-tech robot and so, unlike the motors and squeaks and metallic sounds you’ve got with Wall-E, Eve is held together with some sort of force fields and magnetism. A great deal of her sound is purely synthesized musical type of tones that I could make in a music synthesizer and treat it various ways, because her whole character was supposed to be graceful and ethereal, so she always has an electronic noise associated with her floating around.

Read the full interview with Burtt, who was also responsible for the voice of Star Wars’s R2-D2: moviesonline.ca.

[ July 1, 2008 / bookmark ]

tangents / Electroplankton, Alaska, cabaret …

Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: Playing catch up on links I’ve accumulated. … Is the Nintendo DS video game Electroplankton out of print? Someone’s selling it for over 70 bucks, used, on amazon.com. (Thanks, Jeff.) … Speaking of which, amazon.com has updated its underacknowledged free-download service, now as part of the blue-light specials at amazon.com/mp3deals. …

Alex Ross headed to Alaska to meet up with composer John Luther Adams (newyorker.com). Adams recounts a specific moment when the intensity of Alaska’s importance to him and to his music became clear: “I knew that I wanted to hear the unheard, that I wanted to somehow transpose the music that is just beyond the reach of our ears into audible vibrations. I knew that it had to be its own space.” … Stephen Holden, the New York Times’s resident cabaret beat reporter (how many other newspapers have a cabaret beat?), bemoans the decision by the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan to end the 14-year tenure of resident pianist and singer Daryl Sherman. Marking the distinction between live piano and the presence of an in situ entertainer, he writes, “The Waldorf still has live piano music in Peacock Alley on the way to the hotel’s Lexington Avenue entrance, but that serves as ambient background tinkling” (nytimes.com). …

Mac-only, so I have yet to try it, but Bitnotic says to be an ambient generator (bitnotic.com). … An automated soundtrack service (soundtrack.pumpaudio.com). … The Mosquito has been banned by at least one county (engadget.com). … There’s no apparent way to search within a genre at emusic.com (if only I could search for “instrumental” within “hip-hop”), but if you’ve got some small number of points left in your monthly subscription, there’s a service that’ll find, say, albums in a certain genre with fewer than a certain number of tracks (search.dslgateways.com).

Word’s already out, but belatedly, David Byrne has said that he and Brian Eno are working on their first album-length collaboration since My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (nydailynews.com). … As I mentioned earlier this week (disquiet.com), the Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet remix collection I curated has been downloaded over 20,000 times (archive.org); what I didn’t know at the time is that it’s also now available as a collection of ringtones (beemp3.com). …

R.I.P.: Tristram Cary (born 1925), eminent British electronic composer whose music apeared in Dr. Who, Quatermass & the Pit, and other films (bbc.co.uk, guardian.co.uk). … Bebe Barron (born 1920), who is best known for her work with her husband, Louis Barron, on the score to Forbidden Planet (createdigitalmusic.com, echoes.org, cinefantastiqueonline.com). I never met Bebe Barron but I did have the pleasure of editing the interview with her, written by the now deceased composer Richard Zvonar, that appeared in the magazine e/i (ei-mag.com) several years ago. … Jimmy Giuffre (born 1921), experimental jazz woodwind player (nytimes.com, telegraph.co.uk). His Jimmy Giuffre 4 outfit, with electric keyboardist Pete Levin (brother and musical colleague of prog bassist Tony Levin), has been credited with venturing into ambient territory. … Henry Brant (born 1913), spatial-music specialist (sfcmp.blogspot.com, dallasobserver.com, allaboutjazz.com, artsjournal.com/postclassic). … Michel Waisvisz (born 1949), STEIM founder (createdigitalmusic.com, rarefrequency.com, synthtopia.com). … Alexander Courage (born 1919), composer of the Star Trek theme (nytimes.com). … And as noted recently as a Sunday “Image of the Week” (disquiet.com), Albert Hofmann (born 1906), who first synthesized LSD in a laboratory setting, passed away (telegraph.co.uk). … The Yahoo! group that began a decade ago as an online discussion place for music covered in the British magazine Wire is being closed down as usage has dropped to about 30 message per month (groups.yahoo.com). … And while it’s not a resurrection by any means, perhaps a new magazine will fill in where the defunct hip-hop-production periodical Scratch once reigned (beattips.com).

Grey Market: The Spliff Huxtable blog (subtitled: “Hip Hop Production for the Heads”) posts a heap of Pete Rock instrumentals (spliffhuxtable.com) and at Passion of the Weiss, Jeff Weiss posts an instrumental of the great recent Busta Rhymes track “Don’t Touch Me (Throw Da Water on ‘Em),” produced by Grind Music team of LV and Sean C (MP3, passionweiss.com).

[ June 30, 2008 / bookmark ]

San Francisco Symphony 2008-2009: Bates, Ligeti, Gubaidulina

The San Francisco Symphony’s 2008-2009 season seems lighter on contemporary fare than was the previous year. Five events stand out, chief among them the world premiere of the SFS-commissioned The B-Sides by Mason Bates (May 20, 22 and 23, 2009). Bates performs electronic music under the name Masonic; more info on him at masonicelectronica.com. (Bates is also contributing new work to a series of performances by the Bay Area vocal group Chanticleer, March 20 - 22, 2009, at the SF Conservatory of Music; on that bill, as well, are pieces by young composers Shawn Crouch, who has done some work for computer, and Tarik O’Regan, whose “Scattered Rhymes” and “Virelai: Douce dame jolie” appeared on an album earlier this year alongside material by Gavin Bryars.)

There are Symphony programs of György Ligeti (Requiem, famed for its deployment by Stanley Kubrick in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, on March 5 - 7, 2009, and the attenuated wonder that is Lontano on September 4, the season’s opening night, plus 6 and 7, 2008 — the latter, unfortunately, scheduled against one night of the annual San Francisco Electronic Music Festival) and two works by Sofia Gubaidulina (the world premiere of an SFS-commissioned work that apparently didn’t have a name at the time of the publication of the season schedule, on February 18, 20 and 21, 2009, and her Violin Concerto No. 2, in tempus präsens, having its U.S. premiere on February 27 and 28, 2009). If I’m missing anything else that I shouldn’t be, please let me know.

Here’s the writeup on last year’s season: disquiet.com.

[ June 29, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: AirPiano

The AirPiano, created by Omer Yosha:

“Specifications: Polyphonic, MIDI protocol, Up to 24 keys / 8 faders, USB connectivity.” More info at airpiano.de (via createdigitalmusic.com, hackaday.com, engadget.com).

[ June 28, 2008 / bookmark ]

Our Lives in the Bush MP3s / Over 20,000 Served

The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 20,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 27-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet consists of a dozen remixes I solicited of two tracks off that album.

The songs are all available for free download in various formats (192Kbps MP3, 64 Kbps MP3, Ogg Vorbis, VBR MP3) at:

archive.org/details/OurLivesInTheBushOfDisquiet

Here’s the lineup, with links to the 192Kbps MP3s and to the websites of the contributing musicians:

1. (MP3) “Help Me Help Me” — AllThatFall
2. (MP3) “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” — Roddy Schrock
3. (MP3) “Leftover Secrets to Tell” — Pocka
4. (MP3) “Secret Life Remix” — Stephane Leonard
5. (MP3) “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” — (dj) morsanek
6. (MP3) “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — MrBiggs
7. (MP3) “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” — john kannenberg
8. (MP3) “Somebody Help Us” — My Fun
9. (MP3) “Hey” — Mark Rushton
10. (MP3) “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” — Prehab
11. (MP3) “Not Enough Africa” — Ego Response Technician
12. (MP3) “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” — doogie

More info at disquiet.com/bushofghosts. Thanks to all the contributors, including Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), who produced the beautiful “cover” (shown above) and “back cover” for the collection. The project would not have been possible without the instigation of Eno and Byrne, who posted the raw materials of the original songs at bush-of-ghosts.com/remix.

On Bush of Disquiet’s one-year anniversary, September 4, 2007, it had been downloaded almost 6,000 times (see disquiet.com), which means that the rate of downloads has increased.

[ June 28, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Terra Firma

From wall text at an exhibit currently on view at the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon:

there is not much good that is not in some way based on something old that is good

The sentiment serves sample-based composers and remixers.

The full context of the quote is: “All my training has been in offices doing classical things, with a strong leaning toward the Greek…and I believe…there is not much good that is not in some way based on something old that is good.” The attribution is architect A.E. Doyle (1877 - 1928). The exhibit is “Terra Cotta Portland,” which opened on March 29, 2008. More information at visitahc.org.

[ June 22, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: iKalimba

One of many new music-creation interfaces for Apple’s iPhone — an electronic kalimba, or African thumb piano:

Image by John Biehler (johnbiehler.com), via Peter Kirn’s createdigitalmusic.com.

[ June 21, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Tenori-Off

Recent Twitter post by Josh Santangelo (endquote.com, stimulant.io), a Seattle, Washington-based web developer:

Ordered a Tenori-On (tenori-onusa.com). Soon, there will be one more crappy amateur electronic musician in the world.

Original at twitter.com/endquote.

[ June 15, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Satoh to 11

A stomp box by Japanese artist Yoshihiko Satoh:

More on Satoh at tbb.t-com.ne.jp/hipopo-art. Visit the site for numerous additional such art-boxes. (Via sound designer Tim Prebble’s blog, substation.co.nz.)

[ June 14, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Surf Advisory

From the San Francisco Chronicle review of the documentary film Surfwise:

Advisory: This film contains profanity and strong sexual material and a really unfortunate industrial electronic tune that sounds too much like Greg Brady covering a Nine Inch Nails song.

The film was directed by Doug Pray. The review (at sfgate.com) is by Peter Hartlaub. I haven’t seen Surfwise yet, so I’m not sure which song among those listed at movies.yahoo.com is the offending one. The quote reminded me that there’s some elegant Erik Satie, “Trois Gymnopedies,” in an earlier surf film, Riding Giants (2004) directed by skateboard figure Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys), and the performance was by Peralta’s son, Austin Peralta, who must have been about 13 or 14 years old when the track was recorded.