Disquiet

[ August 15, 2010 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Create (Fill in the Blank) Music

Over at his excellent createdigitalmusic.com website, the prolific Manhattan-based writer and musician Peter Kirn makes the following aside. He’s in the process of describing a forthcoming release by Alessandro Cortini that will include (no kidding) a fully functioning synthesizer, when he makes the (literally) parenthetical comment that he tried to go back in time

“… to tell myself I should include a less literal name for the site, but my past self didn’t believe me”

What he’s getting at is the extent to which the name of his website — and, by extension, that of any publication, online or off — may or may not define what’s covered in it editorially. The “digital” in the name “Create Digital Music” needn’t be taken literally. Only the most perversely post-human, Singularity-minded individuals would take issue with Kirn’s inclusion of analog synthesizers amid his general coverage; the rise of digital music-making has caused a new generation to seek out its analog precedents, and led to numerous digital software emulations of halcyon hardware. That is part of the story.

Furthermore, there’s a long pre-Internet precedent for magazines’ purviews outpacing their logos. It’s unlikely that the editors at Rock & Folk, the French music magazine, think twice about covering hip-hop, or that Down Beat would restrict itself to jazz that has a down beat, or that readers of the New York Review of Books get confused when an article about the World Cup or the naming of a new Supreme Court justice appears untethered to any book in particular.

All of which said, I feel a certain camaraderie with Kirn. I wrote an overview of laptop music for the online publication newmusicbox.org in 2006 (“Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music”), and very late in my final edit realized that I’d been considering Steve Roden as part of the scheme, alongside Fennesz, Ikue Mori, and other musicians — the problem being that Roden doesn’t employ a laptop. Aesthetically, given his fragile music that often draws from real-world and other found sounds, Roden sits alongside many of the musicians I was writing about, but technologically he’s in a different camp. (Fortunately I came to this realization before submitting the story to my editor.)

Technology and aesthetics each engender various types of practice, but they are not inherently mappable to each other in any specific one-to-one manner. Kirn has touched on this very subject himself previously, as I noted back in May of this year (disquiet.com), when he wrote, in part, “I realize I’m making an argument about musical practice based on technology, and that that argument isn’t entirely complete.”

In addition, I have thought on occasion not so much about the name of this site, Disquiet.com, which has aged OK since launching in late 1996, but with the subhead (“ambient/electronica”) and the tagline (“Reflections on ambient/electronic music & conversations with the people who make it”). The word “electronica” in particular seems to have long since fallen from any particular favor, but to my mind, that allows for it to take on new meaning; I like to think of it as being like “Americana,” the varied ephemera of a particular territory. Neither the subhead nor the tagline do full justice to the breadth of what I write about here, which more broadly might be described as “electronically mediated sound,” but even that phrase doesn’t quite do it. I have thought occasionally about adding the phrase “sound art” (or even just “sound”) to either the subhead or the tagline at Disquiet.com, but for now my sense remains that to do so would be — as Kirn might put it — to create a future me who would eventually be able to point out something else that didn’t age particularly well along the way.

[ August 14, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• Bill Fontana will transform @sfmoma bridge w/ "hypersonic speakers and vibration sensors that respond to visitors’ footsteps." Opens Nov 20. #
• Want a push-poller to hang up the phone? Ask who is paying for the "research." (Speaking of which, surveillance exhibit @sfmoma on 10/30.) #
• Construction solo: One lone, invisible hammer slap-echoes crosswise up and down the intersecting streets. #
• The three Palm devices (IIIxe, Tungsten T3, Clie SJ20) in my closet temper my desire to upgrade from a G1 to a Droid 2, at least somewhat. #
• When mashups happen in "real" life (aka meatspace): Patti LaBelle joins cast of Fela! on Broadway http://is.gd/egdXo She'll play his mother. #
• Trailer for promising film on "soundtracker" Gordon Hempton, whose recent book sits alongside Keizer's & Prochnik's http://is.gd/egd6J #
• Neu!, Roedelius, & Fujiya & Miyagi all have CDs on Gronland, the label founded by @groenemeyer, who scored Anton Corbjin's The American. #
• Often when I read about a given DJ's ongoing "residency," I instinctively assume they're apprentice medical practitioners by day. #badtvshow #
• Fog horns are out of control tonight. The Phantom of the Opera has put the pedal to the metal. #
• I think of Los Lobos as the band that releases CDs between Latin Playboys CDs. My csindy.com review of Tin Can Trust: http://is.gd/ef27u #
• The sign in the library reads: "Text Only Zone." Presumably that refers to mobile technology and not the institution's holdings. #
• Despite all those James Murphy tunes in Greenberg, the film's overarching musical theme seems to be the act of dramatically truncating songs #
• Soon as I turn off this computer, it's gonna be all the more quiet. #
• Another day listening (mostly) to 1-track CDs: Ákos Garai (Pilis), Oxide (Chop Shop), Dirac (Phon), & Nilsen/Stilluppsteypa (Passing Out). #
• That previous comment was John Lurie (Lounge Lizards) talking in the sad article about him in the Aug 16 @newyorker issue http://is.gd/ecjGG #
• "There's a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between B'way & Lafayette–a saxophone sounds incredible there at about 6 o'clock." #
• Workmen next door just removed from ground an ancient empty metal drum 1.5x size of my car. That's what the banging has been about. #
• Was just followed by musician whose recent album I was listening to a few hours ago. Maybe my @songbirdteam install has sprung a leak? #
• No, silly @gracenotetweets — it's a Steve Roden 3" CD (Ecstasy Showered) not chapter 17 of disc 7 of Stephen King's Bag of Bones audiobook. #
• This is the Bomb Squad: @shocklee notes @cdmblogs post on Isao Hashimoto's thermonuclear-testing sonification (1945-98) http://is.gd/ebHnX #
• RIP, Jack Parnell (b. 1923), among many other things the (human) bandleader for The Muppet Show. http://is.gd/ebDrd #mahna #mahna #
• I'll be presenting on storytelling (visual + serial, aka comics) at the #planningness conference in Boulder on Sep30/Oct1: planningness.com #
• So, iOS folders can only handle 12 apps despite a pane with room for another 8 & an interface that trained us to swipe across the landscape? #
• Quake hit while listening to Bill Laswell, Toshinori Kondo, & DJ Krush. Now that's some heavy bass. (Also felt by @footage at 5:52pm) #
• Only listened to CDs consisting of 1 track today: Celer Brittle, Terry Riley In C, Brendan Murray Commonwealth, Village Orchestra Sirens … #
• Autofill choices in @soundcloud when listing a track as "8bit": 8bit, 8bitelectronic, 8bits, 8bitish, 8bit*synth*pop #
• "We stared grimly at the radio": Katherine Dunn on listening to boxing in her dad's car while her mom screamed bloody murder. Black Clock 12 #
• Used to think tags would replace genres. Still do, but this morning wonder if it may end up being waveform visualizations that do. #
• Morning sounds: white noise of hard drives & traffic. Then: the beeping of bus slowing to stop while another passes in opposite direction. #
• Car behind me kept honking as I backed up. Turned out to be empty, with an auto-proximity alert. How many beeps to drain the car's battery? #
• I know far too much for my good about the Sprint Samsung Epic 4G and the Verizon Motorola Droid 2. I blame blipverts. #
• Morning sound: a bus that definitely didn't stop for a stop sign. #
• Headed north: 20 miles, and probably as many degrees Fahrenheit; iPod loaded for bear. #
• D'oh! The SFEMF is across town, near Roosevelt's Tamales, but there's a special event at the de Young. No matter; just got my festival pass. #
• The 2010 sfemg.org (Sept 9-11) includes Chowning, Buchla, Mathieu, Trimpin, Hammer, Müller, & Cortini & is walking distance from my house. #

[ August 12, 2010 / bookmark ]

Incident Far From South Street: John Lurie’s Tragic Acoustemology

The recent feature story on John Lurie published in the New Yorker (“Sleeping with Weapons,” newyorker.com) reads like the plot to what could be a recent-vintage Paul Auster novel.

It’s the tale of an aging Manhattanite artist who retreats to the desert, fleeing perceived fears. He is as vain as he is talented, and as paranoid as he is vain, and readers don’t take long to recognize that the true enemy is inescapable: himself.

Lurie (pictured above, from his thrift-store-suit heyday), the once and (one hopes, despite the dire tenor of the story, which appears to portray a highly sensitive and less-than-stable individual) future Lounge Lizards jazz saxophonist and band leader, currently hides in plain sight in Palm Springs. What he’s hiding from is a friend back in Manhattan whom he considers a threat to his life.

According to the story, written by Tad Friend, these are among the things we know about Lurie: he only recently started playing saxophone again, for the first time since 2001; he has been suffering from various physical maladies, some of which may not exist; he sleeps with a machete under his bed (along with pepper spray and a “ninja baton”); he is that rare individual who hires a personal assistant who does not know how to drive.

That assistant, a Turkish woman, brings to mind the dutiful, bewildered, and self-composed Hungarian cousin from Jim Jarmusch‘s Stranger Than Paradise, the 1984 film that put Lurie’s face on the cultural map. While there is a particular individual whom Lurie fears enough to have left New York, he shares in the article various other personal antagonisms, including one involving Jarmusch: “When ‘Stranger’ came out,” he says, “I became this guy Jim discovered, this dumb Kiefer Sutherland guy.” The complaint seems odd, since Lurie went on to work with Jarmusch again, and because as the composer of the score to Stranger Than Paradise — a spare string quartet that is one of his great musical accomplishments — Lurie certainly was not easily mistakable for the character he portrays in the film. (Also, in 1984 Sutherland was at just the start of his career, and had filmed nothing of any consequence. This means that even if the complaint isn’t recent, its depiction is.)

In any case, at the very end of the New Yorker piece, Lurie says the following:

“There’s a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between Broadway and Lafayette — a saxophone sounds incredible there at about six o’clock.”

His appreciation of Manhattan is a very specific one. He comes from an era when life only happened below 14th Street, and that remains very much his mindset. His understanding of this aural space, of those acoustic properties, exemplifies the idea of “acoustemology,” which Steven Feld has defined as “local conditions of acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination embodied in the culturally particular sense of place.” What’s striking is that when Lurie speaks of missing New York, of the life he left behind, what he focuses on isn’t just the place, but the sonic particulars of that place.

What he’s describing is a deeper understanding of sonic life. When people speak of the sounds of a given place, they’re often describing the sounds they hear: the street cars of New Orleans, the taxi cabs of New York, the calls-to-prayer of Mecca, the surf of Big Sur, the bells of London.

What Lurie describes, however, is a place’s capacity for — its potential for — sound, the way the physical environment shapes sound. And aside from mentions of his flourishing art career, it’s arguably the only hopeful moment in the entire story.

[ August 7, 2010 / bookmark ]

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

• If R. Murray Shafer led the White Stripes, it might sound like the trailer for the film Sound of Noise: http://is.gd/e7yci Gear-shift melody #
• First morning birdsong in week. Farmer logic points to a non-wintry day. Of course, it was just one bird. And it isn't singing any longer. #
• New @touchmusic podcast (after 50-plus of field recordings & music derived therefrom) is a short story by Ian R. MacLeod: http://is.gd/e6QTl #
• New Gidon Kremer (De Profundis, out 9/14) includes Pärt, Piazzolla, a Nyman theme from Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers, & more. #
• ♫ Afternoon ambience: "p jørgensen – astoria (Chris Herbert remix, excerpt)" — i.e., by @cjherbert — stream: http://is.gd/e6teR #
• Belated RIP, South Africa sax-ist Robbie Jansen (b. 1949), among other things sideman of Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) http://is.gd/e6kVv #
• The title track off the forthcoming Bad Plus CD, Never Stop, is like how Moby hears Nina Simone, and I mean that in a good way. #
• Hoping DJ Premier's tracks for the new Kanye album sample "The Hammond Song," or something off Evening Star or Darryl Hall's Sacred Songs. #
• Rabbinical wisdom: "They made a lot of noise, like a penny in a can; shake it, and it makes a lot of noise." http://is.gd/e69xL #
• Zimmer on Nolan's intent with the transformed Édith Piaf theme in Inception: "like huge foghorns over a city" http://is.gd/e660P #
• What seemed like a foghorn turns out to be a plane passing low, its fuselage an aerodynamic didgeridoo. #
• "Dreamcrasher, With Brady Hammock" on @awl is like if Philip K. Dick had rewritten Sweet Smell of Success http://bit.ly/cG36x6 #
• Morning music: John Zorn's Alhambra Love Songs — if they make new Peanuts cartoons, the soundtrack music has been written and recorded. #
• I love how the auto-location in the @twitter web interface switches back & forth between Central & Outer Richmond. #quantumliquifaction #
• The @guardiannews prints letter addressing absence of Louis Andriessen from its Willem Breuker obituary: http://is.gd/e4SRt #
• Ah, not the dryer going crazy; drilling on the street a block down. #
• A @serial_consign tweet made me think of this: If anyone out there's teaching sound-art classes, I'd love to see your syllabus. #
• ♫ Scott Johnson's music traces the shape of speech. There are few composers I wish were more prolific: http://is.gd/e4yEn @newmusicbox #
• Pondering how un-neutral net will prioritize writing about sounds of refrigerators & interviews with people whose records sell in the 1000s. #
• Love when a craigslist search for Nexus One brings up someone trying to sell their comic-book collection. #
• Morning sounds: sanitation & public transportation, no birds. I may have to start playing birdsong MP3s if this uber-chilly summer keeps up. #
• Why does @twitter think my location is San Leandro, deep in the East Bay, when I'm in the Richmond District, 2 blocks from Golden Gate Park? #
• The bathroom at @frjtz plays language tapes, I guess to help us get the Belgian part of the fries. Now that's commercial sound art. #
• Despite how nifty all these smartphones are, none have made me more interested in talking on the phone. #
• Glacial ambience: We're discussing the @_type re-release of Thomas Köner's Permafrost: http://is.gd/e0C35 Full album of streaming for free. #
• Cartoonist Richard Sala has posted a comic I commissioned from him for Pulse! back in 1994. Movie-score fans will enjoy http://is.gd/e0sFV #
• Headed to Sactown for the day. #
• Just picked up a ticket to see John Zorn & Terry Riley playing as a duo at Yoshi's on August 26, 8pm. Man, am I looking forward to this. #
• Fave @firefox addons: ChatZilla, Delicious bookmarks, Fission (URL mouseover + load statusbar), Hide Find Bar, Screengrab, Split Browser. #
• Congrats to Paul Clipson, one of Film Comment's "25 filmmakers for the 21st century": http://bit.ly/cMh4pw via @studentsofdecay #
• Putting the "hush" in "hush money." When one trade's physical-ecology green for acoustic-ecology pollution: http://is.gd/dWF8y #windfarm #
• Morning sounds: a moiré lattice of high-pitched whir produced in tandem by the refrigerator and the Tivo machine. #
• Further convinced the two most important household-care products are (1) generalized cleansing agent & (2) subscriptions to museum podcasts. #

[ August 6, 2010 / bookmark ]

Brief Field Guide to Dance Music Genres

Little piece I did for the Colorado Springs Independent (csindy.com) on “the fragmented world of electronic dance subgenres.” The article coincides with the Love Festival happening there this coming Saturday, August 7 (thelovefestival.com). Brief overview of various taxonomic intricacies, such as house (“As close as electronica has come to producing its own recognizable soul music”), techno (“perhaps best understood as emphasizing tech over sex”), minimal techno (“emphasis on monotony as a tool to both Zen-state zone-outs and cathartic freak-outs”), glitch (“celebrates failure and error”), IDM (“Stands for ‘intelligent dance music,’ which doesn’t exactly make nice with all that other dance music”), dubstep (“takes a kind of taut, broken shuffle and makes it reverberate … into dark fantasy of urban mystery”), trance (“Relatively more melodic … ‘Melodic,’ that is, relative to dance music; we’re not talking the Beatles”)”, and electro (“If robots from the 1980s made hip-hop and aspired to be pop stars, this is what it would sound like”), with suggested key acts for each.

Also, a little bit of additional terminology, including my advice on how to best experience a rave-like setting: “Massive party with multiple electronic acts, generally held in large warehouse or outdoor area. Unlike at any other such festival-style event, the best situation arguably isn’t watching an individual act, but standing at some blissful Venn Diagram spot where multiple simultaneous performances overlap in one singular, chest-shaking sonic experience.”

Full piece at csindy.com.

[ August 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Images of the Week: Nicolai’s Theorem

Images from the art exhibit “Moiré” by Carsten Nicolai, perhaps better known in the world of electronic music as Alva Noto. The show ran at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan from May 21 through June 25 of this year:

The exhibit is associated with Nicolai’s recent book, also titled Moiré, which follows his similar collection Grid. Both volumes present numerous examples of the stark geometries defined by the books’ titles. Moiré is a meta-sequel to Grid, in that it focuses on how multiple patterns, when combined, produce the illusion of a subsequent pattern. The exhibit presents a range of op art that plays with viewers’ perceptions. What’s especially interesting is how the patterning mirrors Nicolai’s vibrant-yet-spartan musical output.

Images from the review by Geeta Dayal at frieze.com of the show (in which she reports, “Nicolai’s visual work is so well integrated with his work in sound that while there’s no music to be heard here — unless the hum of an air compressor counts — you can see music in everything.”), and from the gallery’s website, thepacegallery.com.

[ August 1, 2010 / bookmark ]

Top 10 Posts & Searches from July 2010

Usually the majority of the most popular posts in a given month on Disquiet.com are drawn from the site’s daily free (and legal) recommendations of MP3s. July was no exception, though four non-freebie posts also appear in the top 10: (1) the MP3 Discussion Group’s take on Move of Ten, the recent EP by Autechre (cover pictured at left); (2) my essay on the use and meanings of sound in the novella Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo; (3) an announcement of an essay I published (at weallmakemusic.com) on “5 Reasons for Musicians to Consider the Creative Commons”; and (4) the fourth entry in this site’s “Sketches of Sound” series, in which illustrators (in this case New Zealand comics artist Dylan Horrocks, best known for his graphic novel Hicksville) draw objects associated with sound. Horrocks drew a vinyl LP in its paper sleeve.

The six most popular free downloads of the month, rounding out the top 10 most popular posts, were (5) Alec Vance having his way with a vuvuzela sample (that’s the plastic horn made famous worldwide during the recent World Cup); (6) a live performance of Christian Marclay‘s “Graffiti Composition” from 2006 by Melvin Gibbs, Mary Halvorson, Lee Ranaldo, Vernon Reid, and Elliott Sharp; (7) a podcast of field recordings (raw and cooked) produced by John Kannenberg; (8) Mystified‘s retro-proto-electronica (Adventures of Plunderman); (9) minimal-techno space music by Mensa (aka Edu Comelles); and (10) some blissful pop-noise from the group Truman Peyote.

That Autechre discussion was also the most popular post of the last 60 days, and the most popular post of the last 90 days was the previous MP3 Discussion Group, on the subject of Oh, the recent EP by Oval.

The top searches of the month were “autechre” (big surprise there), “aairria” (subject of a couple Downstream entries), “lesley flanigan” (interviewed here in June, and shown in the photo at left), and “oval,” and then in a multi-way tie “:¬l” (that’s a musician’s name), “aphex” (as in Aphex Twin), “exit strategy,” “green day” (your guess is as good as mine), “nah und fern” (the title of a box set of work by Gas, aka Wolfgang Voigt), “p-funk,” “rss,” “terry riley,” “topic,” and “vuvuzela.” That’s leaving out search requests that yield null results.