Disquiet

[ June 8, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Buddha Machine 2.0

A sneak peek at the new edition of the Buddha Machine:

The photo appeared yesterday, June 7, on the website of the duo FM3, fm3buddhamachine.com, under the heading “First photos of Buddha Machine 2.0!” with the following text:

The FM3 Buddha Machine 2.0.
Three new colours. Nine new loops. In stores Autumn 2008. Three new colours. Nine new loops. In stores Autumn 2008.

[ June 7, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Diddley’s Beat

On the occasion of Bo Diddley’s passing, this is Andy Gill writing in the Independent:

Somehow, there’s an integral drama to the stop-start, push-pull of the beat that enables it to remain fresh and exciting for far longer at a time than more direct rhythms. In simple riff terms, the Bo Diddley beat is one of the strongest girders in rock’s entire edifice.

Full article at independent.co.uk.

[ June 1, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Byrne’s Building

One of several images by photographer Ozier Muhammad accompanying the New York Times story on Friday, May 30, about David Byrne’s project “Playing the Building,” in which an old pump organ has been wired to turn the internal space of a massive Lower Manhattan structure, the Great Hall of the 99-year-old Battery Maritime Building, into a musical instrument:

The caption in the paper (nytimes.com) reads, “Solenoids attached to columns produce clacks and clanks.”

[ May 31, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Synaesthesia of Danger

Danger Mouse and his partner in Gnarls Barkley, Cee-Lo Green, spoke on Thursday, May 29, with NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross about the construction of their new album, The Odd Couple. Asked by Gross about how the prevalence of sampling in hip-hop may have influenced the way Danger Mouse thinks about music, he replied:

I was in the bathroom the other day looking at a picture and I saw something in the picture that looked like a certain kind of face, and it was a child’s face, the way it was looking, but when you back away from it, it’s not that at all, it was just a tree branch, you know, and the arm of a bear, or something like that.

But what I saw was that, and if I took that little piece and made a big picture out of that, then it would be the way I looked at or what I saw that was beautiful about it or nice about it or whatever. And with music, it’s a similar thing for me, when it comes to sampling. I just want to work with stuff that’s affecting me.

Check out the full interview at npr.org.

[ May 25, 2008 / bookmark ]

Cliff Caruthers’s ‘Bug’ Sound Design (San Francisco)

When the SF Playhouse shudders, physically, during its current run of the Tracy Letts play Bug, the source of that mix of noise and physical sensation isn’t the actors wandering around a creaky stage, or the audience shifting in their well-worn seats. It’s the thick buzzing sound that is used, along with the traditional blanketing darkness, to note the transition between scenes. I saw the play, directed by Jon Tracy, this past Friday, and was struck by the production’s use of sound, not just to move from one segment of the tautly told story to the next, but to fill each scene with a sense of place and, true to Bug’s emphasis on surveillance and paranoia, of foreboding.

The entire play takes place in a single, seedy motel room. It tells the story of the quick and intense bonding of two emotionally damaged individuals: a single woman, whose ex-husband had been released from prison, and a younger man, who reveals deeper levels of paranoia with each confession. The title subject refers to both the insect and the listening device, and to the frightening idea of a combination thereof.

From the circling helicopters, to nearby Latin American techno, to an occasionally used boombox on the motel room floor, to the substandard air-conditioning unit that is so constant in its mechanical whir that it serves double duty as the play’s score, the sound in Bug is as much a part of the production as are the actors and the set. The sound in Bug isn’t just background; in a dramatic sense, it has a narrative agency all its own.

As it turns out, the sound design in the production, which runs through June 14, is by Cliff Caruthers, an accomplished locally based musician who’s performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (where he is technical director), the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (where he is co-curator), and 964 Natoma (Aaron Ximm’s former curatorial venue in San Francisco).

More on the production at sfplayhouse.org.

[ May 25, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Marclay in SF

A detail from a photo documenting a new solo show by Christian Marclay at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through June 28, 2008:

More info at fraenkelgallery.com.

[ May 24, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Saving STEIM

Simple astonishment is as best as I can sum up the sensation that accompanied the recent news that a funding crisis has struck the estimable institution STEIM, based in Amsterdam. The following statement opened an appeal for support at the organization’s website, steim.org:

Things are not well at STEIM. We are in the danger of losing our structural funding from the government, based on a review from the advisor board which called us ‘closed and only appealing to a niche audience’. The outlook isn’t exactly bleak, but at the moment our future is unclear.

This is the letter that I sent in STEIM’s support:

I write this note in something of a sense of astonishment. To hear that STEIM’s funding is in question came unexpectedly. In the world beyond the institution’s walls — and by “world” I mean the globe in its entirety — STEIM is, to those involved in the pursuit of extending music’s boundaries, synonymous with excellence.

Those five letters can make all the difference on the CV of one of the organization’s fellows — anyone with STEIM experience is seen as having been at the root of the culture, and returned all the wiser to spread the word.

STEIM’s efforts in education, curation, concert promotion and, most importantly, research puts it in the highest order of arts institutions.

It’s been reported that some in the position of judging STEIM’s validity relegate it to a “niche.”

I trust that is a mis-characterization of the concerns of the governing body. The matters that STEIM is focused on — from the digital mediation of information to the role of technology in culture to networked communication — are high on the minds of everyone in business, government, the military, and the arts. The innovations, technological and theoretical, that surface at STEIM have far-reaching implications and applications.

Thank you for providing this opportunity to speak on the organization’s behalf. I truly hope that STEIM’s funding will be continued.

Best regards,

Marc Weidenbaum

The due date for the next stage of STEIM’s appeal is imminent. STEIM needs to collect any letters of support by May 26, which is this coming Monday. A web form has been set up at steim.org to enable supporters to make their voices heard. For further context, the following websites are among those that have raised the alarm about STEIM’s status: createdigitalmusic.com, em411.com, makezine.com, matrixsynth.blogspot.com, musicthing.blogspot.com.

[ May 18, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Byrne’s Squawking Floor

Art student turned pop musician turned sound artist David Byrne takes the idea of flooring the pedal literally with an upcoming installation:

Byrne describes the piece at journal.davidbyrne.com:

I’m currently working on a piece for a benefit supporting the local arts organization, The Kitchen. The event, scheduled for May 21st at the Puck Building, will honor artist and DJ Christian Marclay. I like much of Marclay’s work, so my piece is sort of a tribute to him — or at least it’s fairly inspired by his work. My piece will be comprised of a kind of carpet of one hundred guitar pedals, which benefit attendees must walk on in order to enter the main dining and performance space. A guitar will be plugged into and run through all the pedals, and then into an amp. We’ve tested a portion of it to see if there are any unexpected problems and I was surprised to discover how well it works. Of course, the sounds are fairly random, and stepping on one or two of the distortion or fuzz pedals raises the screaming noise level pretty high, but that will be adjusted. Happily, some pedals will loop whatever is going on at the time of their activation, and so there will be constant sound changing all the time.

One thing Byrne is still sorting out: dealing with guests who wear heels.

[ May 17, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Meta Rucker

This is from Rudy Rucker’s recent novel, Postsingular:

But you have to be kidding about including all that data. Just do a link. If you put too much into a metanovel, it’s as dull as a nearly empty file. Everything and Nothing are the same, you feel me? Aim your frame.

The speaker is one Darlene, the proprietor of the store Metotem Metabooks, a “hangout for the Mission metanovelists” in the sci-fi-ified San Francisco, California, that is the setting for Rucker’s book. This San Francisco exists in a world rapidly, and only recently, transformed by the arrival of ubiquitous sentient technology. Darlene is speaking to one of the book’s main characters, a street urchin named Thuy, who had just proposed including in her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Wheenk, all of the meta-texts in Darlene’s shop — “to capture,” as Thuy puts it, “the full ambience. Every word, every page, all of it part of Wheenk, all visible in one synoptic glance.” Darlene educates her on the value of judicious editing.

Postsingular was published by Tor in October of last year, and it is also available as a free download in various formats at rudyrucker.com/postsingular.

[ 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.)