Just a minor announcement. Comments on this site no longer require approval by the moderator.
You enter your comment and hit “Post Comment” and that’s it. Well, that’s not quite it. There is a little arithmetic question you’ll need to answer. That’s one of at least three layers of spam protection. The other two layers are automated. Such is life on the Internet.
The moderation of comments on this site never had anything to do with concern about the content of those comments. It was entirely related to an absurd amount of spam that hammers the site, but that — thanks to the efforts of the fine firm futurepruf.com — has been brought under control.
Of course, if a comment is deemed inappropriate, it will be deleted. What is inappropriate? Things that are racist, sexist, or otherwise defamatory or offensive, or that are ridiculously and willfully off-topic — or, of course, actual spam. Please don’t be aggressively antagonistic: discussion is welcome; fighting is not. Also to be deleted: self-promoting comments that are really just generic links elsewhere. (If you want your release or project considered for review or other coverage, please read this: “Submission Guidelines.”)
The staggered virtual conversation with readers has been a great thing, and the fact that it can now occur in something more closely approximating real time makes me hopeful for even better ongoing discussion.
Featuring music by Steve Roden (aka In be tween noise), Pedro Tudela (aka Johnny Days), Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner), Kate Carr (aka The Frigatebird), Shawn Kelly (aka Y?Arcka), Marielle V. Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch), Paula Daunt (aka Agnosie), and João Ricardo (aka OCP), all working from a shared set of sounds collected and constructed by Elvis Veiguinha. Veiguinha’s field recordings originally served as the score for an installation of photos of modern urban Lisbon by Jorge Colombo.
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The full album is available for free download as a Zip file of MP3s, and as individual files, at freemusicarchive.org.
A 16-page PDF including images from the exhibit of Jorge Colombo’s photographs, Lisbon Revisited, that inspired this project is available for free download from archive.org.
Below are a handful of those photographs. More on the exhibit at jorgecolombo.com/lr.
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Heteronyms Reconsidered
Unlike Walt Whitman, Fernando Pessoa may not have contained multitudes, but he had a tidy set of alter-egos. He wrote under a variety of names, each with a unique biography and aesthetic. These alter-egos are referred to as “heteronyms,” and among them was Álvaro de Campos, whose poetry inspired Jorge Colombo’s photography exhibit, Lisbon Revisited, which in turn inspired this compilation album.
Heteronyms—in the form of pseudonyms and monikers—are commonplace in electronically manipulated music. Matters of identity are routinely amplified and distorted by various factors: by the semi-anonymity inherent in online communities, by the rampant splintering of genre taxonomy, by the manner in which authorship is complicated by reliance on third-party (and often emerging) technology, by the prevalence of sampling and remixing.
In tribute to Pessoa and Campos, eight electronic musicians were commissioned to explore the sounds of the city of Lisbon, as well as the creative opportunity inherent in the concept of the heteronym. The eight musicians and their eight adopted heteronyms each took a single shared sound source and created from it sixteen new audio works. The shared sound source is an ambient soundtrack of field recordings of urban Lisbon created by Elvis Veiguinha for the installation exhibit of Colombo’s photographs. This project gave each participating musician the opportunity to explore not only the sounds of the city, but also their own internalized multiple viewpoints.
Marc Weidenbaum
disquiet.com/lx-rmx
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Hometown Revisited
In January 2009—just a few weeks before I started finger-painting NYC on an iPhone—my exhibition Lisbon Revisited opened at Casa Fernando Pessoa, a museum in Lisbon, Portugal. Based on the early 20th century poems by Portuguese poet Pessoa (writing under the name Álvaro de Campos), the show consisted of Lisbon photographs of mine in which I tried to forget all personal associations and memories of my hometown, focusing instead (like Pessoa/Campos, a fervent futurist who worshipped the splendors of Progress) on the most contemporary, most technological, most globalized aspects of my hometown. I shot today’s Lisbon like Campos would have, were he not a fictional poet stuck in he 1920s.
The exhibition’s soundtrack was created by Elvis Veiguinha, a Portuguese sound artist, music producer, and filmmaker, who used his recordings of Lisbon’s aural atmosphere. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum has been forever perceiving Pessoa as a 21st century artist who happens to be have been dead since 1935. Veiguinha’s soundtrack became the natural link to revisit Pessoa’s Lisbon through the more recent vocabulary of remixing.
01. “i’m wrapped by it as by a fog” by Steve Roden (aka In be tween noise)
02. “i have in me like a haze” by In be tween noise (aka Steve Roden)
03. “Falha” by Pedro Tudela (aka Johnny Days)
04. “RYLY” by Johnny Days (aka Pedro Tudela)
05. “Marginal Notes” by Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner)
06. “A Heart Wound Like Clockwork” by Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud)
07. “Sing, Sing On for No Reason” by Kate Carr (aka The Frigatebird)
08. “Noone Wonders What Lies Beyond My Local River” by the Frigatebird (aka Kate Carr)
09. “The Magic in the Music” by Shawn Kelly (aka Y?Arcka)
10. “A Working Plain” by Y?Arcka (aka Shawn Kelly)
11. “the squealing of rats and the squeaking of boards” by Marielle V Jakobsons (aka darwinsbitch)
12. “last remnants of a final illusion” by darwinsbitch (aka Marielle V Jakobsons)
13. “In Praise of Absurdity” by Paula Daunt (aka Agnosie)
14. “Prelude for a Lost Disguise” by Agnosie (aka Paula Daunt)
15. “Paz” by João Ricardo (aka OCP)
16. “Desassossego” by OCP (aka João Ricardo)
17. “Original Installation Field Recordings” by Elvis Veiguinha
The track’s waveform is a long dark band of singularly rectangular dimensions. The top and bottom of the wave seem perfectly horizontal. If you blow it up in your browser, it looks like the cityscape from the video game Canabalt as seen in its entirety from across a vast distance. The track is titled “Distant,” and it’s by Damon Loren Baker, who in the work is exploring various aspects of white noise (hence the image, reproduced above, that accompanies the track on the website of Radius, the great podcast that distributed it).
From Baker’s description, the white noise that “Distant” appears to consist of isn’t in fact the original recording itself, but the effect of that recording when broadcast. Here is his description in detail:
Distant consists of white noise and sine waves that are beyond the range of most adults’ hearing. They are arranged carefully in chosen phrase relationships amongst signals that are completely inaudible and have no apparent effect on the final sound. However, when broadcast using a radio transmitter (ideally a low power one, the lower fidelity and power the better) those phrase relationships become mangled by the interaction of the broadcast with the environment it fills and activates. When the listener is too close to the signal, the subtleties between the phrase relationships are lost. When too far, the subtleties become inaudible. However, when somewhere between near and far, the garbling of the transmission creates pulses and tones from the creative and destructive interference caused by the reflected signal and the collapse of the stereo image.
The entire distant range of the broadcast radius becomes an instrument or an organism. Distant is the breath that brings this organism to life; the act of tuning in and listening to the piece forms it into sound.
Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment.
The fifth Disquiet Junto project was, at its essence, about creating an original musical score for a brief, film-less documentary film. The “film-less documentary film” part of the project was track’s sonic foundation: an unedited field recording each musician made during his or her everyday life. To that foundation, the musicians were instructed to add new sounds of their own making.
The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 2, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 6, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0005-layer. As of this writing, there are 53 tracks associated with the tag.
Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:
Disquiet Junto Project 0005: “Layering Reality”
Plan: The fifth Junto project is about amplifying the inherent musicality of everyday life. Of all the Junto projects so far, this one may call for the lightest touch. Of course, achieving a light touch may require the most amount of work. The project will be accomplished by adding sounds (notes, riffs, tones, beats, noises, processing, drones, what have you) to a foundation track that consists of an original, unedited field recording.
Pre-Production: First, you will make an audio field recording from everyday life. This track will serve as the foundation for your piece. This recording can be made anywhere — on the bus, or while riding a bicycle, or sitting in a field, or waiting in the lobby of a building, or in the kitchen, wherever. There are only two rules regarding the field recording: (1) Do not include intelligible voices unless you are certain that recording people, wherever you are, is legal. (2) Do not edit the field recording, except to fade in and out to achieve the desired length. Chances are you’ll record quite a bit, and then select your favorite segment. You might even, after starting work on one foundation track, make decisions about what constitutes a good foundation and then go and make a new field recording.
Length: Keep the work to between two and five minutes.
Sensibility: In the end, the foundation field recording track should remain fairly discernible in the mix.
Title/Tag: Please include the term “disquiet0005-layer” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.
Linking: When you post the track, please include this link:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Bonus: You might consider (if you have an interest in video/film-making) recording the foundation audio field recording as part of a video, and then when the track is complete going ahead and re-syncing the audio with the original video. There’s no deadline for doing this “bonus” part of the project — if you are interested in doing it, feel free to do so after the track deadline has passed.
This “bonus” round — which involved making good on the film-like nature of the assignment — was accomplished by at least three of the participants:
London-based Robert Thomas, aka Dizzy Banjo, made his first appearance as part of the Junto this week, and it seemed like an appropriate project for him, since by day he is the Chief Creative Officer at Reality Jockey. That London-based software development firm created the RJDJ and Inception apps (as well as Voyager and Dimensions), which let people interact with, filter, and transform the sounds around them. Here’s a video (from youtube.com) of his piece, the foundation of which was recorded at Liverpool Street Station. In a great development, Thomas said he will be making an “RJDJ scene” from the software with which he transformed the Liverpool audio — in other words, anyone with RJDJ on their iOS device will be able to witness how the same algorithms transform their own personal sonic environments. Here is his video:
Ted Laderas (aka OO-ray, of Portland Oregon) also made a video (available at vimeo.com) of his piece, filmed and recorded on the Oregon coast. Unlike the other two, it employs artful editing. Also, Ambienteer (James Fahy, of Guildford, Britain) has suggested he may yet get a video up of his piece.
One of the great things about the Soundcloud.com platform is the ability for musicians to post additional information, including external links, related to their tracks. Here are just a few examples from the over 50 pieces of music that resulted from the fifth Junto project:
Kevin R. Seward touched on the opportunities for pushing the perceived boundary between what is background and layer. Of the elements in his track he writes, “One is an imposter, trying to pass itself off as not added on.”
In the write-up for his piece, Brooklyn-based Tom Vourtsis did an exemplary job of laying out what he set out to accomplish, and how he did so:
I gathered a decent selection of field recordings ranging from the sound of an escalator thumping and whimpering to the sound of meatballs simmering on a stove. What I chose is the sound of the freezer in my kitchen at my Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. The drone of the motor in my freezer was interesting enough to stand alone for this project, but I was intrigued by the additional, unexpected sound of ice cubes in the freezer intermittently cracking and popping — not unlike a record — due to the expansion of the ice when the freezer door remained open for an extended period of time, raising the temperature inside the freezer.
I selected a couple of different ice clicks and added a delay effect to introduce some rhythm to the track, and hovering above the other freezer noises were two drones created via MIDI in Ableton Live — one of which is deep bass — that I felt complemented the “cold” feel of the raw recording. My goal was to duplicate the noise of everyday life while adding a bit of flavor, and I’m pleased with how the noises buried inside a freezer held up when serving as the backbone of this track.
Among the new participants to join in this week were Kate Carr (of Surry Hills, Australia) and Michel Banabila (of Rotterdam, Netherlands), bringing the total number of unique contributors to 99.
