Disquiet Junto: Join Weekly Communal Music Projects • Previous: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 etc. • Current: 21
Projects: Instagr/am/bient • LX(RMX): Lisbon Remixed • Key Topics: #sound-art, #classical
How To: Submit for Review • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud (Disquiet & Disquiet Junto), Facebook

Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

[ May 19, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]
  • Spending the day just me and my 20-month-old. Will be wandering around @artmrkt, among other places. #
  • Four more now: @nodebeat + (1) keyboard, (2) Moog Slim Phatty, (3) drone pad, and (4) piano: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • My one regret about my Macbook Air is I shoulda gone with the larger harddrive. Didn’t realize at the time it’d become my core computer. #
  • All in all, I got a brick in the mail from @primusluta. #
  • The first three @NodeBeat Disquiet Junto pieces pair the mobile sound app with a ukulele, a guzheng, and a sitar: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • You’re a dreamer. RT @mmaddencomics: “There’s some very thoughtful dubstep behind this blog”; “Wiley revitalizes curating on his new single” #
  • 1st @NodeBeat track in latest Disquiet Junto project is up, courtesy of @ethanhein + his processed ukulele http://t.co/Iny6uyLO #
  • “It’s refreshing to hear a curate track that doesn’t have a drop.” “They’re hiring someone to dubstep a blog of found objects.” #
  • Perfect. RT @primusluta: Headed out to this gallery my friend dubstepped. Hopefully there’ll be wine and good headnoding curation. #
  • “That new Burial remix is true curate.” “I’m dubstepping 18th-century leather wallets on my Tumblr.” #
  • The words “dubstep” and “curate” are so overused, we should just use them interchangeably. #
  • Not a speaker. (Bathroom fan.) http://t.co/ICf6NrGN #

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The Sonic Image

What the sound looks like / what the look sounds like

[ May 18, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comments: 2 ]


The transsubstantiatio.tumblr.com site collects sounds as images: tracks of audio that are, quite simply, opened in an unexpected and unintended computer program. A source file encoded so as to be heard is instead transferred through that which is meant to be seen. Up top, for example, is the resulting visualization of a track by Nine Inch Nails, “Pinion.” The Tumblr appears to be a sibling site to the soundcloud.com/null66913 account, where the latest track appears to take the opposite course (this is all based on interpreting a page originally in Spanish and itself computer-rendered in a different language, in this case English, courtesy of Google’s Translate service). The track appears to be the sound of an image. What image, I can’t say for sure. Perhaps someone else can be of assistance. The result, nonetheless, is striated noise. In the mind’s eye, it’s the fuzz of a dead channel. I wonder what the channel would show if it were properly dialed in.

More (in Spanish) about the move from sound to image to sound at mediateletipos.net. More on null66913 at null66913.net and twitter.com/null66913.

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Radiophonic Madrid (MP3)

Not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations

[ May 16, 2012 / Department: downstream / Comment: 1 ]


Not all is grey static in the sound world of the excellent broadcast/podcast series Radius, out of Chicago. As always, it takes the phenomenon, the practice, of radio as its subject, but not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations. The entry by Desh & Ekis, “Xprmtal Short Wave Radio B-Side (Radius Edit),” is a mix of serrated, burnished, but still quite audible and intelligible signals, from spoken bits to ceremonial drumming. The duo, who are based in Madrid, Spain, are willfully less easily scannable in their project description:

Site: Argantek Industrial State, AIII Motorway, km 23, MAD ESP.

A landscape of scrapheap hills, rusty heavy-duty machinery, abandoned building sites sheltering engine cults’ followers. A constant metallic buzzing interferes with encoded technical transmissions and radio spectrum “white spaces” while, high above, floats a chaos of frequencies.

Two short wave radio broadcasters establish contact through these airwaves, their dialogue sent back to the listeners of the area who are unaware of such free-form vibrations coming from their speakers.

Nonetheless, their mundane fantasy of subverted communication has a rich narrative groove to it, not the groove of metrically coherent rhythm but the groove of sequence, of found sounds paced and given associative power through contrast and accrual. The slow fade-out is a bit of a cheat in most experimental music, but here, as the sounds wind down, there’s a sense of the disparate noises, bonded by chance intervention, finally giving way to entropy.

Track originally posted at theradius.tumblr.com. More on Desh at digikampradesh.wordpress.com and on Ekis at facebook.com/ard2music.

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The Fax Machine as Dubstep Muse (MP3)

Schrödinger's Dog locates musical charm in the information handshake

[ May 15, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

When we speak of dropped lines, we mean breaches in communication that are severe enough to cause the connection to end: a severing beyond mere degradation of transmitted information. In the capable hands of Schrödinger’s Dog, the dropped line takes on a double meaning. This is because the fragile sound of a fax handshake, the scratchy short-circuiting noise of that fading technology, serves in his song “Automatic Negotiation” as the source material for a track that takes dubstep as its genre model. And like many a dubstep track, “Automatic Negotiation” takes a break midway through for a lengthy — and nearly silent — pause, when the fax’s ringing is heard on its own, before letting loose a half-speed variation on what had come before. This pause is known in the trade, to the point of cliché, as a “drop.” It’s a stellar track. The fax sound isn’t transformed significantly beyond its originating mix of squelch and jitter, so the familiar noise is no less a part of the “musical” aspect of the piece as are the tones and beats that lend it framing context.

The track is by Schrödinger’s Dog, aka British musician Mike Wolf, who thanks the American musician Margaras (aka Ryan Abbott) for some of the sound manipulation. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog. More on Wolf at twitter.com/strangeloup.

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ArtPractical.com Podcast

Audio magazine focuses on the sonic arts

[ May 14, 2012 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Catherine McChrystal and Kara Q. Smith have co-hosted a podcast that complements the sound-focused current issue of artpractical.com, in which I have a story about the San Francisco area’s role in the sonic infrastructure of global arts. The audio track (available as a single MP3, and streaming at the “contemporary art talk” site badatsports.com) mixes excerpts from the issue and audio related to the stories, including a lovely early percussion piece by Paul DeMarinis, and another by Pauline Oliveros. To accompany my story, they play a bit of Shane Myrbeck’s audio from his Sent Forth art installation. There is also audio of artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan in conversation.

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Read my story at artpractical.com. Podcast originally posted at badatsports.com.

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