Disquiet » free

Using the Guitar (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 24 May 2012 06:45:38 +0000

Yasuo Akai‘s “Short Piece for Guitar” is not particularly short, at nearly five minutes, but the “for guitar” part is worth meditating on. The piece is, in fact, for guitar, which is a clarification necessary for those familiar with Akai’s often technologically enabled work. “Short Piece for Guitar” is also, truly, a “piece”: It’s less a song than it is a piece of musical narrative, working through varied sequences, the momentum always pushing ahead: there’s an opening that pits the slow development of a melody against a rhythmic thrumming, there’s the later emergence of a finger-plucked theme resounding amid attenuated hums, and there’s an extended coda of now familiar material that seems brighter than it had been the first time around. We can hear this as a composition, as a carefully navigated solo exploration halfway between sketch and song, or we can ponder its status as structure-informed improvisation, as something that might have been played on the fly and been lent form only by the fact of its recording and whatever mental processes Akai brought to it during its performance. (Side note: I’d be surprised, and even more impressed, if this did turn out to have been wholly improvised.) But it’s better yet still to hear the guitar piece amid Akai’s other work, like his clockwork explorations of tone and rudimentary drum machine, or his transformations of field recordings, or his “wobbly” sampling of Bach. It’s best to listen to this with the guitar considered as a piece of technology itself, pushed in subtle manners: the resonating strings resembling industrial hums, the layered note patterns bringing to mind multitrack recording. The instrument may be in service of delivering the music to the listener’s ear, but the music is in service of exploring the inherent potential of the device on which it is played. “Short Piece for Guitar” is music expressly for, certifiably from, the guitar. And what could be more technological than that?

Piece originally posted at soundcloud.com/yasuoakai.

Dub Techno vs. Dubtechno

Marc Weidenbaum — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:41:31 +0000

The wndfrm track titled “Further” lists itself on soundcloud.com as playing at the intersection of four vaguely defined genres: “dub techno,” “ambient,” “fieldrecording,” and “dubtechno,” in that sequence. Perhaps that is three genres, not four, since the absence of a space is all that distinguishes two of them. The doubling up on these two slight variations on dub techno speaks to the desire for category association that informs much activity on SoundCloud, the hope on a musician’s part that a given individual track will, amid those posted on and listened to on the service’s some 10 millions (yes, 10 million) accounts, find its appropriate audience. As with the fly in the typewriter in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, a simple missing character can threaten to lead to the divergence of two entire realms of listening — or at least be felt to. The emphasis that wndfrm has put on dub techno, the effort to assure that both variations are applied, isn’t just in the track’s favor; it’s in dub techno’s favor. It raises the subgenre’s aspirations. Much dub techno is simply the two things combined: voluminious reverberations amid, or put upon, the somewhat dulled clang of electronic percussion. But “Further” is a welcome melding. The techno, to begin with, is severely muted, the percussion little more than an insistent shuffle and beading background pulses, and thus the dub is less a matter of those beats themselves echoing, and more a generous space in which the minimalism plays out. Arguably, the song “Further” is closer to “dubtechno” than to “dub techno” in that it is a conscientious amalgam.

The embedding feature on SoundCloud isn’t working at the moment, but the track is available for streaming and free download at soundcloud.com/wndfrm. More on wndfrm, aka Tim Westcott of Portland, Oregon, at twitter.com/wndfrm.

Album Preview as Form (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 22 May 2012 06:43:41 +0000

The album preview is a staple of commercial music, often coming in the form of collections of snippets of various tracks. In many cases, this is abbreviation in service of tantalization, but in the end it just causes frustration. The snippets are more teases than tastes, and the abruptness of the cuts between them has a stronger sensibility than do any of the assorted individual parts, let alone the collective whole.

But certain musics lend themselves more naturally to brevity. The preview of the album El libro de los árboles mágicos, due out from Tokyo-based label Home Normal label on June 15, is seven short ambient-infused slivers in sequence, each fading into the next. By all appearances, these individual tracks are more drone than song, and thus the segmented view serves to highlight distinctions between them — distinctions that might in fact be less evident when the work is listened to in the more immersive long-form situation of the full release. There is backward masked light noise, and looped bird song, and spectral guitar, and rain heard against what could be a child’s toy piano, and they all combine into a sonic slideshow. The intent of the preview is to forecast what is coming, but the subdued sounds of the music, not to mention the broader concept of an album itself in this day and age, lends the enterprise a lovely tinge of nostalgia. The music is by Federico Durand, and three of the tracks show him in collaboration: track 1 with Chihei Hatakeyama, 3 with Fuqugi, and 4 with Ian Hawgood.

Track, ten minutes in all, originally posted at soundcloud.com/homenormal.

More on Home Normal at homenormal.tumblr.com and twitter.com/homenormal. More on Durand himself at federicodurand.blogspot.com.

Everyday Bird Song (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Mon, 21 May 2012 06:49:56 +0000

The recent slew of tracks uploaded by Phillip Wilkerson to his soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson account have titles like something out of an ancient haiku practice, albeit one situated in modern Florida. There’s “Osprey at Pine Island FL” and “Midnight Rain at Naples FL” and “Thunder in the Ebb at N Ft Myers,” not to mention the more explicitly contemporary “My Afternoon Commute at Naples Florida.” Most recent is “Sunday Morning Sounds at Palm Island, FL,” which is simply a steady combination of whole-earth white nose and occasional bird song. That’s “simply” as in “elegantly,” not “simply” as in “This is all you have to offer?” It isn’t so much bird song as bird speak, not the full-on melodic enchantment of birds, but the quotidian calls of birds going about their business, which the more melodic bird song is likely as well, but here it is the truly mundane bird call, the one that settles in the background — which Wilkerson has teased into the foreground by recording two solid minutes of it, and making it available separate from its natural environment. The ending of his recording is quite sudden, a file trimmed so immediately it almost recommends the fade out by comparison, but the hard cut is the right approach; it’s a wake-up call from the reverie.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson. More on Wilkerson at phillipwilkerson.com.

The Sonic Image

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 19 May 2012 06:52:45 +0000

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.

Radiophonic Madrid (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:35:11 +0000

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.

The Fax Machine as Dubstep Muse (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:49:39 +0000

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.

ArtPractical.com Podcast

Marc Weidenbaum — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:37:31 +0000

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.

Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_348-Sound_Issue.mp3)

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

SoundCloud as Sketch Book (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:56:30 +0000

SoundCloud.com turns a particular idea of the bootleg on its head. The term “bootleg” is often associated with black market recordings, but much of the realm is actually more grey market: not fake versions of commercial goods, but commercial versions of uncommercial goods, such as live recordings or studio outtakes. SoundCloud is where many musicians, professional, aspiring, and casual, post their works-in-progress. In other words, these are free versions of uncommercial goods. For a particular sort of listener — a listener increasingly characterized as a SoundCloud sort of listener — that is an enticing operation. Which means informed musicians are posting the very things that previously would have been considered the things one gets out of the way before posting something. Tautologies aside, it makes for good listening, and for a great social experiment in sound. Take Greg Surges, who besides having a great family name for someone eking the most out of experimental electronics, is an accomplished participant in the online music world. His mundanely titled “patch[052012] sketch_2″ seems to take a filename for its name, but that’s true to what it is: an “improvised sketch,” as he puts it, for a forthcoming live concert (in Tijuana later this month). He explains his process briefly: “Using homebrew computer-controlled hardware into a custom software filterbank. Slower drones and percussive effects here.” The piece is a mix of slight fluctuations in tone and gentle if insistent percussion, like a Martian drum circle heard from beyond a massive sand dune.

Track originally posted soundcloud.com/greg-surges. More on Surges, who is based in San Diego, California. at gregsurges.com and twitter.com/gregsurges.

Guitar and Tone (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 10 May 2012 06:37:11 +0000

At 1:39, suspicions are verified. In the expansive world of experimental music, it’s pleasant to listen to each new individual track as a standalone entity, to take it as a self-contained whole, let its internal coherence be the ear’s sole guide — but there’s always some bit of metadata to help shape the imagination in advance. It may be a title giving white noise a conceptual framework, or it might be a brief annotation, alloying the sonic abstractions with facts about performance technique. Or it may, simply, be the musician’s name.

Hey Exit is Brendan Landis, whose experiments in music and sound generally employ some manner of string-based instrumentation (guitar, koto), a dose of noise-based sonic perception, and sometimes digital processing. So, when “It’s Just an Ugly Thing to Say,” a track he recently uploaded to his soundcloud.com/hey-exit account, begins with a slowly played acoustic guitar, the ears do two things: first, they wait for the noise, and second, they listen for the potential processing. They wonder, when the acoustic guitar’s notes begin to double, if that is two fingers, or if there is a digital tool being enabled as a subtle level. The sequence is slow, distantly folk-like.

And then, at 1:39, a note kicks in that is far beyond the guitar’s fundamental range. It is a single held note: a round, sour bit of sine-wave emersion that sways a little here and there. It blankets the guitar but doesn’t mute it. It confirms that this is, indeed, Hey Exit, and that a throwback John Fahey fan hasn’t hijacked his SoundCloud account. And it plays with the foregrounded guitar part, as the ear seeks out harmonic alignments and metric significance. It lasts for just over a minute, this tone, and then disappears. But like a bright light impressed upon the retina, it leaves an after image.

More on Landis, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at heyexit.com.