The Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) depicted surreal visions in which the mythological and the quotidian intertwined in enchanting ways. She created fascinating documentation of her explorations of the terrestrial and the otherworldly, a place where sight and sound, scent and taste, sense and fantasy collaborated and contrasted toward a tantalizingly ephemeral end.

This month I had the pleasure of concluding work on a project with Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick that celebrated various facets of Varos’ work and life. Titled La Alquimia de los Sueños (which translates as The Alchemy of Dreams), it was commissioned by the gallery Frey Norris in San Francisco to coincide with an extraordinary Varo exhibit running there through February 25. The project took the form of a dinner, a kind of meal-as-art, held at Engine 43 in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. There were six courses, each associated with a different magical spell and drawing on the surrealist recipes that Varo had created with her close friend, Leonora Carrington. There’s a January 29 story about the event at nytimes.com (“Break Brick, Break Bread, Break the Mold”).

I. The Sound of Dreams

As for my role, among other things I had the pleasure of interviewing Mexico-born sound artist and musician Guillermo Galindo, who lives in San Francisco, about his participation in the project. As seen up top, in a pair of photos by Andria Lo, he performed at the dinner — not only his own mix of sounds, but also deep shuddering bass lines that drew from Varo’s interest in resonance and vibration. What follows is an excerpt of the full interview, “The Sound of Dreams,” which can be read at engine43.org:

Weidenbaum: Regarding the relationship between Tarot and the collective unconscious, can you talk a bit about specifically the role of sound in dreams?

Galindo: I have found that for most people it is difficult to remember the sound, or sounds, of their dreams. Most people, including me, have an easier time remembering music: music that accompanies the dream, music that is played by someone or, in my case, composition ideas that appear by themselves or performed by myself or someone else. As in real life, dream components have sounds: an explosion, someone walking in high heels, the sound of the rain etc. Having said this, I do think that sounds have their own significance in dreams — a significance not necessarily attached to the visual or narrative elements of a specific dream. In other words, I believe that sounds in dreams do have their own specific symbology.

Weidenbaum: Are there parallels between food and sound you’d like to discuss?

Galindo: I had a Chinese music student who, in order to reconnect to her homeland memories, recorded the sound of herself cooking of Chinese dishes, which she would cook one day each month. Then she would present random photographs of the dishes with the audio of the cooking sounds. Different foods have different textures of sound when one cooks them. This provides information about their physical nature and about the chemical reaction that they have when mixed over the fire with other elements. I think that the purest and most enjoyable “food” sound is the sound of water. I think that the sound of the water falling into a glass is a vital element when enjoying a good drink of water, not to mention the “clink” of the wine glasses, the sound of silverware, or the sound of clay, wooden, or ceramic plates and bowls.

And this is a screenshot that Galindo provided to me of the software setup he utilized when playing live, in addition to a pair of Kaoss Pads and at least four iPods. (It is of higher quality than the casual camera shot I posted on Twitter the night of the event.)

Here, from a post-event summary, is a list of the sounds he developed for each of the courses:

0. XECATL (simulated gigantic ice flutes) independent white noise frequency bands oscillating randomly in chaos.

1. Introduction of 50 Hz.low frequency modulated by 260 Hz. and 2.5 Hz. LFO simultaneously resulting in sudden architectural shaking.

2. Harmonic content evolving from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne #1 as if reproduced by echoing crystal feathers.

3. Multiplication of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater as if sang by a bleeding heart.

4. Intermittent triple drone in Eb and recurring patchy electric glitches emanating from pure electricity controlled by light boxes. Agustin Lara’s Veracruz emerges from the minuscule speaker of a transistor radio.

5. Modulated low frequency enters the 20 Hz realm as if entering subsonic levels. Low frequency joins polyrhythmic mass reaching a climax buildup made of electronic glitches and samples of heavy metal distorted guitars doubled with baritone sax reaching 120 bpm plus tempos. The sonic storm breaks into total silence.

II. A Brief Fiction

In addition, I served as managing editor on the project, working with the various participants on their written contributions. And I wrote a short story, “Sitting for a Dream,” that is an imaginary scenario inspired by the fact that Mexico City cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chávez commissioned what yielded the 1957 Varo portrait “Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez.” This is an excerpt from the story:

She took his hand in hers and silently led him through several chambers, each its own little world. One was dark and painted like a jungle. Another was covered, walls and ceiling, in billowing cotton tarps that filtered the daylight. He entered the final chamber by himself. Varo stood on the far side, directly opposite the doorway through which he had just walked. She, too, wore a lab coat, her hair pulled back. The room was almost empty. In the center there was a medium-size wooden frame suspended from the ceiling by pulleys. On either side facing the frame was a single chair. He walked toward the frame, and as he approached, so did Varo. He realized she was mimicking him, but not in a rude way. If anything, it was flattering to be the subject of such attention. He walked toward the closer of the two chairs. She approached the other, copying his gait, adjusting her posture to match his.

When they reached their chairs, they both sat down, looking at each other through the frame, as if at a painting. She gave him a little smile, which he acknowledged by removing his hat. In turn, she pulled from her coat pocket a deck of cards. She selected one card, seemingly at random, and turned it toward him. It showed an old sage with a stick, and below it, in English, was written “The Hermit.” She then pulled another card, this one in Spanish. It read “El Corazon.” It was his turn to smile. He recognized it from the lotería. The next card was “La Pera,” and he recalled the tree from the ill-fated mural she had proposed. She saw the recognition in his face, and her shoulders relaxed. Then his shoulders relaxed. Somehow, he found himself now imitating her, unintentionally but naturally. Varo reached under her chair and lifted a small goblet. Taking the hint, Dr. Chavez did the same. Again, he found himself mimicking her — how simply she had cast her spell.

This is the painting that inspired the story, which is readable in full at engine43.org:

III. Notes on Scent

One especially fascinating element of the event was smell. Each course was accompanied by a scent developed by Mirjana Blankenship (of captainblankenship.com), and these scents built one upon the previous as the evening proceeded. The terms for these elements of a collective scent, I learned from Blankenship, are musical: they are “notes.” The deepest is the “base” note, and then there are “heart” and “top” notes above, and they all “decay” over time, much as a struck chord might. The explanation reminded me of an essay by Brian Eno from the magazine Details back in 1992 (“Scents and Sensibility”), in which he described the parallels and intersections between his experiments in smell and sound. Blankenship’s scents (presented in the elegant bottles shown below) were not to be experienced in their own olfactory anechoic chamber. Quite the contrary, they were selected and constructed to mix with the scents inherent in the meal, including the rich smoke that emanated from the hearth in which meat was roasted, and the burnt sugar that resulted from pistachio pralines made on site just moments before they were served (see the very bottom of this post). By intending to mingle rather than command attention, Blankenship’s scents were like the famed “furniture music” of Erik Satie that is understood as a strong precursor of ambient music — sounds that Galindo included in his performance.

More on the exhibit and the gallery at freynorris.com. There’s a wide range of coverage of the La Alquimia de los Sueños event at engine43.org.

I previously participated in A Sors, a project the duo developed, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative.

(Photos by Andria Lo of andrialo.com.)

The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo. (I was reminded that the Iron Chef of Music projects at kracfive.com were also an influence on my thinking. They were for many years a big part of the Downstream department here.)

The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.

The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.

If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”

Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.

This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:

Disquiet0004-mfischer
Remix the Marcus Fischer piece “Nearly There.”
Start: 2012.01.26 … End: 2012.01.30

Disquiet0003-glass
Record a live performance for “expanded glass harp.”
Start: 2012.01.19 … End: 2012.01.23

Disquiet0002-duet
Duet for fog horn and train whistle — using only those two provided samples.
Start: 2012.01.12 … End: 2012.01.16

Disquiet0001-ice
Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.
Start: 2012.01.05 … End: 2012.01.09

And this is the initial post I made on Disquiet.com, announcing the project on January 7, 2012: “Sneek Peek.”

As of January 31, 2012, this is a Twitter list of Disquiet Junto participants: twitter.com/nofi/disquiet-junto.

The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.

Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.

Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”

Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)

Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Elec­tronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of elec­tronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where some­thing had hap­pened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.

Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.

There has likely been less commercial music discussed on Disquiet.com in 2011 than in any previous year since the site’s launch, almost exactly 15 years ago, in December 1996. This relative absence wasn’t intentional. It doesn’t even particularly reflect my daily listening habits. But it does, in retrospect, reflect my imagination. I listen to enormous amounts of commercially released music, much that is sent to me for promotional purposes, much that I hear online, and much that I myself purchase. My email inbox is overrun with inbound, unsolicited, but often welcome, invitations to listen to the commercial music for free (un-commercially, as it were, though in the end, the whole act of promotion is itself a commercial enterprise).

Yet still, there is something about a commercial record that felt inherently stolid in 2011 — not all commercial records, and not the music specifically. The music can be dynamic, adventurous, but the enterprise can still feel rote or calculated or misguided, or some combination thereof.

I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, and interacting with, the music than emanates from generative sound apps (those based in Internet browsers, and those that come in the form of mobile-device apps). I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, the music that emerges from various outposts of the “free music” movement/phenomenon (from netlabels in particular, and also general Creative Commons work, as well as work that is released for free with no apparent tie to or, perhaps, even knowledge of either of those philosophically informed communities). I spent a lot of time listening to commercially released music, but rarely this year did I think about it with the energy that I did my other listening.

All of which is in no way intended to diminish the 10 (or 12) commercial recordings listed below. Nor is it my sense that following list could easily be swapped out with two or even four more lists of fascinating sets of 10 albums from the past year. These were selected because any other such lists would still have some sense of absence. The music here touches on a variety of approaches, which is part of what makes it feel whole. There is voice-infused music, and sound art, and something not too distantly related to dance music, and noise, and elegant ambience, and contemporary classical, and remixes — and more. There are small-scale recordings, and recordings for which institutional financial support was necessary. In two cases two albums are listed, because they are by the same artists and were released this year and feel of a piece with each other. (And it at least one of the two cases, they were subsequently packaged together by the releasing record label.)

All of which is to say, in a year when I didn’t write about much commercial music, when it came time to list my 10 favorites, the list expanded to 12. They are listed here in alphabetical order by musician. Yes, “musician,” singular. One thing that struck me when I completed this list is that all these albums are, with the exception of the ECM remix collection, solo records.

Julianna Barwick‘s The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty): Julianna Barwick is a choir of one. She makes music in which layer upon layer of her singing, vaguely druid in its tonal quality, form slow cascades of seemingly wordless invention. The effect is both meditative and cathartic. Other elements make themselves heard, including a minimalist piano that sounds like Harold Budd at work on one of Tom Waits’ detuned barroom favorites. This is music that could all to easily lapse into treacle, but it shows restraint, not in its ambition, but in its affect. … More on Barwick at juliannabarwick.com. Listen to the album in full at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More on the record at asthmatickitty.com. There’s also a collection of remixes, Matrimony Remixes, which I cannot recommend; the beats just make all the songs sound like the closing music to a Disney animated film.
 
Jefferson Friedman‘s Quartets (New Amsterdam): The collection contains two complete string quartets and a pair of remixes. The quartets (which date from 1999 and 2005) are alternately fierce and pastoral, and they distinguish themselves with the extent to which the instrumentalists are treated as equal partners, and the extent to which the arrangement is the music: theme and melody rarely stand out above the musical interplay. They are performed here by the Chiara String Quartet, for whom they were composed. The Matmos remixes are some of the duo’s strongest recent work, especially the closing track, “Floor Plan Mix,” which achieves a spectral quality in its distillation of the source material. … More on the musicians at jeffersonfriedman.com, chiaraquartet.net, and brainwashed.com/matmos. Listen to the album in full at chiarastringquartet.bandcamp.com. More on the album at newamsterdamrecords.com.
 
Grouper‘s A I A : Dream Loss and A I A : Alien Observer (Yellow Electric): Between their titles and approach, these are at least companion collections and more like parts of a whole (think how with the final two thirds of the Star Wars or the Lisbeth Salander trilogies, neither half is particularly satisfying without the other). Grouper is Liz Harris, and her two 2011 full-length releases, though available separately, deserve consideration as a whole, not simply because their titles and covers suggest them as halves of a pair, or entries in a series, but because they similarly eke songs, or song-like formations, from quiet accumulations of vocals and supporting sounds. There is a lot of freak folk, or “drone folk,” out there in drone world. These recordings are closer to “drone singer-songwriter.” … Both albums are sample-able at the boomkat.com music retailer, among other places: Alien, Dream.

Tim Hecker‘s Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky): Hecker took source recordings he made of a pipe organ in Iceland and then went to work on them. Each glitch is a synapse-firing crisis of faith. Each echo maps the architecture of the place. Each mass of synthesized material fills the empty church in your mind. The cover shows a piano being pushed off the edge of the building, which makes for a colorful (or, in this case, black-and-white) polemic. There is tension in this music for certain, but it’s more likely to instill in experimental musicians the desire to explore pipe organs than to dispose of them. … More on Hecker at sunblind.net. The music is sample-able at boomkat.com, among other retailers.
 
Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly): In traditional terms, this is the prettiest album on this list. It is built from harpsichords and string sections and other classical instruments, which in combination lend it a storybook quality. It’s less fragile than it is dainty, but the daintiness is undergirded with filmic tension, like something out of the Quay Brothers at their most romantic yet mischievous. And the “traditional” instrumentation is just part of the sound design, mixed in with all manner of knocking and general acoustic haze. … More on the album at ghostly.com, where it is also available for streaming. More on the composer at the somewhat out of date
jacaszek.com.

Eli Keszler‘s Cold Pin (Pan): Based on a massive sound-art installation by Keszler, the album comes in two parts: a recording of his invention (“14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables”) and a recording of Keszler performing freely improvised jazz alongside the sculpture with Geoff Mullen, Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son, and Benjamin Nelson. The artwork is impressive, and the album is a model for documenting site-specific installations. … More on the album (including sound and video) at pan-act.com. More on Keszler at elikeszler.com.
 
Israel Martinez‘s El Hombre Que Se Sofoca (Sub Rosa): Six tracks of resplendent noise. The pieces range from deep washes of grey haze to jittery and anxious scattered samples. Melodic and cinematic washes give way to harsh deadspace. The impact is true to the title’s depiction of suffocation. A major album by the Mexican sound artist and musician, who is also a co-founder of the adventurous record label Abolipop. … More on the album, including two sound samples, at the record label’s website. More on Martinez at israelm.com and abolipop.com.
 
Andy Stott‘s We Stay Together and Passed Me By (Modern Love). Two albums of closely related yet disparate takes on club music. At its essence, this is the most minimal of minimal techno, but it seems more interested in exploring aridity than dankness, a rare and particularly welcome variation in this arena. … Listen to Together and Passed at their respective Soundcloud set pages.
 
Amon Tobin‘s ISAM (Ninja Tune). It was almost as tempting to list this album under “best scores of 2011″ as it was to list Kid Koala’s own recent Ninja Tune release (a soundtrack for a graphic novel he wrote and drew) simply as a commercial album. ISAM, in essence, is a recording of the music to Tobin’s audio-visual concert performance of the same name. It is brash and moving and, more than anything he has done previously, free of riffs intended and required to signal affiliation with a particular techno genre. … More on Tobin and the release, including streaming music and video and a free download, at amontobinisam.com.
 
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer‘s Re: ECM (ECM): The repeated use of the “re” prefix on this album — every one of the 17 tracks on its two halves — suggests that someone at the company still thinks of remixing as a purely post-production undertaking, rather than part of the artistic process. But still, it is a good thing that the estimable ECM label let DJs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer wander through its back catalog, unearth samples, and render from them sonic tapestries. The music, with its constant presence of dust formations, has the texture of affectionate archival research. (It’s very close in spirit to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa stroll through Miles Davis’ work.) … Discussion and music at youtube.com. More on the record at ecmrecords.com

An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:

Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.

Thumbnails of the 25 Images:

The full collection is also streaming at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

The 25 MP3s are downloadable for free individually and as a Zip file at archive.org.

Download a 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians: PDF.

A Disquiet.com Project
Commissioned by Marc Weidenbaum

Design/Boondesign.com
Cover Photo/Brian Scott

This project in no way intends to imply any formal association with Instagram.

“Bits & Pieces” by sound artist Timo Kahlen is an exercise in political noise. It’s an exercise not just in the sense that the word is often applied to actions whose initial parameters are succinctly defined, but also because some exercises yield unintended results, and thus the piece leaves open-ended whether or not the listener will come away with an impression of Kahlen’s stated intended subtext.

The track is a steady sequence of rattly noises, and by Kahlen’s description, that unsteady ground is meant to depict “an acoustic metaphor of current political and economic crises.” Whether it does or not is up to the listener, and whether it does or not is not simply a matter of whether or not the listener is made aware of the political intent. Even with full knowledge of Kahlen’s politics, the sounds of broken glass and stray debris being tread upon are so richly detailed that they can distract from any tangential or metaphoric meaning. They are, simply, beautiful in their roughness, and it wouldn’t be the first time that beauty distracted us from more pressing concerns.

More on the piece at the website of the great radio show and podcast for which it was composed: theradius.tumblr.com Kahlen is based in Berlin, Germany. More on him at staubrauschen.de.

Since April 2010, Disquiet.com has hosted a monthly project called “Sketches of Sound,” in which illustrators, most of them comics artists, are invited to draw a sound-related object. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.”

This, the 20th entry, features bicycle horns drawn by Michael Bartalos. Bartalos works extensively in the graphic arts in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. His design commissions include Swatch watches and postage stamps issued by the U.S. Postal Service.

He also produces limited print editions and sculptural assemblages, and has created artist’s book editions with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. 

For his NSF project, Bartalos collected re-usable discarded material from Antarctica to create a sequential sculptural work now in progress titled ”The Long View” (calacademy.org). The work intends to raise awareness of resource conservation and eco-preservation practices on the Ice, and by extension, to promote sustainability worldwide. Structurally the artwork references the book form, paying homage to an early instance of polar recycling in which Ernest Shackleton fashioned wooden covers from provision crates to bind Aurora Australis, the first book ever published in Antarctica.

Bartalos is the California Academy of Science’s first Affiliate Artist and the Chair of the Imprint of the San Francisco Center for the Book. His work is online at bartalos.com.

He also submitted the following three variations. I may swap in the digital entry on my Twitter page later in the month.

The previous “Sketches of Sound” contributors were, in alphabetical order, Jesse Baggs, Brian Biggs, Leela Corman, Warren Craghead III, Scott Faulkner, Owen Freeman, S.L. Gallant, Scott Gilbert, Brian Hagen, Dylan Horrocks, Megan Kelso, Minty Lewis, Natalia Ludmila, Darko Macan, Caesar Meadows, Justin Orr, Hannes Pasqualini, Thorsten Sideb0ard, and Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca. ‎

I have an essay about the sonic environments of New York and Las Vegas in the 20th issue of the excellent journal Vague Terrain. This issue of Vague Terrain takes as its theme a single word, “ambient,” and the invitation to contribute led me to focus on the sounds in the background that come to the foreground. It opens as follows, before proceeding to annotate various sonic experiences during a two-week period this past August when I listened to no pre-recorded music — well, no pre-recorded music that I myself actively elected to play:

Music is sound that someone has taken the time to organize. Generally speaking, that person is called a musician. Not all sound is immediately enjoyable as music, which means that achieving the goal of music can require widely varying levels of exertion and ingenuity on the part of the musician. Some everyday sound has an inherently musical quality, such as the beat of a windshield wiper or the hum of an apartment radiator. This sort of sound is so self-evidently musical it can be said to self-organize, requiring no effort on the part of a musician, or on the part of the listener.

Everyday sound is the sound nearly universally thought of as background noise, noise even further back than background noise – it is the sonic backdrop to background noise. Such noise can take on the qualities generally attributed to music depending on the effort a listener is willing to make. Far less effort is usually required on the part of a listener than on the part of a musician. What helps sound take on the appearance of music is the model provided by music.

Read the full piece, “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” at vagueterrain.net. As a format, the sound diary has a precedent here in the well-received “Tokyo Sound Diary” I published back in 2007.

I’m proud to be in Vague Terrain, a great resource for considered reflection on technologically mediated culture. This is a particularly strong edition. Here’s a quick overview:

In my favorite of the batch, Michel McBride-Charpentier listens to the everyday sounds of a video game, Half Life 2, and considers the artificial reality in the context of R. Murray Schaefer’s research on soundscapes. In a fascinating turn, reminiscent of some of Jane McGonigal’s perceptions, the narrative turns the tables on reality: “The sound of traffic in an actual city isn’t just atmosphere, but subconsciously processed evidence of radiating streets forming blocks and neighbourhoods, giving us confidence in our unperceived reality.” (I actually pitched a similar subject when approached to contribute to the issue of Vague Terrain, but McBride-Charpentier had beat me to it. I hope to write about the artificial sonic environments of video games in the near future.)

Musician David Kristian contributes a free download, which I’ll be covering in this site’s Downstream section in the near future.

Andrea-Jane Cornell provides a track, and an admirably detailed and open self-critique of her attempt to record it (“I was too intent on recreating the ambiance of a live performance of a piece”).

Andrew Lovett-Barron pulls back, fortunately, from sound and discusses ambient interaction (“the subtle gesture, the shifting of weight, and the tone of voice which tell your friend that something is wrong”), and pushes into the manner in which such interactions can be enhanced or insinuated with digital tools.

Jim Bizzocchi, like Cornell, is an artist describing a practice, in his case ambient video, drawing a direct connection between what he is attempting to do, and the aspirations of Brian Eno’s genre-defining work.

Leonardo Rosado talks about his own music-making, and how his art production aligns with his work as the administrator of a netlabel, the estimable Feedback Loop.

Little Oak Animal is the duo of Robert Cruickshank (projections) and Dafydd Hughes (sound), who contributed a series of short pieces in which neither part (the image or the audio) is intended to take a more prominent role than the other.

Michelle Teran is interviewed by Greg J. Smith (the editor for my piece) on the art of surveillance and finance, among other fascinating subjects.

And Scott M2 contributes two audio-visual works developed on the iOS operating system.

Piece originally posted at cronicaelectronica.org. More on Čiurlionis ciurlionis.lt. More on Gintas K at gintask.dar.lt.

The works in the exhibit, which is titled Metamorphosis, broadly draw from a theme of biological process. Farber’s piece is a large-format construction: part painting, part collage, part installation, part sculpture. A record album, albeit without a turntable needle to give it voice, rests inside the outline of an acoustic guitar, which itself sits alongside the rough structure of what appears to be an old man’s face. Presumably the horizontal slash across the face is a harmonica — as the work’s title suggests, the blues is its subject — though at the close range of the depiction, it also resembles the neck of the guitar. Covering his mouth as it does, it suggests muteness, a reading that aligns with the music-less vinyl record. The guitar neck extends above the album like a weather vane or an antenna — receiving a signal rather than projecting one.

There’s a little switch to the left of the guitar neck, a somewhat ironic detail given that the guitar is an acoustic one, not an electric one. (You might miss it if you don’t look at the wall text, which lists the work’s constituent materials as: “woodcut, painting, electronics.”) When switched on, the vinyl album spins, but there is no music, just the slightly grating mechanism that makes the LP turn. There’s a tension worth pondering about the placement of the record at the center of the guitar, as if the turntable were the heart — perhaps merely, at this stage of history, the pacemaker — keeping the guitar alive. The vinyl record can’t contain Old Blue’s song, which goes nameless. The rumble of that rotating mechanism serves as a requiem for a variety of fading technologies.

Metamorphosis runs through November 6, 2011. More details at sonoma.edu.