Brian Eno appeared on The Colbert Report last Thursday, November 10. (Watch the episode at colbertnation.com.) It was a peculiar conversation, enjoyable for its peculiarity. It ran through highlights of Eno’s career, but not “the” highlights. With barely a nod to Eno’s most recent and prominent work (the latest Coldplay album, new recordings under his own name), Stephen Colbert focused on subjects that are of concern to an admirer.

One of the pleasures of Colbert’s show is figuring out where his parody of a talk-show host ends and where “he” begins. Complicating matters is that in both modes he likes to poke at the pretensions of his guests. In a way, Colbert’s hardcore fan-ness peeking out from inside his assumed identity makes a good parallel to the video that Eno put together a year ago, the one for which he interviewed himself under the guise of “Dick Flash of Pork Magazine.” Both videos invoke alternate identities, and both involve interviewers who go their own way.

Colbert spent no time spent on U2, but plenty on Roxy Music. (Eno talked about how he knew to quit the band when he found himself thinking about his laundry while performing.) No time on Coldplay, but on the “77 Million Paintings” project, which involves a generative approach to visuals. (Eno estimated it would take 400 million years to view the thing in its entirety, but gave no “guarantee,” as he put it.) As is his strength, Colbert managed to praise the work while providing mild ribbing. After comparing “77 Million Paintings” to a computer screensaver, he asked if flying toasters come across it. He asked about the Long Now project, about the giant clock that is at its heart, the 10,000-year clock, and proceeded to josh: He asked if it has an alarm. Eno reminded him it does have a chime. He asked Eno if he can sing the chime. He then reminded Eno of his work on the Windows 95 chime and asked could he sing that? Eno said he did 83 versions for that project, and he isn’t sure which they used. He said it’s his most popular piece of music ever. That’s a familiar line, as is much of what he said, but the absence of commercial pandering made the reiterated material feel less like he was on rhetorical autopilot (the talk-show-guest equivalent of thinking about the laundry), and more like Colbert was eager to run through the true fan’s greatest hits.

As a measure of Eno’s range, and of Colbert’s, they barely talked about music, and when they did, they talked about singing. (Eno’s growing interest in the human voice is a subject of his recent interview on the Sound Opinions podcast.)

And then they sang. Not immediately, but at the end of the show. They sang “Lean on Me” with Michael Stipe, whose band since 1982, R.E.M., recently announced it was breaking up. Their makeshift trio’s harmony was pretty strong, even if the lyrics got flubbed a little, and at times they weren’t entirely all sure who was leading, if anyone was, if anyone should be. (Perhaps Eno and Colbert were also distracted by the possibility that they were singing with Captain Beefheart, whom Stipe has eerily come to resemble.) They actually did the entire song. The show didn’t fade out midway through, as the viewer might have expected.

Once upon a time, the idea of Stephen Colbert, Brian Eno, and Michael Stipe singing “Lean On Me” on national television would have been surreal. Now it is simply television. Surreal, by the way, is reading the comments that appear on the show’s webpage, where all the subjects of the episode (the Occupy movement, Rick Perry’s inability to recall the name of the Department of Energy, the Eno interview) are tossed around like ingredients that resist coalescing into a salad.

The Eno interview (colbertnation.com) begins with an introduction by Colbert at 9:27.

Both the German electronic musician Apparat and the music supervisors for the American TV series Breaking Bad found an interesting balance of licensing and scoring for the final episode of the recent season. The episode, which aired October 9 and closed out season 4, featured the Apparat song “Goodbye” — and yet it wasn’t the full song. It was an instrumental version, lacking the vocal of Soap&Skin (aka the Austrian singer Anja Plaschg). And because Plaschg’s vocal, despite its seeming transparency in the original, was lacking, the piece took on an entirely new meaning — Apparat’s steady if growing pulses serve as a grounding counterpoint to her slowly rising singing. In the absence of that singing, the Apparat instrumental takes on a greater sense of gravitas.

Apparat, aka Sascha Ring, subsequently posted the instrumental track at his soundcloud.com/apparat account for free streaming and download:

The full version of the song, with Plaschg’s vocal, can be heard in this video. It’s from Apparat’s recent album, The Devil’s Walk, on the Mute label. In a funny turnaround, the video to the full version of “Goodbye” makes use of pre-existing footage, in this case from the 1928 film Spione, or Spies, by Fritz Lang:

More on Appart at apparat.net and at mute.com/apparat.

Kid Koala is one of the mainstays of the Ninja Tune label, his expressly nostalgic and maudlin approach to turntablism fitting comfortably between texture-oriented art music and mood-setting party music. His latest release, Space Cadet, is a follow-up to an earlier such venture, Nufonia Must Fall: it’s a graphic novel with a score. He recently discussed the overlap between his comics and turntablism — between the scratchboard on which he made the drawings, and the scratching that is the foundation of his music — as part of a wide-ranging, and highly recommended, interview on the record label’s podcast. It’s downloadable as an M4A file — essentially an MP3 with embedded images, and a slightly more finicky nature in regard to playback.

Among the influences on his work discussed during the podcast interview is Carter Burwell, best known for his scores for Coen Brothers movies. Koala talks about the difference between scoring a movie and scoring a book, noting that while the music is intended to be listened to while one reads the graphic novel, he’s not particularly dictatorial about the speed at which the book is read, or how specific instances in the score are intended to align with instants in the narrative.

He’s touring in support of the album. The evenings are something he’s described as a “seated headphone concert,” in which the audience settles into “space pods” and listens to the music on devices that allow them to adjust the volume. Interestingly, Amon Tobin, arguably the other main artist on the Ninja tune roster, is also doing a multimedia tour right now, though Tobin’s audio-visual effort, titled Isam, is far more technologically demanding than Koala’s (it’s described at amontobin.com as a “25′ x 14′ x 8′ multi-dimensional/ shape shifting 3-D art installation … enveloping him and the audience”).

Video originally posted at youtube.com. More on the release at kidkoala.com and ninjatune.net.

Jóhann Friðgeir Jóhannsson, who hails from Ísafjörður, Iceland, and records as 7oi, has in the track “Yup” crafted the perfect little morning-music instrumental. One could do worse than to set one’s alarm clock to “Yup,” and let its slow accrual of chime-like tones set the pace of the day. The initial pulses have the appeal of a metronome made of soft cotton, and in time it gains layers, each slightly apart from each other, lending it a kind of minimalism-lite appeal. Jóhannsson also posted the above video (best viewed in HD), which tracks the slow expansion of the composition.

Audio originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/7oi. Video at vimeo.com. More on Jóhannsson/7oi at sevenoi.com. Another track by him, “Wsps,” was featured here back in April of this year.

Here’s how it works: The user draws vines on the screen, which are hit by falling stars, thus triggering sounds. Each vine signifies a different sound, most “musical,” which is to say tonal and melodic, though there are also simulated hand claps. The user can trigger the five stars by tapping on them, or can wait for them to fall on their own. The stars bounce when they hit vines, which means that the user can set up Rube Goldberg compositions, sending the stars bouncing from one vine to another, or capturing them in literal loops (a complete circle of vine) that will put the star into a lengthy repetitive cycle. The stars also make different sounds when they hit the bottom of the screen, depending on where they land.

There are seven types of vines, selectable from a menu along the bottom of the screen (it disappears with a swipe). A couple of these vines don’t become available until the user shares a composition, via Facebook, Twitter, or email. (It isn’t particularly invasive, as I was able to just email myself a composition to unlock the remaining sounds.) This being a marketing tool, the emphasis on networked participation isn’t surprising, and the app thankfully lets users share their compositions. And should the visualization of small round dots triggering sounds along long lines bring to mind an abstract take on the traditional format of a piece of sheet music, that probably isn’t an accident.

Speaking of non-accidents, rest assured that the sounds that result from Falling Stars aren’t purely random. Quite the contrary, they are musical and enjoyable, owing to careful balance of the vine-related tones, and to some sort of underlying metronomic pulse that keeps everything relatively in sync.

iOS 4.2 & Vine: The main screen of Falling Stars app

This demo video was posted at the youtube.com account of Interval Studios, home to Thicket’s Ott and Packard. The brief piece is narrated by Ott:

There is additional footage posted by Trident.

Given the advertising-world origin of the app, Falling Stars is worth investigating for what it says about the commercial opportunities for generative music. As of this writing, of the 714 reviews of Falling Stars, almost 90%, 634 in total, give it five stars, the highest rating possible. Of the remaining 73 ratings, more than half are four stars, leaving just 12 three-star, nine two-star, and 16 one-star. The most negative reviews include a few critiques of the app, generally finding it useless, but a lot of them seem to be technical in nature (reporting audio defects that have not been evident on my test units: an iPad 2 and a current, aka fourth, generation iPod Touch). Those “useless” comments are common for generative sound apps, given that they often lack both a self-evident melody and the sort of goal or ending that is the hallmark of a proper game. (The Falling Stars app’s promotional text describes it as an “audio/visual digital toy.”)

The iPhone app based on the film Inception serves as the primary example of the power of a commercial brand to not only draw attention to something as adventurous as generative sound, but to lend it a useful context. The Inception app has 5811 ratings, over 77 percent of which are either four or five stars. By contrast, the various apps associated with RJDJ, the app from which Inception was derived, are more evenly divided between positive and negative responses.

This isn’t to say, merely, that a mass-market commercial property is necessary to garner public interest in generative sound — mass-market commercial properties can bring attention to any number of seemingly esoteric subjects. It’s simply to say that if a popular subject can indeed lend legitimacy to avant-garde ventures, then perhaps those ventures aren’t as esoteric as some might imagine. The Inception app provides the additional evidence that a good story, a rich narrative, can be a grounding force. Inception accomplishes this not only by tying itself to the popular film, but by having built a sense of discovery into the various stages, or levels, of the app. Falling Stars doesn’t have a story, per se, but its natural-world setting brings it out of the realm of pure graphic-score abstraction (the cold grids on which so many generative sound apps are founded), and into something that a broader range of people can relate to. The natural environment is a common source of inspiration in experimental music, and Falling Stars may even help some intrigued users track back to such figures as Stephen Vitiello (whose scores have drawn from images of nature), R. Murray Schafer (who popularized the concept of the soundscape), and Cheryl Leonard (who uses found objects, like bones and rocks, as instruments).

Water Music: Falling Stars’ mix of sheet-music elements and the natural environment echoes avant-garde graphic scores, such as sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s “Reed Music,” shown here, which superimposes sheet music onto a photo of reeds in a pond.

Closer at hand, Thicket’s Ott and Packard have acknowledged (in the text accompanying the video up above that features Ott) the influence of the app Soundrop on Falling Stars. Here’s a demo of Soundrop:

Trident is putting money behind the Vitality app’s promotion. There was a paid gawker.com post, and according to noisenewyork.com, a firm that was also involved in the app’s development, Falling Stars saw “over 100,000 downloads” during its first week of launch (other stats as of late June: “Trident Vitality app is #8 in the new and noteworthy section of the iPad, #15 in free entertainment apps, #85 overall in free apps”).

Get the Falling Stars by Trident Vitality Gum app (that is indeed its full name) at itunes.apple.com. Additional information at the gum’s website, tridentvitalitygum.com/fallingstars.

(Image of Vitiello’s composition from cnylink.com.)

Last year I wrote about Marcus Fischer’s elegant five-spindle adjustment of the common cassette tape, the result of which wasn’t just supremely practical, but also quite visually lovely. In order to loop endlessly, the cassette is altered to bypass one of its two spools, and the three additional spindles (the traditional cassette has two) maximize the length of tape within the cassette casing. The end result has the slightly off-the-norm appeal of such happy mutant icons as the album cover to Todd Rundgren’s Nearly Human, in which a human hand’s sixth finger isn’t immediately evident, or the darkly whimsical silhouettes that serve as interstitial cards in the TV series Fringe.

Here is Fischer’s device:

Innovation begets innovation, and so now we have Jared Smyth‘s seven-spindle cassette tape, which he reports, at uprlip.com, to be capable of a nearly 30-second loop:

Smyth also posted an MP3 of some of his sound experimentation. It’s a slow, lulling work, with a sing-song undercurrent that brings to mind the early tape loops of Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, in particular their Evening Star collaboration. To listen to the loop slowly take on additional elements is an enjoyable process, as bell tones, small figurations, and light textures begin to combine.

Smyth sent me a note making me aware of his experiment, and I asked him if he would post a video, so people could see (and hear) it in action. He quickly provided this, and in it you can see, about every 19 seconds or so, the white vertical strip of the splice making its rounds:

Smyth says he communicated with Fischer, who gave him some splicing advice. The seven-spindle project builds on an earlier, six-second tape loop that Smyth created, perhaps the most basic of cassette tape loops in that it only uses the two spindles that are part of the standard cassette tape structure:

He also posted a short piece recorded on the six-second looper (MP3):

And Smyth’s adventures aren’t nearly over. In addition to learning to master splicing, he reports of his desire to increase the spindle density: “I really think I could squeeze two more in there.”

Tape loop originally announced on Smyth’s website, uprlip.com.

Rewarding Rewording: The site Translation Telephone, at translation-telephone.com, pulls an Alvin Lucier / “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening” on words. In Lucier’s landmark work, the sound of a recording is heard to disintegrate as a phrase is read aloud in a room, and then a recording of that is played in the room, and then a recording of that recording is played, and so on. In Translation Telephone, you type in a phrase, and watch it cycle from one language to the next. For example, here’s a paragraph from a Disquiet post a few days ago:

The remix takes many forms. Music is remixed, but so too are videos, photographs, words, recipes, buildings, ideas. The remix is a means by which the past is made vibrant. It is the means by which the certitude of any form of documentation is probed and prodded until it loses its illusion of integrity.

And here is how it turned out, after going from English to Macedonian to Hebrew and back to English, with 18 additional languages at various stages in between:

Love is in many ways. The Sound of Music Mixer. But he added, video, photos, graphics, love the structure, how to live. This document is credibility

If a good mantra is a universal one, then Disquiet.com’s — “Just sitting here, listening” — holds up OK. After cycling through Bulgarian, Hindi, and 18 others languages, it came out “Just sit and listen,” which is, arguably, an improvement. Of course there are differences between Lucier’s piece and Translation Telephone, in particular that Lucier’s disintegration algorithm does double duty to provide a sense of the contours of the room in which it is recorded. If there were a parallel in Translation Telephone, what would it be? (Thanks to Paolo Salvagione for the tip. He called it an example of “rewording.”)

Bowl Alone: The intersection of physics and spirituality is a not uncommon one. This video accompanied a brief piece at io9.com that discussed how physicists were exploring the unique properties of Tibetan bowls, which are a popular tool for experimental musicians, especially those interested in the drone.

Max/R.I.P.: Belatedly, an excellent interview with famed computer-music legend Max Matthews done by Geeta Dayal just weeks before his death: frieze.com. Dayal is the author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno‘s Another Green World. When she was prepping for the Matthews interview, she asked, via Twitter, if anyone had any questions for him. (Matthews is synonymous with electronic music, because his first name is part of the name of the popular software Max/MSP.) I’d seen him speak at CCRMA at Stanford several years ago, and had wanted to ask him about the multi-channel mixer he had reportedly built for John Cage‘s 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis with the New York Philharmonic, then under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. Dayal did indeed ask the question, for which I am eternally thankful. This is just an excerpt from her Frieze piece:

GD: Didn’t you build a 50-channel mixer in 1964, for the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein? For a performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis?

MM: [Laughs] Yes, it would have been in the 1960s, because Cage and Jim Tenney were the two conductors; they ran the mixer. The mixer did have roughly 50 input channels, one for each pair of musicians at a given music stand. It was an octopus of wires, and they all came into these two consoles with a lot of knobs to adjust the volumes, and to direct the sound to one or more of about a dozen loudspeakers which were positioned around Avery Fisher Hall. Cage wrote the music for the performers, and he and Tenney ran the mixer during the performance. Even by Cage’s fairly generous standards, it wasn’t what he had hoped for. He added a piano portion, and I forgot the name of his pianist to the piece [David Tudor], and my judgment was that Bernstein stayed as far away as he could get; he couldn’t stand it. And I was just as happy to have him stay away, to tell you the truth.

GD: Did you and Bernstein not get along?

MM: We didn’t get close enough to not get along. But if we had gotten any closer, I would have quit the project.

The instruments did not have contact microphones on them, and of course you don’t want to put a contact microphone on a Stradivarius. I’d encouraged the musicians to bring their second violins, or any old violin, instead of their best violins. I arranged the contact mics to be on parts of the instrument that aren’t permanent, like the bridge, and had gone through quite a bit of trouble to be sure that the contact microphones could be put on the instruments without damaging the instruments. I think most of the instrumentalists didn’t have any trouble with that. So I was really mad at Bernstein when he came in one morning and told the instrumentalists that if they didn’t want to use the mics, they didn’t have to. I think most of them went ahead and used the mics. And Bernstein didn’t come back again. It was a concert series, about four or five nights of this piece, that it was played. Anyhow, it was fun to work with Cage, and it was fun to work with the orchestra, and it was fun to build this rather large mixer.

Board Game: There is something really beautiful about motion frozen, like fast-frame stills of bats in flight and of water drops hitting solid surfaces. And then there are Jeff Cook‘s wood sculptures based on cellular automata, like those in John Conway‘s influential “Game of Life” (via boingboing.net‘s David Pescovitz):

They’re on display at the gallery Chalk (chalkla.com) in Los Angeles through July. More photos from the opening at the gallery’s facebook.com account.

Kick It? Yes You Can: Two worthy musical Kickstarter campaigns, both from New Orleans: There’s the new Chef Menteur album, and a musical house. On the latter: “A growing group of local and national sound artists are working towards interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors can bring the house to life through their touch.”

The Sound of Pixels: During dinner with a friend recently, talk turned, as it occasionally does, to the process of taking one’s physical audio recordings and converting them to MP3s. We discussed various subjects: the reasonable legal right to download files of albums you have already purchased, those scary stickers on old promotional LPs you bought used that say they remain the property of the record company, and, inevitably, the proper bitrate. Certainly not 128kbps, but 192? 320? And should it be MP3? OGG? FLAC? I said I usually rip mine at 320, but I have this lingering fear that a decade from now standard audio equipment will be upgraded in a manner that will make our 320kbps MP3s sound the way that our old VHS cassettes look on fancy new HD TVs. The momentary look of anxiety on his face was straight out of a John Carpenter movie.

Navel Browsing: I need to do a better job of tracking comments I make on other people’s sites. Here are two from excellent newmusicbox.org: A piece by Colin Holter takes apart a quote widely attributed to Duke Ellington (that there are only two types of music: good and bad), and while Ellington did say it, he didn’t mean by it what Holter says it means, and I tried to correct the record. Also, in a separate piece, Frank J. Otieri asks, “What is the sound of music-less music?” and I suggest that the answer is held in a study of phonography, or the art of field recordings.

Archives Anonymous: The great ubu.com site now has a landing page for all its electronic-music goods: ubu.com/emr (via Chris Power, of twitter.com/chrisjohnpower)

App Swap: The remarkable app Reactable appears to be the first major port of a general-interest (i.e., not framed as a next-gen instrument) generative-sound app from iOS to Android: reactable.com.

Playing Defense: Reports on “sonic warfare” generally discuss snazzy new weaponry, but there is recent news of an “acoustic ‘cloaking device’”: bbc.co.uk.

Truly Representing: Diego Bernal is the new City Council member representing District 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is, indeed, the same Diego Bernal who remixed the Atlanta-based Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra‘s “Ose Shalom” last December for the tabletmag.com Hanukkah remix compilation I produced. Major congrats, man. Do your city proud.

Case in point is this video by Josh Saddler, aka ioflow, who is based in Southern California. His hands appear early on, but once the sequence is triggered, it’s hands-free. The only digits involved are the ones being processed by a computer. It’s lovely, as with most Monome video documents, to trace the correlation between sound and light, melody and motion:

Titled “Lines and Angles,” the piece is also streaming, and freely downloadable, as video-less audio at soundcloud.com/ioflow. (The video is hosted at Saddler’s vimeo.com account, where there are several others like it.) It’s an elegant, twitchy bit of minimal techno whose main success is how it manages to feel simultaneously anxious and sedate.

But it also means you, as a listener, are faced with liner notes like “grayscale monome 128, ricochet 0.3.1, renoise 2.7, ardour 2.8.11, gentoo linux,” which, clearly, is community-only reading. (I believe Ricochet is the Monome port of the Game of Life–inspired Otomata, which I’ve written about previously, including an interview with the creator of Otomata.) Fortunately, Saddler provided more background information at his livejournal.com, in which he traces his frustrations and the input of fellow Monome users that guided him to the end result. He also lists the three audio sources for the samples he employed (1, 2, 3).

More on Saddler/ioflow at museimpromptu.net and nightmorph.livejournal.com.

The pacing of the rough cut of the video brought to mind a metronomic pulse, which was also the subject of the “Competitive Swinging” essay. It seemed that a steady-paced work that slowly built but never got above a murmur would suit the visuals. Such music would aid in the momentum, never overpower the images, and match the clockwork motion that some of the works display. I also wanted to use a recent piece of music, so whoever ended up supplying the background tune would gain some promotional benefit. After listening through a lot of work by musicians whom I admire, and listening back through entries in this site’s Downstream department, I contacted the UK-based Grand Canonical Ensemble to inquire after “Summer Clothes,” a track off the album Saying Goodbye, which I wrote about back at the end of January. Back when I first heard “Summer Clothes,” it already had struck me as a kind of score to a movie that didn’t yet exist (I likened it to a more upbeat work by Ryuichi Sakamoto). Thanks to Salvagione’s interest and their generosity, that movie now actually exists.

The video was shot and edited by Christian Schneider (of ideagarden.org), with titles by Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), the latter of whom will be familiar to Disquiet.com readers for his collaboration on such projects as Despite the Downturn; Anander Mol, Anander Veig (and its outtakes follow-up); and Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet.

Grand Canonical Ensemble consists of Josh Owen Morris and Sam Bradwell. More on them and their music at gce.tumblr.com and grandcanonicalensemble.bandcamp.com. Their third album and first ever to be released physically comes out July 18 at metersandmilesrecordings.com.

The video is hosted at vimeo.com. Salvagione humorously credits me with “euphonic coordination,” which is to say “music supervision.”

Love of Tunnel: A still from the film that serves as the sonic source material for this “pseudo song”

Esbie has taken sounds from the widely praised subterranean documentary Undercity by Andrew Wonder and turned them into what she terms a “pseudo song.” The end result, which she titled “Undertracks” (get it?), has the elements of a song: beat, mood, and vocals, though the vocals aren’t sung, or rapped, but instead are comprised of select statements by Steve Duncan, the urban explorer whom Wonder tracks in his film.

Trains are a near constant in music, pop and otherwise: as sonic influence in the pacing of the blues, as metaphor in works ranging from Elvis Presley to Steve Reich, and, of course, as sample. Esbie’s response to Wonder’s film suggests itself as kind of souvenir. You can only watch the documentary so many times, and in so many settings, but should you have a hankering for it, this song serves as a compact and evocative, and respectful, memento.

Speaking of being respectful, it also serves as a meta enactment of copyleft creavity. Esbie reminds us in the brief liner note to her track that Wonder owns the copyright to the work she has sampled — but, of course, his documentary was a literal act of creative trespass.

Track originally posted by Esbie (aka Sarah Brown) at soundcloud.com/esbie. More on the Wonder-Duncan video at vimeo.com.