The cassette tape loop is an elegant tool from a more civilized age, not as clumsy or random as its modern, digital equivalent. In the time before easy access to digital audio tools, it provided an inexpensive means to achieve continuous layering: one tape head writes while another reads. Each time around, new sounds are accrued while previous sounds get slowly buried in the mix. The length of the loop has several determining factors, key among them the length of the piece of tape on which the sounds are being recorded: how much time passes before the splice comes around again.
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.
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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):
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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.
Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:
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.
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.
It’s funny that people used to talk doubtfully about what a laptop musician was — or, more to the point, perhaps wasn’t — doing up there on stage. There was for a long time a significant gap between the effort a laptop musician exerted, and the impact that was experienced by the audience. That gap will persist, even as it diminishes. (Much as there are still “Sushi isn’t a fad” stories being published.) One reason it’s funny is because of the proliferation of instruments people don’t even have to “play,” in the continuous, hands-on sense of the word — instruments such as the Monome, which are pleasant to watch all on their lonesome: “Look, Ma, no hands.”
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).
Back in April I shared here the essay I wrote (“Addressing the Competition”) for an installation, titled “Competitive Swinging,” by artist Paolo Salvagione at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, just north of where I live in San Francisco. Following that project, Salvagione asked me to assist in adding a score to a video documenting an earlier exhibit of his, titled “An Excuse to Respond,” which was also held at the Headlands.
The video is shot in a bright room and shows various works, most of which could broadly be described as sculptures, and all of which involve some sort of interaction on the part of the attendees. There are flip books, a kind of elevated hopscotch game, a pair of boots attached to large brushes, and, among other things, a kinetic sculpture about which I’ll have more to say in the future. All are infused with a wonderful mischievousness.
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 “An Excuse to Respond” 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.
