My 33 1/3 book, on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, was the 5th bestselling book in the series in 2014. It's available at Amazon (including Kindle) and via your local bookstore. • F.A.Q. • Key Tags: #saw2for33third, #sound-art, #classical, #junto • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram

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

The Quiet Today

[ January 20, 2021 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Closest I can say to how it feels right now is I used to live near a horrible band that made horrible music loudly day and night, and then one day they moved out and it was quiet, a quiet I came to recognize was not momentary but the new normal. That’s the quiet I feel right now.

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On Algorithmic Winds

A new video for Jamuary by Heymun

[ January 19, 2021 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

You can almost see the clouds break when Heymun’s video gets underway. Her small synthesizer emits massive clouds of cello and other unidentified strings, plus vast choruses of consonant-free singing. Those clouds are artificial, needless to say, and gloriously so. They are striated digitally, and they flow according to algorithmic winds.

This is the latest video I’ve added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of fine live performance of ambient music. Video originally posted to Heymn’s YouTube channel. She is based in Sydney, Australia. More at soundcloud.com/heymun and instagram.com/heymunmusic.

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Dong Zhou’s Alternative Bows

Live video from the Soundwave festival

[ January 18, 2021 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

The medium of perfect sound forever, the compact disc, is here explored for its textural details. One might think that the CD, its data secure(ish) within layers of clear plastic and bright metal, is distinct from, say, vinyl LPs and cassette tapes, both of which have their well-known reproductive shortcomings. LP and tape surface qualities, the wear and tear, are an implicit part of the bargain. But the CD is different. Debates about its fidelity have to do with high-grain digital verisimilitude, not with background noise (even if the glitch genre/effect did derive in part from the sound of failing CDs).

But this video performance locates something different. By using a CD, at the opening of “we will finally lost in heavy fog,” as a means to play a violin, musician Dong Zhou (born in Shanghai, China, and based in Hamburg, Germany) gets at its hard materials, at the clipped corner of it sharp edge. She then proceeds to use other tools, including a pair of bows, what appears to be a rubber band, and an unidentified if certainly suggestive green object. Furthermore, she begins to process the sounds, so by the six-minute mark, when the green item is employed, she’s also using her laptop to echo and lightly yet radically transform the source audio.

Video originally posted at Dong Zhou’s YouTube channel. It appears that it was streamed during the October Soundwave Festival 3.0, which was held five Saturdays in a row in October 2020 (onnow.tv). More from Dong Zhou at dongzhou.live and soundcloud.com/shimo_zhou.

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Current Favorites: Icelandic Viola, Processed Piano

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

[ January 17, 2021 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

A weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them. (This weekly feature was previously titled Current Listens. The name’s been updated for clarity’s sake.)

▰ Sola is Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti performing a three-part piece by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. If hyper-attenuated, ghostly strings are your thing (they are mine), this is ideal listening. As a bonus (and a model for other labels), the three tracks are followed by seven containing a conversation between composer and performer. Releaed on the New Focus Recordings label.

▰ Solo live performance by Raffael Seyfried for piano, complemented and transformed by synthesizer. The track is titled “Haptic,” and it is recommended you watch as he touches the equipment throughout.

▰ A fine synthesizer piece, titled “Frozenfir.” A lot of current synth material can over rely on plucked and warped sounds, but this performance by Ambalek, who has quickly become a personal favorite, strikes a smart balance.

▰ Due out in mid-March, the upcoming Devin Sarno album, Evocation, offers welters of noise and a brief expanse of ether in its two preview tracks.

▰ Also spending a lot of time with two pieces I wrote about in a bit more detail this past week, both solo live synthesizer performances, one by Orbital Patterns and the other by Electric Kitchen.

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twitter.com/disquiet: Dilithium Resonance, Zoom Practice

From the past week

[ January 16, 2021 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

I do this manually each week, collating the tweets I made at twitter.com/disquiet that I want to keep track of. For the most part, this means ones I initiated, not ones in which I directly responded to someone. I sometimes tweak them a bit here. It’s usually personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud, and yow what a week this has been.

▰ “Sound is a mechanical wave. Its energy travels through a medium. … His scream must have travelled at the resonant frequency of dilithium’s subspace components.” (The Star Trek: Discovery finale wasn’t entirely my thing, but it still had my number.)

▰ Whatever happens today, at least my laptop no longer beeps every time I plug in my phone or iPad. (Or, that’s the highlight of the week, and it’s all downhill from here.)

▰ I’ve learned many things about myself during pandemic shut-in life, and key among them is that I’m way more into Miss Marple than into James Bond.

▰ “The sonic scale of interstellar turbulence.” I truly have no idea what this means (nature.com), but it is my favorite clause of the week so far. I believe this explains is a bit more. I could also be entirely wrong: nature.com.

▰ The good news: there will be a new season of Schoolhouse Rock.

The bad news: due to current events, it will be rated R.

▰ I sure miss in-person guitar class, but it’s sure nice to be able to, the second Zoom class is over, use my phone to record myself playing certain sequences before I forget them entirely.

▰ “Sorry, I need to listen to this document right now.” (Thing I just heard myself say.)

▰ Seems sorta personal. I might prefer a one-on-one session.

▰ RIP, Salvador Lopez Monroy, founder of the Mission District’s El Farolito. The morning after we moved back to San Francisco after 4 years in New Orleans, we knew exactly where to go. We drove straight to El Farolito and ordered more food than we could finish.

▰ Reminder of the bliss of setting your Twitter location to a country where you don’t know the language (bonus points if you appreciate the characters’ aesthetics). The social media equivalent of working in a coffee shop where everyone’s chattering but you don’t understand a word.

▰ Current guitar class homework

▰ Send communications between Annares and Urras with ease

▰ Today’s home office tip: an old Lego box makes a good caddy for cables, notebooks, and other doodads.

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