Month: September 2009

Image of the Week: Kind of Bloop

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The promotional art for the recent Kind of Bloop compilation, which resets the classic Miles Davis album as if it were a collection of 8-bit tunes for old arcade video games. The pixel-art rendition is credited to Andrew Duhan, who based it closely on the original cover photo by Jay Maisel, also reproduced below:

The emphasis on the shape of Davis’s head in the Duhan version seems to suggest that the head is bald, which makes the image look a little more like Louis Armstrong than it does Miles Davis at the time of Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago last month.

And just for further comparison, here’s a promotional image of hip-hop producer Timbaland, for the release of his music-making software Beaterator, which is coming soon to the PlayStation Portable, PlayStation Network, iPhone, and iPod Touch. If Kind of Bloop is music adopted to the style of video games, Beaterator is a promising example of music-making adopted to the style of video games — and it doesn’t hurt that Timbaland adopted the Blue Note-era suit and tie for the image:

More on the compilation at kindofbloop.com, where it is available as MP3s or massive FLAC files for a total of five dollars.

More on Beaterator at beaterator.rockstargames.com. It’s due out for the PlayStation on September 29, and for the Apple devices later this autumn.

Quote of the Week: Echo-nomics

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Insight on feedback by Robert J. Shiller:

    even when feedback mechanisms are straightforward, they can produce very strange outcomes, not predictable very far into the future, as the modern mathematics of chaos theory can attest.

He’s writing not about sound but about economic data, in his New York Times piece “An Echo Chamber of Boom and Bust” (nytimes.com, August 29, 2009).

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • My two favorites @mocalosangeles: Christian Marclay's 16-channel video http://is.gd/2V232 & Ai Weiwei's 10-plus video http://is.gd/2V27p #
  • Checking out the "social network" Firefox plug-in @yoono. So far, so good. Definitely saves on simultaneous screens/tabs. Kinda elegant. #
  • Saturday morning sounds: this early, it's just the fridge through one wall, and the hard drive below me. Maybe geese, a bus, or a car soon. #
  • Video of augmented audio on a train — great example of why the iPhone app @rjdj is so great: http://flic.kr/p/6Rs8jc RT @rjdj @revdancatt #
  • Best description of "feedback" I've read recently was in an article not about sound but about economics: http://is.gd/2Q62u (nytimes.com) #
  • Listening to a Basic Channel compilation, which I could easily have been convinced, while cross Market Street, was in fact @rjdj in action. #
  • Nice morning audio synchronism: geese commuting overhead, just as the electric toothbrush sounds its didgeridoo wail. #
  • Realizing that the Tuesday air-raid siren here in San Francisco must emanate from a spot much closer to where I work than to where I live. #
  • Yow — Joan La Barbara is among the musicians at this year's San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, September 16 – 19: http://is.gd/2LkNu #
  • Field recordists & phonographers, @alexismadrigal has started a locative-sound project @HearThisWorld and http://HearThisWorld.tumblr.com/. #
  • Afternoon sounds: typing, voices below, footsteps, printer buzz, distant & limited traffic, air plane, a dozen hard drives in choral unison. #
  • Just listened to my own house. Put AC/DC on stereo; went to showing at house next door. Couldn't hear a thing. Realtor said, "Rock out." #
  • Sunday morning sounds: foghorns, hard drives, and the continued silence of the uninhabited single-family home next door. #
  • Said the good reverend at tonight's wedding, "The language of love is silence." #

Christian Marclay’s Alien Cultural Autopsy at MOCA

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Christian Marclay installation currently at the MOCA in Los Angeles is 16 generic, black monitors set in a circle; each monitor on a pedestal; each pedestal a tall, stark white box. On each monitor, one of 16 different videos displays human hands in white gloves investigating different objects, and the audio for each video is a likewise pristine, no-background-noise document of the object — as it is shaken, or rubbed against something, or banged.

Many of these are common household items, like a travel toothbrush (see image below), its little clear case knocked and brushed, making tiny noises as a result. There’s also a bright green hanging house plant, its leaves ever so slightly rustling. Some of the items are inherently musical, like a spinning noisemaker, and a child’s xylophone. Some or associatively so, like a sealed copy of a Yoko Ono vinyl LP, its plastic covering emanating that once common soft-yet-proscriptive flutter.

If the individual investigations are routinized and hermetic, the overall effect — should one stand in the center of the speakers — is of some catalog cacophony. It brought to mind, more than anything else, the installation in late 2007 and early 2008 at PS1 in Queens, New York, of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, a 15-hour film that was divided into 14 parts, each shown in a separate makeshift room, the rooms standalone (almost outhouse-like) structures set in a circle. In each room, you could watch an individual segment, or you could stand in the center of the rooms (an interesting variation on the more common “center of the room”), and be immersed in the sonic simultaneity.

As one friend who visited the Marclay exhibit with me two weekends back put it, the collection of videos look like alien surveillance of domestic life on this planet. The piece is titled “Shake Rattle and Roll (Fluxmix)” (2004).

More at moca.org (the Grand Avenue MOCA), where it is part of the exhibit Collecting History: Highlighting Recent Acquisitions, which is scheduled to run from July 12 through October 19.

Classic King Crimson Rock Minimalism MP3 (1982)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Once you plug in the microphone, it’s all electronic music.” That’s something Bill Bruford once said. Bruford was one of the first musicians I ever interviewed, and he said it to me. I was in college at the time, and he was touring with Earthworks, his then fairly new and plugged-in jazz ensemble that had world-music flourishes, an interest in minimalist patterning, and a solid sense of swing. Around then, the emergence of Wynton Marsalis and his staunch if inspired jazz traditionalism had drawn a firm line in the sand, and that line appeared ’round about when Miles Davis had first plugged in.

I was doing a radio show at WYBC when Bruford came through town, and I had been watching the jazz culture war unfold in the liner notes to the record albums that arrived weekly at the station, like missives from the front line (it was especially informative to watch Stanley Crouch go from maverick of the avant-garde to defender of the faith). I had asked Bruford, during the interview, what it meant to play jazz with electric instruments, but mostly what I wanted to do was talk about his work with the band King Crimson, in which he’d been a drummer on some of their best albums, notably Discipline. Drop the swing for the moment, and it’s clear that the work achieved by him and his rhythm-section partner in King Crimson, Tony Levin (on bass and Chapman stick), was clearly the root from which Earthworks was beginning to grow.

Over at the Crimson-and-related website dgmlive.com, a studio recording (circa 1982) has been posted of an early take on what, as the entry notes, would become “Waiting Man,” the track that closed the first side of Discipline‘s follow-up, Beat (this was the age of the vinyl LP). It’s an intricate, pattern-rich jam featuring just Bruford and Levin (none of the dual guitars of their Crimson partners, Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp, the early live-looping progenitor). And it’s very much an adoption of minimalism by a rock ensemble (MP3), just as the Who had done with Terry Riley decades earlier, and Tortoise would do with Steve Reich a decade later.

[audio:http://www.dgmlive.com/tickles/kc19820320-0101-Bill_And_Tony.mp3
|titles=”Bill and Tony (1982)”|artists=Bill Bruford and Tony Levin]

The DGMLive site only keeps those MP3s posted briefly, so get it while you can. It’s brief, but it’s a splendid snapshot of a formative in-studio work-in-progress.