Month: July 2010

Kate Carr “Pin Prick” MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

You’ll forgive yourself if you look over your shoulder as the four-minute point approaches in Kate Carr‘s desolate “Pin Prick,” a track she’s posted in recent months at her soundcloud.com/katecarr account. After a distant metallic patterning, mechanical urgings, a voice cuts in — not a voice in the speaking sense of the word, but a groan, a moan, a cough, the slightest sound that, in most contexts, would be invisible, dismissible. But following — amid — all that most minimal techno, the sound of the human voice is vivid, deeply human, thoroughly alive. Don’t consider this alert a spoiler. Each time around, the voice is a surprise, a whisper over your shoulder.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/katecarr. More on Carr at myspace.com/k8carr. The track was released as part of the Things Are Bad in Haiti compilation at pertin-nce.com.

Vuvuzela: Just Bleat It

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If “vuvuzela” isn’t the Word of the Year, expect to hear a lot of Bronx cheers. Past winners, which are determined by the American Dialect Society, have included “tweet” (2009), “subprime” (2007), and “y2k” (1999). It’s certainly difficult to recall a single sound as widely discussed as the “vuvuzela.” The word refers to the long, tapered, plastic horn that resembles an over-sized golf tee, and whose continual playing by thousands upon thousands of fans has been the white-noise backing track to this year’s World Cup.

Just as one gauge of the vuvuzela’s place in the public consciousness, take a look at the development of its wikipedia.org page: there have been twice as many updates to the entry in 2010 as there were between 2006, when the subject first arose (during the previous World Cup), and 2009. (Will the history records of Wikipedia entries replace article counts in LexisNexis as the new measure of a subject’s ubiquity?) In the New York Times (nytimes.com), Rob Walker (friend of Disquiet.com) noted the depiction by Jemele Hill, at espn.com, of the horn as “a major subplot of the World Cup,” and the advice, via createdigitalmusic.com, on how to filter out the sound. A professor at George Mason University named John Nauright suggested that the horn may have roots in “the traditional kudu horn used to call villagers to gatherings” (according to smithsonianmag.com). Composer/sound-artist Andreas Bick took issue with interpretations of the horn’s significance that emphasize a rowdy underclass: “Can anyone from the townships of South Africa afford a ticket for a … match?”

And as of Saturday, there were 32,072 members of a Facebook group named “Ban football from vuvuzela concerts.” While there’s humor in that association (the widely despised noise as music), some have taken it seriously — at least seriously to mix the sound into something composed, in an abstract-electronic way. Alec Vance, back on June 15, posted at aleatoric.backporchrevolution.com just such a recording (MP3), and while doing so, he noted a particularly interesting aspect of the word “drone”: “I am not sure, but I am pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence that the word ‘drone’ is used both for male worker bees and the droning sound that bees make.”

[audio:http://aleatoric.backporchrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/15-Vuvuzela.mp3|titles=”Vuvuzela”|artists=Aleatoric (Alec Vance)]

Vance’s track takes about 15 minutes of the U.S. England game and echoes it into a dirgey wonder, a spinning noise without center. The track, notably, doesn’t fetishize the horn. Quite the contrary, it makes clear that the horn is part of a broader array of sonic artifacts at a Word Cup event: there’s the play-by-play of announcers, the beeping of whistles, and foremost the roar of the crowd, which at certain point rises just as the sound of the collective vuvuzelas dies down: you can’t blow your horn and yell at the same time.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon among 25 recordings newly added to Library of Congress. Also: Tupac, Wagner: http://is.gd/de14t #
  • Just love the idea of "smart crates" in Serato. #
  • Fascinated by how even slight movement of a headphone cable can be so amplified in isolation earbuds. Maybe Bluetooth is the way to go. #
  • RIP, hip-hop pioneer and gothic futurist Rammellzee (b. 1960) http://is.gd/ddXFd #
  • 32,072: Number of members of the "Ban football from vuvuzela concerts" Facebook group: http://is.gd/ddWfV #
  • Just realized I was in New York for 57 consecutive hours last weekend & never heard Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, or Bon Jovi once. #
  • Morning sounds: car passing, two hard drives (laptop, Tivo),
    fridge, unidentified distant engine. #
  • RIP, music publisher/producer Francis Dreyfus (b. 1940), influential in career of Jean Michel Jarre & others http://is.gd/ddasp #
  • RIP, tuba player Aaron Dodd (b. 1948), troubled formed member of underappreciated jazz ensemble 8 Bold Souls http://is.gd/ddatn #
  • Neat. With the exception of a month when an @drumc0rps write-up became a spam magnet, last month was the biggest yet at Disquiet.com. #
  • Autechre's Oversteps still not growing on me. #
  • Golden Gate Park aircraft-drone update: apparently they were hunting two dogs that had attacked someone. #
  • Either there's an under-publicized drone concert going on in Golden Gate Park, or aircraft have been circling slowly for half an hour. #
  • Bum speaker on Muni 31 bus in SF is adding fizzy snare-drum reverberation to every beep and automaton vocal that the vehicle emits. #
  • Just realized how much extra stuff is packed into reissue of Un”‹-”‹Herd Vol”‹.”‹1, awesome avant-hip-hop by @whyarcka — http://bit.ly/165DJq #
  • RT @tobiasreber hi marc, did you hear about this? care to share? http://tinyurl.com/2fhabxl [I hadn't — thanks for spreading the news.] #
  • Desktop fan came on suddenly and loudly, signaling a 200mb cut'n'paste. #
  • RIP, Allyn Ferguson (b. 1924), Hollywood composer, third-steam proponent: http://is.gd/d858K #
  • RIP, Parliament-Funkadelic's Garry "One Nation Under a Groove" Shider (b. 1953): http://is.gd/d8arT #
  • When's insta-translate coming to @twitter to help me follow musicians like @ichiro_0414 & @ryuichisakamoto etc.? #
  • The loungey in-plane soundtrack on @virginamerica turns most night-time landings into little Michael Mann films. #
  • Sounds at 35,000 (or so) feet: engines, cabin personnel, bleeding headphones, cackling children, typing (mine), occasional overhead beeps. #
  • Really, I need to install bloatware @realplayer in order to get audio notes (amr files) to play in @evernote on my Win7 netbook? #
  • S__> is the statusicon (staticon?) for being stuck in airplane on runway. S15__> is when stuck with 15 planes ahead of you, as I am now. #
  • When statusicons supplant emoticons, among the first will be "stuck in airplane on runway." #
  • Can now break cover during surprise trip to NY for dad's 75th bday. Enjoying LIRR sounds now ("Syyyyyy-oset," "Bable-en") en route to JFK. #
  • Subscribe to @emusic? Then the 19-track Grand Valley State University Terry Riley: In C Remixes costs just 9 credits/linden/clams/whatever. #
  • For the Win by @doctorow — a teen thriller that's actually a strong defense of unionizing. Detailed take on video-game economics, too. #

Chinese Red Glare & Blare (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

We may celebrate Independence Day in the U.S. with firecrackers, but July 4 aside, for many the popular combustibles summon up images of China, where they are thought to have been invented.

And yet for all China’s association with firecrackers, the country is anything but laissez-faire about them. There were bans around the time of the recent Olympics held there. And by some reports, there appears to have been a long-running ban, from 1994 to 2006, in areas of Beijing, and elsewhere.

Robin Dumont captured sounds of firecrackers being launched in 2006, when that ban was relaxed, and posted two and a half minutes of them archive.org (MP3, MP3)

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/ChineseSoundscape-NewYearFirecrackers2006/060228SonsPtards_64kb.mp3|titles=”060228 Sons Postcards”|artists=Robin Dumont] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/ChineseSoundscape-NewYearFirecrackers2006/060128SonsPtardsIi_64kb.mp3|titles=”060128 Sons Postcards II”|artists=Robin Dumont]

For soundcrafters looking for some seasonal audio experimentation, they make good source material. For the rest of us, the recordings provide a consideration along the lines of the phonography koan, “If a tree falls in a different forest, does it sound different?” How are these recordings Chinese — is the layering of sounds, the sheer density of simultaneity a sign of populism beyond that of most casual municipal fireworks? Is there something in the range of noises (pops, crackles, explosions, whistles, roars — not to mention some car alarms) that speak of China-specific materials, experience, or culture?

Original files at archive.org, including higher-resolution VBR and Ogg Vorbis recordings. Dumont has a lot of great Chinese audio available, including sounds from a Chinese McDonald’s and the Beijing Metro: archive.org. (Photo of firecrackers exploding at five frames per second shot and compiled by Wesley Oostvogels, flickr.com. It was taken at a Chinese New Year celebration in Antwerp, Belgium.)

Music for Unmanned Spacecraft (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When asked where I took my vacation, I used to joke with the answer: Google Reader. It’s the same joke these days, with a different answer: Soundcloud.com. The sheer density of music on the site, all uploaded by musicians themselves, as well as by some small labels, provides an interesting spin on Jorge Luis Borges’ idea of an infinite library. When listening to music on Soundcloud, one can have the impression that none of this music might have existed had Soundcloud itself not existed in the first place — it’s like the sound-library equivalent of Field of Dreams: it was built, and now the musicians are coming. That’s in contrast with Myspace, which, all negative assessments aside (which are largely about over-expansion and a chaotic visual interface), often feels like the music has all been uploaded from actual CDs that are sitting in a box somewhere gathering dust as they wait for someone to purchase them.

Now, Soundcloud has a long way to go in terms of making the most of its interconnectedness, but you have to admire what it’s accomplished so far: a bare-bones architecture and interface that has managed to provide musicians, a vast number of them electronica-ly oriented, a home base. Not only do the musicians post, but they comment on each other’s music, and a Twitter-like Following/Followers system, along with Groups, helps organize everyone into fluid communities of interaction. Through the Following/Followers system, you can make your way through a maze of associations — who likes what, and then who likes them. Unlike Myspace and Bandcamp, another great music community, Soundcloud has figured out how to best include music-followers (i.e., folks who don’t actually make music, but whose listening habits serve as a guide to others). My own experience is not anomalous: I’ve never uploaded anything, yet have 105 followers, who I suppose occasionally give a listen to what I’ve “Favorited” (how recently did this word enter our vocabulary?).

Here’s one recent favorite — well, recent to me; it was uploaded half a year ago. Through some such maneuvering I came to two tracks by Patrick Cavanagh (aka Scherzo), who’s apparently pursuing a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics “with a concentration on the development and design of unmanned spacecraft.” That little biographical tidbit makes it difficult not to hear “ells,” one of Cavanagh’s Soundcloud postings, as an audio sketch of the emissions of just such a future machine. (Yeah, there’s no sound in space — but there is imagination.) At about four and a half minutes, it is all rumbling synths with little gear-like machinations that slowly build and fade.

More on Cavanagh, who’s based in Indianapolis, Indiana, at myspace.com/scherzomusic and mypage.iu.edu/~pdcavana.