Month: August 2010

‘Determinism’ Score (WAV Files)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The model for the independently produced film Determinism isn’t unfamiliar: turf battle, racial firestorm, class-crossing love triangle, domineering kingpin, addled drug-runners. Part of what makes it different — more to the point, what makes it tick like a time bomb — is that all these things play out on a suburban college campus.

To some extent, that contrast between action and setting brings to mind Brick, which starred a pre-Inception (and, for that matter, pre-500 Days of Summer) Joseph Gordon-Levitt in what was essentially a film noir shot at a high school. What Brick played for deadpan meta-shtick, though, Determinism does with realism. While drug deals in dorm rooms are nothing new, the mingling in Determinism of homework and guns is palpable. This is a movie where returning to the straight and narrow after a drug-fueled walk on the side means hitting the books, though in a way that’s more “AA 12-Step” than it is “ABC After School Special.”

Adding to the interesting mix is the very nature of those racial identities. The film is the creation of twin South East Asian brothers Sanjit and Ranju Majumdar. Sanjit also edited it (and stars as its anti-heroic protagonist, Alec), and Ranju was its cinematographer. (There’s a bit of knowingness to the “filming within the film” in Determinism, which features Sanjit recording video diaries as he tries to extricate himself from family ties and school ties, and ends up digging himself a deeper and deeper hole of trouble.)

And, to top it off, Ranju also composed the Determinism score, which puts him in the small but elite category of filmmakers who contribute the music to their work, among them JJ Abrams, John Carpenter, Clint Eastwood, and Tom Twykker. That music is what really stuck with me after several viewings of the film, and I eventually suggested to Ranju that he post the score, which he has done (for free download) at soundcloud.com/determinism. (Full disclosure: A relative of mine was a producer on Determinism, and I saw its rough cuts at various stages of development.) One favorite cue of mine is the “Determinism Closing” theme, which is a characteristically haunting mix of drones, sonar beeps, field noise, and occasional percussion that is all dread, all anxiety.

And here’s the film’s promotional trailer:

 

More on the movie at determinismthemovie.com. Get the full score as a set of WAV files, or stream them, at soundcloud.com/determinism.

My Liner Notes to the New Landrecorder EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Lisbon, Portugal, netlabel feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com just released a great three-track set by Landrecorder, the British phonographer. FeedbackLoop proprietor Leonardo Rosado (aka twitter.com/sbtrmnl) invited me to write the mini-album’s liner notes, based on his sense that its mix of composed sound and field recordings would entice me. He was by no means mistaken, and he was patient as I took my time to work through Landrecorder’s narrative construction, based around phases of the waking day, as the album’s title, morning | afternoon | evening, suggests. Here is what I wrote:

Reportedly, that would be a music box, not an ice-cream truck, coasting into (aural) view early on during “Evening” — those tinkling notes immediately summoning up (mental) images of childhood, despite their objectively terse, metallic timbres.

“Evening” is the third and final track of Landrecorder’s lovely, daylong, slo-mo odyssey. We know it is a music box because of some brief liner notes provided by Landrecorder, but without that insider information, we might not be entirely certain. This is because Landrecorder mixes field recordings and instrumentation in a way that artfully confuses any preconceived notions of scale.

In that one track alone, we hear mournful piano chords, the delicately wound music box, and a variety of field noise, including birdsong and street sounds — often at the same time. By and large, Landrecorder’s approach is to maintain such sounds at the same relative volume level, and the result is that the piano and the music box, the avian calls and some random bristly disturbance, are all set alongside each other, like so many ducks in a row.

Occasionally he modifies these sounds — there’s some backward masking on “Morning” that mimics the seep of a half-lost thought, and during “Evening” the piano at one point is echoed majestically — but his primary technique is deeply, and creatively, curatorial: combining unassociated sonic elements into something new.

Landrecorder announces the importance of framing in his technique at the album’s outset, when “Morning” begins with an acoustic guitar part on repeat, as if a needle has been set down more than once at the same place on an old piece of vinyl. A similar sense of nostalgia is infused in all three tracks, from the mournful harmonica on “Morning” to the distant chatter of children on “Afternoon,” to the way the sound of a car driving past brings “Evening” (and, hence, the full set) to a close.

This compositional technique mirrors the process of memory, things combined in unlikely combinations, and in unlikely proportions: sometimes warped, sometimes laid bare. And both approaches, in Landrecorder’s hands, lead to tantalizing results.

And, more importantly, you can listen to (and download, for free) morning | afternoon | evening here:

<a href="http://feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com/album/morning-afternoon-evening">Morning by FeedbackLoop Label</a>

Get the full release at feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com or feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com. More on Landrecorder at twitter.com/landrecorder and landrecorder.wordpress.com.

Quote of the Week: Create (Fill in the Blank) Music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Over at his excellent createdigitalmusic.com website, the prolific Manhattan-based writer and musician Peter Kirn makes the following aside. He’s in the process of describing a forthcoming release by Alessandro Cortini that will include (no kidding) a fully functioning synthesizer, when he makes the (literally) parenthetical comment that he tried to go back in time

“… to tell myself I should include a less literal name for the site, but my past self didn’t believe me”

What he’s getting at is the extent to which the name of his website — and, by extension, that of any publication, online or off — may or may not define what’s covered in it editorially. The “digital” in the name “Create Digital Music” needn’t be taken literally. Only the most perversely post-human, Singularity-minded individuals would take issue with Kirn’s inclusion of analog synthesizers amid his general coverage; the rise of digital music-making has caused a new generation to seek out its analog precedents, and led to numerous digital software emulations of halcyon hardware. That is part of the story.

Furthermore, there’s a long pre-Internet precedent for magazines’ purviews outpacing their logos. It’s unlikely that the editors at Rock & Folk, the French music magazine, think twice about covering hip-hop, or that Down Beat would restrict itself to jazz that has a down beat, or that readers of the New York Review of Books get confused when an article about the World Cup or the naming of a new Supreme Court justice appears untethered to any book in particular.

All of which said, I feel a certain camaraderie with Kirn. I wrote an overview of laptop music for the online publication newmusicbox.org in 2006 (“Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music”), and very late in my final edit realized that I’d been considering Steve Roden as part of the scheme, alongside Fennesz, Ikue Mori, and other musicians — the problem being that Roden doesn’t employ a laptop. Aesthetically, given his fragile music that often draws from real-world and other found sounds, Roden sits alongside many of the musicians I was writing about, but technologically he’s in a different camp. (Fortunately I came to this realization before submitting the story to my editor.)

Technology and aesthetics each engender various types of practice, but they are not inherently mappable to each other in any specific one-to-one manner. Kirn has touched on this very subject himself previously, as I noted back in May of this year (disquiet.com), when he wrote, in part, “I realize I’m making an argument about musical practice based on technology, and that that argument isn’t entirely complete.”

In addition, I have thought on occasion not so much about the name of this site, Disquiet.com, which has aged OK since launching in late 1996, but with the subhead (“ambient/electronica”) and the tagline (“Reflections on ambient/electronic music & conversations with the people who make it”). The word “electronica” in particular seems to have long since fallen from any particular favor, but to my mind, that allows for it to take on new meaning; I like to think of it as being like “Americana,” the varied ephemera of a particular territory. Neither the subhead nor the tagline do full justice to the breadth of what I write about here, which more broadly might be described as “electronically mediated sound,” but even that phrase doesn’t quite do it. I have thought occasionally about adding the phrase “sound art” (or even just “sound”) to either the subhead or the tagline at Disquiet.com, but for now my sense remains that to do so would be — as Kirn might put it — to create a future me who would eventually be able to point out something else that didn’t age particularly well along the way.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Bill Fontana will transform @sfmoma bridge w/ "hypersonic speakers and vibration sensors that respond to visitors’ footsteps." Opens Nov 20. #
  • Want a push-poller to hang up the phone? Ask who is paying for the "research." (Speaking of which, surveillance exhibit @sfmoma on 10/30.) #
  • Construction solo: One lone, invisible hammer slap-echoes crosswise up and down the intersecting streets. #
  • The three Palm devices (IIIxe, Tungsten T3, Clie SJ20) in my closet temper my desire to upgrade from a G1 to a Droid 2, at least somewhat. #
  • When mashups happen in "real" life (aka meatspace): Patti LaBelle joins cast of Fela! on Broadway http://is.gd/egdXo She'll play his mother. #
  • Trailer for promising film on "soundtracker" Gordon Hempton, whose recent book sits alongside Keizer's & Prochnik's http://is.gd/egd6J #
  • Neu!, Roedelius, & Fujiya & Miyagi all have CDs on Gronland, the label founded by @groenemeyer, who scored Anton Corbjin's The American. #
  • Often when I read about a given DJ's ongoing "residency," I instinctively assume they're apprentice medical practitioners by day. #badtvshow #
  • Fog horns are out of control tonight. The Phantom of the Opera has put the pedal to the metal. #
  • I think of Los Lobos as the band that releases CDs between Latin Playboys CDs. My csindy.com review of Tin Can Trust: http://is.gd/ef27u #
  • The sign in the library reads: "Text Only Zone." Presumably that refers to mobile technology and not the institution's holdings. #
  • Despite all those James Murphy tunes in Greenberg, the film's overarching musical theme seems to be the act of dramatically truncating songs #
  • Soon as I turn off this computer, it's gonna be all the more quiet. #
  • Another day listening (mostly) to 1-track CDs: Ákos Garai (Pilis), Oxide (Chop Shop), Dirac (Phon), & Nilsen/Stilluppsteypa (Passing Out). #
  • That previous comment was John Lurie (Lounge Lizards) talking in the sad article about him in the Aug 16 @newyorker issue http://is.gd/ecjGG #
  • "There's a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between B'way & Lafayette–a saxophone sounds incredible there at about 6 o'clock." #
  • Workmen next door just removed from ground an ancient empty metal drum 1.5x size of my car. That's what the banging has been about. #
  • Was just followed by musician whose recent album I was listening to a few hours ago. Maybe my @songbirdteam install has sprung a leak? #
  • No, silly @gracenotetweets — it's a Steve Roden 3" CD (Ecstasy Showered) not chapter 17 of disc 7 of Stephen King's Bag of Bones audiobook. #
  • This is the Bomb Squad: @shocklee notes @cdmblogs post on Isao Hashimoto's thermonuclear-testing sonification (1945-98) http://is.gd/ebHnX #
  • RIP, Jack Parnell (b. 1923), among many other things the (human) bandleader for The Muppet Show. http://is.gd/ebDrd #mahna #mahna #
  • I'll be presenting on storytelling (visual + serial, aka comics) at the #planningness conference in Boulder on Sep30/Oct1: planningness.com #
  • So, iOS folders can only handle 12 apps despite a pane with room for another 8 & an interface that trained us to swipe across the landscape? #
  • Quake hit while listening to Bill Laswell, Toshinori Kondo, & DJ Krush. Now that's some heavy bass. (Also felt by @footage at 5:52pm) #
  • Only listened to CDs consisting of 1 track today: Celer Brittle, Terry Riley In C, Brendan Murray Commonwealth, Village Orchestra Sirens … #
  • Autofill choices in @soundcloud when listing a track as "8bit": 8bit, 8bitelectronic, 8bits, 8bitish, 8bit*synth*pop #
  • "We stared grimly at the radio": Katherine Dunn on listening to boxing in her dad's car while her mom screamed bloody murder. Black Clock 12 #
  • Used to think tags would replace genres. Still do, but this morning wonder if it may end up being waveform visualizations that do. #
  • Morning sounds: white noise of hard drives & traffic. Then: the beeping of bus slowing to stop while another passes in opposite direction. #
  • Car behind me kept honking as I backed up. Turned out to be empty, with an auto-proximity alert. How many beeps to drain the car's battery? #
  • I know far too much for my good about the Sprint Samsung Epic 4G and the Verizon Motorola Droid 2. I blame blipverts. #
  • Morning sound: a bus that definitely didn't stop for a stop sign. #
  • Headed north: 20 miles, and probably as many degrees Fahrenheit; iPod loaded for bear. #
  • D'oh! The SFEMF is across town, near Roosevelt's Tamales, but there's a special event at the de Young. No matter; just got my festival pass. #
  • The 2010 sfemg.org (Sept 9-11) includes Chowning, Buchla, Mathieu, Trimpin, Hammer, Müller, & Cortini & is walking distance from my house. #

Orchestrated Drones (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Saiph‘s Diffusion limns that space where electronic drone and classical orchestration meet. There is no doubt, in “Einsames Element” (MP3), that those are, indeed, tremulous strings amid the woodsy percussion, even if the strings are playing a role more likely to be handed to a synthesizer these days. And even on repeat listen, the knowledge of those traditional, symphonic materials doesn’t make it any more clear what, exactly, is the source of the light gusher of white noise, the fizzy wonder with which begins “Der Letzte Mensch” (MP3). Saiph’s melding of these elements puts guesswork aside, in favor of a contemplation of the inherent narrative, as when after-dark ambience, brush fire, footsteps, and horror-show voices collide late in “Mensch” for a truly filmic enterprise.

[audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw070/dw070-Saiph-01-Einsames_Element.mp3|titles=”Einsames Element”|artists=Saiph] [audio:http://www.darkwinter.com/dw070/dw070-Saiph-03-Der_Letzte_Mensch.mp3|titles=”Der Letzte Mensch”|artists=Saiph]

Get the full set, which includes a third track, and additional information, at darkwinter.com. More on Saiph, whose real name is Andre Faupel and who is based in Weimar, Germany, at saiphmusic.de.