Month: January 2011

Four Caribou Variations (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Caribou (aka Daniel Victor Snaith) was last heard of here after remixing a Four Tet track. Caribou is no less enamored of letting his work take a spin in the imaginations, and technologies, of others, and he’s been slowly posting commissioned renditions of tracks from his 2010 album Swim, released on the Merge record label. Particularly active in remix circles has been “Bowls,” a hit of loungey exotica with prayer-bowl beats and harp flourishes:

As with the Stonesthrow Beat Battles that get an occasional mention here, the pleasure in hearing the variations spun from the original is precisely in the variety. As of this morning, when Four Tet tweeted the existence of an Icarus remix of “Bowls,” there are at least three distinct iterations since the original. One by Holden opens and closes with a sharp snap of that prayer bowl, a come-to-trance gong that introduces and occasionally bisects a mix of heavy acoustic beats and backwards-masked warbles. Nearly twice the length of the Caribou original, the Holden version grabs hold of little details and plays with them at length:

Gavin Russom‘s version is more self-evidently dance-able, its two main sections separated by a bit of ecstatic stasis. The opening is all gamelany, low-key counterpoint; the second half dives into My Life in the Bush of Ghosts territory, with a pulsing bass and ritual whirlygig sounds:

Which brings us to the Icarus edit, the sole one of the four tracks mentioned in this post that is available for free download. It’s the most dessicated of the batch, and willfully so, a defiantly remote take on the original. It moves, spookily, from a looped snatch of overheard conversation to dense Michael Mann cinematics: rumbling subaural texture and automated percussion. It shares with the Holden version a taste for extreme specificity (neither track sounds merely like loops set on hold), but is much more abstract in its plotting:

More on Icarus at icarus.nu.

2011 Resolutions: 1. Upgrade Streaming Music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These aren’t quite resolutions, but there are several things I intend to do a better job of on Disquiet.com in 2011 than I have in the past:

1. Feature more streaming-only music. True, there is arguably no such thing as streaming music. It’s all downloadable, since the audio you’re hearing is on your computer (or other web-enabled device) by some means. In many cases, all you need to do is look at a streaming-only page’s source code (Ctrl + U in the Firefox browser) to locate the URL for the streaming media.

But even if the distinction between downloadable and streaming is artificial, an illusion, it is still a distinction made consciously, one way or the other, by people who post their music online. This site honors such decisions, aside from the occasional gray-market tip regarding particularly remarkable items that have long been out of print. This site also favors, to a great degree, downloadable music over that which is only intended for streaming. (There’s a whole department dedicated to it, Downstream, much as there is for commercial music, The Crate, which has far less coverage, and there’s no section for streaming-only.)

Part of this decision to pay more attention to streaming audio is curatorial: There’s an enormous amount of streaming-only music available. Part of the decision is practical: Once upon a time, the distinction between downloadable and streaming-only was a matter of what was and wasn’t portable: downloadable music you could pop onto your iPod (or semi-equivalent MP3 player), whereas streaming music was only available while you sat in front of your computer. With the rise of the smartphone, especially in our age of 4G/Mobile-WiMAX/LTE/etc. connections, it’s arguable that the tables have turned: the downloadable file is now a weighty object that needs to take up precious space on a device, whereas streaming audio is available (allowing for some hyperbole) in any place at any time.

In the past, there’s been this sense that downloadable music is part of a community that takes open-source culture seriously and that non-downloadable (i.e., streaming-only) music can, as a result, have a sense of being promotional, but that divide no longer seems to hold. (Please don’t read anything into this about the fate of the Downstream section — it will continue to exist, a new item each weekday.)

In any case, I’m hoping that in 2011 I’ll spend more time acknowledging, critiquing, recommending, and otherwise paying (and directing) attention to audio that is streaming-only … such as this track by Chris Herbert, titled “Shortwave Study for Scott Morgan.” Scott Morgan is better known loscil, and he and Rafael Aton Irisarri are compiling a compilation titled Air Texture II for spring 2011 release, and this is a rough sketch of something that Herbert is working on for them. It’s a lovely, low-key bit of near-silent ambience, all slow gusts of aether with occasion additional tones and textures and bits of voice.

More on the track on the page where it is hosted, soundcloud.com/chrisherbert.

Recording Sound without a Sound Recorder (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Walk Men: President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, 1903

A not uncommon refrain on Twitter is, “Why didn’t you record it?”

This question is always in response to something someone has described overhearing, especially field-recording-friendly sounds like church bells, jet fighters, police helicopters, surf, rain, broken domestic appliances, babies laughing, and so forth.

My response to such a response is always the same: I did record it, with my keyboard (and, by extension, my pen or pencil). Field recording isn’t just about using an audio recorder to capture the sound. It’s about making note of a sound by notating it, not necessarily by copying it but by describing it. To underestimate the word’s ability to reproduce sound is to overestimate the microphone’s.

At twitter.com/disquiet, I’ve experimented with re-tweeting these typed-recordings, the implication being that I’ve “recorded their recording,” by marking them with a hashtag like #eartwit, which Harold Schellinx, at twitter.com/soundblog, in particular has made use of. Again, my intent with #eartwit is not to mark my own described sounds, but to note those of others. For a while I tried to use an alternate hashtag term, #twittear, which seemed a little more witty than #eartwit, but as it turns out, that word is used by a lot of Spanish-speakers in the context simply of talking about tweeting, so it’s proved less useful than #eartwit. As it turns out, #twitthear seems unused, so perhaps I’ll try that down the road; #twittolith is probably too obscure a joke, and it’s another valuable letter longer than #twitthear.

In any case, the renowned environmental sound recordist Gordon Hempton touches on this subject of recording sound with one’s words in a wide-ranging talk that he gave at BASEbot in San Francisco, which has been released as a free download: MP3. At around the 25-minute point, Hempton begins to talk about what Muir described as “the most eloquent voice of nature,” on the occasion of Muir’s first encounter with a mountain stream. Says Hempton, “John Muir really was a sound recordist. His recordings are so accurate. … I was reading all of them, and cataloging them.”

[audio:http://www.basoundecology.org/listen/podpress_trac/web/137/0/BASEbot_004_Gordon_Hempton.mp3|titles=”BASEbot Lecture”|artists=Gordon Hempton]

This is but one small part of Hempton’s overall talk, and the MP3 also includes a lot of great cross-conversation by BASEbot participants, and the full thing is highly recommended.

Lecture MP3, along with annotation, originally posted at basoundecology.org. More on Hempton’s book, One Square Inch of Silence, written with John Grossmann, at onesquareinch.org.

(Above image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service website, nps.gov.)

Tangents: Schmidt, Eden, Scores

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

Design Strategy: Four of 1,500 prints of the cover of the Brian Eno album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)

¶ Burning Bright: John Emr‘s ongoing website-as-hommage to the late artist Peter Schmidt, perhaps best known for his work with Brian Eno, has posted two particular treats of late: the program to a London ICA exhibit titled “A Painter’s Use of Sound” in 1967 and Schmidt’s typed description of how, at Eno’s request, he had developed 1,500 unique prints of the cover art to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy).

¶ Old Albion: If you have access to Spotify (which a lot of us, say living in the U.S., do not), you can access a playlist that Rob Young put together to complement his book, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. More at electriceden.net.

¶ Reel Life: According to pitchfork.com, David Fincher has signed Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to score his next film after The Social Network, the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. … The three parts of last year’s BBC documentary on Brian Eno streaming: 1, 2, and 3 (via metafilter.com and musicofsound.co.nz). … Documentary, half hour long, on the widely adapted open-source electronic gadget Arduino: vimeo.com (via via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com). … According to imdb.com, composer Cliff Martinez is reuniting with director Steven Soderbergh. Martinez is attached as composer to Contagion; it would be their first work together in almost a decade, since 2002’s Solaris. Martinez is also reportedly on The Lincoln Lawyer and The Salesman. … Speaking of Soderbergh, he’s brought another colleague back, working with David Holmes (the Ocean’s films) on Haywire from a script by Lem Dobbs (The Limey). … No composer is attached, as of yet, to Soderbergh’s Liberace. … Lisa Gerrard is on Samsara, Burning Man, and InSight. … Clint Mansell has re-teamed with Moon director Duncan Jones for Source Code. … With the exception of the Eno and Arduino documentaries, which are already out, these are all due for release in 2011.

Nam Jun Paik in Liverpool (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Family Tree: Nam June Paik’s 1986 work ‘Uncle’

Ezra Pound is frequently quoted in regard to how “Artists are the antenna of the race.” Less often does the rousing quote include its concluding, and considerably more fatalist, clause: “but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists.” Not only did the technological work of Nam June Paik foretell the direction of culture, he took Pound’s metaphor and effectively made it literal, by working with broadcast technology, most famously his television sculptures, but also radio, not to mention the tape recorder. Despite those un-traditional materials, esteem for Paik has only grown since he passed away in 2006, so perhaps we’re correct to collectively forget the latter half of Pound’s comment.

The Tate Liverpool is hosting an exhibit of the life and work of pioneering multimeida artist Nam June Paik from December 17, 2010, through March 13, 2011. That’s his “Uncle” (1986) up top. Complementing the exhibit are the standard suite of events, including lectures and films. There’s an especially strong emphasis on appealing to children, which does justice to the play, humor, and warmth inherent in Paik’s highly technological work. There’s even a PDF of an educational guide, which is worth a read.

Part of the overall package is a sizable collection of some 32 MP3s containing information about the exhibit. A lot of the entries are brief lectures on Paik’s work (his use of light, his multimedia cello) and the context in which that work was produced (Paik’s connection to the founder of Fluxus, his interest in nature and Buddhism), but there is an example of his sound art, “Hommage à John Cage” (1958-9), listed as “A live recording of Paik’s musical homage to his friend John Cage” (MP3). The piece, which is just over four minutes in length, is introduced with the explanation that it shows Paik’s “intent to destroy classical music.” Composed for tape recorder and piano, it is a raucous and fast-paced collection of serialized audio fragments, whose key pleasures are the riff-like quality of those highly memorable segments and the drama with which they are artfully and energetically posited.

[audio:http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/namjunepaik/audio/07_hommage_a_john_cage_1958-9.mp3|titles=”Hommage à John Cage”|artists=Nam June Paik]

Get the full set of MP3s at tate.org.