Month: March 2012

Depicting the Drum Machine

Rob Ricketts brings graphic design to the sonic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The graphic designer Rob Ricketts, of Birmingham, England, last year produced four posters that celebrated the lock-step TR-808 Drum Machine beats of long ago electronic music. This is Ricketts describing the process: “Each sequence has been analyzed and represented as to allow users to re-programme each sequence, key for key.” This is an example of the result:

In addition to Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” the poster series features Cybotron’s “Clear,” A Guy Called Gerald’s “Voodoo Ray,” and Adonis’ “No Way Back.” The beauty of Ricketts’ visual approach is how the rudimentary differences in the data belie the complexity of the individual tracks and the differences between them. By reverse-engineering the patterns, and representing them as static visual patterns, he points out how the drum machine is both instrument and score simultaneously — and, thus, how the drum machines of old prefigured the grid-based (and, generally, software-based) music tools of our time.

Here are two images of another Ricketts project, titled Book of White, in which he collated the names of all the different white papers he could find, to which he added some jokes. No word on whether Pae White, who collaborated with Brian Eno on an edition of Oblique Strategies, made the cut.

More at robricketts.co.uk. (Found via twitter.com/jensjonason via twitter.com/aw_4 via iso50.com.)

Listening to Comics

A moment of considered near silence in a brutal post-apocalyptic tale

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A word of warning before you might click through to the comic about to be discussed. A lot of comics these days come emblazoned with mature-reader warnings, but this one really deserves it. There’s a lot of brutal sex and violence in this comic, usually at the same time. In the words of the website on which it is hosted, the webcomic, titled Crossed: Wish You Were Here, “is extreme entertainment for adults. Anyone under 18, or anyone easily offended, please go no further.”

It’s written by Simon Spurrier, whose The Afterblight Chronicles: The Culled I read last year, and whose more recent A Serpent Uncoiled is on my to-do list. In any case, below are two consecutive pages from Spurrier’s Crossed, which is illustrated by Javier Barreno. Like Afterblight, it is a post-apocalyptic tale narrated by a lucky survivor, in this case someone who, like Spurrier, is a comics professional — or was, in the narrator’s case, since there is little apparent use for comics after the fall of civilization.

The scene depicted here takes place on a lighthouse where the character and his fellow survivors keep a lookout for the diseased humans who outnumber them and threaten them daily. Sound is a difficult thing to present visually, as too is listening, and I was struck by how Spurrier and Barreno sought to do it: first by using a tool (the ear horn), an archaic one at that; second, by emphasizing the effort by depicting the concentration on the character’s face; and third by using comic panels to bridge the physical gap between the listening and what is being listened for, in this case the motor of an approaching watercraft:


All reader warnings considered, here is where the comic is housed: crossedcomic.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0010: “The Reflective Remix”

The Assignment: Remix one of the previous Junto project tracks.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.

The tenth weekly Junto project provided an opportunity to reflect on what the group had accomplished thus far. To that end, each participant was asked to select one of the tracks created for an earlier Junto project, one of the first nine projects, and to remix it — as an option, it was also suggested that they might remix the recent Soundcloud podcast about the Disquiet music projects.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, March 8, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 12, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0010-reflect. As of this writing, there are 44 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0010: The Reflective Remix

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, March 12, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The tenth Junto provides an opportunity to reflect on what the group’s participants have accomplished in the past nine weeks. The project is as follows: all participants will produce a remix of any track of their liking from any of the past projects (that is, any of the tracks from projects 0001 through 0009). One clarification: please make certain that the track you select is eligible for remixing. If you’re not sure, contact either the musician (via “Send Message” within Soundcloud) or me (at [email protected]) for confirmation. There is one additional track option; you can remix the recent Soundcloud podcast that was about the Junto. That track is here:

http://soundcloud.com/community-team/soundcloud-speaks-001-disquiet

Length: Please keep your piece to between two and five minutes in length.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0010-reflect”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post your track, please include a link to the Soundcloud page for the original version of the track you remixed.

And also include this:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

For an undertaking dedicated to the concept of restraint, it may have a bit unwieldy to ask people to filter through all the previous assignments, and some folks said as much. Various participants, though, saw the relative lack of restraint as a call to develop their own additional layer of restraint, and came up with their own Junto-ish approaches in order to winnow the pool of possible subjects. One musician tracked down one of the least commented upon pre-existing tracks. The sense of reflection surfaced in various ways — one musician, for example, employed the script he’d developed for an earlier assignment and applied it to a newly selected subject.

Unboxing the TNR-i (Tenori-on for iPad)

A musician's initial steps with a new digital instrument

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The casual nature of sound postings on the Soundcloud.com service has increased intimacy between music-makers and music-listeners in a way no other service can really compare with. On Soundcloud, a musician is more than likely to post within a day of purchasing a new piece of equipment some little test recording, just a snippet of them learning their new tool or toy. In the case of Jared Smyth‘s latest purchase, it is both those things: the TNR-i, aka the iPad rendition of the great Tenori-on device, Yamaha’s next-generation music machine spearheaded by Toshio Iwai, of Elektroplankton fame. If Elektroplankton was a game-like interface for making music, the TNR-i is a music-making interface that feels like a game (see below for images). In Smyth’s hands, the grid-like system gives way to a gentle, lulling piece of music, a sketch of a burbling melody, a gesture toward a proper song.

If tradition holds that a single can serve as a teaser for an album yet to be released, then this track is a teaser for what Smyth has yet to record.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/jared-smyth. More on the TNR-i at apple.com. More on the Tenori-on at tenori-onusa.com. More on Smyth at jaredsmyth.info.

Framing John Kannenberg

My foreword to the catalog of his exhibit Hours of Infinity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I was honored to have been asked by John Kannenberg to contribute the foreword to the catalog for his exhibit Hours of Infinity. The introduction is by Egyptologist T.G. Wilfong. The catalog will be published this Friday, March 23. The exhibit consists of three parts, which have been running in Ann Arbor, Michigan, throughout this month. The work began as Kannenberg’s thesis project for the MFA program at the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design. Much of it is being presented at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (lsa.umich.edu), which ties together numerous aspects of Kannenberg’s past work, including sonic documents of everyday life, the cultural impact of ancient Egypt, and the institutions we call museums.

Here is the text of the forward:

Consider the word “phonography.” Note for a moment that there is an “n” where normally one would expect to find a “t” residing. The term is employed with increasing frequency to describe the act of recording environmental sound, the sound around us. The term’s close alignment with “photography” is helpful when orienting newcomers to field recordings. A phonographer, like a photographer, captures a document of the real world and then proceeds to frame it, transforming it from documentation into art. Photographers are taught to “frame with the lens,” but of course they employ all manner of tools after shooting an image to nudge it toward what they saw with their mind’s eye. Likewise, contemporary music composers frequently take field recordings and from them produce original works, in which the recordings are manipulated into something situated ambiguously between ambient sound and ambient music: what they heard with their mind’s ear.

As a descriptive term, “phonography” has utility, but associations with photography are not optimal. Sound occurs over time. For that reason, field recordings have more in common with film and video than with photography. One can stare at a photograph, step away, return to it. But a recording of sound or visuals, or both, plays back at its own pace; the audience can only appreciate it as it speeds past them, much like the tireless motion of history.

History can itself serve as a frame. In 2010, the artist John Kannenberg took a trip to Egypt, where he made detailed audio recordings in and around local museums. The Western imagination associates Egyptian antiquity with the deepest recesses of human history, a moment akin to dawn along the infinite developmental timeline of intellectual consciousness; the setting lent his work spiritual as well as archeological timbres. By documenting the sound of museums, he turned the concept of “sound art” inside out: listening for sound inherent in institutions that house art.

Little did he know that in less than a year, one of those museums would become a battlefield in the Egyptian Spring, a political uprising that in its first few days took the life of a promising Egyptian artist named Ahmed Basiony. In short order, sounds Kannenberg recorded in the spirit of John Cage’s 4’33” — to acknowledge the transient beauty in everyday sound — became a retroactive, somber memorial; a document of observational neutrality took on political force. Kannenberg had done nothing to alter the sounds he recorded, imposed no filters, added no instrumentation. History had done the work. The sounds of museum-goers’ footsteps became those of ghosts.

There are various sorts of history. Among them is the linear course of an individual artist’s career. Kannenberg’s has taken many shapes: musician, performer, recording artist, proprietor of the Stasisfield record label, curator, sound artist, visual artist, art student. Each new work of his joins the continuity of what preceded it; each new work alters our understanding of what occurred earlier. The Red and Black Land drawings become extensions of visuals he oversaw on Stasisfield productions. The sound installations expand on his early recorded material. And by actively occupying a museum for his latest work, he can be heard, himself, wrestling with its ghosts.

More on the exhibit at hoursofinfinity.tumblr.com. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com. Above images drawn from his photos at flickr.com.