Month: May 2012

Album Preview as Form (MP3)

A teaser of the new Federico Durand LP serves as a composition unto itself

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The album preview is a staple of commercial music, often coming in the form of collections of snippets of various tracks. In many cases, this is abbreviation in service of tantalization, but in the end it just causes frustration. The snippets are more teases than tastes, and the abruptness of the cuts between them has a stronger sensibility than do any of the assorted individual parts, let alone the collective whole.

But certain musics lend themselves more naturally to brevity. The preview of the album El libro de los árboles mágicos, due out from Tokyo-based label Home Normal label on June 15, is seven short ambient-infused slivers in sequence, each fading into the next. By all appearances, these individual tracks are more drone than song, and thus the segmented view serves to highlight distinctions between them — distinctions that might in fact be less evident when the work is listened to in the more immersive long-form situation of the full release. There is backward masked light noise, and looped bird song, and spectral guitar, and rain heard against what could be a child’s toy piano, and they all combine into a sonic slideshow. The intent of the preview is to forecast what is coming, but the subdued sounds of the music, not to mention the broader concept of an album itself in this day and age, lends the enterprise a lovely tinge of nostalgia. The music is by Federico Durand, and three of the tracks show him in collaboration: track 1 with Chihei Hatakeyama, 3 with Fuqugi, and 4 with Ian Hawgood.

Track, ten minutes in all, originally posted at soundcloud.com/homenormal.

More on Home Normal at homenormal.tumblr.com and twitter.com/homenormal. More on Durand himself at federicodurand.blogspot.com.

Everyday Bird Song (MP3)

Phillip Wilkerson's ongoing Floridian sound journal

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The recent slew of tracks uploaded by Phillip Wilkerson to his soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson account have titles like something out of an ancient haiku practice, albeit one situated in modern Florida. There’s “Osprey at Pine Island FL” and “Midnight Rain at Naples FL” and “Thunder in the Ebb at N Ft Myers,” not to mention the more explicitly contemporary “My Afternoon Commute at Naples Florida.” Most recent is “Sunday Morning Sounds at Palm Island, FL,” which is simply a steady combination of whole-earth white nose and occasional bird song. That’s “simply” as in “elegantly,” not “simply” as in “This is all you have to offer?” It isn’t so much bird song as bird speak, not the full-on melodic enchantment of birds, but the quotidian calls of birds going about their business, which the more melodic bird song is likely as well, but here it is the truly mundane bird call, the one that settles in the background — which Wilkerson has teased into the foreground by recording two solid minutes of it, and making it available separate from its natural environment. The ending of his recording is quite sudden, a file trimmed so immediately it almost recommends the fade out by comparison, but the hard cut is the right approach; it’s a wake-up call from the reverie.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/phillipwilkerson. More on Wilkerson at phillipwilkerson.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Spending the day just me and my 20-month-old. Will be wandering around @artmrkt, among other places. #
  • Four more now: @nodebeat + (1) keyboard, (2) Moog Slim Phatty, (3) drone pad, and (4) piano: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • My one regret about my Macbook Air is I shoulda gone with the larger harddrive. Didn’t realize at the time it’d become my core computer. #
  • All in all, I got a brick in the mail from @primusluta. #
  • The first three @NodeBeat Disquiet Junto pieces pair the mobile sound app with a ukulele, a guzheng, and a sitar: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • You’re a dreamer. RT @mmaddencomics: “There’s some very thoughtful dubstep behind this blog”; “Wiley revitalizes curating on his new single” #
  • 1st @NodeBeat track in latest Disquiet Junto project is up, courtesy of @ethanhein + his processed ukulele http://t.co/Iny6uyLO #
  • “It’s refreshing to hear a curate track that doesn’t have a drop.” “They’re hiring someone to dubstep a blog of found objects.” #
  • Perfect. RT @primusluta: Headed out to this gallery my friend dubstepped. Hopefully there’ll be wine and good headnoding curation. #
  • “That new Burial remix is true curate.” “I’m dubstepping 18th-century leather wallets on my Tumblr.” #
  • The words “dubstep” and “curate” are so overused, we should just use them interchangeably. #
  • Not a speaker. (Bathroom fan.) http://t.co/ICf6NrGN #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

The Sonic Image

What the sound looks like / what the look sounds like

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The transsubstantiatio.tumblr.com site collects sounds as images: tracks of audio that are, quite simply, opened in an unexpected and unintended computer program. A source file encoded so as to be heard is instead transferred through that which is meant to be seen. Up top, for example, is the resulting visualization of a track by Nine Inch Nails, “Pinion.” The Tumblr appears to be a sibling site to the soundcloud.com/null66913 account, where the latest track appears to take the opposite course (this is all based on interpreting a page originally in Spanish and itself computer-rendered in a different language, in this case English, courtesy of Google’s Translate service). The track appears to be the sound of an image. What image, I can’t say for sure. Perhaps someone else can be of assistance. The result, nonetheless, is striated noise. In the mind’s eye, it’s the fuzz of a dead channel. I wonder what the channel would show if it were properly dialed in.

More (in Spanish) about the move from sound to image to sound at mediateletipos.net. More on null66913 at null66913.net and twitter.com/null66913.

Radiophonic Madrid (MP3)

Not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Not all is grey static in the sound world of the excellent broadcast/podcast series Radius, out of Chicago. As always, it takes the phenomenon, the practice, of radio as its subject, but not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations. The entry by Desh & Ekis, “Xprmtal Short Wave Radio B-Side (Radius Edit),” is a mix of serrated, burnished, but still quite audible and intelligible signals, from spoken bits to ceremonial drumming. The duo, who are based in Madrid, Spain, are willfully less easily scannable in their project description:

Site: Argantek Industrial State, AIII Motorway, km 23, MAD ESP.

A landscape of scrapheap hills, rusty heavy-duty machinery, abandoned building sites sheltering engine cults’ followers. A constant metallic buzzing interferes with encoded technical transmissions and radio spectrum “white spaces”while, high above, floats a chaos of frequencies.

Two short wave radio broadcasters establish contact through these airwaves, their dialogue sent back to the listeners of the area who are unaware of such free-form vibrations coming from their speakers.

Nonetheless, their mundane fantasy of subverted communication has a rich narrative groove to it, not the groove of metrically coherent rhythm but the groove of sequence, of found sounds paced and given associative power through contrast and accrual. The slow fade-out is a bit of a cheat in most experimental music, but here, as the sounds wind down, there’s a sense of the disparate noises, bonded by chance intervention, finally giving way to entropy.

Track originally posted at theradius.tumblr.com. More on Desh at digikampradesh.wordpress.com and on Ekis at facebook.com/ard2music.