Month: June 2012

Craft an Alien Signal

A call for submissions from new label CS²

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Craft an alien signal. That’s the call for submissions put out recently by Primus Luta’s new label, Concrete Sound System, aka CS². Think of the request as a SETI-style search for intelligent life in the online-music universe. The project takes its cue from this comment by writer Adam Harper, from his book Infinite Music
Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making:

With the alien we encounter strange new musical objects that repeat and differ across unexpected dimensionalities, images we may think we come to recognize suddenly dequantise, ranges of values never lie still in the ways we’re used to, complex new variables appear oddly significant and there seems to be very little order at first listen.

The compositions should draw from these provided sonic elements, a quartet of flanged white-noise warbles that sound straight out of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop:

A collection of submissions to the project will be released by CS², and one entry will be, as Luta puts it, “chosen by our judges as the song to be sent to our hypothetical alien.” The composer of that track will receive “a terrestrial prize package” that includes a signed copy of Harper’s Infinite Music book, the Audiofile Engineering Studio Life Package, a copy of Photosounder, and the 100th edition of the CS² Schrödinger’s Cassette limited series. Disquiet is proud to cosponsor this event along with the prize contributors.

More details at concretesoundsystem.com/the-alien. More on Harper’s Infinite Music at zero-books.net.

The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Electronic Dance Music

Musician-critic Philip Sherburne guests on the Sound Opinions podcast.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


To discuss the rise of electronic dance music, musician and critic Philip Sherburne was interviewed recently on the Sound Opinions podcast, which is hosted by Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot. It says something about the status of electronic dance music in the broader realm of pop music that an outside critic needs to be invited in to explain it. Even if, to the session’s point, musicians like David Guetta and Skrillex have brought electronic music to a wide pop audience, the circumstances of that rise are remote and specific enough to still push the knowledge threshold of everyday critics, even ones as experienced as DeRogatis and Kot (MP3).

[audio:http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.soundopinions.org/podcasts/sooppodshow341.mp3|titles=”Sound Opinions featuring Philip Sherburne”|artists=Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot]

Sherburne, in the interview, himself says the rise of the popular manifestations of so-called dubstep took him somewhat by surprise. The hosts note at least one earlier instance of electronic music’s burgeoning prominence, back in the big-beat years of the mid-1990s, when major record labels banked heavily on the likes of Aphex Twin (whose Selected Ambient Works Volume II came out on Sire, home to Madonna and Talking Heads, in 1994), Fatboy Slim, Moby, and others. Sherburne lists several possible reasons for why this music is crossing over in a way it hadn’t previously: that the acts being signed have more star-power than their recalcitrant and shy DJ predecessors, that ubiquitous computer usage has diminished the matters of authenticity that once divided rockists from club kids.

I’d propose at least three more:

¶ One is simply time, what I think of as the “hip-hop cop factor”: at some point the kids whom cops found suspect because they listened to hip-hop eventually grew up to become cops themselves, thus diminishing a genre’s negative associations.

¶ Another is the rise of text messaging; as I experienced during a late-2008 rave in Tokyo, at a Richie Hawtin show, the constant contact provided by cellphones has radically altered that kind of concert-going experience, making it more internally clique-ish, less of a “let’s get lost” scene, than it had been 15 years go. This has made raves significantly more social, and helped them to be perceived as less unsafe.

¶ A third is the received understanding that producers are the music-makers; from Timbaland to the Neptunes to Dallas Austin to the Matrix, it’s widely understood, even if only at a casual level, that the majority of what it heard on the radio is, in fact, more the product of the people behind the mixing board than behind the microphone, and today’s generation of electronic dance producers benefit from the suggestion that they, in fact, are the true music stars.

More on the podcast, which aired June 8, at soundopinions.org.

Micromelancolié’s Nano Techno (MP3)

A Polish musician's survey of small sounds

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Crónica podcast is a steady source of abstract sound, but abstraction comes in many forms. To listen to the fragments that comprise the latest entry in the long-running series — it is number 94, and is by Micromelancolié, aka Poland-based musician Robert SkrzyÅ„ski — is to hear slim noises, bright crunches, whizzes of passing static, and other material that is truncated just shy of recognizability. The manner in which the material is collated suggests if not composition or narrative, then at least association and sequence. Apparently some of the source audio comes from recordings from two labels, 77industry and 49animals. This might explain why for all their abstraction, the noises seem, in fact, orderly — because their presence here is a secondary stage of collection, of curation. Whatever the provenance, the result is best appreciated as a survey of tensile sonic structures, of small noises given the chance to be considered as idealized objects (MP3). Bracing stuff.

[audio:http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast094.mp3|titles=”Micromelancolié”|artists= Micromelancolié]

Track originally posted at cronicaelectronica.org. More on some of the source audio at 77industry.com and 49manekinow.net.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Proposed slightly alternate universe: One in which Max/MSP is named after Max Neuhaus. #
  • SoundCloud’s new, multi-account-based sets are my new jam. #
  • 3 hrs, 3 mins & 32 secs of drones by 38 musicians based on shared sample set: http://t.co/py7BEIgt, thanks to new @soundcloud “sets”… #
  • Disquiet Junto project 24 has gone to the group’s email list and been posted at http://t.co/XdREURGZ. Theme: functional sound. #
  • It makes weirdly too much sense that Billy Campbell is half Billy Crudup and half Campbell Scott. #
  • Remain convinced the best thing about Apple OS is that its orderliness and elegance encourage same in its users. #
  • Between Quakers and the new David Byrne / St. Vincent, something is going on with all this brass band music, and it’s quite welcome. #
  • If I’m reading correctly, the “next” @SoundCloud indeed provides ability to create sets, which will be a great way to compile Junto projects #
  • On morning of day we’re due to start Disquiet Junto project about sonic alerts I mistook a crow’s call for an unfamiliar laptop/phone alarm. #
  • Generally speaking, I am Con-metheus. #

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite

The Assignment: Create four alert sounds that complement each other.

/ 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 week’s project is both the Junto’s most mundane yet and, in a certain light, its most experimental — mundane in that it focuses on the commonplace sound of what would broadly be described as the “ringtone,” but experimental in that it pushes the definition of music further than even the drones, ice cube rattling, and broken speech that preceded it. This is because it asks the participants to consider how a set of tones interrelate, how they might complement each other — how, in other words, they serve as a kind of asynchronous suite.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, June 14, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 18, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0024-alertsuite.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into four additional languages: German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, courtesy of Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, David Font-Navarrete, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.

Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite

This week’s project is about “functional music.” You will make four individual sounds that serve as alerts for digital communications. They will be in these categories:

1. email arrival
2. incoming phone call
3. new IM received
4. calendar event alert

The goal is that the four alerts will work together as a suite — that is, that they will complement each other, yet be distinct and recognizable from each other.

For the purposes of the Disquiet Junto, you’ll present these four alert sounds as one single track, repeating each sound a few times.

Please note: If you’d like to post the sounds individually for use by others, that’s wonderful, but please don’t associate the individual alerts to the Disquiet Junto SoundCloud group; only associate the single track that compiles all the alerts.

Deadline: Monday, June 18, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: This will be determined by the instructions above. Generally speaking, it will be under a minute.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, please include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0024-alertsuite”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 posting the track please include the following information:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0024: Alert Suite”