Month: June 2012

Non-Experimental Experimental Music (MP3)

A beat that explores the iPad app DM-1

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some of the most enjoyable work on SoundCloud is of the experimental variety, but that’s not necessarily “experimental” as in “noises that push the limits of a listener’s comprehension of music.” It’s often simply experimental in the sense of an experiment on the part of the musician: trying something new, whether that be a new piece of music, a new instrument, or a new approach, or perhaps all at the same tine. Take “Ex the Extrax” by freesoulsound, aka Gerren Grant. The piece is a straightforward but thoroughly engaging bit of bippy downtempo rhythmic play. Part of its pleasure is its lack of intended utility — it isn’t the backing track to a vocal cut; it’s simply a rhythm beating like a sonar, exploring the user-interface caverns of a new piece of software.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/freesoulsound. More on the DM-1 at fingerlab.net.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Stretching the Orchestra

Madelyn Villano reworks recordings of music by Glass and Nyman, Beethoven and Mahler

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cover of Madelyn Villano's Broken Histories albumThe stretching of music to expose its inner apparatus and its inherent ambient-ness has seen explosive growth this past year, and what’s been lost in the process is the process that goes into these reworkings. While many are, truly, just a matter of easing the pace of the familiar until it takes on the appeal of the exotic, still others wrestle with parts and not just whole; the more adventurous play a more recombinant game with the source material. A case in point is Madelyn Villano‘s exceptional collection Broken Histories, released for free download at brokenhistories.bandcamp.com. In it she explores the mechanisms and textures of music by Mahler, Grieg, Beethoven and others, including such contemporary figures as Glass and Nyman. I will be surprised if this album is not among my favorites when the year is over. Intrigued by what went into the work, I corresponded with her via email, and she gave me permission to post some of her communications, which appear lightly edited here:

I put the mix together as part of an ambient sound installation project for arts week at my school (Reed College), and put up the website so anyone who wanted could download it and use it for studying, or sleeping, or whatever.

I made the tracks over the course of a year mostly as I came into contact with the pieces / recordings. I’m a violin player so I was familiar with some of the composers and their works but most of them I’d heard in film, or chamber performances over that time period. I’d recently become pretty enamored with the ambient artist Celer (youtube.com), whose technological processes and sample sources I’d scavenged for a little bit over the Internet and wanted to learn to emulate (tape and laptop based manipulations that include loop layering, stretch, reverb, and delay that employ multiple levels of recycling: their sample sourcing both choral , string, and piano timbres. Here’s one interview textura.org. Here’s one self-released album in which they further describe process: celer.bandcamp.com.

I used the samples as exercises in Ableton, which I started using around a year and half ago, to try and approximate / emulate the processes they discuss to achieve the quality of suspended & stretched orchestral – acoustic & harmonies from contemporary classical music (they used a field recording of a Samuel Barber choral concert [i’m assuming adagio for strings] for one of their pieces for instance). All the samples were acquired through torrents, youtube, and grooveshark rips, except for the Grieg and the Mahler, the former of which is built from me playing the violin part from the suite played into a dl4 loop pedal and Ableton processing and the latter of which was built from a recording I got from a Chamber Music Northwest performance I attended.

One major focus of the project was the compositional and conceptual possibilities of suspended derivatives vs. direct quotation in sampled music , and decisions concerning manipulated textural transformation vs. exact reproduction.

Get the full set for free download at brokenhistories.bandcamp.com. More on Villano, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at madelynsmusic.blogspot.com.

Listening to Instagram

A little of what I've learned and photographed since the Instagr/am/bient album's release

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Late last year this site launched the Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards compilation album. The success of it, as measured by coverage (hilobrow.com, createdigitalmusic.com, theverge.com, blog.soundcloud.com) and listens (almost 40,000 between SoundCloud and the Free Music Archive, and nearly 16,000 downloads on top of that), continues to astound me.

The biggest surprise for me, though, is how much I have embraced Instagram. The Instagr/am/bient project originated not out of enthusiasm for the popular image-sharing service but out of skepticism. I only started an account — I’m @dsqt on Instagram — out of a sense of duty to the project. But the relation between sound and image that the project explored drew me in, and in time I found myself using Instagram regularly. I haven’t yet sorted out a simple manner to collect that activity, those images, here on Disquiet.com, though the majority of them appear in the Twitter collation that is posted automatically each Saturday. This week I added to the site’s sidebar a space to display the two most recent Instagram images.

What my use of Instagram has taught me focuses primarily on how images serve as a form of communication unto themselves. To observe how people share images on Instagram is to understand how people are communicating visually by posting images that represent their days, and that respond to others’ photos. As a primarily verbal person, I only noticed this past week that while I always caption a photo, a lot of people I follow do not. I wanted to point this out, but of course there isn’t a way to communicate solely verbally to one’s Instagram audience, so I posted a blank white square with the caption “Just a note that I have never thought not to caption one of my Instagram uploads.”

As for my own use, it falls into a handful of categories. I’ve found myself doing a little ongoing series, titled “Not a speaker,” of which these three following images and the three at the very top of this post are a part:

A less frequent series is of images of sonic detritus, “street sounds,” such as these discarded objects that I’ve come across on the sidewalk and in parking lots:

The vast majority of my Instagram posts, of course, are one-offs. Clockwise from upper left, the following six are: a painting by Jean-Pierre Roy shown by Sloan Gallery at artMRKT in San Francisco a few weeks ago; some “industrial Mondrian” ceiling tiles, which I noted are generally accompanied by a significant HVAC hum; the “urban moss” of old flyers on a tree in Cole Valley in San Francisco; some old Dictaphone recording media at a “vintage” store; floor tiles at an ice-cream parlor that resemble Conway’s Game of Life; and “Indiscriminate Sound” by Mauricio Ancalmo, part of an exhibit at the Park Life gallery in San Francisco.


So, if you’re on instagram.com, I’m @dsqt. And if you’re not, the images will pop up in various ways here, and you can keep an eye, if not ear, on them at web.stagram.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0023: Palindrone

The Assignment: Make an extended drone structured as a palindrome.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The above player is as of mid-June a new feature in SoundCloud’s service. It allows for the collation into one place of tracks from various accounts, and what’s great about that is we can, for each project, have one single player. The above one is a work-in-progress. I will populate it over the next day, and then work through earlier projects.

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 theme of the 23rd weekly Disquiet Junto project is the “palindrone” — that is, a drone in the form of a palindrome. The source audio was provided by Thomas Park, a prolific musician who records as Mystified. I’d wanted to do a drone-based project for some time, because the drone is such a ubiquitous presence in contemporary music, and has been a strong force in the pieces submitted by musicians as part of previous Disquiet Junto projects. It took awhile for me to come up with a project that I felt would inherently explore the subject matter. Park had offered his source material some time back. They’re a series of drones made with acoustic instruments, like a slide whistle and a kazoo. They’re selected from his collection Various Wind Instrument Drone Samples, available at mystified.bandcamp.com.

The idea of everyone sharing samples seemed helpful to explore the perceived generic quality of drone music; since everyone is using the same raw goods, the distinctions and similarities between tracks will be immediately apparent. The idea of the palindrome likewise brings the matter of structure — something that drone music suggests itself as apart from — to the fore; listeners used to getting lost in drones will likely find themselves listening for, or simply being made aware of, the mirror-like shape of the resulting pieces of music.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, June 7, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, June 11, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0023-palindrone. Within a few hours of the project’s launch there were already two entries, one by CP McDill and another by Park/Mystified himself.

These are the instructions that went out to the email list. They appear below translated into French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, courtesy of Eric Legendre, Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, David Font-Navarrete, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.

Disquiet Junto Project 0023: Palindrone

This week’s project is about drones, a pervasive undercurrent in contemporary music. Whatever your definition of “drone,” you will compose a piece of drone music using five of the provided source tracks. These source tracks are a series of drones made by Mystified (aka Thomas Park) from such analog instruments as kazoo, bottle, slide whistle, and didgeridoo. There are 20 source tracks in all, and you will select 5 for your piece. You cannot add any new sounds, but you can transform the provided ones as you wish.

Your drone will take the form of a palindrome. This is to say: once the track reaches its midpoint its structure will then continue to unfold as a mirror, or reverse, of its first half. As always, these instructions are intended as a starting point, and are open to interpretation.

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

Length: Please make your track no longer than eight minutes.

Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud 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 “disquiet0023-palindrone”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:

Samples courtesy of Mystified, aka frequent Disquiet Junto participant Thomas Park:

http://archive.org/details/Junto_23_Samples

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

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