Month: July 2012

Alphas (+ Infrasound) in Nature Magazine

My interview with showrunner of the Syfy superhero TV series

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The current issue of Nature magazine, dated July 19, 2012, features in its Books and Arts section an article I wrote about the TV series Alphas. (Note: those links lead to a paywall required to access the story, but for those without access, Nature is pretty well stocked by libraries.) The second season of Alphas begins airing on the Syfy network in the U.S. this evening, July 23. The piece is a Q&A with the series’ new showrunner, Bruce Miller (also of such shows as Eureka and ER); I was interested in discussing with him the scientific basis for the various powers that are explored in the show, from the synaesthesia-like sensory awareness of Rachel Pirzad to the endorphin-infused strength of Bill Harkin to the ability of Gary Bell (pictured up top in the same image that accompanies the Nature piece) to sniff data from the air.

Part of the realism of Alphas has to do, simply, with the fact that the characters don’t think of themselves as superheroes; they think of themselves as misfits who are more burdened than blessed with these unusual abilities. Rooting that anxiety is the show’s writers’ attempts to only depict powers that can be extrapolated from natural sciences. Thus, there is — at least so far — no time travel or, say, long-distance teleportation. Sound, of course, is among the numerous areas of scientific study that inform Alphas. Last season there was a blind man with dolphin-like sonar powers; he was played by Star Trek’s Data, aka Brent Spiner. This season, Miller explained, there will be at least one more audio-based storyline, one in which “infrasound” — those sounds considered to be below the spectrum perceived by humans — plays a role. He told me more than appears in the Nature story but if I’d written much more, it would have given away the episode.

The Nature story is available, unfortunately behind a paywall, at nature.com. More on Alphas at syfy.com/alphas.

When a Synthesizer Isn’t a Synthesizer (MP3)

Wind-based ambience from the duo Paiyatuma

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Despite the zone-out droning and ether-thin intonations, there’s no synthesizer per se to be heard on Arriving at Night in Ithaca, a project by the duo of Paiyatuma (MP3). That’s Thomas Park and Shane Morris, who together conjure up all manner of nocturnal moods. Reportedly the constituent parts are all wind instruments (including “trombone, flute, and found sounds such as bottles and whistles”), though they’re so deeply sublimated into the greater whole — a whole that also has its share of natural elements, including apparent insect song — that the effect is less of constituent parts and more of a deep rich texture.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/kpu114/kpu114-02-arriving-at-night-in-ithaca-radio-edit.mp3|titles=”Arriving at Night in Ithaca”|artists=Paiyatuma]

Kudos to the duo for releasing the music in a variety of formats — not only MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and the “lossless” FLAC, but also as a shorter radio edit. The version linked to from this post is but an eight-minute reduction of the longer work, which stretches out to three quarters of an hour. The release was originally posted at the kikapu.org netlabel. It’s housed at archive.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Hoping the new iAnnotate PDF app upgrade fixes my Dropbox issues — except the iTunes store is down. #
  • Kudos to @delicious for getting rid of "stacks." Tags are sufficient. #
  • Broke another pair of earbuds. I need a sponsor. #
  • If you could wear out MP3s, some tracks on this Quakers Instrumentals album would've been reduced to .ds files by now. #
  • Likelihood that the person who committed the horrible crime in Denver was insane & so many people saying horrible things now are sane. #
  • New track from Lee Scratch Perry's team-up with the Orb: http://t.co/LzIPX3Ud. Truly no disrespect, but I eagerly await the instrumentals. #
  • Beginning to confuse press releases about 7" singles and 7" tablets. #

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Rural Murk (MP3)

A lovely track by Chicago musician Cinchel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Chicago-based musician Cinchel doesn’t say much of anything about his recent posting at his soundcloud.com/cinchel account, but it certainly is lovely. The track, “20120718 acc2,” is a slow movement of light strumming, reverberant humming, and an underlying rhythm like that of a far away train rattling through a dense, moist forest. The following cultural reference registers more positively with some than with others, but trust that it is intended as fully appreciative when suggested that the track sounds, for all its sublimated pleasure, like Led Zeppelin just before it bursts out of its occultist haze and rocks out. Here, however, the rock never comes. There is just the lovely murk of songless ruralisms left to lull themselves to sleep.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/cinchel. More on Cinchel, aka Jason Shanley, at cinchel.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero

The Assignment: Make music from running water, inspired by William Gibson's novel Count Zero.

/ 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.

This week’s project makes use of field recordings, a not uncommon source of sonic material in the Disquiet Junto series of weekly music projects. The particular idea this week originates in the following description at the start of chapter 17 in the 1986 novel Count Zero by William Gibson. I selected this version of the book’s cover, because it’s the paperback I own:

This idea of running water as music, in particular as “one of the oldest songs,” is highlighted in various ways in the chapter, which is titled “The Squirrel Wood,” and in the book as a whole. In the next paragraph of the chapter there’s an implied contrast to an artificial canopy in a forest, with its “mimetic approximations of leaves and branches.” More broadly, this is a novel in which there is an ongoing concern about possible Voudoun spirits running loose in cyberspace. The console jockeys make their money, and their names, reading signals: gleaning meaning from perceived noise.

I’d had the idea for some time of using running water in a Disquiet Junto project as the proposed source of a track, so my imagination was primed when I came across this notion in the novel when I recently reread it for the first time in many years. I was rereading Count Zero because of all Gibson’s novels, it lingers with me the most, in part because of its themes of corporate espionage, which I find fascinating, but also because this is the book of his that I found most difficult to pierce when I first read it. One interesting final note: This chapter holds special meaning in the broader novel, because it is the only chapter whose title is repeated. “The Squirrel Wood” is also the title of the book’s final chapter.

In any case, that’s all backdrop to this week’s project.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 23, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0029-countzero.

Bonus: In advance of the project’s announcement, I tweeted some information about it from the twitter.com/djunto account, and William Gibson himself (aka twitter.com/greatdismal) retweeted it not once but twice:
Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0029: Count Zero”