Month: July 2012

“Alternative Musical Interfaces”: Disquiet @ GAFFTA (San Francisco, September 19)

Panel discussion at the new media hub

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


On Wednesday, September 19, there’s a panel discussion in San Francisco at the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts on “Alternative Musical Interfaces,” and I’ll be serving as moderator.

The panelists include the highly talented trio of Michael ZbyszyÅ„ski (mikezed.com), Peter Nyboer (see his bayimproviser.com entry), and Spencer Salazar (see his ccrma.stanford.edu page) — more on whom at gaffta.org.

It’s all under the auspices of GAFFTA’s Sound Research Group. GAFFTA is located at 923 Market St, Suite 200, which is between 5th and 6th Streets. The event runs from 7:00pm until 8:30. Tickets are $20, but GAFFTA has a solid “no one turned away for lack of funds” policy.

I’m excited to be headed back to GAFFTA. I last took part in a discussion there in August 2011, when I presented some thoughts on “Sound as Commentary.”

Update (2012.07.25): The following description of the event has been added to the GAFFTA page at gaffta.org:

We’ve seen many shifts in ways to control sound over the millenia; everything from animal skins and bones to hacked Game Boys and everywhere in between. We find ourselves positioned at an interesting point in time for how we manipulate sound in a post-instrument world. The topic of alternative musical interfaces has been discussed by those attempting to redefine how we’ve shaped sound since the tribal era, but the discourse seems to be thriving. We’ve brought together three specialists (see below) who have dedicated large portions of their lives to the noble task of constructing new musical interfaces and pushing musicians to interact with their instruments in new and different fashions.

The object of this evening is to gather together those interested in redefining our physical relationship to sounds and music. If you are interested in audio we recommend that you come join in the discussion with us.

Karriem Riggins Gets Alone Together (MP3)

An instrumental hip-hop taste from the longtime jazz drummer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The great Stones Throw record label has shared an MP3 teaser of the debut full-length from longtime sideman and producer Karriem Riggins, whose CV is absurd in its breadth, from support as a drummer to Diana Krall, Mulgrew Miller, and Ray Brown, to production work for the Roots, Slum Village, and Common. Those jazz and hip-hop threads have overlapped at times, notably in his projects with Madlib. The forthcoming Riggins album, Alone Together, will be a set of hip-hop instrumentals. The advance taste is titled “Moogy Foog It,” a bit of downtempo martial-drumming arts, the beat a flangy percussive riff, above which an 8bit snake charm melody noodles around lazily. The track ends quite suddenly, suggesting it will merge with the subsequent song when the full album appears.

[audio:http://www.stonesthrow.com/jukebox/karriem_moogy.mp3|titles=”Moogy Foog It”|artists=Karriem Riggins]

More on the release at stonesthrow.com. The notes on the album page are a little confusing, in that they list October 23 as the release date but state “Vinyl and digital will be released in two-parts over summer and fall 2012.” Perhaps this MP3 comprises the “digital” part of that release.

And for additional context, here’s Chet Baker covering the jazz standard, by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, from which the Riggins album takes its name:

The Voice in Instrumental Hip-Hop (MP3)

The only vocal that this track needs is the one that it has used as an ingredient.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

With a bit of piano that sounds like a tape loop that’s been soaking in bourbon all night, a vocal that suggests the r&b chorus as ethereal presence, and a beat that’s so downtempo it could be mistaken for the pace of distant traffic, Dustmotes has produced an enticing bit of instrumental hip-hop. Titled “For Nikola (leviculus),” it encapsulates the pleasures of the unintended genre within which it falls, a genre that is, in essence, a byproduct that has taken on a life of its own. Listeners to — admirers of — the instrumental backing tracks to hip-hop have proceeded, over time, to make music with no intention of having a vocalist muddy their effort. The only vocal that this track needs is the one that it has used as an ingredient.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker of London, England, at dustmotes.net.

Reducing the Buddha

C. Reider puts his machines through the machine.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


C. Reider has posted a two-track set of Buddha Machine reworkings, which he has titled Buddha Reduction. The music results from putting the machine’s now familiar loops of sedate ebbs and flows through a sequence of recursive sonic processings. What is left is splendidly similar to mininal techno, a dank, atmospheric effect resulting from echoed percussion and hazy pattern fields. Reider explains a bit about how the work came together:

“Buddha Reduction” was composed using a process I have been calling “reduction” in which a source sound is subjected to a series of repeated noise reductions using a type of processing that uses a sound sample selected by the user to reduce unwanted noise. The source sounds for this particular release were taken from the Buddha Machine and the Buddha Machine 2 from FM3.

I have used this same reduction process in the past, most recently for one of the Disquiet Junto challenges on soundcloud: “Bottle Reduction”. Before that, the process was used to “remove the drone from the drone” in a recording titled “Inconstant”.

Originally posted for free download at vuzhmusic.com/releases. More on his process at vuzhmusic.com/blog.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, soprano Evelyn Lear (b. 1926), acclaimed interpreter of Alban Berg: http://t.co/QPq7kh1A #
  • Bonus: along with https://disquiet.com being newly mobile/tablet-responsive, comments will be a whole lot tidier. Likely live this weekend. #
  • Blogger’s Remorse: Is a separate topic-specific @tumblr necessary, or should it just be a tag on your existing site? #
  • Super close to mobile/tablet-optimized https://disquiet.com. (Main site looks the same. Changes are all about device-based responsiveness.) #
  • New @tumblr I’ve got going, collecting links re: the “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” class I’m teaching: http://t.co/Fjk1qo9m #
  • Filed article with British magazine on the Fourth of July. Felt vaguely traitorous. #

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