In advance of a renewed rendition of his live video event, Isam 2.0, Amon Tobin has posted another free download, this one a beat-heavy cascade titled “Bed Time Stories (Extended Live Edition). The title is owed to the children’s toy whose sounds provide much of the initial material, and a distorted lullabye that is eventually subsumed by Tobin’s trademark ecstatic electronica.
Keith Fullerton Whitman is both author and audience of his latest modular work
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Keith Fullerton Whitman is a maximalist even when he’s a minimalist, a DJ, or (at the online retail store he runs, Mimaroglu Music Sales) a purveyor of physical recordings. There is a sense of expansiveness that informs — that exudes from — his work, and this may never have been more the case than with “120620.” That’s the title of work for modular synth that he posted for free download. It is, in his description, “an uninterrupted 5:43:30 transcription (in stereo) of a particularly nice patch built on the ‘voight-kampff machine’ (pictured) on 06/20/12, recorded whilst i was out having lunch in davis square (i.e. unobserved, unmoderated, untouched, unheard, etc).” As one commenter noted, SoundCloud — where the track was posted — doesn’t list times to the 100th of a second. That’s a nearly six-hour recording of a modular patch running on automatic. Beyond the sheer ever-shifting pleasures of the work, there’s the unique bonus of a sense that Whitman is, in effect, as much a member of the audience as we are, discovering it from a not dissimilar station: “everyone skip to 3:33:33 – this part is AWESOME,” he notes in one comment, as if he had just himself stumbled upon it.
The Assignment: Treat a chart of U.S. presidential-election polling data as graphic notation.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Data of the current U.S. presidential election suggests itself as a musical composition.
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 assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, August 9, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 13, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0032-sonicvote.
Below are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The graphic score mentioned in the post is shown above. The instructions appear below translated into two additional languages: Croatian and Japanese, courtesy of Darko Macan and Naoyuki Sasanami, respectively.
Disquiet Junto Project 0032: Sonified Election Data
This week’s project revisits the concept of the graphic score, something we explored with earlier in project 0019. You will treat the provided image as if it were a musical score. The image can be found at this link:
You can use any instrumentation you choose. (You may employ the human voice, but no comprehensible words should be used, just sounds.) The goal is for you to “read” the image as if it were presented as a piece of notated music. You might do this by assigning note values across the page horizontally, or by interpreting it holistically, or by running the image through a piece of software — or by any other systematic approach.
Background: The image shows the poll averages for the two major candidates for the upcoming presidential election in the United States. At the far left hand side of the image is October 2010, and at the far right hand side is July 2012. The blue data represents Barack Obama, the red data Mitt Romney. The image is a screenshot taken from the TalkingPointsMemo.com website on August 8.
Deadline: Monday, August 13, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 4 minutes in length.
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 “disquiet0032-sonicvote”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 this information:
Jeff Kolar, of the Radius broadcast, investigates a film artifact.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
The “Wilhelm Scream” is one of the most extraordinary examples of cinematic afterlife in the sound library. The recording, made by Sheb Wooley (aka the man behind the novelty hit “The Purple People Eater”), has been used hundreds of times, including in Them! and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Jeff Kolar, the man behind the Chicago avant-sound broadcast Radius, often featured here, has used various transformative effects to explore the scream as a sonic artifact. The result is a study in gaping-maw static. There’s an ecstatic element at work, as something so closely associated with fear is itself put under the knife. The piece, simply titled “The Wilhelm Scream,” was created as part of an exhibit, And Then She’s Like, and He Goes, curated by Chris Campe, which opens today, August 9, at Columbia College Chicago’s Averill and Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery; it runs through September 6.
