Month: September 2012

Not Drowning, Composing (MP3)

Clayton Alpha's water-logged mix of field recordings and classical themes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is an unattributed introduction to Leaving in Waves, Clayton Alpha‘s recent album of gestural ambient-infused music. The collection of 10 tracks is a mix of plaintive low-energy melodic lines, often drawn from what appears to be classical-music source material, and lightly filtered field recordings, the point of origin unclear but the natural elements firm and persistent. The album was released earlier this week for free download by Panda Fuzz, which is a netlabel, which means that it specializes in MP3s. For this reason, the reference to “needle drops” in the following paragraph excerpt from the introduction is largely metaphorical:

Abstract music is just that; abstract. The artist can make suggestions, in titles and artwork, but in the end, the listener holds all the power. Once the needle drops, or the headphones slip on, the creator can only hope that they’ve done their due diligence in getting what they need across, be it as abstract of concrete as they like.

While there are no dropped needles in the process of listening to Leaving in Waves, there appear to have been some in the album’s making. Most of the tracks employ slowed down orchestral cues or languorous piano lines. The sampling occasionally takes on a physical property. Key among the tracks is “A House Out of Reach,” in which the minimalist piano part is rendered weather-beaten by association with the fog bank of field recordings that subsume it (MP3). Furthermore, the part is presented as if on a wobbly turntable, the warped vinyl having an ebb and flow like the surf.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/pf035/06-a-house-out-of-reach.mp3|titles=”A House Out of Reach”|artists=Clayton Alpha]

Get the full release of 10 tracks at pandafuzz.com and via archive.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Doing my part to support the economy. MT @jmmy_kppl: i walked through a shop because @djunto told me to. http://t.co/eN31Qfrn #
  • “Don’t you got any Christmas music?” “This is Christmas music.” #
  • Morning sounds: refrigerator hum, quiet buzz of distant traffic, passing bus. #
  • 3 sonic documents of consumer space so far in @djunto #37 Simi Valley Target, Dorset Primark, Manhattan Macy’s: http://t.co/lSzme8ob #
  • Cloud sync means four devices on your desk near-simultaneously signaling a calendar event. #
  • Interesting standoff between networks and Apple about network IDs. Did record companies ever balk at the absence of a label field in iTunes? #
  • The faces are so all familiar in the trailer to Spielberg’s Lincoln that it looks like an exercise in anachronism cosplay. #
  • Nix that. Per @nynexrepublic (@disquiet “I would not be surprised to learn of a Hello Kitty taser”), confirmed existence thereof. #
  • Maybe if I put Hello Kitty stickers on my Zoom H4n, fewer people will mistake it for a taser. “I’m a field recordist. We mean no harm.” #
  • It helps that the dual microphones on the Zoom H4n look like deathray devices from a James Bond movie starring the Micronauts. #
  • Gauging quasi-objective sound-recording quality is not exactly in my skill set, but man does this Zoom H4n sound good. #
  • “Pre-Raphaelites trailer.” #
  • There will be a Fringe episode titled “Transilence Thought Unifier Model-11.” That is all. #

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

Human Automation (MP3)

Justin Buckley uses a "rotating processes" approach to focus his musical productivity.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Much electronic music involves rules-based systems, algorithms that process input and produce output. These processes can be sequenced or nested or run concurrently or mixed with other approaches. Justin Buckley of Berlin, Germany, has acknowledged this aspect of his work by applying rules, in an external manner, to his own efforts as a composer. He’s selected four different “methods for writing music” and he rotates through them, producing one piece of music each week. The four methods are: modular improvisation, notation, field recordings, and live looper. He describes these in detail in the notes to “Calhoun’s Universe 25 [rotating-processes-looper],” which as its integrated tag suggests was the result of the “looper” process.

The noisily blippy digital conflagration that is “Calhoun’s Universe 25” resulted from the following approach:

A noise source was used to create semi-random sequences, which you hear at the beginning of the track, which was then used to ‘fill’ Ableton’s live looper plugin, which in turn became the very repetitive loop at the heart of this track. More controlled randomness is then layered over it all, plus some other elements to give it some interest.

The track was posted for free download at soundcloud.com/justin-buckley.

“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 1

Sound journals, syllabus, Fringe, JJ Abrams, Kit Kat, sonification, Gordon Hempton, Brian Eno, homework

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Wednesday of this week was the first of the 15 weekly three-hour classes I’m teaching on sound at San Francisco’s Academy of Art (academyart.edu) this semester. I thought I’d take some notes here as the class proceeds.

I opened with an exercise, shown above. For the first 15 minutes no one spoke. Instructions were posted for the students to write down all the sounds they heard, and to write down sounds that came to mind as being normal for a Wednesday morning shortly after waking. (They’re now keeping a sound journal, and will for the remainder of the course. During next Wednesday’s class we’ll compare what they wrote down about actual sounds that morning versus those they had recalled from memory during the first class session.)
Continue reading ““Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 1″

Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store Recordings

The Assignment: Record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store.

/ 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 is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 27:


The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 13, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 17, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project is one in a foreseen series being done in conjunction with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. More information on the exhibit at apexart.org. The list of featured participants in the exhibit is: Kelli Anderson, Conrad Bakker, Beach Packaging Design, Matt Brown, Steven M. Johnson, Last Exit To Nowhere, MakerBot Industries, The Marianas (Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco), Angie Moramarco, Oliver Munday, Omni Consumer Products, Staple Design, U.S. Government Accountability Office, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Marc Weidenbaum/Disquiet Junto, Shawn Wolfe, and Dana Wyse.

Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store Recordings

This project is the first in the Disquiet Junto series to focus on a pure, unadulterated field recording — or, in this case, a “store recording,” as you’ll see. Many of the previous Disquiet Junto projects have used field recordings as their source material, either audio created by the participants, or a shared sample created by a third-party.

For this project, you will record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store. You will select a section of that recording that you find to be inherently exemplary, and that segment will be your project entry for the week. There will be no editing, no processing, no producing, per se — you may, if you choose, do a slight volume increase at the opening and decrease at the closing.

Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore field recordings as an end unto themselves, as an opportunity to document the world in sound.

The project, however, has broader intentions. It’s being undertaken in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. Sounds produced for this Disquiet Junto project will be considered to be played in the gallery as part of the exhibit, and will also be made available to Disquiet Junto participants and other musicians and sound artists for subsequent projects related to Walker’s exhbit.

There are also plans afoot for a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art in late November in conjunction with the exhibit.

This is Apex’s initial, brief description of the upcoming exhibit: “As Real As It Gets gathers fictional products, imaginary brands, hypothetical advertising and speculative objects, devised by artists, designers, and companies. We resist commercial material culture as inauthentic, phony, and less than legitimate, but should we? Presenting the marketplace as medium — while supplies last.”

Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Design Observer, and the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House: 2008) and Letters from New Orleans (Garrett County Press: 2005). Walker co-founded, with Joshua Glenn, the Significant Objects project.

Deadline: Monday, September 17, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 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 “disquiet0037-asrealasitgets1”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:

This Disquiet Junto project was done in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan (November 15 – December 22, 2012):

http://apexart.org/exhibitions/walker.php/

More on this 37th Disquiet Junto project at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store Recordings

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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