Month: November 2012

As Real As It Gets / As Real As It Sounds

Disquiet Junto sound design for the apexart exhibit in Manhattan (November 15 - December 22, 2012), organized by Rob Walker

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Notes on the sound design produced by the Disquiet Junto over a series of projects for the exhibit “As Real As It Gets,” organized by Rob Walker for the gallery apexart in Manhattan. The exhibit runs from November 15 – December 22, 2012. More at designobserver.com. There will be a live concert of music from the exhibit at 6:30pm on Tuesday, November 27. It will feature:

Shawn Kelly (Arcka)
Brian Biggs
Ethan Hein
Kenneth Kirschner
Tom Moody
Joon Oluchi Lee
Roddy Schrock

Moreon the show and the musicians at [apexart.org](http://apexart.org/events/disquiet-junto.php).

In his novel Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Émile Zola (1840 ”“ 1902) depicted the rise of the modern department store during the waning years of the 19th century. He did so in terms that seem more futurist than realist: “There was the continuous roar of the machine at work, of customers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. And it was all regulated and organized with the remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force.” Or perhaps, more to the point, Zola was simply being realistic about the future. The book is rich with sonic depictions of the intensity of retail goings-on — not only the noisy machinations of capitalism in action, but the weighty silences that punctuate human communication.

As part of the “As Real As It Gets”exhibit, the online music collective known as the Disquiet Junto explored the nature of sonic activity in large-scale retail spaces. The Disquiet Junto is a freeform group of musicians — approximately 250 as of this writing, located around the globe — who take on weekly music projects; with Fluxus and Oulipo as guides, they employ creative restraint as a springboard for productivity. Between September and November of 2012, a series of assignments spurred the Disquiet Junto members to probe the acoustics of commerce from distinct vantages.

”¢ The first of these assignments Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store Recordings involved the collection of raw field recordings from retail spaces. These include, among other locations, a London, England, shopping center; a Macy’s in Boston, Massachusetts; a department store in Shibuya, Tokyo; an Apple Store in Boulder, Colorado; a market in Nonthaburi, Thailand; and a Target in Simi Valley, California.

”¢ The second assignment Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley asked the Disquiet Junto members to create fake field recordings, artificial environments: sounds that suggest retail spaces but were created from whole cloth. This project employed the foley techniques of motion pictures and television.

”¢ The third assignment (Disquiet Junto Project 0043: Dazzled Machine) asked the Disquiet Junto members to remix the material accumulated during the first two assignments. The proposed goal was to approximate the mechanistic fury inherent in Zola’s novel.

”¢ And for a fourth side project, a handful of Disquiet Junto members produced brief, seductive sonic cues for an imagined contemporary franchise of The Ladies’ Paradise / Au Bonheur des Dames department store.

The combined 2.7 hours of sounds will be heard in an ongoing state of shuffle throughout the run of “As Real As It Gets.”Imaginary and documentary soundscapes will challenge each other’s sense of reality. Remixes will run up against the raw materials from which they were forged. And on occasion a voice will beckon the gallery visitor to The Ladies’ Paradise for the latest blue-light special.

This set is comprised of material selected from the above project by Rob Walker, the exhibit’s organizer:

The following is a list of the more than 40 members of the Disquiet Junto whose sounds are heard in this project: Adam Baker (Deadwood), afterpostmodernism (Ian Campbell), all n4tural, Benjamin Dauer, bigpause, Carlos Lemosh, Charlie Grant, Damon Holzborn, Dean Terry, DEMILIT, Dick Mitic, Dizzy Banjo, echosonic (Grant Weston), Emma Hendrix, Ethan Hein, Inlet (Corey K.), jai_, jmmy kpple, James Ross, Justin Buckley, Ken Mistove, Lem Herlihy, lordofoverstock (Matthew Austin), Mark Rushton, Michel Bananbila, mjh 7, Moody Alien (Thessaloniki), Natalia Kamia, Naotko (Naoyuki Sasanami), Random Coil, SIGHUP (Steven Hamann), simpsi, Steve Burnett, Summer of Nebula, Super Miracle Dream Team, The Holocene (Pj Hamlin), Tuonela, vanWinkle (Neal B Johnson), vuzhmusic (C. Reider), Westy Reflector, and Zedkah.

The Disquiet Junto is moderated by its founder, Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet.com). Special thanks to Rob Walker, apexart, Antonin Gaultier, Hunter Hayden, Cameron Maddux, Cullen Miller, Carl Ritger, Paolo Salvagione, Ellen Shakespeare, Stephen Vitiello, Boon Design, dstl.info, Futureprüf, SoundCloud.com, Twitter.com, WordPress.org, the students in the fall 2012 semester of the course ADV 499-30 (“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds”) at the San Francisco Academy of Art, and the members of the Disquiet Junto.

The Sound of Oramics (MP3)

Savaran's record of a Daphne Oram—themed exhibit

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Field recordings don’t only take place in fields. Or more to the point, sometimes the field of study is indoors. And sometimes the field of study is itself a field of study. Savaran’s “Oramica” captures the electronic afterglow, the sonic byproduct, of a gallery exhibit itself dedicated to electronic sound. It’s an eight-plus-minute record of Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music, an exhibit that began its run at the British Science Museum in July 2011 and concludes on December 1 of this year. Savaran’s track isn’t a pure field recording. It’s a distillation of the initial document, with additions from Savaran himself.

Here’s Savaran’s description of his process:

This track is based around an 8 minute field recording of the sounds in the Science Museum, London during the Oramics to Electronica. … The exhibition is on the 2nd floor of what is essentially a long open hall, so sound carried from all floors. I sat at the front of the second floor facing the Oramics exhibition and recorded everything that could be heard into a Sony PCM M-10 recorder. Some parts of the exhibition were playing individual electronic sounds and the oramics sounds could also be heard over headphones while using an interactive screen.

I mixed the field recording with sounds from Reaktor and Kore2 blended in such a way that the Oramics sounds and field recording appear to seemlessly fit into the overall soundscape.

Among the materials on display are the instrument that composer Daphne Oram called her Oramics Machine, and an EMC VCS3 synthesizer of the sort utilized by Oram’s one-time employer, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Here’s a video produced by Science Museum about the exhibit:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/savaran. Savaran is Mark Walters, who’s based in Wales in the U.K. More on/from him at twitter.com/Savaran_Music and savaranmusic.wordpress.com. More on the Oramics exhibit at sciencemuseum.org.uk/oramics.

Netlabel Derivations, Collected (MP3s)

The netlabel Nowaki collects the Disquiet Junto project derived from its efforts.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“All these bottles thrown into the sea eventually found recipients.” So read a brief note from Marc Jolibois of the France-based netlabel Nowaki. The phrase was his poetic and succinct summary of what had occurred — which is that the combined efforts of the Disquiet Junto members had, back in late September, taken several tracks released on Nowaki and combined them into new, original works.

The Nowaki netlabel was selected for the Juno project for a simple reason: while there are many netlabels (some 500 or so active ones at this stage, releasing music intentionally for free download), and while their practice embraces the Creative Commons, very few go the next step and make their music available for the production of derivative works. Nowaki is the sadly rare exception. So it was that, in the end, 19 Disquiet Junto members went to work on a handful of Nowaki tracks.

Read the original instructions for the project: “Netlabel Derivations.” Download the Nowaki compilation as a Zip archive. View, and stream, the set at nowaki-music.org and here:

“All these bottles thrown into the sea eventually found recipients” — and those recipients took the bottles, combined their contents, and filled the bottles anew with the concoctions.

Geologic Time, Sped Up (MP3)

Mark Ward shares a personal breakthrough.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Mark Ward almost titled this nine-minute mix of drone and pulse “Three Chords in Geological Time.” Instead he went with “From Sea to Sierra.” The latter is arguably the better of the two titles for various reasons. Like the “Geologic Time” title, “Sea to Sierra” hints at the sense of movement, but it better allows for the pacing of the actual track. Drones can be especially static, and this drone-based composition is anything but. The key thing here is that “geologic” simply doesn’t apply to the kind of shifting and modulating and development that occurs within the piece, how extended tones and rough textures and beading percussion shift in relative emphasis. There’s nothing “geologic” about the momentum of Ward’s piece, except in the way that we often see geologic time sped up to display change in a manner that the human brain can process, watching continents split and mountains rise in seconds rather than eons.

Do read the note that accompanies the track at soundcloud.com/mark-ward, where it was posted for free download. Ward makes it plainly clear that this is something of a breakthrough for him. The challenge he’d long faced was, in his words, “How on earth do you make those giant droning sounds?” It’s evident that he has found his own answer.

More on/from Ward at mark-ward.org and twitter.com/words_are_wild.

Grid Music (MP3s)

The results of Karl Fousek's punch-card ingenuity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Disquiet Junto projects have yielded fascinating results, and high on the list is what Karl Fousek, aka analogue01, calls his Grid Music system. The system has two parts: one in which an image is encoded on graph paper, and another in which the resulting pattern is treated like an antique punch-card system. Part one is illustrated by the transition in the four images up top, and part two in this shot here:

All five of those images are from a recent post on Fousek’s website in which he describes the Grid Music system in full. It originates back with the 19th Disquiet Junto project, when the participants interpreted a photo by Yojiro Imasaka as if it were a graphic score.

Here are three gently percussive Grid Music tracks, all of them the result of processing “photographs of urban skylines in Montreal,” where Fousek lives:

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/analogue01. More on the system at karlfousek.com/grid-music.