Month: December 2012

The Shadow in a Shadow

Seeking details in a Touch Editions broadcast

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20121219-Radio87

The folks behind [touchradio.org.uk](http://www.touchradio.org.uk/touch_radio_87_bruce_gilbert.html) must be major fans of New Criticism, since they posit their audio on the web regularly with little enough contextual information for the word “scant” to sound generous. In the end, though, what is generous is the audio itself. The podcast series is a marvel of experimental audio, often though not always drawing from field recordings as source information. Among the latest is “The Only Known Photograph of Bruce Gilbert,” the photograph in question, reprinted above, a dark box with barely the outline of a figure. The sound is a rapture-inducing shadow itself, low key clangs, a simple dirge of a rhythm, and dusty ambience in full effect.

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio87.mp3|titles=”The Only Known Photograph of Bruce Gilbert”|artists=Bruce Gilbert]

20121219-nocturne45

The work was performed on November 1, 2012, as part of a show featuring Gilbert, Mike Harding, and Achim Mohné. Details on the show at [khm.de](http://www.khm.de/kmw/klanglabor/?p=1392).

Running the Tabletop

An app demo by Richard Devine

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20121218-rdevine

There are various ways to discern an individual’s presence in social media, key among them is the simple integer associated with the individual in a given network. Take SoundCloud.com for example, where **Richard Devine** has north of 55,000 of what we’ve become accustomed to call “followers.” His reputation as a tech clothes horse precedes “Glitch Breaker Demo,” a track he produced on the iOS app Tabletop, which is a kind of meta-app, containing assorted mini-apps that emulate various audio tools and instruments, from effects filters to drum machines to a simulated turntable. Devine’s track is IDM by way of EDM, a slowly raging deployment of the various tool at hand:

In related news, the iMPC — the iOS version of the classic Akai drum machine — is the first “Tabletop ready app,” which is to say it comes with a free unlocked version that appears within the Tabletop system. More on that at the Tabletop developer blog at [retronyms.com](http://blog.retronyms.com/2012/12/announcing-impc-for-ipad.html). It’s pictured in the screenshot that accompanied Devine’s track, shown up top.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/richarddevine](https://soundcloud.com/richarddevine/glitch-breaker-made-with-1). More on Devine at [richard-devine.com](http://www.richard-devine.com/).

“Losting” with Mark Rushton

A display of the recent iOS app Samplr

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Following up an app-related note in an [earlier post](https://disquiet.com/2012/11/19/eno-lux-junto-concerts-ncis-more-stems-disquiet/) here, Iowa-based musician **Mark Rushton** has posted another example of his work with the Samplr tool, a recently released app for the iOS operating system. The track is titled “Losting,” and it’s a slowly undulating bit of atmospheric effluence. Writes Rushton of the core of the track’s development: “It’s based around a melodic ostinato, and while the motif repeats over and over you’ll hear things changing in the background ever so slightly.” The result is like a miasma with a pulse, a threadbare haze that comes and goes with the elegance of a fragile, rotating machine. Oh, and he recommends good headphones.

More from Rushton at [markrushton.com](http://markrushton.com).

The Radiant Darkness (MP3)

New album of internalized drones from Mystified

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Fire can sound like water. Passing traffic can sound like the rush of waves. And in the hands of **Thomas Park**, aka **Mystfied**, what appears to be the sounds captured in a dark cavern are transformed into something radiant. The album, a single track more than 20 minutes in length, is titled *The Luminous Deep*. Phillip Wilkerson is credited with “some of the sounds,” and the cover art depicts just the sort of place one might come upon fellow Deep Listening spelunkers like Pauline Oliveros or Stuart Dempster. The sounds may be sourced from somewhere other than the pictured location, but the effect would remain the same: less the soundtrack of the place than the internal soundtrack of the experience of the place.

Track originally posted for free download at [deprofundisnetlabel.bandcamp.com](http://deprofundisnetlabel.bandcamp.com/album/the-luminous-deep). More on Park/Mystified at [mystifiedmusic.com](http://www.mystifiedmusic.com/).

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Well, this is fortunate. In the past few months the two main semi-automated content features employed on this site stopped working. One was the monthly list of most-read posts, the other the production of weekly Twitter compendiums. The latter happened when the plugin Twitter Tools for WordPress (the backend of this site) stopped supporting weekly compendiums. Enter a plugin called Twitter Digest. This post was the first test. It worked OK. In advance of next week’s compendium, the reply tweets (the ones beginning with @) won’t appear. Previously, these ran in reverse chronological order, but this chronological setup below works well, so it’ll remain the way these will be formatted. (Two copies of this post appeared, and I have vague recollections of a similar issue with Twitter Tools. I’ll keep an eye on it.)