Month: April 2013

Like a Loop Machine

Passerby of Chicago flirts with chaos.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Feedback comes in many forms, but the two essential ones may be (1) that moment when a frisson of time-warping, near-simultaneous-state echoing occurs, and (2) that moment when the noise overwhelms the system, when the sonic equivalent of matter and anti-matter seem to collide, resulting in broad sensory overreach. The track “2013-04-04 tape loop+mixer feedback+doepfer” by **Passerby** flirts with the second while keeping things in check well enough to largely adhere to the first. Passerby’s system is complex, as laid out in an accompanying liner note:

>Two contact microphones attached to a Otari MX-5050 tape machine on the left and right sides. Those signals were fed into a Doepfer modular analog synthesizer, then into the tape loop, then from the tape loop to analog delay and reverb to separate channels in a mixer, which was feeding back both on itself and through the contact microphones.

The result is a constant state of self-adjusting balances, noises edging to the fore, then fading back, eruptions sensed more as premonitions than actual occurrences.

A piece by Valerio Tricoli is credited for inspiration. Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/passerby](https://soundcloud.com/passerby/2013-04-04-tape-loop-mixer). Passerby is **Nicholas Davis** of Chicago, Illinois. More from him at [twitter.com/mosspassion](https://twitter.com/mosspassion) and [numbers.fm](http://numbers.fm/~nicholas-davis/).

Post-Human Hard Listening (MP3)

A live work by Ephraim Wegner and Cem Güney

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130405-cronic107

**Ephraim Wegner** and **Cem Güney** have their ear to mid-distant future, specifically the one in which technology has manifestly altered human nature. Now, it may be argued that technology is merely an extension of human nature, that by our very nature everything we do is natural, and that all human-created technology — right back to rudimentary tools, even to the tool called language — has in turn altered what it means to be human. But it doesn’t seem an act of generational hubris to sense that something is going on with networked communication, with outboard memory, with ambient awareness, and so on that does raise the species stakes. What Wegner and Güney are up to in their 20-minute sound work “How to Survive in the Post−Human Era” is to explore those resulting circumstances in sound. In the work we hear Morse code, snatches of encoded verbiage, snaggles of wire dragged through the muck, signals aligning, data being parsed — yes, some of these are objective, and other are associative, but the strength of the piece is precisely how the boundaries between them blur ([MP3](http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast107.mp3)).

[audio:http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast107.mp3|titles=”How to Survive in the Post-Human Era”|artists=Cem Güney + Ephraim Wegner]

In a framing essay, Wegner and Güney talk about countervailing tendencies in depictions of the future, from global-beneficent singularity to dark, dystopian malaise. They pursue this with a focus on artificial life, on the machine as a music-producing mechanism enacting indirectly the will of the machine’s creator, making the creator a meta-creator. They term this an “AI-DSP” (an artificially intelligent digital signal processor). They describe their process as follows:

>Musically the topic was implemented in various ways: The composition is divided into three parts: Design, Test and Launch. Design begins with pure sine waves which generate different interferences. Thereafter, a more complicated structure, consisting of voice, feedback and bit errors develops. Test starts with processed voice recordings played in the form of a canon. Different tones and words simulate sounds already existing in our surroundings. Bit by bit the machine takes over the action of the musicians and manipulates the voice recordings by means of a logical defined structure. Launch is based on Christian Wolff’s techniques for structured improvisation. Digital noise processed with different filter settings is played according to a call & response scheme. Lastly, sounds are generated with spatial movement according to a score.

The piece was performed live and debuted at the Festival for Applied Acoustics in Köln, Germany, on November 6, 2011, in an eight-channel format. The music was originally posted for free download as part of the Crónicaster podcast series at [cronicaelectronica.org](http://cronicaelectronica.org). More from Wegner at [anti-matter-plant.org](http://www.anti-matter-plant.org/), and from Güney at [impulse.tumblr.com](http://impulse.tumblr.com/).

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Weird. My automated weekly Twitter aggregator decided, all on its own, to post on Sunday rather than Saturday. ->
  • The week’s @djunto has 31 pieces, with two full days to go. Here's a helpful 320kbps MP3 of the massive AIFF source: http://t.co/Fg8T8FPXQD ->
  • It was darker before the dusk this evening, the storm breaking at land’s end, sky overhead stormy but in the distance lit by the waning sun. ->
  • RIP, Robert Zildjian (89), of the namesake centuries-old Turkish cymbal-making family; founder of rival Sabian Cymbals. ->
  • I get Bcc'd on soul-retrieval SKU requisitions. RT @Le_Berger: @disquiet It's like you have a direct link with the grim reaper or something. ->
  • RIP, composer and educator Edward Charles Mattila (b. 1927), via @jcharney ->
  • Very sad. Learned via @vuzhmusic that Jeffrey Melton (@nofi), who participated in many @djunto projects, including the first, passed away. ->
  • Here's something I wrote about @nofi in 2011: http://t.co/w5wnsFc9mT. And here's more of his sounds: https://t.co/csnM59i7bI. ->
  • Man, @naotko has reminded me that the late @nofi was the compiler of the main @twitter list of @djunto participants: https://t.co/QzF3jON9pe ->
  • "I did not believe I could be so sad to learn someone I'd never met passed away." From a fellow admirer of @nofi. ->
  • Indeed. MT @happypuppyrecs: sad to learn of @nofi's death. at least his musical creations will be available for us to remember him with. ->
  • It's not that it's odd that I am saddened by @nofi's death despite having never met him; I am sad in part because I never met him. ->

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

Steady State Drones (MP3)

From nojoined, aka David Priestley of Leicester, Britain

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130405-nojoinedThe drones are thick, lengthy tubes that pass overhead, riddled with indents, flush with strange liquids, vibrating to some indiscernible rhythm. They move in odd ways, slowing suddenly to let Tesla-coil sparks fill the space. They rumble like a dead field reacting to sudden pressure change. They are the material from which the album *Steady State* by **nojoined** is made, six tracks of these menacingly beautiful, arterial explorations. Beats make themselves present, but the strongest work may be that, like the third track, “Steady State 3.2,” which is more about pulse than percussion ([MP3](http://archive.org/download/nojoined-steadystate/3%29%20steady%20state%203%202.mp3)). *Steady State* was released for free download by the [arewrecordings.com](http://www.arewrecordings.com/) netlabel. There are six tracks in all. Nojoined is **David Priestley** of Leicester, Britain, more from whom at [soundcloud.com/nojoined](https://soundcloud.com/nojoined).

[audio:http://archive.org/download/nojoined-steadystate/3%29%20steady%20state%203%202.mp3|titles=”Steady State 3.2″|artists=nojoined]

Get the full set at [archive.org](http://archive.org/details/nojoined-steadystate).

Disquiet Junto Project 0066: Communing with Nofi

The Assignment: Collaborate posthumously with the late Jeffrey (Nofi) Melton.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130404-nofi

*Each Thursday at [the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) 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 in the Junto is open: [just join and participate](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/).*

This assignment was made in the mid-afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, April 8, 2013, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at [tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto)):

>Disquiet Junto Project 0066: Communing with Nofi
>
>This week’s project is a tribute to the late Jeffrey Melton, the talented musician, best known on SoundCloud and Twitter as @nofi. Melton passed away a few days ago, on March 30, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lived with his wife and seven-year-old son. He was 42. Melton had been involved with the Disquiet Junto since the very first Junto project, back in January 2012, and he early on volunteered to create a Twitter list of the handles of participating Junto members.
>
>The theme of this project, the 66th in the weekly Disquiet Junto series, is “posthumous collaboration”: communing through music.
>
>These are the steps:
>
>Step 1: Download the following live session of Jeffrey Melton performing. It was recorded in June of last year. Warning: it’s fairly sizable, at over 350 MBs:
>
>http://nofi.org/media/2012-06-15-Unwind-live-session.mp3
>
>Step 2: The track is quite long, so select a segment of between 2 and 5 minutes. The best way to go about this might be to do it at random (just put the needle down, as it were), but of course feel free to listen at length and select a favorite section.
>
>Step 3: Once you have your extracted segment, set the opening of the track to fade in.
>
>Step 4: Set the ending of the track to cut out suddenly.
>
>Step 5: Listen to it several times, to get to know it.
>
>Step 6: Record yourself performing live along with the segment you have selected. Any instrumentation is fine. Just no voice. Be sure to play alone for approximately 10 seconds after Melton’s performance cuts off.
>
>Deadline: Monday, April 8, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Length: Your finished work should be the length determined in steps 2 and 6 above.
>
>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: Include the term “disquiet0066-nonofi”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
>
>Download: Please set your track in a manner that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution). I’d like to potentially combine all the pieces into a single composition, and this license would allow me to do so easily.
>
>Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
>
>This track is a posthumous collaboration with Jeffrey Melton, aka Nofi, who passed away on March 30, 2013. It was recorded live in April 2013 atop a June 2012 Melton live recording.
>
>More on this 66th Disquiet Junto project at:
>
>https://disquiet.com/2013/04/04/disquiet0066-nonofi/
>
>More of Melton/Nofi’s music at:
>
>http://www.nofi.org/
>
>Read Melton’s obituary here:
>
>http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/fortwayne/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=163988588
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/