The streaming original and a downloadable Pete Swanson remix
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
There are few pleasures like hearing the song removed from a song. After **Pete Swanson** has finished with **Ashley Paul**’s “Soak the Ocean,” what is left is like the skin of a snake after the snake has gone on to shadier pastures. The original song is a mix of gestural near-microsonic composition and lightly layered vocals, more intoned than sung. It is a pleasure on its own, Paul’s tremulous voice moving amid the fragile plectrum geometries of the accompaniment. True to the snakeless-skin image, Swanson has largely excised the vocal — the inhabitant has moved on —Â and left the instrumental bed, which he has in turn made more motoric. There are hints of her voice, a syllable allowed to repeat here and there, a phrase even less robust than the ethereal original, more a vestige, a memory, of the song than a new rendering of it. The beat gains momentum as the track proceeds, memories left behind, as it moves forward into a deeper, richer, harsher, welcoming noise.
For comparison, this is the original version, from the Paul album *Line The Clouds*, which came out on REL Records in late March:
Swanson was half of Yellow Swans (the other half having been **Gabriel Mindel Saloman**), whose *Going Places* was one of my favorite commercial albums of [2010](https://disquiet.com/2010/12/22/best-of-2010-commercial-albums/). The magazine [xlr8r.com](http://www.xlr8r.com/mp3/2013/02/soak-ocean-pete-swanson-remix) covered the remix back in February. More from Ashley Paul at [ashleypaul.net](http://ashleypaul.net/). More from Pete Swanson at [twitter.com/pete_swans](https://twitter.com/pete_swans).
**Jesse Eric Schmidt** does not use the scan button on his radio to search for something to listen to. He uses the scan button to compose something to be listened to, something that collectively he has called a “rhythmic modular inventory” of what is on at that moment, the moment that is in fact an expanse of contiguous moments, the chance moments that occur between the start and end of his performance. The result is something that emphasizes the ephemeral nature of a radio signal. Much radio scanning by casual listeners has to do with finding a song worth lingering on — and in the vast majority of cases, that means to have temporary access to something that one knows is firmly available elsewhere: on YouTube, encased in a CD, in a box of 7″ singles at the back of one’s closet. Schmidt never lingers for long, instead allowing each audio element to commune with what preceded it and with what one anticipates will come next, each chess move enacted with the white noise signature of radio static.
Track originally posted for free download at [theradius.us](http://theradius.us/episode39). More from Schmidt at [jesseericschmidt.com](http://jesseericschmidt.com/home.html). The image below is a grid of his varied activities:
â—¼ ***Sound Motion:*** Three videos of materials responding to sound:
First up, mercury: “The higher the frequency the more ‘nodes’ will appear along the outer edge of the mercury,” via [io9.com](http://io9.com/watch-how-mercury-completely-flips-out-when-its-blaste-493103471):
Second, what a speaker looks like when a 61 Hz tone plays at 60 frames per second, via [laughingsquid.com](http://laughingsquid.com/curious-wobbling-speaker-effect-captured-with-dslr-camera/), via [Max La Rivière-Hedrick](http://engine43.org/stories/):
Third, “Non-Newtonian fluid meets subwoofer,” an experiment by **Natasha Carlin** (a student this semester in the class on sound I teach at the Academy of Art in San Francisco):
Note: the project was for an earlier class Carlin took, but she used as part of a student presentation in our class.
â—¼ ***Generative Fiction:*** This is a paragraph from early on in the novel *You*, written by **Austin Grossman** (*Soon I Will Be Invincible*). The novel is set in the world of video-game development. The paragraph is told from the point of view of the book’s main character and narrator. He’s a newb game designer who at this moment in the story, toward the end of chapter seven, is trying to sort out a bug in the software. The paragraph also seems to work as a playful metaphor for composers working in generative environments:
>They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.
More on the novel at [austingrossman.dreamhosters.com](http://austingrossman.dreamhosters.com/).
â—¼ ***Reading Sound:*** This immediately movied to the top of my to-read list: **Justin St. Clair**’s [*Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature: Novel Listening*](http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415661393/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Lit_JM_1303_RR20), just out from Routledge. From the description:
>This study examines postmodern literature— including works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Ishmael Reed, and Thomas Pynchon —arguing that one of the formal logics of postmodern fiction is heterophonia: a pluralism of sound. The postmodern novel not only bears earwitness to a crucial period in American aural history, but it also offers a critique of the American soundscape by rebroadcasting extant technological discourses. Working chronologically through four audio transmission technologies of the twentieth century (the player piano, radio, television audio, and Muzak installations), St. Clair charts the tendency of ever-proliferating audio streams to become increasingly subsumed as background sound.
More from St. Clair at [soundculturestudies.net](http://www.soundculturestudies.net/). He’s an assistant professor of English at the University of South Alabama.
â—¼ ***Sound Matter:*** The publisher Noch bills itself as having a focus on “expanded listening.” Its first volume, *What Matters Now? (What Can’t You Hear?)*, features 16 new writings (ranging from music criticism to short fiction, from visual poetry to art writing) by **Cheryl Tipp**, **Chiara Guidi**, **David Toop**, **Francesco Tenaglia**, **Helena Hunter**, **Ivan Carozzi**, **James Wilkes**, **Luciano Chessa**, **Mike Cooper**, **Patrick Farmer**, **Salomé Voegelin**, **Sandra Jasper**, **Simone Bertuzzi**, **Stefano Scalich**, **Steve Roden**, **Tone Gellein**. It’s edited by Noch founders **Daniela Cascella** and **Paolo Inverni**. Details at [nochpublishing.com](http://nochpublishing.com).
â—¼ ***Dr. Eno:*** The BBC has some audio (one minute and six seconds) of **Brian Eno**’s The Quiet Room, an audio-visual healing installation at the Montefiore Hospital in Hove, England: [bbc.co.uk](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22187595). It is very *Thursday Afternoon*. That’s a good thing. … While on the subject, the Soundcheck show from WNYC has been interviewing musicians about their guilty pleasures; Eno [provides](http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/2013/may/06/your-musical-guilty-pleasures/) a welcome context to his answer: “I’m not really embarrassed about any of my tastes.” (Latter link thanks to [Mike Rhode](http://comicsdc.blogspot.com/).)
â—¼ ***More Children:*** Nice little review by the Seattle *Stranger*’s **David Schmader** of *The Children Next Door*, for which I did sound design with composer **Taylor Deupree**, at [thestranger.com](http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/festive/Content?oid=16638613): “it’s a masterpiece — smart, tough, fearless, and miraculously compact.” Directed by **Doug Block**, produced by **Lynda A. Hansen**. The film is playing there at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival 2013.
â—¼ ***One Liners:*** Keep an ear out for cicadas. â—¼ There’s now a page on Google+ for a fledgling Disquiet.com presence: [gplus.to/disquiet](http://gplus.to/disquiet). â—¼ Various Microsoft content projects apparently have an “electronic dance music” component ([adweek.com](http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/microsoft-pitches-new-content-fields-technical-glitches-149034)). â—¼ 19 musicians made tracks from [just two tones and three beats](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet0070-2tones3beats) in the 70th Disquiet Junto project, which ended last night.
It’s all scraped, noisy metal and these tones that echo in seeming slow-motion. The track, “acoustic laptop ”˜xen’ (edit)”by Norwegian musician **Tore Honoré Bøe**, teeters at the place where microsound meets European free improvisation, where attention to sonic detail is enacted with a freeform, narrative-in-progress spirit. It manages, in turn, to be both reflective and invigorating. The title of the track refers to a series of “acoustic laptops” that he has developed, a collection of “wood boxes with various tiny objects attached; springs, stones, metal, rubber, string, needles, memorabilia – amplified by contact mikes (piezos).” Each is a kind of sonic wunderkammer. View a gallery of them at [origami.teks.no](http://origami.teks.no/thb/1.2-al.html).
Bøe is based in the Canary Islands. More from him at [origami.teks.no](http://origami.teks.no/thb/) and [twitter.com/origamiboe](https://twitter.com/origamiboe).
A collaboration between Michael Ash Sharbaugh and Adrian Hallam
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
With its lulling melody, ominous overtones, and the fragments of lightly tweaked vocal elements, “The Parting,” credited to **Michael Ash Sharbaugh** and **Adrian Hallam** (the latter aka **Blue Room Green**), could be a lost Angelo Badalamenti track. It has the enjoyably coy longueurs of weary decadence. Hallam is credited with guitar, Oberheim synth, and found sounds, and Sharbaugh with vocals, synthesizers, found sounds, and sound manipulations:
Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/michael-ash-sharbaugh](https://soundcloud.com/michael-ash-sharbaugh/the-parting-michael-ash). More from Hallam, who is based in Australia, at [twitter.com/BlueRoomGreen](https://twitter.com/BlueRoomGreen). More from Sharbaugh, who is based in Decatur, Georgia, at [twitter.com/MDSharbaugh](https://twitter.com/MDSharbaugh).
â—¼ ***Generative Fiction:*** This is a paragraph from early on in the novel *You*, written by **Austin Grossman** (*Soon I Will Be Invincible*). The novel is set in the world of video-game development. The paragraph is told from the point of view of the book’s main character and narrator. He’s a newb game designer who at this moment in the story, toward the end of chapter seven, is trying to sort out a bug in the software. The paragraph also seems to work as a playful metaphor for composers working in generative environments: