Month: July 2013

Reworking Emma Hendrix (MP3)

A bagpipe derivation by Larry Johnson

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130721-hornpipe

Some of the best posts about exploratory Creative Commons music online are themselves works of music — not text posts, like the ones I do here at Disquiet.com, posts that are a kind of semi-casual public processing in words of recent listening, but music proper: reworkings, remixes, and answer tracks that in the course of revisiting the source audio make considered statements about it.

Larry Johnson, who goes by L-A-J on SoundCloud and elsewhere, frequently pops up on this site having taken a recent subject of of Disquiet Downstream post as the source audio for a reworking. Recently he focused on a piece by the talented Emma Hendrix that itself had taken the drone of the bagpipe and made proper, contemporary drone music out of it. Hendrix’s, titled “Prominal,” is a scintillating piece — imagine the proto-minimalist, raga-esque burble of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” turned into a frantic pulse, like a cicada having a heart attack. She writes of the track’s origin:

Promial is sourced entirely from the introductory notes of a Sailor’s Hornpipe. It is intended to envelope the sailor’s tradition in the vast expanse common to both the sea and the drone of the bagpipe. It was commissioned by the Community Radio Education Society’s (CRES) Media Arts Committee in Vancouver Canada in 2011.

Johnson, in his “Promial [Emma Hendrix] Remixed,” digs into the drone within her drone (that is, the drone within the drone within a drone), pulling a see-saw fragment from Hendrix’s piece and moving it about this way and that, nudging it to and fro, teasing out chance harmonics and rhythmic details.

This is his revision:

https://soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1/promial-emma-hendrix-remixed

And this is Hendrix’s root track:

Johnson version originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/l-a-j-1, and the Hendrix at soundcloud.com/emmahendrix. Hendrix is based in Vancouver, Canada; more from her at emmahendrix.com. The above image is from the Project Gutenberg ebook of The Little Skipper by George Manville Fenn (gutenberg.org). Johnson used it as the “cover” for his cover version.

Pink Floyd on Pause (MP3)

Ambient from Sweden

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Longing” by Ï€ Dogx is mournful drone of a song, nearly six minutes of gentle swells that sound like someone took snatches from Pink Floyd tracks, slowed the just shy of recognizability, and wove new sonic cloth from them. Aching bits suggest a voice struggling to be heard, and the pace is slow enough to cause BPM counters to short circuit. Though just uploaded this past week to SoundCloud, it’s a track from a January 2009 album, Reliquum Fertilis.

https://soundcloud.com/peedogx/02-longing

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/peedogx. Ï€ Dogx is Bo Davidson and HÃ¥kan Müller of Linköping, Sweden.

Disquiet Junto Project 0081: Cheap Generative

The Project: create generative music with four loops of differing lengths.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130718-iching

Each Thursday 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 in the Junto is open: just join and participate.

This assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, July 18, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, July 22, 2013, as the deadline.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0081: Cheap Generative

The theme of this week’s project is generative, an approach in which music is produced beyond the strict, immediate control of the composer-performer. The composition and performance are less a linear work than they are a system that is set in motion. We’ll use this approach to investigate pre-existing work. Your finished Junto project should link back to the pre-existing work for comparison’s sake.

Step 1: Choose a recent work that has isolatable parts, preferably layers, or at least distinct elements.

Step 2: Create loops from four of these distinct elements: one 2 seconds in length, one 3 seconds, one 5 seconds, and one 7 seconds long.

Step 3: Add a 3-second pause to one of the elements and a 1-second pause to another of the elements. The choice is yours.

Step 4: Record a five-minute swath of the four loops playing simultaneously. The sounds will rotate through at their own individual paces, create numerous chance intersections. The result is your finished track. Feel free to add a fade-in and a fade-out, though it is not necessary.

Deadline: Monday, July 22, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your track should have a duration of five minutes.

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 “disquiet0081-cheapgenerative”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider employing a license that allows for attributed, commerce-free remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information — and to post a link to the track from which the elements were derived.

More on this 81st Disquiet Junto project, in which generative music is produced with four loops of differing lengths, at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0081: Cheap Generative

Original source track at this URL:

[insert link]

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Modest Beatcraft (MP3)

From Patrick from Seattle

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another fine bit of slomo instrumental hip-hop from the Seattle-based musician who goes, simply, by Patrick. He’s a SoundCloud engineer, according to his brief bio, which may explain why his SoundCloud page has one of those snazzy personalized banners that are mostly reserved for big-league accounts. Big-league graphics aside, the track is reliably modest in scope, just a flutter of sub-downtempo beatcraft with enough bridge-like asides to keep things interesting. Ripe for repeat.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/patrick/amethyst. More from him at patrick.bandcamp.com.

Where Beat and Background Merge (MP3)

An archival noise performance by Tore Honoré Bøe

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tore Honoré Bøe has posted four and a half minutes of a performance recorded live at Det Akademiske Kvarter in Bergen, Norway, back in 2001. It is an industrial drone that is interrupted regularly by a pounding, percussive element. This is self-evident in the waveform visualization of the track, what with all those ragged, saw-blade juts. The pounding at first is in stark contrast to the background sound, but as time passes what becomes clear is that the pounding is not so self-contained, that the sound of the percussive has a resonance that extends beyond its initial imposition of a beat. And as these attenuations come to the fore, the distinction between the background and foreground gets confused. It is often said that repetition is a form of change, but generally what that means is that repetition fuels the ear’s attention to previously unapparent variety; by contrast, in Bøe’s piece, as time passed it is similarities, rather than distinctions, that make themselves heard.

http://soundcloud.com/origamirepublika/music-even-16-years-in-bergen

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/origamirepublika. Bøe’s “acoustic laptops” were mentioned here back in May. More from him at origami.teks.no and twitter.com/origamiboe. He is based in Gran Canaria, Spain.