Month: December 2013

Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.52)

Fringe sound, covering Walter Benjamin, more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This would be roughly the week of December 23 through December 29.

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5 Years Ago (2008): A feature collected this site’s readers’ favorite albums of 2008. … The quote of the week collated material from Fringe, among it: “Was I humming? I thought it was in my head. ”¦ Nothing sings like a kilo volt. Unique pitch. Nothing else in nature quite like it.” … The image of the week was the cover to the then new edition of a Penguin paperback of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. … The week’s Downstream entries included some 8-bit Christmas music, a raucous drone by Growing, Esther Venrooy’s saw-toothed wave forms, jazz remixes from Silences Sumire (aka Thomas Faulds and Charles Gorcyznski), and foghorn-tronic material from Stray Ghost.

10 Years Ago (2003): My favorite albums of 2003, in a post this week, included Quartets by Boxhead Ensemble (to this day a major favorite — I briefly considered pitching it to 33 1/3 instead of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II), Systems/Layers by Rachel’s, and So by So (aka Markus Popp and Eriko Toyada). … I must have been taking an end-of-year break, because there were no Downstream entries.

15 Years Ago (1998): Nothing this week.

Disquiet Junto Project 0104: 2013 in 60 Seconds

The project: Create a 2013 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

0104-audiojournal2013

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.

Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as the project proceeds:

This project was published in the evening, California time, on Thursday, December 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 30, 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 0104: 2013 in 60 Seconds

This week’s project is a sound journal, an audio history of the past year. You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2013. You will then select one 5-second segment from each of these audio elements. Then you will stitch these dozen 5-second segments together in chronological order to form 1 single 1-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should preferably of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Deadline: Monday, December 30, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be 60 seconds long.

Information: Please, when posting your track on SoundCloud, list the source of each of the 12 elements.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0104-audiojournal2013”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting your track, be sure to include this information:

More on this 104th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a 2013 audio diary with a dozen five-second segments”) at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0104: 2013 in 60 Seconds

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

The Disquiet Junto Project List (0001 – 0574 …)

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Photo associated with this project found via Creative Commons at:

http://goo.gl/AuZpPf

One Prayer Bowl Ringing

Buddhist-inspired digital processing by Jason Charney

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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The sound of one prayer bowl ringing is quite a bit more than the familiar lulling waveform when that ringing is sent through myriad processing routines. This is why while Jason Charney’s “PratÄ«tya,” named for the Buddhist concept of “pratÄ«tyasamutpāda,” veers from its opening ring tone, that which follows — overtones, and cicada chatter, percussive tweaks — always seems rooted in the source audio.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jasoncharney. More from Charney, who is based in Ohio, at jasoncharney.com and twitter.com/jcharney.

Disquiet: 15, 10 & 5 Years Ago This Week (2013.51)

Tokyo Art Guide, 1940s ear telescope, 2008 gift guide, more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

2008.12-roden

5 Years Ago (2008): This week I was in Tokyo, where I came upon a book titled Art Space Tokyo: An Intimate Guide to the Tokyo Art World. I was headed to a concert at the club Super Deluxe, so I didn’t but a copy, which was unfortunate because it quickly went out of print and sold for hundreds of dollars in the second-hand market. Later, in 2010, the book was a successful early Kickstarter project for a reprint and iPad edition, which finally appeared in mid-2012. There’s a free browser-based version, too. Anyhow, my quote of the week in mid-December 2008 was from the book. This is Roger McDonald: “This sense of physical impermanence makes Tokyo something like a huge, ever-evolving John Cage composition, whirling itself through chance procedures and the interventions of its inhabitants/users.”

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The image of the week, a 1940s listening device shown in this post, was found via the musician and sound artist Steve Roden’s ephemera-rich blog. … In the Downstream department of legally free downloads: C. Reider reworking nine other musicians’ work, mischievous Morse code from Sublamp (aka Ryan Connor), the collaboration of James Blackshaw and Jozef Van Wissem, and Jonathan Coleclough’s amplified sounds. Many of those offsite links have, inevitably, since expired.

10 Years Ago (2003): I did a holiday gift guide this week, with recommendations based on category (a broader concept than genre), such as “quietly deceptive” (Doron Sadja’s A Piece of String, a Sunset) and “historic” (James Tenney’s Selected Works 1961-1969). … In the Downstream departent of legally free downloads: a Nurse with Wound tribute album, some “songwriting as sine wave” by Sophrosyne (aka Jason van Pelt), various live recordings by Christopher Willits, and video by Keith Fullerton Whitman (then still better known, perhaps, as Hrvatski). Many of those offsite links have, inevitably, since expired.

15 Years Ago (1998): No posts this week 15 years ago.