Month: August 2020

Panic Girl x R Beny

A remix from a forthcoming EP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Almost a year after releasing the album Cake on Jupiter, Munich-based synth musician Panic Girl has followed it up with a remix collection. Six of the original album’s eight tracks are reworked by the likes of ISAN, r beny, Mess Montage, Synth Witch, Jericho, and Lightbath. “Himalayan Tea” was the opening track on Cake on Jupiter, as it is here. It’s also the first listen we have of the record, due out October 9, 2020:

Below is the original for reference. Note the percussive undergirding, and listen for how it trails across the stereo spectrum. This is the stuff of which r beny’s dream was made. In his piece, above, the beat is gone, leaving some of inspiring sonic gentility in its wake.

Both Cake on Jupiter and Cake on Jupiter Remixes are available at panic-girl.bandcamp.com. More from Panic Girl (aka Martha Bahr, who is also half of Lucid Grain, the other half being Anatol Locker) at panic-girl.com.

Current Listens: Special Instagram Edition

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

There’s always chatter about how various streaming services size up next to each other, and how services like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and YouTube, among others, fit into the mix. The fact is, a good amount of my “discovery” happens on Instagram, so this entry in the weekly Current Listens series focuses on some examples. Now, Instagram videos tend to be short. You have click through to IGTV to see longer versions, which I only do on occasion. My listening/viewing experience tends more toward seeing bits of performance clips in a row, and then heading over to the respective musician’s longer-form work elsewhere. These three artists, from up and down the West Coast, are among my numerous favorites.

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰
NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ The musician who goes by Scanner Darkly is a Jedi knight of firmware upgrades and modular-synthesizer ingenuity. This here is a piano phase work in the style of Steve Reich. Scanner Darkly is based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

▰ Arckatron is a master of the MPC, though he also stretches out on the SP-404. Here’s a taste of a work in beatcraft progress. Arckatron, aka Shawn Kelly, is based in Los Angeles.

▰ This is a glimpse at Patricia Wolf’s multi-cellphone piece Cellular Chorus, engineered by Jared Herad. Wolf is based in Portland, Oregon.

IM-OS: The Journal of Improvised Music – Open Scores

Edited by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Now in its second year, the online journal IM-OS is a wellspring of experimental composition. The initials stand for Improvised Music – Open Scores, and there’s a slightly longer description on its homepage, im-os.net: “new music journal focused on improvised music, open scores in various forms like prose, graphic and action notations.” There have been four issues thus far, two in 2019 and two this year, all edited by Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. All are available as free PDFs.

The most recent, dated Spring 2020, includes a graphic score that approaches the rhetoric of current sitting U.S. president as a composition (see the graphic above) and a deck of cards from Dennis Báthory-Kitsz (see sample set below).

The second issue included an essay by Adam Wasażnik connecting such games as cribbage and Monopoly to music-making, and the third had an 80-card “mathematical music” game composed by Samuel Vriezen on the occasion of composer Tom Johnson’s 80th birthday. (Frequent Disquiet Junto participant Glenn Sogge has a card-based composition in the second issue titled “Gestures for one or more percussionists.”)

Check it out at im-os.net. More from Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, who is based in Finland, at soundcloud.com/jpkervinen and from Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen, who is based in Denmark, at intuitivemusic.dk. (Thanks to Colin Drake for having introduced me to the journal.)

Ebb and Flow

Modular ambiance from Orbital Patterns

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Another excellent ambient modular synthesizer piece from Orbital Patterns. Not even four minutes long, it played on repeat this morning for a couple hours while I tried to settle into another unsettling day. The video is titled “Layers,” appropriate to the variety of through-lines heard here, overlapping in various ways, ever in flux: plucked virtual strings that echo to infinity, a chiming ambiance like a phaser set for stunning, and the central singsong ebb and flow. Gorgeous.

Video originally posted at youtube.com. More from Orbital Patterns (aka Abdul Allums of Rochester Hills, Michigan) at orbitalpatterns.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/orbitalpatterns.

Disquiet Junto Project 0452: Let’s Scream

The Assignment: Get cathartic. Be resilient. Turn your scream into music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, 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. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, August 31, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 27, 2020.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0452: Let’s Scream
The Assignment: Get cathartic. Be resilient. Turn your scream into music.

There’s only one step this week:

Step 1: It’s time to let out some stress. Record your scream and turn it into music.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0452” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0452” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0452-lets-scream/

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, August 31, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, August 27, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Hold your scream as long as it takes.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0452” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 452nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Let’s Scream (The Assignment: Get cathartic. Be resilient. Turn your scream into music), at:

https://disquiet.com/0452/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0452-lets-scream/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.