downstream – Page 125

Leaking Pipe Abandoned Courtyard

The title of a new collection of field recordings

February 5, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="https://freetousesounds.bandcamp.com/album/abandoned-courtyard-ambience-leaking-water-pipe-church-bells">Abandoned Courtyard Ambience! Leaking Water Pipe & Church Bells by freetousesounds</a>

The Free to Use Sounds account on Bandcamp is packed with what it sounds like: field recordings for use, royalty-free. One of the most recent sets, *Leaking Pipe Abandoned Courtyard* (that’s the title on the digital cover, while the entry itself bears the more prosaic *Abandoned Courtyard Ambience! Leaking Water Pipe & Church Bells*) has seven tracks, dripping atmosphere.

All but two are of a length between two and five minutes, featuring undisturbed continuity of the title sounds. The additional pair, both brief, at around 30 seconds each, include the sounds of church bells. While the audio sets a scene, the accompanying notes lend specific detail. The tracks were recorded in Malta in the courtyard of a tall, largely unused apartment complex: “High ceilings, huge corridor doors and if you walk up and down the stairway it already creates this natural haunting reverb.”

The dripping here doesn’t suggest water torture; quite the contrary, it’s soothing, comforting. The two tracks with the church bells are especially beautiful, the combination of the natural and man-made, both speaking in different ways of the heavens opening up.

The set is at [freetousesounds.bandcamp.com](https://freetousesounds.bandcamp.com/album/abandoned-courtyard-ambience-leaking-water-pipe-church-bells). More at [freetousesounds.com](https://www.freetousesounds.com/) and [youtube.com/freetousesounds](https://www.youtube.com/freetousesounds).

Disquiet Junto Project 0475: Low End (4 of 3)

The Assignment: Remix a trio by doing forensics on its component parts.

February 4, 2021February 5, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

*Special Note: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. This week you can do a second one. Please see additional details in Step 4 below.*

*Answer to Frequent Question: You don’t need to have participated in any of the recent solos, duets, or trios projects to participate in this one.*

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 the end of the day Monday, February 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 4, 2021.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0475: Low End (4 of 3)

The Assignment: Remix a trio by doing forensics on its component parts.

Step 1: This week will involve remixing. The past three weeks, we’ve produced a large number of trios. These have been the result of a sequence of steps: first someone made a solo, then someone else turned it into a duet, and then someone else added a third element, making a completed work in the form of a trio. This week you will be remixing one of these trios, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project ([disquiet.com/0475](https://disquiet.com/0475)).

Step 2: First, you must select the piece of music you will remixing. There are over 65 tracks in all to choose from, 62 as part of this playlist:

[https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0474](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0474)

And these four others. Consider the first to be number 63, and then in sequence to number 66:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/41007/54](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/41007/54)

[https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/fog-in-the-chanel-continent-cut-off](https://sevenism.bandcamp.com/track/fog-in-the-chanel-continent-cut-off)

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/41007/38](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0474-police-action/41007/38)

[https://prrk-industries.bandcamp.com/track/follow-the-drummer](https://prrk-industries.bandcamp.com/track/follow-the-drummer)

To select a track, you can listen through all that (warning: it’s a lot) and choose one, or you can use a random number generator. (Note: it’s fine if more than one person uses the same original track as the basis for their piece.)

Step 3: The simply stated goal is to remix the trio resulting from your selection process in Step 2. However, it is strongly encouraged that you locate the duet and the solo on which the trio is founded, and that you then employ those three tracks in your work. (In past projects like this one, some musicians have essentially extracted the other half of the duet by “removing” the solo from it, and done the same with the trio versus the duet.)

Step 4: As with last week, you can contribute more than one track this week. You can do up to two total. If you choose to do a second, you should preferably try to use a duet track that no one else has used yet. The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0475” (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 “disquiet0475” (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-0475-low-end/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0475-low-end/)

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 the end of the day Monday, February 8, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 4, 2021.

Length: The length is up to you. Go long, or keep it tight, or somewhere in between.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0475” 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 475th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Low End (4 of 3) / The Assignment: Remix a trio by doing forensics on its component parts — at:

https://disquiet.com/0475/

Femi Fleming’s Ambient Noise

A live video performance

February 2, 2021February 14, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Settle in as Femi Fleming gets this live improv rolling. There’s time to don headphones, and you might as well follow the cue of the musician, seen doing so at the start. That’s before potting up some loops of pleasingly garbled voices, which soon enough are overlapped, one atop another, into a syrupy drone. Employing a mic admirably suited to CB radio activity, there’s some deep intoning, layering human hum amid the hum already accrued. From there on in, the pattern is set: a whir of whirling dervishes, a tornado of microsonics, a noise performance that involves repeated employment of gritty textures but ultimately bends toward atmosphere.

Video originally posted at Femi Fleming’s [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMJRLBFiG-8) channel. More from Fleming, a student at RISD who records as Sadnoise, at [instagram.com/femifleming](https://www.instagram.com/femifleming/).

Christian Carrière’s Sacred Space Exploration

Using a no-input console

February 1, 2021February 27, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

If the sonorous spaciousness of this track by Christian Carrière has a heavenly resonance to it, there’s a specific reason for that impression. Not only was the audio recorded at a church, but the recording process entailed exploring the characteristics of that space itself. The location is in Montréal, Québec, at the Église Sacré Coeur, which is approaching its 150th anniversary. Carrière explained to me via email that his project originated in 2019 as a consideration of “the acoustics of sacred spaces,” the plan being to use, as he described it, “the pure tones generated by my polyphonic no-input console.”

A no-input console is one in which the sound emitted is nothing but the inherent noise fed back through the console itself, resulting in unique, often alien-seeming tonalities, such as the ones heard here. Carrière has been at this a long time. Here’s a (https://vimeo.com/30074885), dating back nearly a decade, of him performing some of “Fratres” by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, using a no-input mixer:

The tones heard in “Sacred Acoustics T004” are externalized in the heart of the Église Sacré Coeur on a system of speakers, and then the sound is recorded, capturing the echoing effect that the architecture gives shape to. Explains Carrière, “The idea was to tune the tones of the console to the resonant frequencies of a given space, thus emphasizing — and playing with — its inherent acoustical properties.” The sounds are glorious, pulsing and swelling and sinuous like an otherworldly choir.

Track originally posted to Carrière’s [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/christiancarriere/sacred-acoustics-190313-t004) page. More from him at [christiancarriere.com](http://www.christiancarriere.com/).

Current Favorites: Interior Landscapes, Live Tape Drones

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

January 31, 2021January 31, 2021 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A 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. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them. (This weekly feature was previously titled Current Listens. The name’s been updated for clarity’s sake.)

▰ Matt Madden’s three-minute [“Tme No Radar on Emit”](https://soundcloud.com/mattmadd/time-no-radar-on-emit) is a mix of atmospheres, most of them misty and somber, artfully so. A repeated line hints at a foghorn’s signal, some white noise at rough weather. That it’s guitar and a ventilator, according to Madden’s own description, just adds to the sense of being transported.

▰ Listen as a dense drone emerges from Femi Fleming’s January 25 [live tape performance]((https://youtu.be/WdAEspqqT4o)). What begins as ringing and mottled grows turbulent and orchestral as time passes.

▰ [*Live Ateliers Claus*](https://ihearu.bandcamp.com/album/ga-l-segalen-live-ateliers-claus) captures a pair of rangy performances by Gaël Segalen. A French sound artist, Segalen, who also goes by IhearU, is heard here moving between hyperreal urban noise, Fourth World rhythms, and dramatically processed field recordings.

<a href="https://ihearu.bandcamp.com/album/ga-l-segalen-live-ateliers-claus">Gaël Segalen – live ateliers claus by Gaël Segalen</a>

▰ A set of [field recordings](https://jeremyh.bandcamp.com/album/june-august-2019) by Jeremy Hegge from a summer journey during 2019, one that took him from Chongqing, China, to Hong Kong, to Xinjiang, to Kazakhstan. The tracks are labeled by time of day (morning, afternoon, night), helping to set the context for insects, frogs, and street noise.

<a href="https://jeremyh.bandcamp.com/album/june-august-2019">june – august, 2019 by Jeremy Hegge</a>