When Music and Video Are Truly Paired

A live performance by mafmadmaf

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is far from ambient, so it won’t be going on my live-ambient video playlist, but it’s an excellent live video. There’s no sound until just about the 30-seconds mark. That’s because mafmadmaf, the musician whose hands dart in and out of view, up until then is still getting the patch started. That is, he’s still adding cables, and until enough are connected, his small synthesizer setup has no sound to make. And then it begins. First with a drone, a low undercurrent of foundational noise. Then the rapid clicking of industrial action, like a fervent sewing machine doing its duties. Not every cable connection alters the sound. Some, as at the opening, are subsets of multi-stage efforts to accomplish a sonic goal. The beauty of this piece, including the intent rhythmic quality, is how precisely the sounds and image correlate, how the viewer takes in the music not merely as sound, but as connected to the device from which it emanates, much as the music itself is predicated on connections made with patch cables.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leu_bSCx3S4). More from mafmadmaf, who is based in Guangzhou, China, at [mafmadmaf.com](https://mafmadmaf.com/).

A Modular Study

By mafmadmaf

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The ER-301 is a great and powerful synthesizer module, not in the Wizard of Oz sense, where there’s a man behind the curtain ready to spoil any sense of wonder, but in the sense that it requires significant effort due to, as the musician mafmadmaf puts it, the considerable amount of depth and complexity it represents. All of which said, in what is billed as a first study here, mafmadmaf induces a tremendous operation of chamber electronic music from it. Initial pulses glitch out, yielding trailing drones that combine with rhythmic trills, filigrees of error. In time, a seesaw melody gently brings the disparate pieces into a lulling whole.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccuBRpixpmc). More from mafmadmaf at [instagram.com/mafmadmaf](https://www.instagram.com/mafmadmaf/).

Light to Sound

An experiment from Suss Müsik

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The saying goes that it’s only experimental music if there’s a chance it won’t work. A corollary observation would be to point out: Sometimes what sounds like experimental music isn’t experimental music. It’s simply an experiment. And nonetheless, it can be musical. Case in point, this little DIY project by the musician who goes by Suss Müsik. He’s been experimenting with illumination-responsive circuitry, creating a theremin-like apparatus that creates and alters sound abased on the presence of a flashlight. As he notes in a brief accompanying text, “Somehow it created layers of harmonic dissonance in nearly perfectly phased, overlapping sequences.”

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDi3zfWVVX4&t=0s). More from Suss Müsik at [sussmusik.com](https://sussmusik.com/).

Current Listens: Japanese Ambient, Lubbock Classical

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ 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.)

▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰

NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Like many contemporary synthesizer musicians, Takeyuki Hakozaki has welcomed the old-school Nagra reel-to-reel player-recorder into his toolkit, hence the sense of buckling to the audio in this billowing ambient recording.

▰ “Lightway” is a soaring demo recording posted by Lubbock, Texas-based composer Jennifer Jolley. Mallets and woodwinds summon arpeggio birds and droning clouds.

▰ Last night on the walk back from the ocean, as clouds that later revealed themselves to be providing cover for heat lightning slowly gathered, I listened to “Into,” the slow, 20-minute track by Dzöon. Twice. Be prepared to hit pause early on to confirm that cottony under-drone is, indeed, part of the track and not some hum from elsewhere. Then listen as the piece ever so patiently reveals itself, one carefully placed sonic element at a time.

▰ And if you missed out on the thunderstorm, the musician r beny recorded it for you. He writes, “The thunder was so loud and so close, it shook my windows and clipped the audio recorder.”

An Orchestra of Two

Straight out of Chicago

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Cinchel and Akosuen, both based in Chicago, Illinois, have combined resources to for three tracks of majestic, tension-laden music. Two of the pieces are orchestral not just in aural scale — broad, spacious, enthralling — but in length, one at nearly 20 minutes, the other well over 16. The hallmark of this collection, titled simply *Cinchel + Akosuen*, is how strands at varying paces combine for simultaneous effect. “Sequest,” with which the set opens, has genteel piano against even more ethereal vocals, while guitar rages like some fiercely focused machine is rapidly scratching at electrified strings. At moments in “Tether,” the shortest piece here, six and a half minutes, it sounds as if a college radio DJ forgot to fade out a psychedelic folk record before potting up a metallic shoegaze hybrid. The result is brisk and commanding, and as long as the tracks are, you want to start them all over again when they’ve reached their natural close.

Cinchel is Jason Shanley (guitar, feedback, effects), Akosuen is Billie Howard (violin, piano, voice, synthesizers), and together (likely with more tools than listed here) they get blissfully lost in their airy frenzy, taking the listener aloft and along for the ride.

Album originally posted at [scriptsrecords.bandcamp.com](https://scriptsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cinchel-akosuen-2). More from the releasing label, Scripts Records, at [scriptsrecords.com](https://scriptsrecords.com/). More from the respective musicians at [cinchel.com](http://cinchel.com/) and [akosuen.bandcamp.com](https://akosuen.bandcamp.com/).