The Sound of One Gallery Clapping

A room tone test from the Fridman in Manhattan

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like so many so-called “non-essential” businesses, art galleries largely sit empty right now. Some have been finding uses for the social distance, maintaining connections — and building new ones — through virtual events. The Fridman Gallery in Manhattan, for example, has been hosting live performances, under the title Solos, starting back on May 14. The gallery’s Vimeo page just yesterday uploaded a 12-minute video titled “SOLOS 04 – Room Noise Test.” Presumably it’s for the event scheduled tomorrow, June 23, at 8pm New York time (5pm here, I say to myself, as I enter it into my calendar). The footage, which is continuous and unedited, opens with actual room tone: near silence against the sheer absence of visible activity, aside from cars passing in the street just outside the distant glass front. Then a voice begins speaking and there is clapping, signals testing out the space’s reverberations (the sound of one gallery clapping, as it were), and the actual reverb on what must be the house sound system. There’s an extended bit of reverb right around 10:30, the echo so long and deep that sounds layer atop each other, spoken statements rendered unintelligible as the syllables cascade into a pile. The video is a strange thing, and a welcome one for someone who is used to spending lots of time in art galleries and who hasn’t been in one since February.

Video originally post at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/431273180). More about the series at [fridmanlive.com](https://www.fridmanlive.com/).

Current Listens: Sadnoise’s Drones + Note-less Patches

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.)

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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Femi Shonuga-Fleming records as Sadnoise. The just-released album *Droner* is far more exploratory and aggressive than its title might suggest. It’s filled with dense atmospheres, yes (numbered “Droner 00” to “Droner 09”), but they generally feel like the listener is on the receiving end of some intense industrial power plant’s exhaust. Which is to say, it’s exhilarating.

▰ Julianna Barwick has a new album due out July 10, and judging by the first two tracks to be made available, “Insight” and “In Light” (the latter featuring Jónsi of Sigur Rós), Healing Is a Miracle is going to be a masterpiece of melted pop, deep in shoegaze territory. Also guesting: Nosaj Thing and Mary Lattimore. Due out on Ninja Tune.

▰ The one downside about Fact Magazine’s Patch Notes series on YouTube is there aren’t actually any patch notes. That peculiar shortcoming aside, the latest is up to the series’ high standard: a solo performance of slow-motion, pastoral ambient from the excellent r beny.

▰ Robert Henke has added another archival bit to his Bandcamp account. Two bits, actually, from 2015. There’s the 90-BPM drones and clangs of “Dolores,” by Anstam (Lars Stöwe), and Henke’s own “VT-100,” antic yet spacious techno recorded entirely using one instrument: the Linn Drum.

Rain Loops

From Indonesia-based Fahmi Mursyid

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A single tape loop makes its course, round and round. It does so out of one tape recorder and into another and then back to the first again, over and over, or at least over and over for the three minutes and thirty seven seconds of “Rainy Season.” The track is by the always inventive and often, as here, playful Famhi M, or Fahmi Mursyid, who is based in Bandung, Indonesia. The sound of “Rainy Season” is alternately frazzled and desolate, sharp and distant, all thanks to, as Mursyid describes it, the tools employed: “The texture of analogue magnetic tape, high frequency noise, crackle, magnetic particles, and hiss.” The source audio is field recordings, here transformed into a whole other fictional soundscape. Listen with your eyes closes, and get transported. Open your eyes, and appreciate the structural accomplishment, the devices partially disassembled and put to uses far beyond their original engineering, the fragile loop traveling a distance unintended for this archaic material. There’s a connection to be considered between the sound and the structure, between the artifice of the imagined world and the purposeful jury-rigging of the devices.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMe79mqn3nE). More from Fahmi Mursyid at [ideologikal.bandcamp.com](https://ideologikal.bandcamp.com/), [soundcloud.com/ideologikal](https://soundcloud.com/ideologikal), and [fahmi-mursyid.weebly.com](https://fahmi-mursyid.weebly.com/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0442: One Sentence

The Assignment: Make music that explores the shape, tone, cadence, and content of a favorite section of prose or poetry.

/ 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, June 22, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 18, 2020.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0442) for the duration of the project.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0442: One Sentence

The Assignment: Make music that explores the shape, tone, cadence, and content of a favorite section of prose or poetry.

Step 1: Choose a favorite single sentence. The sentence should be from prose or poetry, but not a song lyric.

Step 2: Say the sentence out loud, slowly, several times in a row. Consider its shape, its tone, its cadence, and its content, and how these connect with each other.

Step 3: In some way that you can understand, map the exploration of the sentence from Step 2.

Step 4: Compose a piece of music that follows the map from Step 3. Note that the finished piece shouldn’t (or better yet: needn’t) include the spoken sentence (that is, it’s best if it’s purely instrumental), and it might last much longer than the sentence would take to say out loud.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0442” (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 “disquiet0442” (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-0442-one-sentence/

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, June 22, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 18, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0442” 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 442nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Disquiet Junto Project 0442: One Sentence — The Assignment: Make music that explores the shape, tone, cadence, and content of a favorite section of prose or poetry — at:

https://disquiet.com/0442/

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-0442-one-sentence/

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

The Search for Intelligent Life

Between the notes

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

All held chords and cinema-ready dramatics, calculated shimmers and barely perceptible shifts, “OUT∃R WΩRLDS” by composer Dolores Catherino represents a search for intelligent life between the notes. The result bridges the gap between 20th-century classical modernism and classic synth space music. Track originally posted art [soundcloud.com/dolores-catherino](https://soundcloud.com/dolores-catherino/outr-wrlds). More on Catherino at [newmusicusa.org](https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/author/dolomuse/).