downstream – Page 171

Disquiet Junto Project 0426: Cellular Chorale

The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project.

February 27, 2020March 4, 2020 / 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, March 2, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 27, 2020.

Tracks added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0426) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0426: Cellular Chorale**

The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project.

Step 1: This is a collaboration with Patricia Wolf, based on her Cellular Chorus. Check it out at:

http://cellularchorus.com

Step 2: Download the 64 source tracks of the Cellular Chorus at:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v0w2kl69ys9bzvx/AAC4Ydqg7KeGCuICxO6gIipEa?dl=0

Step 3: Create a new piece of music using only the source audio. Use as many of the samples as you’d like, but don’t add other sounds, or process the samples to any extent more than slightly altering the individual material.

Background. Patricia Wolf has said of her original piece: “Cellular Chorus is a work of spatialized aleatoric music using smartphones to bring people physically closer to have an interactive and collective experience with light and sound. The piece is played by each user visiting Cellular Chorus on their smartphones. … The sounds I made are meant to harmonize. There is no right or wrong way to play them. The intention of this piece is to repurpose your smartphone for deep listening, creative experimentation, and to immerse groups of people in a sound and light environment with face to face interactions.”

**Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:**

Step 1: Include “disquiet0426” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your track.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0426” (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 track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

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

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0426-cellular-chorale/

Step 5: Annotate your track 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, March 2, 2020, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, February 27, 2020.

Length: The length is up to you. Shorter is often better.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0426” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, post one finished track with the project tag, and 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: Consider setting 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 426th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Cellular Chorale / The Assignment: Make music with the source audio from (and inspired by) a Patricia Wolf project — at:

https://disquiet.com/0426/

Thanks to Patricia Wolf for collaborating on this project.

Multiple Narratives

An EP from Chicago's NoiseTheorem

February 26, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://noisetheorem.bandcamp.com/album/graveyard-of-forgotten-gods">Graveyard of Forgotten Gods by NoiseTheorem</a>

A woman’s voice intones the melody of a child’s bedtime song (hence the track’s title, “Lullabye”) amid throbbing synthesized bass and squawking, barely comprehensible (purposefully so) emergency-services chatter. In combination, the elements suggest multiple narratives converging toward tragedy. The same could be said of the album as a whole: *Graveyard of Forgotten Gods*, a three-track EP from NoiseTheorem, who’s based in Chicago, Illinois. Old-school video-game projectile noises enliven a dubby, spacey, downtempo techno on “Tears for Venus,” which conjures up the likelihood that someone managed to recreate a didgeridoo simulacrum inside of a hacked Second Life account (and just so there’s no ambiguity: that’s meant as a compliment). And on “Song for Ellie,” a gothy procession of dark beats and whirly effects finds the tiniest glimmer of hope in a gentle keyboard motif.

Get the full set at [noisetheorem.bandcamp.com](https://noisetheorem.bandcamp.com/album/graveyard-of-forgotten-gods). More from Noise Theorem at [noisetheorem.com](https://www.noisetheorem.com) and [soundcloud.com/noisetheorem](www.soundcloud.com/noisetheorem). (The voice on “Lullabye” is Janet Kownacki’s.)

Join a Cellular Chorus

At the invitation of Patricia Wolf

February 25, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Chances are you have more than one internet-accessible device in your home. Gather them together, and pull up the following webpage on each: [cellularchorus.com](https://www.cellularchorus.com/).

Every time you invoke the Cellular Chorus page, a random audio file will be set as the browser’s default. (There are currently 64 different audio files in all.) Then let them play, all of them at once. Move the devices around the room. Don’t let any single device take prominence. Adjust the volume accordingly. Use the pulldown menu or the forward/back buttons to alternate between tracks. Note how the same file will sound different on your rattly old tablet than it does on your brand new laptop, how your humble kitchen speaker can’t hold a candle to your bleeding-edge smartphone.

Now dim the lights. Each instance of sound comes with its own shade of gradated color, like a little handheld Olafur Eliasson installation. Let them illuminate the room. Also note how the sounds work together. This is due to the planning and intent of Patricia Wolf, the Portland, Oregon-based musician who came up with Cellular Chorus, which she describes as “a work of spatialized aleatoric music using smartphones to bring people physically closer to have an interactive and collective experience with light and sound.” (The website was designed and developed by Jaron Heard.)

“The sounds I made are meant to harmonize,” she notes on the site’s info page. “There is no right or wrong way to play them.” Many of the tracks are drones, some electronic in origin (like number 5), others employing the human voice (12). Some (like number 9 and 34) are percussive.

In an email to me, Wolf explained a bit more about the project’s origin, about how the cold Northwest winter inspired her to employ a tool of online social activity, the smartphone (hence the name of the piece), to bring people together in person.

So now use one of your devices to get in touch with some friends. Have them over, and get them all to use [cellularchorus.com](https://www.cellularchorus.com/) at once, together.

More from Patricia Wolf at [instagram.com/patriciawolf_music](https://www.instagram.com/patriciawolf_music/), where [recent videos](https://www.instagram.com/p/B88aUTlBWRL/) have highlighted footage of the Cellular Chorus in action, and at [soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music](https://soundcloud.com/patriciawolf_music). More from Jaron Heard at [jaronheard.com](http://jaronheard.com/).

Where Industrial and Ambient Meet

And ambient takes control

February 24, 2020February 23, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

<a href="http://pomusic.bandcamp.com/album/session-one">session one by Ariana van Gelder & Ars Troitski</a>

There are spaces where industrial music and ambient meet. One such space exists where the drone of archaic, mechanized activity joins up with a concern less for the routinization of modern life, and more for the machinery itself. It’s less about, perhaps, the metronomic pulse of life, and instead more about the underlying hum of activity. Beats go by the wayside as an aesthetic affection for rust, for the texture of a grinding gear, for the serrated whir of equipment takes control. This is the industrial ambient of the first side of *Session One*, the album a pair of lengthy tracks (17 and nearly 13 minutes each) by Ariana van Gelder and Ars Troitski. Presumably *Session One* isn’t a split single — that, instead, the two musicians are acting in tandem, or at least trading files toward a singular, collaborative whole. The first side is a rich, slowly evolving soundfield, through which various airborne irritants make their conflicting paths, leading to a whorl of action in what might seems, on first listen, to be a portrait of stasis. The flip side (neither has a name, save “side a” and “side b”) is where a more familiar rendering of industrial rears its gearhead. After a slow build, it is all heavy klang, though even here the klang is still more about volume and power than about tempo. Gorgeous stuff.

Album originally posted at [pomusic.bandcamp.com](https://pomusic.bandcamp.com/album/session-one). P.O. is a record label based in Moscow, Russia. More from Ariana van Gelder at
[arianavangelder.com](https://arianavangelder.com/) (I didn’t locate a link for Ars Troitski).

Graphic Notation x Visual Code

Software-based music from Fahmi Mursyid, who is based in Indonesia

February 21, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

There is a tradition of graphic notation, in which images are read as musical scores, whether or not that’s actually the intended case of the original source — contrast, for example, the beautiful designs of an Iannis Xenakis’ orchestration (below) with the found scores of Christian Marclay (further below).

There is, as well, the growing range of software tools that are, in effect, visual programming languages for sound. They allow the user/composer/coder to create systems — virtual instruments — that then emit audio both planned and discovered, intended and by chance.

In turn, when an implementation of a visual programming language reaches a certain synchrony with the music it produces, the visual can be said to serve double duty: both as virtual instrument and, in effect, as graphically notated score.

This is certainly the case with the vibrant hodge podge, shown up at the top of this post, that constitutes “Generative Music with Modular Synth in Pure Data,” by musician Fahmi Mursyid. As its title suggests, it’s a generative piece (one that produces music that might differ over time) in Pure Data (a programming language originated by Miller Puckette). Listen and watch here (and if you are a Patreon supporter of Mursyid’s, the original post for the track on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDq3f79Esoc) includes a link to the Pure Data patch, which you can download, listen to in real time, and tweak as you like).

More on Pure Data at [puredata.info](https://puredata.info/). More from Fahmi Mursyid, who is based in Indonesia, at [ideologikal.bandcamp.com](https://ideologikal.bandcamp.com/). (I don’t usually write about the same musician twice in a week, but this piece is quite different from the feedback drone of Mursyid’s I wrote about [on Tuesday](https://disquiet.com/2020/02/18/perpetual-energy/).)