downstream – Page 199

Steady State

Nudging an ambient beast

January 9, 2019November 9, 2020 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The machine does most of the work. It chugs along, lights blinking a telegraph of the underlying rhythm, knobs erect and at precise angles, tones rendered as held bits atmosphere, fraying as they go, the full effect a sort of aged glisten. Occasionally a hand comes into view, introducing a new note, altering the way a present sound is filtered, making other adjustments that may not be immediately evident to the listener — perhaps just to retain the work’s status quo. Sometimes when you’re the caretaker of a modular synthesizer, your job is not so much to play an instrument as it is to keep steady something that’s already moving on track, on target, in key. This video is Alex Roldan at play with his modular synthesizer, and it dates from late November of last year (earlier videos from him include drum covers of songs by [Boards of Canada](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzTBrF0eO3c) and [Aphex Twin](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiUlJgQ8Gl0)). Since then there have been another four modular ones from Roldan. Subscribe to his channel to encourage further endeavors.

This is the latest video I’ve added to [my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). Video originally posted to Rodan’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw9hEUsFuhU&t=29s). More from Rodan, who is based in Washington, D.C., at [iamanalog.bandcamp.com](https://iamanalog.bandcamp.com/).

A Jigsaw of Desire

Listen to — and watch — Peter Speer re-work Alice Coltrane.

January 7, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

If you really love a piece of music, you don’t just remember it in sequence. You remember it in slices, bits that your brain plays on repeat, often without effort. You remember it in different keys. You remember it slower, faster, in a different time signature altogether. You remember segments played out of the original order, layered, yoked together through a compulsion for a different whole, or more to the point: in a new arrangement that prioritizes your ideal comprehension of the song, a jigsaw of desire.

To hear Alice Coltrane’s “Om Shanti” re-worked (the hyphen added to emphasize the newness, the apartness-from-the-original) by
Peter Speer on the sparest of a modular synthesizer setup — just two pieces: a sampler and a tool to control the sampler — is to hear such a mental remapping, albeit here performed in realtime. It’s Speer’s consciousness manifesting in the physical world of dials and cables. Coltrane’s alternately sultry and mournful tonalities are stretched and echoed, turned into nano-washboard rhythms and deep cavernous spaces, all in fitting tribute to her otherworldly oeuvre. Grounding the effort are the modest, even mundane, maneuvers that Speer must enact over the course of the video to accomplish his goals.

Video originally posted at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/user262182). More from Speer at [instagram.com/peter.speer](http://instagram.com/peter.speer/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0366: Ice Breaker

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

January 3, 2019January 4, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the [Disquiet Junto group](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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, January 7, 2019, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, January 3, 2019.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0366) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0366: Ice Breaker**

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it.

Welcome to a new year of Disquiet Junto projects. This week’s project is as follows. It’s the same project we’ve begun each year with since the very first Junto project, way back in January 2012. The project is, per tradition, just this one sentence:

Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.

Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single-sentence assignment — “Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it” — as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series back on the first Thursday of January 2012. Revisiting it at the start of each year since has provided a fitting way to begin the new year. At the start of the eighth (!) year of the Disquiet Junto, it is a tradition. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a regular if not weekly habit. It can be beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0366” (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 “disquiet0366” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0366-ice-breaker/

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

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

**Additional Details:**

Length: The length of your track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0366” 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: Please 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).

**Context: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:**

More on this 366th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Ice Breaker / The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it — at:

https://disquiet.com/0366/

Module Learning: Fixed Fourses

My most and least straightforward synthesizer modules

December 29, 2018February 2, 2019 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A fixed filter bank provides direct access to the spectrum components of a given signal, breaking it into narrow bands you can fiddle with individually. Just lending an LFO to contort the low end of a guitar phrase, or letting a square wave impose a rhythm by turning on and off some mid-range — it’s an approach I have come to love. In this patch, a fairly rich noise source is being sent through a fixed filter bank. Four spans of the filter bank are going into a voltage-controlled mixer, and those each are being modulated by a synchronized quad LFO. In addition, the bounds of the noise source are being affected slightly by a slow LFO, separate from the quad LFO.

The filter bank is the newest module for me: the FXDf from Make Noise. The noise source is the Fourses module from Peter Blasser’s Ieaskul F. Mobenthey. The mixer is the ADDAC 802. The quad LFO is the Batumi from Xaoc. The additional LFO is the Dixie II from Intellijel.

The audio was recorded on a Zoom H4n via a Mackie mixer. The track was then trimmed of some high end and given a fade-in and a fade-out in Adobe Audition.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/disquiet](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/module-learning-fixed-fourses).

Disquiet Junto Project 0365: 2018 Tracker

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

December 27, 2018December 28, 2018 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Deadline: This project’s deadline is Monday, December 31, 2018, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are on. It was posted in the morning, California time, on Thursday, December 27, 2018.

Tracks will be added to [the playlist](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0365) for the duration of the project.

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

**Disquiet Junto Project 0365: 2018 Tracker**

The Assignment: The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.

Many thanks to Junto member Glenn Sogge for having pointed out, awhile back, that this 365th project was coming into view. And thanks to member Nate Trier for having introduced me to the idea of a “habit tracker.”

As is the tradition at the end of each calendar year, this week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past twelve months.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2018 — or you might choose even more elements, perhaps building on the idea that this is the 365th weekly Junto project, and there are 365 days in the year. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one segment from each of these dozen audio elements (if you’re doing a dozen items, one for each month, then five-second segments are recommended).

Step 3: Then you will stitch these segments together in chronological order to form one single track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

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

Step 1: Include “disquiet0365” (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 “disquiet0365” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation 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-0365-2018-tracker/

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

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

**Additional Details:**

Length: The length of your track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0365” in the title of the track, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

**Context: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:**

More on this 365th weekly Disquiet Junto project — 2018 Tracker / The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments — at:

https://disquiet.com/0365/