Let’s Get Physical

A new device, a new human-machine connection, new music from Marcus Fischer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A post shared by marcus fischer (@marcusfischer) on

The notions of YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers are indisputably up for debate. What isn’t is that both sites, along with other social media platforms, are rich with bits of sound and music, art and culture, design ingenuity and technological innovation, that exist primarily on those platforms and that are, for all intents and purposes, in existence because of those platforms. It’s an article for another time that YouTube and SoundCloud and Instagram, among other spots, are where I get the sense that I once upon a time got from crate digging — that’s before I even knew it was called crate digging and I was just a kid in a record store buying specific records because I recognized one name in the liner notes from another record I liked — and then listened to that new (to me) record, listening through it for some element I might find tantalizing, and then following that element to other recorded destinations on my next trip to the record store. That act of tracking took days or weeks to complete a cycle in the pre-internet era, and has long since come to happen so often — so fluidly, so subconsciously — within a few minutes that we don’t even remember what we clicked on that got us eventually to the bit of sound/music/art that has now enraptured us.

Now, that’s all back story, because I know what got me to Marcus Fischer’s test video of a new music-making device. I’ve followed his work for a long time, and gotten to know him, and even [worked with him a bit](https://disquiet.com/2017/06/16/music-for-aging/), and I marvel at the subtlety and emotion of his music, and at the visual acuity he brings to how it is presented. This Instagram video is a short segment in which he employs a new device called the Automat, from the company Dadamachines, that allows someone to impact physical objects with the same sort of MIDI data that was designed to sort of go in the opposite direction — MIDI was what let keyboards and other gadgets communicate their instructions (which note, what velocity, how hard, what sequence) to a digital device, as well as for those digital devices to communicate with each other. Here, information on a computer uses MIDI to send instructions via Automat to bang on a drum, or shake a rattle, or wallop a xylophone.

In Fischer’s hands, this isn’t merely a proof of concept. It’s an lovely micro-composition that explores how different devices will respond to the mechanical instructions, and that pushes at the intention of the tools, seeing how rapid-fire triggers will cause elegant chaos. There’s a balance in the finished work that is best exemplified by the way that final bell tone is let to ring out and decay, how this is physical music being played out in human time in the physical world. I’m avoiding the word “real” throughout that previous sentence so as not to get sidetracked by ponderings about hierarchies of experience or expression. What I want to do is draw attention to, and express admiration for, the way this little video presents an artistic pursuit in such an enjoyable, memorable, and artfully encapsulated manner.

Video originally posted at [instagram.com](https://www.instagram.com/p/BekB5kcD3-4/) More from Marcus Fischer at [mapmap.ch](http://mapmap.ch/). His latest solo album is [*Loss*](http://mapmap.ch/index.php/recordings/loss/), which came out on the 12k label last year. He also contributed, [in his words](https://www.instagram.com/p/Beavqs6DyDu/?taken-by=marcusfischer), “granular processing + modular synth drones” to a song, “Dream on Mount Tam,” on the deluxe edition of Calexico’s most recent album, *The Thread That Keeps Us.* More on the Dadamachines Automat at [dadamachines.com](https://dadamachines.com/) and at the [kickstarter.com](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1481744082/dadamachines-music-machines-for-everyone?token=bf5ca50a) page where it was funded.

Lindsay Duncanson’s Looped Vocalese

Down by the river, iPad in hand

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Much of Lindsay Duncanson’s work up on Soundcloud employs voice as its primary sound source. There are gurgles and drones, thick densities of tone and sudden, glottal explosions among the myriad examples Duncanson has posted. At one moment the voice is a calming presence, and at another it is a fierce, antagonist. In both such situations the lack of actual verbal language serves different purposes, either prelapsarian in its bliss, or suggesting a mental rupture that has short-circuited rational thought.

One standout track of Duncanson’s combines looped bits of mouth noise with that of a brook — accomplished, judging by the accompanying photo and tags, on the popular [Loopy app](https://loopyapp.com). This is the rare track amid this SoundCloud collection that has no harshness to it, no veering from calm to tension or splutter. Titled “StreamSound,” it combines a sweet melody, the sort of thing one might find oneself having been humming unconsciously, with the delicate, percussive noise of the waterway. The vocal tones build slowly, a held note, like a warm sine wave, underneath childlike snippets. The closest it gets to the harshness of many of the other tracks is when brook’s burbles, toward the end, are emphasized for their thump-like qualities, and then when the voice impersonates a flying insect, darting this way and that.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/productofboy](https://soundcloud.com/productofboy/streamsound). More from Duncanson, who is based in Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom, at [noizechoir.net](http://www.noizechoir.net/) (a partnership with Marek Gabrysch) and at [productofboy.net](http://www.productofboy.net/).

Adding Without Overwhelming

Modus Pony layers into Joseph Branciforte and my asynchronous duet.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One interesting side effect of the current Disquiet Junto project is an enjoyment of the extreme panning involved. The current project is the third in a sequence. In the majority of the pieces, the initial track was panned hard left, meaning you pretty much only hear it in the left speaker or headphone. The second track, which was added to the first to form a duet, was panned hard right, and then the track that completed the trio — in the third project in the sequence — was placed center.

While not every piece in the projects — there have been about 50 each of the first two weeks — has necessarily followed those precise instructions, the majority have, including this great track by Modus Pony, who has done me the great honor of adding to the piece that [Joseph Branciforte did last week](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/19/building-on-fever-pitch/), a piece that was itself built upon a bit of [slow-poke guitar glitch](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/14/fever-pitch/) that I’d posted the first week of this project sequence.

To listen to Modus Pony’s entry is to not only hear a perfectly understated addition (he’s on bass, to my heavily processed electric guitar and Branciforte’s Fender Rhodes) that matches the tone of the first two pieces, both separately and in combination. He managed to add his own voice, and yet maintain what had preceded his arrival. As a result of the stereo separation, you really hear the parts as if the trio of players is right in front of you.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/moduspony](https://soundcloud.com/moduspony/january-fever-disquiet0317-disquiet-jbranciforte-modus-pony). More from Modus Pony, aka Matt Ackerman, who is based in Los Angeles, California, at [moduspony.bandcamp.com](https://moduspony.bandcamp.com/), [twitter.com/moduS_ponY](https://twitter.com/moduS_ponY), and [moduspony.com](http://moduspony.com/).

A Little Imaginary Proto-Techno

Tribal music before and after technology, from Certain Creatures

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The recent Certain Creatures album takes its title, as did its predecessor, from a mystical term with Sanskrit origins. Back in 2015, it was *Vipassana* (on the Styles Upon Styles label). This time around it’s *Nasadiya Sukta* (Mysteries of the Deep), or the Hymn of Creation. Like a lot of origin myths, the new album, released the first week of January 2018, is at its most mysterious, at its most amorphous, at its most singular, when it first begins — before reality emerges, before reality sets in.

The opening track on *Nasadiya Sukta*, “Cross Star Woman,” starts with thuddy gongs that usher in a dark, wet sonic space, deep with echoes that, as the track proceeds, push at distant, unseen contours. A chanting vocal, a muffled bit of finger percussion, and slow, syncopated beats slowly consume that gong. A door opens and closes and opens again. Perhaps it’s one door, perhaps several down a long corridor. Maybe it’s a trick of mirrors, and it’s the same door over and over. (There’s also a plinky IDM nod to *Selected Ambient Works*-era Aphex twin as the track comes to a close.)

Only in retrospect, over the course of the full album, does the techno-primitivism of that first track become evident. In subsequent pieces, the analog sounds of doors, percussion, and voice give way to more industrialized alternatives. “Nyau Dust” has a similar ghostly-noise backdrop to “Cross Star Woman,” but introduce far more synthesized effects, all throbby synths and digital snares. “Golden Circle” layers in a modulating keyboard part and the carefully plotted drama-via-layers of club music. All the subsequent tracks, from the thriller-cinema pacing of “We Live Inside a Dream” to the squelchy dub of “Tachyon,” trace a not dissimilar pattern to “Cross Star Woman” but do so with a more evidently synthesized vocabulary, often as much techno, at times with synth-pop flavoring. To go back and listen to “Cross Star Woman” after taking in the album in full is to hear that opening track as a kind of pre-historical techno, an imagined tribal ceremony before the fall.

Certain Creatures is Brooklyn-based musician Oliver Chapoy, formerly of Warm Ghost and Saxon Shore. He’s also played with the metal band Shai Hulud. Album available at [certaincreatures.bandcamp.com](https://certaincreatures.bandcamp.com/). More at [certaincreatures.com](http://certaincreatures.com/) and [mysteriesofthedeep.mx](http://mysteriesofthedeep.mx/).

Tension in the Mist

A device-duet in layers by Joseph Branciforte

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This short test run by a composer based in Brooklyn by the name of Joseph Branciforte combines two devices toward layered, fragile effect. One is a synthesizer that provides for patching by cables to produce various sounds, patterns, and textures. The other, into which the synthesizer’s signals flow, is a delay pedal, which lends a sense of spaciousness that is in direct contrast to the tiny footprint of the actual boxes.

The pedal isn’t the sole source of the airy quality inherent in the track’s tonal material. Branciforte explained to me in an email that while this piece — which bears no title aside from what is little more than a list of the equipment with which it was made (“makenoise 0-coast / ambient loops with earthquaker space spiral”) — is a layering of eight elements. The first seven had already been completed when he hit record on his camera. What we’re witnessing here, in the video, is the eighth and final layer being added to the whole.

The overall effect is cloudy and drowsy, but there is tension in the mist, like the way the stereo play introduces a singsong quality, and how occasional tiny percussive blips suggest a signal beeping in an unattended NASA mission control center. At a minute and a half in length, the piece is best played on loop, which is especially appropriate since it is itself an accumulation of loops.

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 published to Branciforte’s [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA1XAVWSt8E). More from Branciforte at [josephbranciforte.com](http://www.josephbranciforte.com/home.html), [instagram.com/josephbranciforte](https://www.instagram.com/josephbranciforte/), and [twitter.com/josbranciforte](https://twitter.com/josbranciforte). Branciforte did me the honor recently of [adding to a track I’d recorded as part of a Disquiet Junto project](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/19/building-on-fever-pitch/).