Your Own Personal Tape Music Festival

Six minutes of stereophonic assemblage from Amanda Chaudhary

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Burred saw waves zig left and zag right and then zig left again through the stereo spectrum. Distant bells clang and then evacuate. Electric piano chords suggest a mood-setting mid-1960s film scenario. There is whirring sci fi noise and the deep dark clang of a gong and, later, the pitter patter of a cymbal meeting a brush head on. The cymbal seems to hover over your heard why the brush does its magic, attacking at numerous angles. This assemblage, of which those are merely a few of the constituent parts, is “ragged claws silent seas,” which Amanda Chaudhary committed to fixed recording as a submission to the annual San Francisco Tape Music Festival. Judging by the playbill posted at [sfsound.org](http://www.sfsound.org/tape/), Chaudhary nearly six-minute piece didn’t make the final cut, but it is available as a download for your own personal tape-music experience. What makes this “tape music” rather than, say, simply a collage, or simply a composition is less a matter of strict genre distinctions and more about a mix of literature and sensibility. Tape music is music that dispenses with both live performance and traditional instrumentation in favor of something that explores the experiential, spatial potential inherent in recorded sound.

Track originally posted at [amandachaudhary.bandcamp.com](https://amandachaudhary.bandcamp.com/track/ragged-claws-silent-seas). More from Chaudhary at [amandachaudhary.com](http://www.amandachaudhary.com/) and [catsynth.com](http://www.catsynth.com/). Chaudhary is based in San Francisco, California.

The Vocal Layers of Sea Beau

One minute of feather-light strata from Toronto

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This short burst of vocal simultaneity by the Toronto-based musician Sea Beau dates back a year, but I heard it for the first time this weekend while tracking various Canadian (and Detroit-based) performers and composers on SoundCloud. I go in and out of use of various streaming services. The past six months I’ve been much deeper in YouTube, in a way I never have before, for example, and Bandcamp has nudged up as well. One point of frustration with both YouTube and Bandcamp is they don’t foreground as well as SoundCloud does the musical connections of the posting account. Somehow these two services seem to think that we want to know what our fellow listeners listen to, but on YouTube we’re left to largely automated, algorithm-driven recommendations in terms of what the source audio might connect us to, and Bandcamp doesn’t even invest that many computing cycles.

On SoundCloud every account has a clearly marked list each of following and followers, which can make for a fluid series of forking discovery paths. (That’s “discovery” in the active sense of looking around, not the passive sense of “look what the music conveyor belt served up.”) With BandCamp, my “feed” tells me what the listeners I follow have purchased lately, and any individual album lists who it is “supported by,” but the service doesn’t allow, in the manner SoundCloud does, that the person who posted music might themselves listen to music. Some YouTube accounts show their subscriptions, but it isn’t consistent.

In any case, this piece by Sea Beau is an absolutely gorgeous, endlessly loopable polyphonic series of vocal intonations. It is all non-verbal, feather-light vowels produced as closely knit strata. The tones are alternately heavenly and nasal, in chordal harmony at one moment and set in deliciously sour contrast with each other the next.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/sea-beau](https://soundcloud.com/sea-beau/tried-up-in-tile). More from Sea Beau, who is based in Toronto, Canada, at [twitter.com/seeseabeau](https://twitter.com/seeseabeau).

Disquiet Junto Project 0265: Kitchen Music

Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer.

/ 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.

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 30, 2017. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 26, 2017.

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 0265: Kitchen Music

Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer.

Step 1: Choose one drawer or cabinet shelf in your kitchen. If you don’t have a kitchen, then choose a drawer or cabinet shelf elsewhere in your home.

Step 2: Record a short piece of music using only materials from Step 1.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: If you hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0265” (no spaces) in the name of your track. If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to my locating the tracks and creating a playlist of them.

Step 2: Upload your track. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your track.

Step 3: In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co please consider posting your track:

http://llllllll.co/t/kitchen-music-disquiet-junto-project-0265/6244

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 30, 2017. This project was posted in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, January 26, 2017.

Length: The length is up to you, but two to three minutes sounds about right.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0265” 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: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track online, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 265th weekly Disquiet Junto project, “Kitchen Music: Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer”:

https://disquiet.com/0265/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

llllllll.co/t/kitchen-music-disquiet-junto-project-0265/6244

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

Image associated with this track is by Lyn Lomasi and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

flic.kr/p/d8adVd

creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Plaid and IDM Circa 2017

Two free new tracks from the beatcrafters

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Perhaps the early IDM act Plaid got advance word that Pitchfork.com was about to post ([today](http://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/10011-the-50-best-idm-albums-of-all-time/)) a list of “The 50 Best IDM Albums of All Time,”but either way the duo of Ed Handley and Andy Turner (they generally list themselves in the opposite order, but alphabetization gets the best of me) surfaced this past week with a free two-track released. It’s streaming at [soundcloud.com/plaid](https://soundcloud.com/plaid/sets/bet-nat) and available as a gratis download at [warp.net](http://warp.net/news/plaid-bet-nat-out-now-us-tour-dates/). Both tracks, “Bet” and “Nat,” are beat-heavy exercises in syncopation, off-kilter time signatures, and dodgy atmospheres. In other words, pure Plaid. (Oh, and I wrote about Plaid’s *Not for Threes* as part of that Pitchfork top-50 effort.)

Marcus Fischer Live in His Home Studio

A video shot last fall in Portland, Oregon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Marcus Fischer is currently participating in an artist residency at the [Rauschenberg Foundation](www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/residency/artists-residence) on Captiva Island off the Florida coast. His [Instagram feed](https://www.instagram.com/marcusfischer/) is filling up with images and brief videos captured during his time there: Sugimoto-like pictures of the sea and a studio as white as a Rauschenberg painting. He’s suspending tape loops from the ceiling and quoting his fellow residents about the changes afoot in American politics.

The Instagram materials constitute beautiful slivers of his goings-on, but fortunately Datachoir is filling the void with a 17-minute video of Fischer alone in his Portland, Oregon, home studio — one continuous solo performance for electric guitar, synthesizer, pine cones, and other tools. The constituent parts are far more than the sum total of the sounds. He takes near-silent textures and generates light dustings from them. He strokes the guitar once, and then transforms the chord into something muted yet majestic. And while he plays, the videographer tours his studio, focusing in on his instruments, on a matrix routers and additional guitars, on cabling and boxes of spare parts.

I’ve worked on several projects with Fischer myself, and I recall an instance where someone we were newly working with asked what his primary instrument is. I struggled to explain there wasn’t a single focus of his music-making imagination. That studio is his instrument, and watching him employ it at length is a true pleasure.

It’s on the [Datachoir Sounds YouTube channel](https://youtu.be/hZziybgEXE0). I’ve added it to my (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJqCQ_Frl-hv-GiFC59u3a5). More from Fischer at [mapmap.ch](http://mapmap.ch/) and [marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com](https://marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com/). Previous Datachoir videos have featured Summer Mastous, Nate Dalton, and Jeremiah Green, among others.