downstream – Page 272

Where Piano and Tape Meld

A duet by Danny Clay and Greg Gorlen, both of San Francisco

August 12, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The syrupy, slurpy, melty place that Danny Clay and Greg Gorlen map in intimate, elegiac detail on “marigolds i” makes for an enticing sonic cul-de-sac, a turnaround in which to get pleasingly disoriented, happily stuck. Time, genre, and technology loop back on themselves and on each other.

The piece appears to be a duet for piano and tape cassette, the latter as much a medium for the former as it is a source of sounds itself. Every form of media lends some quality to that which it documents, and the dissolving, warping aspect of the tape here blurs the place between the piano and the droney, nostalgic sonic space the two musicians seek to produce.

The piano, just a few keys hit in slow procession, creates tones that get stretched in static-laced loops, the brittle little seams heard as tiny crunchy footsteps. The tape bends and frays at times, making the piano come in and out of focus as if it’s a landscape seen through a window dotted with clingy raindrops. Occasionally it is quite clear but misshapen, and other times it returns to its proper dimensions but is tantalizingly difficult to fully make out.

This is apparently a track from a longer forthcoming album-length work. Something to look forward to, for certain.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/nocturnalsignal](https://soundcloud.com/nocturnalsignal/danny-clay-greg-gorlen-marigolds-i). More from Gorlen at [cascadingfragments.tumblr.com](http://cascadingfragments.tumblr.com/) and Danny Clay at [dclaymusic.com](http://www.dclaymusic.com/). Both Clay and Gorlen are based in San Francisco.

Disquiet Junto Project 0241: Foreground Effect

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing.

August 11, 2016August 18, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

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Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [disquiet.com/junto](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. 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.

This project was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.

Tracks will be added to this playlist 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 0241: Foreground Effect

The Assignment: Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing.

Please pay particular attention to all the instructions below, in light of SoundCloud closing down its Groups functionality.

Big picture: One thing arising from the end of the Groups functionality is a broad goal, in which an account on SoundCloud is not necessary for Disquiet Junto project participation. We’ll continue to use SoundCloud, but it isn’t required to use SoundCloud. The aspiration is for the Junto to become “platform-agnostic,” which is why using a message forum, such as llllllll.co, as a central place for each project may work well.

And now, on to this week’s project.

Project Steps:

Step 1: Consider the following. New music can often involve flipping a perceived hierarchy: between rhythm and melody, between harmonic and melodic development, and between background and foreground, for example. This project involves flipping another perceived hierarchy: between the effect employed and the source audio on which it is employed (for example, between a flanger and a rhythm guitar line, or a gate and a drum kit, or between a filter and a complex waveform).

Step 2: Create an original piece of music in which the effect is the prominent thing heard throughout, while the source audio changes frequently between varied materials. The compositional goal is that the piece still hangs together as a considered whole unto itself.

Five More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Per the instructions below, be sure to include the project tag “disquiet0241”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: This is a new task, if you’ve done a Junto project previously. In the following discussion thread at llllllll.co post your track:

http://llllllll.co/t/foreground-effect-disquiet-junto-project-0241/4134

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 was posted around noon, California time, on Thursday, August 11, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, August 15, 2016.

Length: The length is up to you. Between two and four minutes seems about right.

Title/Tag: When posting your track, please include “disquiet0241”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 241st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which the material processed is secondary to the processing”— at:

https://disquiet.com/0241/

Flirting with Entropy

Squelch and distortion courtesy of Salt Lake City's sunhil

August 9, 2016August 9, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The track “FMMMOPm” by sunhil runs for under two minutes. The transformation processes within it unfold in a manner that works well on repeat. The piece brings to mind aspects of the recent Autechre album, *elseq* — there’s a short riff that replays itself over and over, each turn tweaked this way and that by various effects, and the shifting of effects doesn’t directly parallel the ebb and flow of the loop.

The emphasis is on a rich, compact squelch, and on a distortion field that never fully encompasses the source material. Interference and static, sonic moirés and signal chiaroscuro are all in effect at various moments, but under the full, strong control of sunhil (aka Jeffrey Paul Shell of Salt Lake City, Utah). The piece flirts with entropy but never succumbs completely.

Presumably this short Instagram video, captioned “Saturday FM” on [instagram.com](https://www.instagram.com/p/BIxbFpLAhxG/) and at his [Twitter account](https://twitter.com/jshell/status/761946677183938561), is from the sessions that yielded this track:

A video posted by Jeffrey Shell (@aodl) on Aug 6, 2016 at 8:26am PDT

The video shows the screen of a Teenage Engineering OP-1, whose FM synthesis is half of the toolset in the brief liner note accompanying the track:”FM operations between OP-1 and Monomachine. OP-1 FM synth being sequenced and processed by Monomachine, accompanied by a pair of MM’s FM-PAR machines.”

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/sunhil](https://soundcloud.com/sunhil/fmmmopm). More from Sunhil at [euc.cx](http://euc.cx/), [sunhill.bandcamp.com](https://sunhill.bandcamp.com/), and [twitter.com/jshell](https://twitter.com/jshell).

Aphex Twin Turns on the #Learning Spout

Will his latest user18081971 be a black hole or a rabbit hole?

August 7, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Aphex Twin’s [user18081971](https://soundcloud.com/user18081971/) account was once home to some 250 or so tracks of artifact audio, partial takes and rough sketches from a quarter century or so of music making. It felt like a snowstorm at first, a thick, heavy blanket of material. But it was more like one of those tropical rainstorms that comes on heavy, reduces to a trickle, fakes you out with a blue sky, and then rains down again. He’d put up all or most of the tracks, and then take them down, teasing and pleasing his audience in turns. (Given that the upload dates are retained, it’s more like he turned them on and off.)

It’s been blue sky — which is to say, blank or virtually blank — on the user18081971 account for many months. As of yesterday there were just six tracks up, all many months old. But then today, just two hours ago as of this typing, three seconds arrived of new audio arrived, under the title “Inventions & ideas” and tagged #Learning. It’s a warbling, speedy sample of what sounds like computer speech synthesis. If the spoken message is garbled, the accompanying text is notably clear in its intent:

>This is a place to share hardware and software inventions, I was going to publish a book of my own but im going to start slowly putting them up here instead, it’s too much work hassling people to do these things, so putting them here will hopefully reach the right people. Will start with the more simple ideas first. If you want to work with me on any of the ideas PM me with IDEAS in the subject, no person or company too big or small. If you want to make it a commercial product then talk to me but im just as happy to work on it together and release it for free. If it’s someone elses idea just PM them, no need to tell me about that if you don’t want to , although be interesting to know if I helped a hookup along the way. Discussion and refinement of all ideas very welcome, in fact thats the main idea of this space. Bring it on!

It looks like after flooding SoundCloud with archival material, largely leaving annotation up to his fans ([here’s a communal spreadsheet of track details](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11ouNaaVrNp60Ib34Kp0TO1n1XSc7-9DvfiZ9ZiTiD2c/edit)), he’s now going to be posting details about how he gets the sounds he gets.

This three-second track includes detailed, time-coded information about its creation, like this:

>[[[REsonant Tuning table EQ/vocoder]]] Import of Scala tuning tables to EQ frequency amounts, so each EQ frequency band would correspond to an entry in the imported tuning table. User definable number of EQ bands. Each band should have varying resonance options AND separate built in variable delay with adjustable feedback. Live input of either fundamental with slew/portamento or chord entry for immediate multiple band selection, so you can play in your resonances in real time. Sequence mode, allows cycling through the resonant bands, amount of bands active selectable, syncable, backwards/forwards/random etc, slew/lag/transition adjustment, wraparound. Create custom tuning table from audio analysis, whereby the amount of prominent resonances of the input audio can utilised to create a custom tuning table which can then be used within the EQ and also exported to a Scala file, use audio to create tuning tables!

And when a given comment isn’t detailed enough, Aphex Twin, aka Richard D. James, replies to himself in greater detail:

>@user18081971: Order of tuning table should be selectable, so pitches don’t always have to ascend or descend, they can be arranged/sequenced in any order. Pitch shifter must have user definable delay with sync within the feedback loop.

We’ll see what comes of Aphex Twin’s latest foray into self-publishing of his sonic experiments. It could be the beginning of his own Well-Tempered Synthesizer … or it could all disappear into the same void where the earlier 250+ tracks went. Rabbit hole or black hole, it promises to be interesting.

10 Seconds of Salvation

In the hands of Amulets, repetition is a form of repurposing

August 6, 2016August 6, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Like his earlier [reworking of Tony Robbins self-help tapes](https://disquiet.com/2016/07/05/amulets-tony-robbins/), Amulets’ *New World Translation* repurposes a piece of spoken word audio on cassette and transforms it into something that fits into the contemporary world of experimental cassette music — not just music released on cassette, but music in which the cassette is the instrument.

This recording is a 10-second tone set on loop, playing (per his [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlmvhlqRPI) video) on a four-track recorder. The loop is a snatch of symphonic white noise, an orchestral drone, like a string section in a deep cistern holding a note until, collectively, they mark the loop’s repeat with a momentary swell.

When Brian Eno wrote that “repetition is a form of change,” part of what he was getting at is how the ear hears new things when subjected to the same sound over and over. In the hands of Amulets’, that change is more practical, but no less evocative. As he write in a note accompanying the video: “the endless tape loop flutters, fluctuates, and slowly degrades over time.”

Here’s the excerpt on YouTube. It’s the latest piece I’ve added to my ongoing [YouTube playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-) of fine [“Ambient Performances.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/04/30/a-youtube-playlist-of-ambient-performances/)

And the full 50-minute version:

Video originally posted at Amulets’ [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwlmvhlqRPI) channel. It’s available for purchase as physical cassette and download at [amulets.bandcamp.com](https://amulets.bandcamp.com/album/new-world-translation). The flipside of each cassette is the unmolested original audio from a series of Jehovah’s Witness Bible tapes. The length of the A-side depends on the length of the individual tape, ranging from 30 to 45 minutes. More from Amulets at [amuletsmusic.com](http://www.amuletsmusic.com/). Amulets is Randall Taylor of Austin, Texas.