Part of the pleasure of the first track to be (pre)released from Julianna Barwick’s forthcoming album, *Will*, is how her voice merges with the synthesized sounds that accompany it. The piece opens with this slow mix of drone and scale. The drone pulses and the scale, tracing the shape of the pulse by moving up and down on repeat, puts soft pads against something even softer still. (According to [NPR](http://www.npr.org/event/music/469539244/julianna-barwick-announces-new-album-with-the-haunting-nebula?autoplay=true) it’s a Moog synthesizer, the Mother-32.) And then comes her voice — her voices, really. Barwick’s breathy intonations come and go in looping layers, a folktronic canon. These echoes proceed for the length of the piece, which is titled “Nebula,” tracing the vast contours of an imagined cavern. It’s one of nine tracks on *Will*, and while “Nebula” is solo, the album features a range of guests: singer Thomas Arsenault (aka Mas Ysa), cellist Maarten Vos, and percussionist from Jamie Ingalls (Chairlift, Tanlines, Beverly). There’s also a video for “Nebula,” directed by Derrick Belcham and shot at Philip Johnson’s historic Glass House:
The album has a pre-release page at [juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com](https://juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com/album/will). More from Barwick, who is based in Brooklyn, at [juliannabarwick.com](http://www.juliannabarwick.com/).
Christina Vantzou’s first three solo albums of chamber ambient music are numbered, like Led Zeppelin’s before hers. There is *Nº1*, *Nº2*, and *Nº3*, the most recent of which was released late last year. Naturally the collection of remixes is seen as an iteration, not a release unto itself. Its title: *3.5*. She’s assembled a great crew to rework the originals, and the first track, Steve Hauschildt’s take on her “Sterepscope,”was posted a few days ago as a promotion. Other participants in *3.5* include Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (aka Lichens), Loscil, John Also Bennett, Tara Jane O’Neil, the Sight Below, CORIN, and Francesco Donadello. Bennett played all the synthesizers on *Nº3*, Vantzou told me when I interviewed her last year ([“The Bell Jar Filter”](https://disquiet.com/2015/11/09/christina-vantzou-bell-jar-no3/)). Bennett and Loscil also contributed to the *Nº2 Remixes* collection, and Loscil was also on the *Nº1 Remixes* album. If the original “Stereoscope”was quiet and unassuming, with a glitchy undercurrent that suggested rain on a living-room window, then Hauschildt’s rendition is full-on orchestral. (You can stream the original at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX3cKUx-koE) for comparison.)
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/platform](https://soundcloud.com/platform/christina-vantzou-stereoscope-steve-hauschildt-remix-boiler-room-debuts). The album will be available as of March 18 at [christinavantzou.bandcamp.com](https://christinavantzou.bandcamp.com/). More from Vantzou at [christinavantzou.com](http://www.christinavantzou.com/).
This weekend was a pretty tremendous one in San Francisco for modular synthesis. There were not one but two expos. A series of workshops capped by a concert was sponsored by Moog as part of its Dial-tones regional spinoff of Moogfest, and a dozen manufacturers plus four performers gathered under the aegis of Sync 01, an event plotted by Chris Randall of Audio Damage. I [posted](https://disquiet.com/2016/03/05/what-sound-looks-like-36/) a [few](https://disquiet.com/2016/03/05/what-sound-looks-like-35/) photos [from](https://disquiet.com/2016/03/05/what-sound-looks-like-34/) the evening, and interviewed both [Ciani](https://disquiet.com/2016/02/29/suzanne-ciani-moogfest-dial-tones/) and [Randall](https://disquiet.com/2016/02/29/sync-01-codeword-chris-randall/) in advance for [48hills.org](http://www.48hills.org/2016/02/29/synth-city/). If you missed the shows, here’s a taste:
I caught the Sync 01 performances as well as the Dial-tones headliner, Suzanne Ciani (the elder statesperson of the crew), who did a concert-length piece on Buchla. This video shows her working with Moog equipment and unlike her Dial-tones event it isn’t in quadraphonic, but it gets at her rhythms-as-texture mastery:
The Sync 01 performers included Neybuu, who mixed her tabla through a pair of Elektron tools, the Octatrack and Rytm. Neybuu, who lives in Portland, spent a decade in India learning to play tabla. She produced the Total Tabla sample set for Elektron ([elektron.se](https://www.elektron.se/accessories/total-tabla/)). More from her in an interview at [elektronauts.com](http://www.elektronauts.com/talk/view/73). Here’s a video that’s close to (arguably an improvement on, as there were feedback issues last night) what she sounded like at Sync 01:
The highlight of all the weekend’s performances was arguably Bana Haffar. (I’ve written about her once previously, back in [January](https://disquiet.com/2016/01/10/bana-haffar/).) Part of this has to do with her set being the most difficult to describe. There were echoes of Tangerine Dream and mellow Underworld in some of the other performances, and classic modular quadrophonic rhythms in Ciani’s, while Reybuu quite clearly was porting an old tradition through a new one — all of which led to interesting results. But Haffar’s was something apart, a through-performed work that mixed drones and pulsing and low-level hints of vocals into a fully formed work. This recent live set of hers, nearly 18 minutes in length and recorded in late February, feels more subdued than last night’s performance, but it gets at the sinuous, exploratory nature of her work:
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/banahaffarmusic](https://soundcloud.com/banahaffarmusic/live-eurorack-set-at-modular-on-the-spot-0225). Haffar, who plays bass professionally, lives in Los Angeles.
What better source of raw sound materials than a nearly 20-year-old documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the legendary brain trust of electronic-music ingenuity? Chris McAvoy goes to town on samples from the 1979 production *The New Sound of Music*, transforming the Radiophonic’s own transformations, taking an old lampshade and an empty tin can and from them generating beats and textures, just as the workshop itself did. “Anything … could be doctored with the tape recorder,” says the narrator, before his voice itself is warped just shy of recognizability. It’s a testament to McAvoy’s activities that you can’t tell if the self-reflecting, hall-of-mirrors echoes imposed humorously on the following phrase were his own, or in the documentary: “Whatever this microphone picks up is being fed to this loudspeaker back to this microphone … round and round.”
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/chris-mcavoy](https://soundcloud.com/chris-mcavoy). More from McAvoy, who’s based in Boulder, Colorado, at [twitter.com/chmcavoy](https://twitter.com/chmcavoy).
This ever so brief, four-minute drone performance by Oslo-based Sunflower Correspondence follows the arc of a slow billow, rising and falling at the pace of a lonesome cloud bank. A squelchy tone occasionally peeks out, like a mountain top revealed amid the passing mist. The mountain has its own curves, sedentary compared even to the passing cloud, of course, but taking on varied appearances depending on the cast shadows. Sunflower’s Norway base of operations may account for the nocturnal theme of the track, titled “Winter Midnight Streetlight Smalltown Rain.” It’s a landscape painted with light static and warped bells, white noise and gentle pulses.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/kent-gulbrandsen](https://soundcloud.com/kent-gulbrandsen/winter-midnight-streetlight-smalltown-rain).
