The Drone’s Self-Definition MP3)

Vapor Lanes shows how a drone defines itself by its un-drone-ness

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The word “drone” suggests a certain amount of stasis, an amount fairly beyond the ordinary experience of an everyday listener, a stasis employed through static, both figuratively, in the form of something that barely can be felt to move, and literally, in that white noise is often its substance, is often its effect. Drones appear alien to ears used to the structures provided by rhythm, melody, and harmony. But once you recognize those structures as just that, as structures, then you come to hear them everywhere, including in music that appears to refute them — music such as that encapsulated by the term “drone.” Vapor Lanes‘ “Matchbox Twenty” is such a drone, and like many drones it pushes at its drone-ness, pushes away from drone-ness, in its own manner. The odd thing about drones is that they are often defined by that effort that they make to be more than drone, more than what might be considered mere drone. In any case, here that effort is akin to the revving of an engine, moments when the drone seems to speed up, to get unforeseen momentum underway as it moves ahead, for even in its static form it has a sense of motion. The sole bit of framing information of consequence is a single tag associated with the track. The tag is a word, and the word is “oneiric,” which is to say dream-like.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/vaporlanes. The musician is based in Chicago, Illinois.

1:13 of Rattle, No Hum (MP3)

A spare beat from Virginia

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s a short piece, a mere beat, really, barely a minute. It’s a rhythmic utterance, a rattle with an occasional flare-up. There’s a jittery sound, like a pair of dice being rolled in cupped hands, or a spray-paint can being shaken in advance of some mercenary street artistry, the potential evidence muffled by an oversized coat. It’s “Vncertainty” by Glia, the Virginia-based musician, and in this presumably unfinished form (it’s described in the accompanying note as a “warm up beat”) it serves less as a full listening experience than as something hinting at prospects, and also submitting itself for repeat listens, for looping, for the repetition that is, as we know well, a form of change. It’s worth listening for those changes, for the depth to be perceived between the downbeats, for the way the flares suggest sparks on a rail, for the tonal quality of each percussive element. It may just be a warm up beat, but sometimes practice is perfect.

More on Glia at mitaminelab.com and emetece.net.

Everyday Ambient Music (MP3)

In praise of the lightly augmented field recording

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The term “ambient music” by definition, in our post”“John Cage world, is broad enough to include such a simple, unadorned thing as a quiet raw field recording of daily life — sounds that are loose and transparent enough to pass as background on second listen. That’s the “ambient” part of the equation. The “music” part would be the basic act of framing such a recording as a composition through the election to stop and start the tape at some point, and to subsequently make it available.

But why stop there? Then there is the next stage of field recording, that which is lightly augmented, so lightly that the emendations are nearly invisible. Take, for example, the lovely “Chun,” by Mola CL, which combines rudimentary elements (“Field recording, frog caller, bass guitar, buddha machine, tuning forks, sample,” reads the full text of the accompanying liner note) into something considerably less than the sum of those parts. It’s all small-bore sounds, elegant slices of everyday life and additional noisebits that are barely louder, barely more resonant or intrinsically memorable, than the jingle of change in one’s pocket. And yet the composite takes on the aspect of a sonic hologram, of pieces frozen in space, listened to as time passes as if one is moving around it and observing from various vantages. Just wonderful. It’s listed by Mola CL as a work in progress, but it sounds complete to these ears.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mola-cl. Mola CL is Chase Lynn of High Wycombe, Britain.

Taking Shelter (MP3)

Ghostly, in two ways, track from forthcoming Loyal album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As a promotion for the forthcoming album Heathered Pearls from Loyal, the label Ghostly has made available for free download a track, “Beach Shelter,” that makes so much of so little it seems to recoil at being branded either minimalist or maximalist. It’s a threadbare loop that slightly overlays itself, turning the seam into a momentary braid of wispy figments. It has the sloopy motion of a moored raft in a light current. It’s minimalist in its materials and rhythmic rectitude, maximalist in its rich sonic spaciousness, and yet something else entirely in the way it makes epic gestures in tiny motions. Just beautiful.

Heathered Pearls is Jakub Alexander. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ghostly and ghostly.com. More on Heathered Pearls at heatheredpearls.tumblr.com, soundcloud.com/heathered-pearls, and twitter.com/heatheredpearls, among other places.

Disquiet Junto Project 0043: Dazzled Machine

The Assignment: Make mechanical roars from the sound of a retail space.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com 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.

This is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 22:

The assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, October 25, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 29, as the deadline. (Instructions below translated below into Croatian, Japanese, and Turkish by Darko Macan, Naoyuki Sasanami, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.)

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0043: Dazzled Machine

This is a shared-sample project. The goal is to take pre-existing field recordings and to turn them into something else.

The pre-existing field recordings are the audio produced by Disquiet Junto members for projects 0037 and 0038.

The “something else” is as follows:

The field recordings in question are documents of retail spaces, such department stores. You’ll will rework the audio from one or more of the field recordings to achieve something inspired by the following description: “There was the continuous roar of the machine at work, of customers crowding into the departments, dazzled by the merchandise, then propelled towards the cash-desk. And it was all regulated and organized with the remorselessness of a machine: the vast horde of women were as if caught in the wheels of an inevitable force.” The quote comes from the novel Au Bonheur des Dames, or The Ladies’ Paradise, by Émile Zola, originally published in 1883. Please pay special attention to the notion of everyday noises that in combination suggest machinery at work.

You can use as many of the recordings as you desire, but you cannot add any other sound sources to them. You can use whatever tools you desire in your reworking of the original material.

The field recordings are located at these two search returns:

http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=disquiet0037
http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=disquiet0038

Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore field recordings for their rhythmic intent.

The project, however, has broader intentions. It’s being undertaken in association with the exhibit As Real as It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 ”“ December 22, 2012. Sounds produced for this Disquiet Junto project will be considered to be played in the gallery as part of the exhibit, and will also be made available to Disquiet Junto participants and other musicians and sound artists for subsequent projects related to Walker’s exhibit.

There will be a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art on November 27 in conjunction with the exhibit.

This is Apex’s initial, brief description of the upcoming exhibit: “As Real As It Gets gathers fictional products, imaginary brands, hypothetical advertising and speculative objects, devised by artists, designers, and companies. We resist commercial material culture as inauthentic, phony, and less than legitimate, but should we? Presenting the marketplace as medium — while supplies last.”

Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Design Observer, and the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House: 2008) and Letters from New Orleans (Garrett County Press: 2005). Walker co-founded, with Joshua Glenn, the Significant Objects project.

Deadline: Monday, October 29, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 2.5 and 6 minutes in length.

Information: Please, when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0043-dazzledmachine”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: Please consider setting your track for free download.

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

This Disquiet Junto project was done in association with the exhibit As Real as It Gets, organized by Rob Walker at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan (November 15 – December 22, 2012):

http://apexart.org/exhibitions/walker.php/

More on this 43rd Disquiet Junto project at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0043: Dazzled Machine

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/

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