- Today’s Hardly Strictly priorities: Anderson/McLaughlin (11am, Banjo), Lloyd Cole (noon, Rooster). #
- Tonight on Fringe the Observers let slip their deep, dark secret — that Rogaine is people! #
- Giggle worthy: Brian Eno, still not an inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. More thoughts: http://t.co/iZ6yVVjA #
- Not a fan of the airborne part of Fleet Week. #
- Second line parade in Valencia Street. #
- Finding underlined text in an old physical book feels like surveillance. Doing so in a Kindle book feels like you’re being surveilled. #
- What a physical site for public speaking looks like mid-construction. http://t.co/Qu8jZfmw #
- The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass app’s UI is whittled to priorities: Schedule, Map, Info, Warren. #
- Old Marc: “In the future you’ll live where Nick Lowe plays for free every year walking distance from your house.” Young Marc: “Yeah, sure.” #
- 40th Disquiet Junto project goes out momentarily. This week we’re adding a third part to a Kenneth Kirschner duet. #
- Hardly Strictly Bluegrass started looking like people form roots acts so they can be rationalized as participants. Still, a great lineup. #
- Alvin Luci(f)er #
- Adele’s Skyfall theme song is an odd bird. It’s extravagantly retro in a way the revived franchise is anything but. http://t.co/RgpFqODK #
The Accrual of Everyday Noise
Active memory system by Joseph Kramer
If you accept that memory is a matter of accrual and not of distinct moments, of layers rather than compartments, then the sonic approach employed by Joseph Kramer will have immediate appeal. His Porous Notion: Index Fragments and Interpretations is among the most low-impact of segments heard yet on the superb Radius broadcast/podcast out of Chicago. The Radius series generally emphasizes harsh noises intrinsic to communications systems, but Kramer’s work is most often fragile sounds that filter in and out of focus, leaving the listener to locate chance parallels, chronological interstices, light moire patterns of consonance and incident. Kramer describes the Porous Notion project as follows:
These are private snapshots of home, simultaneously captured on and created by a system consisting of a specialized tape recorder and customized cassettes.
This mechanism, typically employed as a performance instrument, both records onto the custom tape and plays it back in turn. The result is a system that makes a record of the sonic space that also reproduces the recording from moments ago while simultaneously recapturing its own output. The system continuously collects new bits of sound that have either originated in the space, passed in through the window or electrical wiring, or leaked into the electronic circuitry of the device. These new sounds join the already recorded sounds in the accumulating sonic image as certain parts of the spectrum are reinforced while others are smeared away.
Track originally posted for free download at theradius.us and soundcloud.com. Kramer lives in Chicago, where he partners with Noé Cuéllar as part Coppice (futurevessel.com/coppice).
Resolving the Sonic Themes on Fringe
The final season starts off with a musical statement of purpose.
When the final season of the TV series Fringe debuted this past Friday, September 28, there were many pressing questions: Would all our heroes emerge from amber in distant 2036? Would this dystopia look different in any considerable way from all the other recent Hollywood dystopias? Would Dr. Walter Bishop finally remember Astrid’s name? Would the Observers let slip their deep, dark secret — that Rogaine is people!?
One thing I was particularly focused on was the show’s employment of music — whether the inventive use of sound in the series would in some way play a substantial role as Dr. Bishop and his family/colleagues did their best to save the future in 13 episodes or less. Sound has been a central part of Fringe science and storytelling, from instants caught like record grooves in the plate glass of a crime scene, to the regular presence of pop music as a symbol of memory (often abetted by the appearance of a phonograph), to murderers incited by a Conet-style numbers station, to the chiptune version of the opening credits music in a flashback episode. And more broadly, attention to the creative employment of sound has been a hallmark of producer JJ Abrams’ production company’s work, notably in the ways various cues from Lost later surfaced in the ill-fated Alcatraz.
And then, shortly into the first episode (with the delightfully unwieldy title “Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11”) of this final season, Dr. Bishop was taken hostage — and into his holding cell walked the Observer known as Windmark. And out of their mouths came as close as an Abrams production has ventured toward providing a conspicuous description of the role sound plays in his work. In the scene transcribed here, Windmark can listen in on Bishop’s thoughts, and he hears some music Bishop is attempting to summon up.
Windmark: I don’t know why you’re alive. … Oh, you’re trying to think of music. You … miss … music.
Bishop: There’s not a lot of it here.
Windmark: We tolerate it, but it’s merely tones, rhythms, harmonic vibrations. I don’t understand …
Bishop: Mostly it amazes me. Music helps you shift perspective, to see things differently if you need to.
Windmark: See things … like “hope.”
Bishop: Yes, very much like that.
Windmark: But there is no hope for you. Nothing grows from scorched earth.
Later in the episode, Bishop is saved from captivity. He wakes next to his patient assistant, the agent Astrid, and the first thing he says to her, after inevitably mangling her name (“Afro?”) is, “Do you have any music?” Later, after some more rest, Bishop’s spirits rise, in part because of colorful lights that dance on his face. These turn out to be the reflection of some broken CDs hanging in a makeshift mobile in the street outside the building where he’s resting. He wanders into the street, finds a CD hand-labeled “Trip Mix 6,” wipes it off, and pops it into a CD player (in an abandoned car that still happens to have battery power). Out comes Yaz’s “Only You,” and Bishop smiles. Through the windshield he spies something flowering in the dirt — so much for things not growing in scorched earth.
Given how distressed Bishop was earlier, it’s particularly comforting to see him not only at peace but pleased. And given how often the phonograph has been used to signify how out of touch he is with the modern world (echoing similar usage in Lost), it’s interesting that it’s not a vinyl record but a CD that plays a role in reviving him. That flower isn’t the only thing that’s maturing.
Update (2012.10.07): A friend pointed out to me at lunch today that the music in Walter’s head during the interrogation is “Song for the Unification of Europe”by composer Zbigniew Preisner, from the movie Blue (1993), directed by Krzysztof KieÅ›lowski. The musical theme is not just a presence in Blue but its subject, the work of the late husband of the character played by Juliette Binoche, in whose head the music repeatedly appears during the course of the film:
A quick search showed that this correlation between Fringe and Blue was also picked up by at aldeburgh.tumblr.com, where the above video was posted.
Is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Getting Electronically Mindful?
Or is it just biding its time before it catches up with grunge?
The just-announced 2013 nominees for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame are an especially technologically-oriented bunch. It’s a generation increasingly marked by the ever-rising influence of technology at a practical, day-to-day level in popular music.
The 2012 inductees were certainly tech-oriented in their own right; the 17 inductees last year included three production legends (Tom Dowd, Glyn Johns, Cosimo Matassa) as well as sample-innovators the Beastie Boys.
The widespread electronic nature of this year’s list, however, goes far beyond last year’s showing. The Hall of Fame announced the nominees yesterday morning, October 4, and with this cohort the technological is as much an aesthetic matter as it is one of technique. Of course, these are just the nominees, not the inductees. Quickie rules cheat sheet: “To be eligible for nomination, an individual artist or band must have released its first single or album at least 25 years prior to the year of nomination.” In a couple years Nirvana, whose Bleach was released in 1989, will be eligible, and the ensuing grunge years will provide plenty of rockist comfort for the Hall of Fame. For balance, industrial act Nine Inch Nails, whose Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989, will be eligible the same year. Brian Eno, it’s worth noting, is not yet a Hall of Fame inductee, despite his production of such major-league inductees as Talking Heads and U2.
This year the nominees include the following: Two early rap stalwarts, N.W.A and Public Enemy, are sure to draw attention to their production teams, notably Dr. Dre and the Bomb Squad. Donna Summer is nominated; her collaborations with producer Giorgio Moroder are major milestones in pop music’s adoption of a purely electronic instrumental foundation (the disco single “I Feel Love” from her 1977 album, I Remember Yesterday, is widely considered a watershed moment in this transition). The ensemble Chic, although quite grounded in r&b virtuosity, was very much a studio endeavor for co-founder Bernard Edwards; the group’s tight, mechanized recordings — brittle hand claps, lockstep tempos — set a template for the more willfully synthetic dance music to come.
And then there’s the prog-rock vote: it centers on Rush, but should consider as early prototypes the adventurous early hevay metal band Deep Purple, whose sound was deeply shaped by Jon Lord’s organ, and the art-rock outfit Procol Harum.
Even the Meters deserve some consideration from this perspective, given the extent to which the rhythm ensemble’s modern reputation owes much to the frequent sampling of their back catalog.
In fact, of the 15 nominees announced today, just six are difficult to situate as electronic fellow travelers: the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Heart, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Albert King, the Marvelletes, and Randy Newman.
Again, these are the nominees. The actual inductees will be announced soon, once voting has been tallied. Between five and seven of the nominees are expected to be inducted, and they will share the limelight with additional figures in the form of the Ahmet Ertegun Award (for non-performers), a batch of “early influences,” and the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Award for Musical Excellence” (which along with the Ertegun award is generally where producers get the nod). It’s quite possible that the inductees will be selected primarily from the gang of six listed above who have little in the way of a technological sensibility.
Read the annotated list of nominees at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s website, rockhall.com/pressroom.
And consider voting for those you consider most worthy. This is the first year that the Hall of Fame is factoring in a “fans’ ballot”: rockhall.com/get-involved.
Disquiet Junto Project 0040: Music + 1
The Assignment: Turn a Kenneth Kirschner piano/viola duet into a trio.
Each Thursday evening 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 to the Junto is open: just join and participate.
The assignment was made in the evening, California time, on Thursday, October 4, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, October 8, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)
This is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 23:
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto).
Disquiet Junto Project 0040: Music + 1
The latest release from Kenneth Kirschner is a series of duets for himself on piano and Tawnya Popoff on viola.
For this Disquiet Junto project you will add your own performance to one of the duets. This will turn it, in effect, into a trio.
You cannot change the existing audio, except to the extent that you can elect to trim it to a more manageable length, in which case you might choose to fade in and out.
The Kirschner release is titled June 5, 2012, and it consists of three parts. You’ll be working on the third part, which is titled “June 5, 2012 – iii.” It’s available for download at the netlabel shskh.com, where the album is the 7th (and most recent) of the label’s releases.
Deadline: Monday, October 8, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 11 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 “disquiet0040-kirschnerplus1”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
The source audio for this track is part three of the Kenneth Kirschner album June 5, 2012, which features Kirschner on piano and Tawnya Popoff on viola. The album was released in September 2012 on the shskh.com netlabel, where it is available for free download.
More on this 40th Disquiet Junto project at:
More on Kenneth Kirschner at:
http://www.kennethkirschner.com/
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/