“Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 2

A Brief History of Sound: celebrity death, oral culture, anatomy, perception, synaesthesia; Whitney Houston, Gordon Hempton, John Cage

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Wednesday of this week was the second of the 15 weekly three-hour classes I’m teaching on sound at San Francisco’s Academy of Art (academyart.edu) this semester. Last week’s entry on the first class got a helpful and enthusiastic response, so I thought I’d do it again. As with last time, this isn’t the full lecture, and even less so is it a representation of the discussion, which this week was great; it’s just a quick run through the subjects we covered.

Per the syllabus (PDF), this second class meeting focused on “A Brief History of Sound:”

Overview: We’ll trace overlapping paths through the history of sound, beginning with the human conception of sound, and then exploring the developing role of sound in modern media.

Part I: Celebrity Death

The class starts each Wednesday at noon, and my intention was to begin this one by playing some music, specifically an instrumental version of a Whitney Houston hit. The subject at hand was “celebrity death,” more on which in a moment. The tech failed me (more likely I failed the tech), so I ended up playing the song after the class break, but in the interest of context, this is a video containing the audio:

One of the pleasures of this course is probing my own uncertainties. Last week, the specific uncertainty on which I focused related to the role of sound in the work of JJ Abrams (briefly: to what extent his notable sonic sensitivity contributes to the popularity of his projects). This week allowed me to touch on a question that haunts me: What was the emotional and cultural experience of losing a musician to death before development of recorded music? Continue reading ““Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” Week 2″

The Prepared Hand (MP3s)

Nils Frahm makes music minus one – one finger, that is.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Nils Frahm, the German pianist, is currently on tour. Yesterday he turned 30, and to celebrate he gave a present to his fans: a collection of nine short pieces for free download. Why nine? Because he was playing with nine fingers. Why nine fingers? Because one of them is out of commission. Frahm busted a thumb while bracing himself during a fall, and has several screws — a handful, one might say — to show for it. That’s his thumb up above in the X-ray. The image initially accompanied a single track he’d uploaded to SoundCloud, “Song for 9 Fingers.” The full EP, titled Screws, is highly recommended. It is Frahm at his most intimate. The texture of his instrument, the sound of the piano’s mechanisms, the fundamental physical interactions of his body and the machine, are almost as important to the recorded sound as are the Satie-eqsue melodies he pursues. Key among these melodies is “Me,” which of all nine tracks is the one in which background noises come closest to gaining parity with the foreground music, combining into a rich sonic spaciousness. The attention to detail evidences why the word “dust” carries such meaning for turntablists, beat makers, and crate diggers, and it’s a strong cross-cultural experience to hear those textures embraced by a pianist. There’s an aura of antiquity to what Frahm is up to, a fragility that can be mesmerizing.

I interviewed Frahm recently for the Colorado Springs Independent (“Felt Up”), and talked with him about how his live performances differ from his recorded output, his use of felt in preparing his piano, his favorite John Cage work (“Imaginary Landscape”), and his relationship with the various pianos he encounters on tour. “They have 88 times of the same mechanism,” he said, “and usually one or three aren’t working. I tweak little things, modify slightly. Otherwise, you deal with the character of it, and get in a dialog with a specific instrument.”

Screws EP originally posted for free download, as a Zip archive of MP3s or AIF files, at soundcloud.com/erasedtapes, which also houses “Song for 9 Fingers.” More on Frahm at nilsfrahm.de. Read the interview at csindy.com. Tour dates at erasedtapes.com, his label.

Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley

The Assignment: Create from scratch what appears to be a field recording of a large department store.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

This is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 7:


The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 13, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 17, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project is one in a foreseen series being done in conjunction 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. More information on the exhibit at apexart.org. The list of featured participants in the exhibit is: Kelli Anderson, Conrad Bakker, Beach Packaging Design, Matt Brown, Steven M. Johnson, Last Exit To Nowhere, MakerBot Industries, The Marianas (Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco), Angie Moramarco, Oliver Munday, Omni Consumer Products, Staple Design, U.S. Government Accountability Office, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Marc Weidenbaum/Disquiet Junto, Shawn Wolfe, and Dana Wyse.

Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley

This project is a follow-up to last week’s. Last week, for the 37th project, we focused on pure, unadulterated field recording; the project was to “record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store.”

This week, for the 38th project, we will create an “artificial field recording.” That is, this week we’ll make something that to the listener appears to be a field recording, but is in truth entirely constructed. The aim carries over from last week: the finished audio should appear to be that of a large department store.

Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore foley techniques from film and television sound, in which noises are employed to suggest other sounds (i.e., a bicycle bell suggests a cash register, layered and echoed footsteps suggest a crowd, a doorbell suggests an elevator).

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 draws from Émile Zola’s novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), published in 1883, which depicts life and commerce in a massive department store in Paris. As Real as It Gets 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 are also plans for a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art on Tuesday, 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, September 24, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 4 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 “disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2”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:

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 37th Disquiet Junto project at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0038: Zola’s Foley

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Photo of Émile Zola via wikipedia.org.

The Lathe of Brooklyn (MP3)

Lary 7 recorded live, opening for Eleh just days ago in New York

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The great Touch Radio podcast has uploaded audio from just a few days ago. The concert in question was a show at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Eleh was the headliner, and the opener was Lary 7 (pictured above in a photo of the event from Touch). Charactertistic for the Touch Radio series, there’s close to no information about the event provided. What there is is half an hour of increasingly violent chafing, noises of mechanisms in action, echoed in a reverberant space. Fortunately, a lengthy New York Times review of the Eleh show allowed a parenthetical reference to Lary 7’s opening set: “The opening act was Lary 7, a New York artist who used a lathe-cutter onstage to record the hum and buzz of the machine itself onto a black disc; and then played back the recording with a tonearm. It was process-oriented, less spiritual and much less attractive as sound.” Irritation, it appears, is in the ear of the beholder (MP3).

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio83.mp3|titles=”Live at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral (September 2012)”|artists=Lary 7]

The concert was one in a series of events celebrating Touch’s 30th anniversary. Advance word of the show was at issueprojectroom.org. Recording originally posted for free download at touchradio.org.uk. More on Touch’s 30th anniversary at 30.touchmusic.org.uk. Here’s to hoping that the Eleh part of the evening gets a post-concert opportunity for an audience.

Two at a Drone (MP3)

A collaboration between Milwaukee's He Can Jog and Nomad Palace

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s no immediate telling if at the 2:26-minute point along the 10:57-long timeline of “C Drone,” when the higher-pitched, more sinuous drone emerges from a thicker, more burr-like drone, one of those in particular can be attributed to He Can Jog (aka Erik Schoster) and the other to Nomad Palace (aka Nate Zabriskie). It’s a duet, a collaboration, per the track’s title (Schoster inserts a “with Nomad Palace” parenthetical after the “C Drone”), but beyond that, little is made clear. Both musicians live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and are two thirds of the band Cedar AV (the missing piece being Nicholas Sanborn). They have plenty of collaborative performance experience between them, and thus the apparent parts within “C Drone” could just as likely be the result of their mutual efforts, not simply an expression of their simultaneous performance. Either way, it’s a strong piece. Schoster in his brief note calls it a “drone /not-drone,” which is apt — it’s more of a series of drones, from oh-so-quiet, to richly patterned, to a cicada frenzy, sewn into something that progress like a piece of program music.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/hecanjog. More on Schoster at hecanjog.com. More on Zabriskie at nomadpalace.net. More on Cedar AV at cedarav.org.