Touch, Live at Oto (MP3)

Jiyeon Kim, Maia Urstad, Dawn Scarfe, and Sandra Jasper performing in London

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest Touch Editions download, from its wonderful touchradio.org.uk side project, is a live set recorded as the first in a series — Touch Invites — being held at Cafe Oto in London. The 81st in the download series, it includes performances by Jiyeon Kim, Maia Urstad, and Dawn Scarfe with “interventions” from Sandra Jasper. The works are arguably took abstract and diverse to be done justice in this compressed space, but suffice to say they range from elegant, minimalist sine waves to broken field recordings, to understated rhythmic convulsions (MP3). All the works play with noise as their primary source material, their primary object of investigation.

[audio:http://www.touchshop.org/touchradio/Radio81.mp3|titles=”Live at Cafe Oto in London”|artists=Various Touch Editions musicians]

More on the event series at cafeoto.co.uk. More on the specific event at touchradio.org.uk. The concert took place July 17, 2012.

Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono’s Match

The Assignment: Interpret an incendiary Fluxus score from 1955 by Yoko Ono.

/ 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.

The assignment was made late in the day, California time, on Thursday, July 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 2, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0031-onomatch.

Below are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into three additional languages: German, Japanese, and Turkish, courtesy of Allan Brugg, Naoyuki Sasanami, and M. Emre Meydan, respectively.

Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono’s Match

This week’s project takes the opportunity to focus on the art movement known as Fluxus. We’ll use as the starting point a 1955 composition by Yoko Ono. Her work is titled “Lighting Piece” and it consists of a single, simple sentence: “Light a match and watch till it goes out.” It is one of a number of pieces that Ono produced as part of Fluxus. For this week’s Disquiet Junto project, please interpret her instruction as closely or as loosely as you choose.

Deadline: Monday, August 6, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Length: Your finished work should be as long or short as you wish to make it, though longer than a five minutes seems unlikely.

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 “disquiet0031-onomatch”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When posting the track please include this information:

More on the 30th Disquiet Junto project at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono’s Match

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0031: Ono’s Match”

Bradbury + Gibson: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of July 2012

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each month on the first day of the month for the past countless months a little plugin in this site’s WordPress installation has provided a list of the 10 most popular posts on the site. At some point between last month and today that plugin ceased to function. So, there will be no such post today. In its place, I’ll list 10 key posts from July 2012, during which there were 42 posts. These have nothing to do with how often they were read, and are just ones that strike me as especially of note.

(1) my interview with Christof Migone about his sound art exploration of Ray Bradbury‘s The Martian Chronicles; (2) a Disquiet Junto project that explored the sounds within silence, in honor of John Cage, who would have turned 100 this year; (3) a Disquiet Junto project that employed an observation by William Gibson as its starting point; (4) the announcement of my story about the Syfy series Alphas, which ran in the magazine Nature; (5) the announcement of the upcoming class I’ll be teaching at the Academy of Art in San Francisco; (6) the announcement of this site’s newly mobile/tablet-friendly, “responsive” design (thanks to futurepruf.com); (7) the announcement of my upcoming panel discussion at GAFFTA in San Francisco about “alternative musical interfaces”; (8) the announcement of the launch of sound.tumblr.com; (9) MP3s of a series of lectures from the Tate Modern about women and electronic music; (10) the upcoming (August 19) Disquiet Junto concert in Denver, Colorado, at which I’ll be present. Here’s the poster for the Denver event:

The other part of the monthly post is a list of the most popular searches, and that is available. They were: distinction, dome, ionizer, classical, orchestra, aaron, academy, cardboard, fluxus, flyer, gaffta, Horchata, query, savaran, sexby, African Feedback, alphas.

New Free Amon Tobin MP3

From his Two Fingers side project

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s free, there’s free as in “Well, you still need access to the Internet,” and there’s free as in “You need to provide your email address, but sure you can unsubscribe after the fact.” Into the latter category falls the new Amon Tobin release, the heavy-beat electro of “101 South” from his Two Fingers side project. The track is available as a free download at the bigdada.com label site. To those used to Tobin’s increasingly fractured sense of rhythm, the hip-hop flavor of this track will be an enjoyable surprise. There’s no sense of shards of noise cycling around in three-dimensional audio, just ever steady forward momentum. The full album, Stunt Rhythms, is due out October 1. More on Tobin at amontobin.com.

Digitally Enhanced Cello from Vienna (MP3)

A solo performance from Alexandr Vatagin

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is much digitally enhanced cello music today, and well there should be. The world we can trace back at least to Hank Roberts and David Darling has expanded widely, deeply, and in many directions. Few musicians go as far with their instrument as the Vienna-based Alexandr Vatagin, whose laptop-enhanced playing rarely bears much resemblance to its sonorous source material. In its place are sinuous sine waves and all manner of light mechanistic experimentation (MP3). This recording, posted recently as part of the Crónica label’s excellent podcast, was recorded back on September 3, 2010. The music is drawn from Vatagin’s album Shards.

[audio:http://download.cronicaelectronica.org/cronicast097.mp3|titles=”Live on Crónica”|artists=Alexandr Vatagin]

Originally posted for free download at cronicaelectronica.org, where it is entry number 97. More on Vatagin at vatagin.klingt.org.