Denver Disquiet Junto Concert Planned for August 19

7 acts booked for a night of electronically enhanced glass harmonica

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This coming August 19, a Sunday, we’ll be hosting a Disquiet Junto concert in Denver Colorado at the Walnut Room. It’s billed as “An evening of musicians performing new compositions and improvisations for the electronically enhanced glass harp.” These fine Colorado ambient/experimental performers are featured:

Ӣ Offthesky
Ӣ Radere
Ӣ C. Reider
Ӣ Pillow Garden
Ӣ Ten and Tracer
Ӣ Cody Yantis

And there’s a special guest visiting from New Hampshire:

Ӣ Mysterybear

Doors open at 6pm, and the show begins at 7pm. The Walnut Room is located at 3131 Walnut Street in Denver, Colorado. The tickets will cost $10. More on the venue at thewalnutroom.com. Special thanks to C. Reider and Carl Ritger (aka Radere) for assistance in putting this together. Details will be added to this page as the event approaches. If you’d like to spread the news, please use this URL: disquiet.com/JuntoColorado2012. There’s also a facebook.com event page. The above poster is by Boon Design (boondesign.com).

All the acts will perform two works: one drawn from the Disquiet Junto series of weekly projects, and a recent piece of their own they’d like to share with the audience and their fellow musicians. The Junto project involves treating the sounds of a glass harmonica, the instrument that held a special interest for Benjamin Franklin, from whose own Junto society ours borrows its name. This is the same format as the concert held in Chicago earlier this year, back in April, but with a whole new set of performers. Concerts are also in various stages of planning for San Francisco and Portland.

Repetition Is a Forum for Change (MP3)

John Dombroski submits a locked groove for remix

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The track is rhythmic, like a municipal light rail passing in steady rain on a quiet street. There’s a crunch to it, the leaden beat of something hit repeatedly yet resilient enough to show little if any resulting damage. Through headphones, the noise expands; it comes to span the sonic periphery despite its inherent delicacy. You hear the beat, but you listen through it as well, first to the broader, textural noise, and then to the beats within the beat, to the shape of the beat. In time, the beat regains its centrality, and new questions emerge: Does the beat give a little, sway a little, on occasion? Is there a nudge toward development? What in fact is it?

It’s the sound of a locked groove on a vinyl recording, taped by John Dombroski not only for posterity, enjoyment, and analysis, but also with the intention that others might rework it, might make music from the absensce of music. We know from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies card deck that “Repetition is a form of change.” In Dombroski’s gambit, it is also a forum for change. In his brief accompanying note he states:

Record player needle in locked groove repeats (~1.8 seconds) 55.5 times and resolves.

NOTE: (If you would like, go on and make a remix of this sound and share it – I’d love to hear).

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/johndombroski. More on Dombroski, who is based in Richmond, Virginia, at dombroskij.com.

The Conqueror from Darmstadt

A malevolent post-drone from Phirnis

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

For gaping-maw, devil-in-the-machine, end-times background listening, you could do worse than “Conqueror” by Phirnis, a musician from Darmstadt, Germany, whose account on Soundcloud lists him solely as one K.G. The track is three and a half minutes of radio-static-during-a-windstorm chaos, all churning white noise and helpless rattling, and a slowly impinging malevolent howl that suggests all will not end well. It’s a welcome swatch of non-rhythmic industrial music, neither as formless as pure drone — are we entering the realm of the post-drone? — nor as descriptive as a proper song. It’s somewhere in between, not so much a soundtrack as the sound design of a dark, arduous, fictive scenario.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/phirnis. More on Phirnis/K.G. at phirnis.de and twitter.com/phirnis.

Alphas (+ Infrasound) in Nature Magazine

My interview with showrunner of the Syfy superhero TV series

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The current issue of Nature magazine, dated July 19, 2012, features in its Books and Arts section an article I wrote about the TV series Alphas. (Note: those links lead to a paywall required to access the story, but for those without access, Nature is pretty well stocked by libraries.) The second season of Alphas begins airing on the Syfy network in the U.S. this evening, July 23. The piece is a Q&A with the series’ new showrunner, Bruce Miller (also of such shows as Eureka and ER); I was interested in discussing with him the scientific basis for the various powers that are explored in the show, from the synaesthesia-like sensory awareness of Rachel Pirzad to the endorphin-infused strength of Bill Harkin to the ability of Gary Bell (pictured up top in the same image that accompanies the Nature piece) to sniff data from the air.

Part of the realism of Alphas has to do, simply, with the fact that the characters don’t think of themselves as superheroes; they think of themselves as misfits who are more burdened than blessed with these unusual abilities. Rooting that anxiety is the show’s writers’ attempts to only depict powers that can be extrapolated from natural sciences. Thus, there is — at least so far — no time travel or, say, long-distance teleportation. Sound, of course, is among the numerous areas of scientific study that inform Alphas. Last season there was a blind man with dolphin-like sonar powers; he was played by Star Trek’s Data, aka Brent Spiner. This season, Miller explained, there will be at least one more audio-based storyline, one in which “infrasound” — those sounds considered to be below the spectrum perceived by humans — plays a role. He told me more than appears in the Nature story but if I’d written much more, it would have given away the episode.

The Nature story is available, unfortunately behind a paywall, at nature.com. More on Alphas at syfy.com/alphas.

When a Synthesizer Isn’t a Synthesizer (MP3)

Wind-based ambience from the duo Paiyatuma

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Despite the zone-out droning and ether-thin intonations, there’s no synthesizer per se to be heard on Arriving at Night in Ithaca, a project by the duo of Paiyatuma (MP3). That’s Thomas Park and Shane Morris, who together conjure up all manner of nocturnal moods. Reportedly the constituent parts are all wind instruments (including “trombone, flute, and found sounds such as bottles and whistles”), though they’re so deeply sublimated into the greater whole — a whole that also has its share of natural elements, including apparent insect song — that the effect is less of constituent parts and more of a deep rich texture.

[audio:http://archive.org/download/kpu114/kpu114-02-arriving-at-night-in-ithaca-radio-edit.mp3|titles=”Arriving at Night in Ithaca”|artists=Paiyatuma]

Kudos to the duo for releasing the music in a variety of formats — not only MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and the “lossless” FLAC, but also as a shorter radio edit. The version linked to from this post is but an eight-minute reduction of the longer work, which stretches out to three quarters of an hour. The release was originally posted at the kikapu.org netlabel. It’s housed at archive.org.