The Voice in Instrumental Hip-Hop (MP3)

The only vocal that this track needs is the one that it has used as an ingredient.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

With a bit of piano that sounds like a tape loop that’s been soaking in bourbon all night, a vocal that suggests the r&b chorus as ethereal presence, and a beat that’s so downtempo it could be mistaken for the pace of distant traffic, Dustmotes has produced an enticing bit of instrumental hip-hop. Titled “For Nikola (leviculus),” it encapsulates the pleasures of the unintended genre within which it falls, a genre that is, in essence, a byproduct that has taken on a life of its own. Listeners to — admirers of — the instrumental backing tracks to hip-hop have proceeded, over time, to make music with no intention of having a vocalist muddy their effort. The only vocal that this track needs is the one that it has used as an ingredient.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/dustmotes. More on Dustmotes, aka Paul Croker of London, England, at dustmotes.net.

Reducing the Buddha

C. Reider puts his machines through the machine.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


C. Reider has posted a two-track set of Buddha Machine reworkings, which he has titled Buddha Reduction. The music results from putting the machine’s now familiar loops of sedate ebbs and flows through a sequence of recursive sonic processings. What is left is splendidly similar to mininal techno, a dank, atmospheric effect resulting from echoed percussion and hazy pattern fields. Reider explains a bit about how the work came together:

“Buddha Reduction” was composed using a process I have been calling “reduction” in which a source sound is subjected to a series of repeated noise reductions using a type of processing that uses a sound sample selected by the user to reduce unwanted noise. The source sounds for this particular release were taken from the Buddha Machine and the Buddha Machine 2 from FM3.

I have used this same reduction process in the past, most recently for one of the Disquiet Junto challenges on soundcloud: “Bottle Reduction”. Before that, the process was used to “remove the drone from the drone” in a recording titled “Inconstant”.

Originally posted for free download at vuzhmusic.com/releases. More on his process at vuzhmusic.com/blog.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, soprano Evelyn Lear (b. 1926), acclaimed interpreter of Alban Berg: http://t.co/QPq7kh1A #
  • Bonus: along with https://disquiet.com being newly mobile/tablet-responsive, comments will be a whole lot tidier. Likely live this weekend. #
  • Blogger’s Remorse: Is a separate topic-specific @tumblr necessary, or should it just be a tag on your existing site? #
  • Super close to mobile/tablet-optimized https://disquiet.com. (Main site looks the same. Changes are all about device-based responsiveness.) #
  • New @tumblr I’ve got going, collecting links re: the “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” class I’m teaching: http://t.co/Fjk1qo9m #
  • Filed article with British magazine on the Fourth of July. Felt vaguely traitorous. #

    • Continue reading “Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet”

The Sound (and Sound Application) of Video Art (MP3)

Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon in conversation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The Tate Modern’s interview featuring artists Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon, as moderated by former Whitney Museum of American Art director David A. Ross, is focused on their video work, but it serves wider-ranging consideration and application (MP3). As Ross says early on, it’s almost unseemly to simply refer to them simply as video artists, because to do so seems to unintentionally but firmly subjugate their work as some sort of subset, or offshoot, instead of as artworks whose elected medium was simply defined by the projects they desired to implement, the questions they wished to probe. This is a situation not unlike that of “sound art” — it often seems like “sound arts” is a more applicable term, much as feminists rightly speak of “feminisms” lest they unintentionally feed the impression of a unified collective point of view, or better yet of “sound in art.”

[audio:http://static.tate.org.uk/1/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2008_04_17DouglasGordon.mp3|titles=”Tate Modern Discussion”|artists=Peter Campus and Douglas Gordon]

In any case, the Tate interview, which dates from April 2008 but only recently popped up in the museum’s RSS feed, is quite thought-provoking, especially Campus’ depiction of early interactive work, and Gordon’s thoughts on matters of slowing down pre-existing media (this is the artist who created 24 Hour Psycho). And those listeners hoping for a touch of the purely sonic will appreciate a moment when Gordon aims to characterize the sound of Campus’ studio, the sound inside Campus’ head; he does this by intoning a wordless hum that he modulates incrementally up and down.

Track originally posted for download at tate.org.uk. (Image up top of 24 Hour Psycho from cbc.ca.)

sound.tumblr.com

A new lightly annotated outboard-brain link-blog Disquiet.com side project

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In association with the 15-week class that I’m teaching this fall at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds,” I’ve started a new Tumblr side-blog project, a lightly annotated outboard brain of links associated with the topics that are core to the class: the use of sound in marketing and advertising, the marketing and advertising of sound-related brands, sound design in consumer products, and music licensing, among other things.

I may collate and/or cross-post some of those pieces here, but in the meanwhile, you can follow it all at sound.tumblr.com.

Initial posts include the presence of sound design at the London Design Festival this year (developed by Arup, with audio by Squarepusher and Jana Winderen, among others), consideration of the purchase of Mog by Dr. Dre’s Beats, the work Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) did on an alarm clock for Philips, and the use of Roland 808 imagery by Nokia to tease a forthcoming smartphone.