The Welcome Return of Hexawe.net

Two tracks appeared in June, following a lull since November

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The excellent abstract-beep netlabel hexawe.net produced a steady stream of releases up through November 2011, and then it went as quiet as an unplugged Tempest console. The label had long distinguished itself with tracks that had one foot in the arcade and the other in ”¦ well, where exactly was never quite clear, but it was a place that seemed to prize a certain artful sloppiness, like the avant-pop equivalent of an animated gif image. All Hexawe tracks are produced with the rudimentary Little Piggy Tracker, a simple piece of software described as having been optimized for game consoles. Over at littlegptracker.com it is downloadable for free use, and in addition to an OS X rendition, there are version for the PlayStation Portable and for the Linux GP2X system. Fortunately, Hexawe revived itself last month with a pair of tracks, one by Rhionstrich and the other by B.Leo. The latter is particularly recommended. Leo’s, “Loves and Likes,” lays a groovily modulated synth figure over a gurgling drone that, as the track proceeds, reveals its percussive core — it feels like a lo-bit version of Tron drama (MP3).

[audio:http://hexawe.net/hex003E_loves_and_likes_by_bleo.mp3|titles=”Loves and Likes”|artists=B.Leo]

The source code and samples that made the Leo release possible are available as a Zip archive, as is the standard mode for Hexawe tracks; definitely of use for those interested in fiddling with Little Piggy Tracker. More on B.Leo at dummydrome.com.

The Voice Emanates from the Next Room

Listening in a hotel

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The voice emanates from the next room, the one behind the bed’s headboard. This is the Sheraton in downtown Los Angeles. I’m in a room on the 12th floor, toward the end of the corridor. It’s shortly after dinner, maybe 9pm. Through the thick wall, someone is talking. Quiet as this voice is, it stands out — from the HVAC drone, from the routine rising and falling of the service elevator, from the traffic far below. It’s evidently a voice, even if it’s muffled far beyond comprehension. The pace and volume are steady. I assume it’s a man, because the tone seems on the low end — I’d guess it’s a newscaster, except that he’s been speaking too long without anything to suggest a commercial break. There’s no interlocutor, so I surmise that he’s on the phone. All there is is this sound, this low-end murmur, the shape of a voice, saying nothing. The mental image is of a single hand moving slowly from behind a thick, almost opaque scrim of plastic.

Background: I briefly employed Tumblr to maintain a collection of observations of sound in everyday life, and then decided not to pursue the project; I decided if I were to do such a thing, I’d just make it part of Disquiet.com. Most of the material was, indeed, re-collated into various entries here at Disquiet.com, but this one lingered on the Tumblr page. I’m fond of it, and decided to add it here, for archival purposes.

Her Noise (MP3s)

Recordings from a recent Tate Modern event

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Tate Modern recently hosted a series of events collectively titled Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic. Pauline Oliveros gave a rousing solo performance and lecture on May 3. The next day there was a screening and performance organized by Isla Leaver-Yap, who took Meredith Monk as her subject. And the day after that served as a lengthy series of public lectures and short performances relating to a wide range of sonic activity. The Oliveros evening and the multiple lectures are all available for free download from Tate Channel, the institution’s online multimedia archive of its events. The Oliveros is especially recommended for her extended talk, in which she both explores her own history, and singles out a half dozen women composer-performers whose work she admires; these include Ximena Alarcon, Ellen Fullman, Brenda Hutchinson, Maria Chavez, Jaclyn Heyen, and Clara Tomaz.

The May 5 lectures are divided into three separate sets, each contained as a single MP3. The third is especially recommended, thanks to two lectures in particular. One is Tara Rodgers’ “Dissonant Histories: Gender and Culture in the History of Synthesized Sound,” the other Nina Power’s “The Dystopian Technology of the Female Voice.” Rodgers provides a wide-ranging critique of our understanding of the synthesizer as a largely masculine endeavor, and pays particular attention to concepts proposed by Jessica Rylan. Power’s is a fascinating study of how the female voice is employed in public space, in particular in the form of announcements, warnings, and the like. Their panel was titled “Dissonant Futures” and was chaired by Anne Hilde Neset.

More on the Her Noise symposium at tate.org.uk, where you can also access the Oliveros event as an MP3, as well as the first, second, and third parts of the lectures.

Aliens + EDM: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of June 2012

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The top 10 posts of the month of June 2012, out of a total of 39 posts, included (1) a call for submissions (top left) by New York-based Primus Luta to craft an alien signal, (2) Lisbon, Portugal’s Leonardo Rosado’s work for apparently imaginary organ and piano, (3) Milan, Italy’s Matteo Milani and Federico Placidi (aka U.S.O. Project) exploring urban noise, (4) Germany-based all cousmatic (aka Allain Cousmatique) remixing field recordings (top center) by rawore (aka Portland, Oregon’s Bob Phillips), (5) the top-10 list from May, (6) Philip Sherburne on the rise (again) of pop dance electronica, (7) the summary of the 24th Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Create four alert sounds that complement each other“), (8) non-industrial industrial music by BpOlar is Dirk Driesen (of Antwerp, Belgium), (9) non-experimental experimental music by Gerren Grant of Sacramento, California (top right), and (10) tensile free improvisation by Mathieu Werchowski (violin), Fabien Duscombs (drums), and Heddy Boubaker (electric bass).

The most popular searches on the site during the month of June were: distinction, sol rezza, aaron, instagram, albemuth, dome, monolake, the grassy knoll, zurich, bars, chiba, Horchata, humeka, iPad, lique, sexy, tallin, would-be messiahs.

Drones as Background Noise as Context

Putting the ambient sound in ambient awareness

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

One of the pleasures of following Dizzy Banjo (aka Robert Thomas, aka the Chief Creative Office at Reality Jockey, aka the home of the RjDj app) on soundcloud.com is having an ongoing sonic sense of his whereabouts. This is because Thomas/Banjo is keen to post brief snippets of field recordings. His SoundCloud account is a stream of tidy segments of real-world audio. Each track’s title generally serves as sufficient explanatory context. Like, most recently as of this writing, “Drone from loud air conditioning unit on bus at London,” which is 25 seconds of said industrial whir.

The thing about real-world sound is how much our ears edit out what we think we hear from what we’re actually hearing — the distinction not only between listening and hearing, but between something even less conscious, something about how our brains process the inputs at a purely functional level. A fascinating exercise is to carry a tape recorder with you, tape 10 minutes during which you pay attention to the sounds around you, and to then listen back to the tape. Not only are the things you missed suddenly evident, but the relative prominence of the things you were aware of often differs significantly as well. Part of this is purely mechanical, as two different microphones will also record different sonic vantages. But much of it is perceptive. To hear Thomas’ audio recordings is to get a sense of what he, aesthetically, edits for: the sounds he elects to extract from the broader world he inhabits. And, of course, because Reality Jockey has as its focus the way real-world material can be processed digitally, his SoundCloud posts also give us a glimpse into the kind of world Thomas is thinking about as he develops RJ projects.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dizzybanjo.