Modular Hip-hop (MP3)

Time heals all musical genre rifts

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Musics from disparate cultures that occur during a similar era might have shared dispositions, shared characteristics, that become clear only as time progresses. Case in point: Ethan Hein‘s recent experiment in employing a Buchla modular synthesizer to rework source material from hip-hop, specifically the human beatboxing of Doug E Fresh. Fresh isn’t himself self-evident in the track, so transformed are his syllables. But the vibrancy of the track makes sense when the listener is informed of the source material. Hein reports that it is a rough draft of a piece for a class he is taking with Morton Subotnik, who back in 1963 was responsible for commissioning the development of the Buchla, which was the first analog synthesizer: “Rough mix of my newest Buchla epic,” writes Hein, “with some processed beatboxing by the great Doug E Fresh. Presently long and unstructured. Future iterations will probably be shorter and more orderly.”

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ethanhein. Earlier homework by Hein for his Subotnick class: “The Modular Harmonica.” More on Hein at ethanhein.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, Swiss artist David Weiss (b.1946) of Fischli/Weiss: Rube Goldberg-ish video The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge) http://t.co/05DZynwH #
  • RIP, Joe Muranyi (b. 1928), latter-day Dixieland clarinetist in Louis Armstrong’s band: http://t.co/5xUFnQiN, http://t.co/KrGmazuP #
  • 17th Disquiet Junto project already has 2 new 1st-time participants: Biel, Switzerland’s @tobiasreber & NYC’s @clownfacee. #
  • Somehow got a http://t.co/ygIzHsQ1 MBAir cover at Apple store in @soundcloud orange/grey today even though they’re not on the @acmemade site #
  • Note from daycare today says my kid has started a band with two other kids. My kid turns 20 months on Monday. #
  • The telltale pocket-fabric swish with which begins the semi-surreptitiously recorded bootleg of a lecture. #
  • Anyone have any experience with the mailing-list services of http://t.co/abAJFrlp or http://t.co/2oFj6v4s? #
  • Read my first Kindle Single: Jonathan Biss’ Beethoven’s Shadow. Pondering his informed critique of the shadow cast by recording equipment. #
  • Wonderful! RT @tobiasreber: posted my 1st disquiet #junto contribution on soundcloud. glad I could finally participate http://t.co/0d6EsmUR #
  • Downtown San Francisco is like a busker convention today. #
  • Coldplay’s “Trouble” is Pink Floyd fan fiction. #

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

Tangents: Lethem/Cage, Kracfive Gaming, iOS Updates

News, quick links, good reads

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

4’33 Neoteny: Jonathan Lethem gave the tenth State of Cinema address at the 55th San Francisco Film Festival on April 21, and wired.it posted a bootleg of the audio. The sprawling lecture, which is highly recommended, is very much a novelist welcoming film to post-relevancy. Of course, Lethem turns matters of relevancy on their head, employing the concept of “neoteny,” in which juvenile traits surface in adult behavior (that is a poor paraphrase). In the process of outlining his thinking, he attributes neotenic qualities to John Cage’s 4’33”, describing it as the sounds a child might accomplish before even beginning to learn to play piano. Lethem’s latest book is a study of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, which was produced by Brian Eno (continuumbooks.com).

Ball, Game: The name Noah Sasso will be familiar to longtime readers of Disquiet.com due to his having been a founding member of the Kracfive collective (kracfive.com), whose Iron Chef of Music was a big presence on this site for many years, and was an influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Like many electronic-music practitioners, Sasso has an active role in game development, and his new project, BaraBariBall, will debut at the NYU Game Center’s Third Annual No Quarter Exhibition (nyu.edu) on May 18. He’s posted this video trailer (at vimeo.com) for the game. It has that perfect mix of pixel elegance and stellar fluid motion, like watching basketball through mosaic sunglasses:

Sasso says it was developed for Windows and Mac but has no current planned public release. More on Sasso at strangeflavor.net and soundcloud.com/strangeflavor.

App Updates (iOS Edition): Tabletop, a virtual music studio with device emulators, has improved the manner in which one swaps between devices. ”¦
Animoog has debuted a SoundSet by Richard Devine in its in-app storefront. …
The Buddha Machine app has been updated to include sounds from the Buddha Machine 3.

Leonardo Rosado’s Barren Sonic Landscape (MP3)

A new track from the Lisbon-based musician

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Leonardo Rosado‘s “Sharp Knives Eyes” opens with what could easily be, or be mistaken for, the warning signals of fog-deep lighthouses, muffled and solemn sirens that pulse slowly and forbiddingly. As the track proceeds, the sounds soon move from apparent naturalism to a more representative approach, as what appears to be a slowly implemented guitar registers a barren sonic landscape. The music straddles the line between enticing and remote, between the depiction of a stark realm, and being pleasing in its solitary presence.

The track appears on the Escala 2:3 compilation (escalared.com). It was also posted, individually, at soundcloud.com/l-r-1. Based in Lisbon, Portugal, Rosado runs the great feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com netlabel. More on him at works-by-lr.tumblr.com.

Disquiet Junto Project 0017: Transition:

The Assignment: Make a transition from field recording to pre-existing track.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

*Each Thursday evening at [the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) 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](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/).*

This assignment was made in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, April 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, December 30, as the deadline.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list:

>Instructions for Disquiet Junto Project 0017: Transition:
>
>Deadline: Monday, April 30, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Plan, in three steps:
>
>First step: At some point during the day, make a field recording of the world around you. Then select a 30-second segment from it. (Please, don’t include other people’s voices without their knowledge unless you are absolutely certain doing so is legal wherever it is you make the recording.)
>
>Second step: Choose one of the following two preexisting tracks and select a 30-second segment:
>
>Option 1: http://archive.org/download/zero130/01AControlledBurn.mp3
>Option 2: http://archive.org/download/WM074_900/WM074-03_64kb.mp3
>
>Third step: Create a new track in which your field recording can be heard to slowly transition into the preexisting track. You can add whatever you like to the new track, and you can transform the field recording and the preexisting track. However, the first five seconds of your field recording and the last 5 seconds of the pre-existing track should be left untouched, aside from fading in and out. The goal is for the transition to be as indiscernible, as seamless, as you can achieve in the time allotted for production.
>
>Length: Please keep your finished track to between 1.5 and 4 minutes in length.
>
>Information: Please along with your track include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it.
>
>Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0017-transition”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
>
>Download: Please set your track to download, in alignment with “share alike” nature of the Creative Commons license employed by the source tracks.
>
>License: Please assign this license to your track: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
>
>Linking: When you post your track, please include this information:
>
>If you used Option 1, please include this information:
>
>This track includes a segment of “A Controlled Burn” by Tag Cloud off the album Named Entities on the Zeromoon netlabel, thanks to Creative Commons license. More information at:
>http://archive.org/details/zero130
>http://zeromoon.com/releases/tag-cloud-named-entities-zero130/
>
>If you used Option 2, please include this information:
>
>This track includes a segment of “The Day Love Came In The Mail” by Lee Rosevere off the album Play 3 on the WM Recordings netlabel, thanks to Creative Commons license. More information at:
>http://archive.org/details/WM074_900
>http://www.wmrecordings.com/free-downloads/wm074-lee-rosevere-play-3/
>
>And whichever track you used, please include this:
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info