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

Remixing “The ‘Classical’ Button”

18 seconds gets its 15 minutes, and then some

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As of this typing, the 18 seconds of static that I recorded off my hotel radio in Evanston, Illinois, last weekend has been played over 350 times on soundcloud.com. That’s 105 minutes of a bit of noise that served more as a trigger for an extrapolative thought process than as actual listening. The noise occurred when I hit a button marked “classical” on the bedside radio. The button was, presumably, intended to be preset to the local classical radio station. Instead, it was untuned, or tuned to a near-dead zone between stations, yielding a particularly minimal techno.

Now the frequent SoundCloud poster, and Disquiet Junto participant, Jmmy Kpple has gone and riffed on the source material. His tweaking of the 18 seconds has extended it by nearly three full minutes, which collectively are titled “AntiGravity Certification #4 [@disquiet’s radio].” It’s the originating rough noise, with its beat slowed to from a twitch to a scratch, along which a sonorously fluctuating wave hovers, while another flanges up and down, like something emitted from a bit of sci-fi tech in a Cold War”“era horror film when the device gets a little too close to a man paid union scale to roam the set in a rubber suit. Which is to say, it sounds great.

Kpple tagged the creation with the characteristic “cheap concrete” genre neologism. It was especially interesting to have Kpple’s take on the near tabula rasa of that static, because the other work enacted under that name has been both enticing and remote — Kpple’s identity on SoundCloud (and at twitter.com/jmmy_kppl) is one of the most accomplished acts of ecstatic minimalism in recent memory: in sound, and image (note the slightly obscured avatar up top, with its mix of Negativland-like celebrity blankness and serrated-GIF disruption), and text (a typical Kpple track comment is a mix of vibrant disjuncture and odd characters turned into glyphs through repetition and spacing, such as “///Thanks! I guess i chose *undramatic* when i should have said something like u n e v en t f u l perhaps” and “[ w a r m c r e a k i n g & d r e a m s c r a p e &rt;”).

Kpple’s track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/jmmy-kpple. Source track at soundcloud.com/disquiet. More on the source track when it was first uploaded: “The ‘Classical’ Button.”

CDM & The Verge on Disquiet.com Projects

Technology journalists focus attention on Junto, LX(RMX), Instagr/am/bient

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The Disquiet-commissioned projects Junto, LX(RMX), and Instagr/am/bient got some great attention this past weekend when both createdigitalmusic.com and theverge.com covered them.

In “Music Making, Shared: Communal Ambient Tracks Explore Instagram Photos, Lisbon, and More,” CDM’s Peter Kirn compliments the projects (“The results are imaginative, varied, superb music”), quotes at length from a discussion he and I had, and jokes about putting a dollar value on the Instagram project, in light of the company’s recent purchase by Facebook:

Now, given the Instagram sale for US$1 billion, I would value the free compilation inspired by its photo sharing at least a couple of million dollars. Finding a welcoming community both to spur on new musical ideas and share the results? Priceless.


The piece on the Verge, “Ambient Music Community Finds Inspiration in Instagram and Ice Cubes” by Jeff Blagdon, gives welcome emphasis to a major influence on the Junto project. It opens:

For communities of creative individuals, working under shared constraints can result in some incredible work, showing off what artists can put together with a limited set of tools. A great example is the “beat battle,” in which competing musicians are all given the same sample and compete to build the best instrumental track out of it.

Part of what is rewarding about these two stories is that they come from beyond the realm of publications that are focused solely on music as end-product. Much of CDM’s coverage is on the technology of music-making, and the Verge is pretty squarely in the gadget-journalism category. Between the two articles, an additional approximately 5,000 listens were registered at soundcloud.com/disquiet in the 48 hours or so after the posts appeared, and the Disquiet Junto had almost half a dozen new participants, bringing the total to 170 as of project 16.