Snare Dub (MP3)

It's like an X-ray of dub: all the contours, none of the humidity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Andras Hargitai, who’s based in Budapest, Hungary, has posted one of his most rarified, desiccated bits of dub yet. Titled “Saturday Sub (Live),” it is dub from an alternate universe, a place where the snare serves as the unlikely source of dubby goodness. In his rendition, the downtempo track has all the remote echoes one associates with dub, but not only is it laden with a raspy high-pitched beat, like a signal flare doubling as a metronome, it seems to take place in a uniquely arid environment. It’s like an X-ray of dub: all the contours, none of the humidity. It’s post-Singularity dub, when dance halls are unmapped partitions of forgotten hard drives.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/banyek314. More of Hargitai’s work at banyek.bandcamp.com. Here’s a group interview I did back in 2006 that Hargitai participated in: “Free as in Netlabel.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0009: “Cross-Species Collaboration”

The Assignment: Create a cross-species collaboration between bird song and acoustic guitar.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com 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.

The ninth project in the Junto series was another “shared sample” project, though there were some variables at work. The musicians were given the same samples to work from, but they had a choice. Two choices, in fact. There were two guitar samples, both acoustic, though one employed a slide, and there were two bird-song samples.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, March 1, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, March 5, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0009-avian. As of this writing, there are 78 tracks associated with the tag.

Here are the instructions that were presented to members of the Disquiet Junto:

Disquiet Junto Project 0009: Cross-Species Collaboration

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, March 5, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The ninth Junto project is a shared-sample project, though participants have some choice in the source material. Each participant will produce a single track that combines a source recording of bird song and a source recording of acoustic guitar. Four samples are provided: two guitar, two bird song. You will select one of the two guitar samples and one of the two bird-song samples. You will employ only those two samples in the production of your track. You can do whatever you want with those two samples (process, contort, edit, etc.). The goal is to explore the very different origins of these sounds: one human, one avian.

These are the two options for the guitar sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/30266/
http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/40866/

These are the two options for the bird-song sample:

http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/14909/
http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/32480/

Length: Please keep your piece to between two and five minutes in length.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0009-avian”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.

Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.

Linking: When you post your track, please include this information:

The source material for this track was provided from these two samples:

[and then include the two appropriate freesound.org links]

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

The biggest surprise for me was that the slide guitar sample was far less popular among remixes than the other acoustic guitar sample. Someone at some stage commented along the lines that if they never again heard the latter chord progression it would be too soon, though many people re-used it to transformative effect, and as always slight variations were, to my ears, as illuminating as drastic ones. One possible reason the acoustic guitar was more popular was it provided a more clear contrast to the bird song than the slide guitar did.

One thing I learned was: have backups available of source material. The great freesound.org site was the location of the four samples, and it is not the most stable environment. It went down during the project, perhaps as a result of Junto participants’ downloading. Numerous Junto members answered the call to make the source tracks available, and in the end everyone benefited from the assistance of Larry Johnson, DJ_Kaboodle, Matt Kane, and Elst Pizarro

The image up top is a still of a kinetic sculpture by Keith Newstead (more info at keithnewsteadautomata.com). His work is tremendous, and I was unaware of it until Junto participant Schrödinger’s Dog employed an image from it as the “cover” to his entry in the ninth project: soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • RIP, Peter Bergman (b. 1939), founding member of Firesign Theater, ingeniously used audio in satiric comedy: http://t.co/YPM7KzyG #
  • RIP, Moebius (b. Jean Giraud, 1938), comic book artist. #
  • Never checked out the Stones Throw Beat Battle (big influence on Junto)? It’s in its 261st week, and it’s a great one: http://t.co/W3PXB5KD #
  • Yowza. The Disquiet Junto 1 one track away from its 500th track in 10 weeks: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • Dear Hivemind: Is there a AAA version of the AA USB battery that USBCell makes? #
  • Excellent reason to skip a week. RT @arbeemonkey: My new project is takin all my studio time, not sure I’ll submit for the 10th junto. #
  • That premonition of typing on a keyboard becoming an antiquated practice. #
  • Remembering Samuel Johnson’s emphasis on the weighting of words in drama has made me more empathetic toward emoticons. #

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

The Modular Harmonica (MP3)

Homework ... when your teacher is Morton Subotnick

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Ethan Hein regularly posts his ongoing projects at his soundcloud.com/ethanhein page, including recent excursions into music for film. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the music technology program at New York University. And among his professors is none other than the legendary Morton Subotnick, who is schooling his students in the Buchla synthesizer and in the more contemporary software suite, Ableton Live. Hein just posted his “midterm project,” a phrase that isn’t all that promising, since it brings to mind homework, but Hein’s “midterm” is a fun employment of the Buchla. As he explains it:

“Midterm project for Morton Subotnick’s seminar, combining whistling, assorted mouth sounds and harmonica filtered through the Buchla synth (which is also being voltage controlled along various parameters by the mic envelope.) Afterwards I layered on some heavily processed percussion.”

The result is a whimsical experiment in mouth-powered modular, which true to its “Buchla Harmonica” title does often resemble the sound of a kind of cybernetic busker. Above is a photo that Hein posted of Subotnick’s own Buchla. Here is his audio midterm:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/ethanhein. Hein mentioned his studies on his ethanhein.com blog. And he’s on Twitter at @ethanhein. More on Subotnick at mortonsubotnick.com.

Improvisation and Everyday Sound (MP3)

The cooked and the raw of the noise of our lives

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The combination of performed and everyday sound is a many-splendored thing. Often as not, the former is provided a backdrop by the latter. The relative distinctions lend much of such a work’s tension. The performed music expresses the impact of the human mind and physicality on an instrument, while the everyday noises express the external chaos of life beyond our control. It’s a kind of after-and-before shot of the cooked and the raw of the noise of our lives: that which we make of sound, and the sounds that surround us. Different musicians handle the balance in different ways, sometimes leveling the playing field, making the distinction between these two sides less self-evident, perhaps by “playing” the everyday sounds through sampling and processing, or perhaps by bringing random or less formal elements into their own playing.

In the track “Scattered” by ioflow, the procedure was as follows: after improvising on an electric piano, he “then went out to the park to capture some sounds. it was a bitterly cold, intermittently rainy day. came back and combined the two recordings, slicing, processing, effecting, and sequencing.” It’s a lovely combination. Indeed, the processing of the “real” sounds and the electronic nature of the “played” sounds helps find a common ground. Perhaps the strongest association, though, is provided by the improvised nature of the piano playing, the loose correlation of melodic elements that engages the imagination rather than directing it as a formal composition might have.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ioflow/scattered. More on ioflow, aka Josh Saddler, at museimpromptu.net and twitter.com/ioflow.