The Doors of Perception / The Perception of Doors (MP3)

The otherworldly horror inherent in everyday sounds

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sonic source material exists anywhere and everywhere. Often the most ordinary sounds yield the most fantastic results, and not only because their content is so ignored as to serve as a secret well of audio fodder. Perhaps the main reason everyday noises can yield alarming results through experimental electronic audio processing is because by focusing on these sounds, the composer employing them simultaneously exposes the noises elsewhere, and in turn asks what is inside of those sounds. If, for example, the supermarket doors that serve as Ambienteer‘s quotidian muse in a recent track can yield the sort of anxiety generally associated with a Francis Bacon portrait, what of other doors: the locked one that leads to the bedroom, or the mechanical one enclosing the garage, or the hinged one that covers the front of the oven?

He explains his process on “Automatic Doors” as follows:

This v.experimental piece is a recording taken 5/3/2012 of the automatic doors of a supermarket in Addlestone, Surrey. It’s a really amazing sound yet I can’t think why they’ve chosen such noisy, if harmonic motors.

I’ve simply layered three versions of the recording, each warped a little in pitch, to thicken things, and slightly effected the overall mix with some eq and a little reverb.

I hear a sound that reminds me of childhood days playing in tower block lifts, with the sound of the wind whistling through the elevator shafts in which we travelled along with the clunks, clicks and the singing electrical motors.

The result is a quietly harrowing tour, the rattling of chains as if in some paraphysical prison. Often a fade-out can sound at a track’s end like an easy way out for the composer, the close of a piece of music just decreasing in volume until it hits silence. But here, it is as if some nightmare train is slowly pulling away from the station, going into the dark distance. And just as it’s almost out of earshot, there is one final primal whine.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ambienteer. More on Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, at ambienteer.com and twitter.com/ambienteer. He’s based in Guildford, Britain.

Synth Almost-Pop (MP3)

An exercise in mellow Kraftwerkian stasis

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a little heartbeat, the sleep-time murmur of a candy robot, the appears at a regular pace during “My Mistake,” a recent posting by Earsmack at soundcloud.com/earsmack. It’s a small, rising, rhythmic pulse, a sing-song melodic snippet that sets the pace for this slow, methodical bit of synthesized almost-pop. It isn’t really a song, leaving aside the absence of a lyric. It opens and closes with compositional finesse, far more than just a fade in and out. And it opts for a kind of mellow Kraftwerkian stasis in place of any proper development. Which isn’t a criticism — the stasis is in the track’s favor. The monotony underscores just how monotone the track isn’t. It’s lively, if mellow, and utterly delighted in its artificiality. What isn’t clear is the title’s meaning. “My Mistake” sounds nothing like a mistake. It sounds deliberate and self-aware. A real treat.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/earsmack. More on Earsmak at earsmack.com and twitter.com/earsmack.

Disquiet Interview on Hilobrow

In which Peggy Nelson asks about Junto, Benjamim Franklin, Instagram, "the influence question," Twitter, IRL, CC, and more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

If you follow Peggy Nelson on Twitter (where she’s @otolythe), or her writings at hilobrow.com, you know she pays particular attention to sonic subjects. It was a pleasure when she inquired about interviewing me about Disquiet projects, and it was doubly a pleasure when the interview got underway. Not only did she lead up to the interview with a great overview of the Disquiet Junto group a few days in advance, she also illustrated both articles with a well-chosen selection of tracks from both the Junto and Instagr/am/bient. And, she asked some great questions that worked together collectively to get me thinking about threads that run through various projects, and where they are rooted in the broader culture, and in my own personal experience. The full interview is at hilobrow.com. It’s pretty lengthy (Nelson tags it as a #longread), so I’ll reproduce here my response to her final question, on the chance some readers don’t get that far:

What’s your view of music in the 21st century? Where’s it going, where should it go?

Man, how many pages do you have for me to fill? I’ll be brief with this one, or try to be. I think talking about the future is a fool’s game, and even though I’m as foolish as the next person, I’m going to talk about the present instead.

I think we’re in a resplendently transitional moment, and while I have no idea what kind of unforeseen form might become normalized, I do like to think we can do a lot to make more of our present cultural circumstances. I think there is something between RSS and API that could make music more exhilarating, and that’s kind of what Junto is for me. RSS can be seen as the steady flow of information in a linear fashion that allows for its wide, unintended dispersal. API can be described as the means by which a code-based system allows itself to interact with other code-based systems.

There is a reason why political blogs are exciting even if the individual posts are just ever-shifting bits of tea-reading and barometer-checking, because watching politics unfold in real time is fascinating, and watching a good blogger’s mind change in real time is intoxicating, like the best serial television can be. I think music has an opportunity to unfold in a more blog-like mode. Meanwhile, most of the major online commercial music apparatuses are just trying to make virtual record stores, and I think that’s a strategic error so sizable that “strategic”is an understatement; I just don’t know what is to “strategic”the way “strategic”is to “tactical.”Maybe I should just get comfortable with that hackneyed term, “paradigm.”

Anyhow, the future — OK, here I go, fool that I am — isn’t an online record store. It could be something else, something more fluid and ephemeral, with a sense of narrative underlying it. I think music in the not too distant future might relate to the concept of a record store like telephones related to the concept of a “visiting card”and automobiles related to the concept of a train schedule.

Read the full piece at hilobrow.com. More on Nelson at peggynelson.com and twitter.com/otolythe.

A Split Second Before the Funk (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“Goobs en Regalia” by Craque is several things. It’s a single individual improvising on a synthesizer. It’s a standalone track by a musician who’s released enough full-length collections to know the unique pleasures of the online single. And, at various times throughout, it’s the sound of something rhythmic and tasty a split second before it kicks in. The improvisations that Craque performs are a mix of gurgling tones and snatches of fuzzy static. The one-sentence liner note describes it as follows: “A bit of an excursion through the twisted roots of what’s through us.” The playing regularly ekes out these memorable little segments, like an avant-garde performance built entirely from fragments of pop music. Numerous among them have the sound of a proper riff in the process of winding up, but they rarely if ever repeat often enough to take on any sort of compositional solidity, at least until the very end when a blippy rhythm is allowed to continue at some length. Many of them in the process of winding up sound like they’re about to unleash some serious funk, like the gurgling is about to congeal into a serious beat. It never happens, which is no failure; that sense of tantalization is a core part of the track’s pleasure.

More on Craque at craque.net. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/craque.

Disquiet Junto Project 0008: “Giving Voice”

The Assignment: Rework a spoken-word recording of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.

/ 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 eighth project in the Junto series was the first to actively employ voices. Voices had appeared in some of the earlier projects, but entirely at the decision of an individual musician. Here, words were the subject.

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 27, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0008-voice. As of this writing, there are 51 tracks associated with the tag.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0008: Giving Voice

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 27, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The eighth Junto project is the first to focus on the human voice. It is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from roughly the same source material, though there are choices to be made. You will select a single sentence (or extended, self-contained clause) from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It is Franklin’s own Junto Society that provided the name for our association. You will either extract the single sentence/clause from this public-domain recording of Chapter 11 from the book:

archive.org

Or you will record your own version of a sentence/clause of your choice (again, as long as it is from Chapter 11). The free text of the autobiography is available here — the link goes directly to the 11th chapter:

gutenberg.org

Whether you use the provided MP3 or you elect to record a section yourself, you will use that recording as the sole audio source material in your work. You can do with it as you wish — cut it up, slow it down, process it, otherwise transform it — so long as at some point, the sentence/clause is comprehensible to the listener. You will not add any other sounds.

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 “disquiet0008-voice”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 the track, please include this information if you use the MP3:

The underlying vocal sample is from this public-domain recording of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, from LibriVox:

archive.org

And use this information if you record your own sentence from Franklin’s book:

Text made possible thanks to:

gutenberg.org

And either way, please include this:

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

Many of the participants opted to use the MP3 from the public domain recording of the autobiography, while some did employ an original recording of the text, and at least one participant uses a text-to-speech software approach. Particularly effective were tracks in which the musicians emphasized the meaning of the spoken text, and several singled out sentences in which the word “Junto” appears (Franklin’s Junto is the society from which our Junto takes its name).

As an additional side benefit of the project, many of the participants saw fit to rework portraits of old Franklin, with particular attention paid to his various likenesses that have adorned the $100 bill. The images up top are just four examples. They originate in tracks by, clockwise, from upper left: Matt Nix, Naotko, Stringbot, and DJ Kaboodle.