Junto at Hilobrow.com

In which she decodes the predictions inherent in Benjamin Franklin's original Junto

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com has produced a thoughtful and highly appreciated overview of the weekly Disquiet Junto series of music assignments, which are hosted at soundcloud.com.

She intersperses pairs of recordings from various Junto assignments in order to highlight contrasts in response to the same instructions and source material. And in between these pairings, she inserts descriptions of the Junto’s broader concerns. She touches on Benjamin Franklin, whose own Junto loaned its name to our endeavor, and has kind words regarding the open nature of participation in our modern version.

And she drops this excellent insight:

“A social club dedicated to mutual improvement”might be a #TweetsOfOld description of remix culture, if we extend social into media and networking, and aim improvement at the artworks instead of their makers. Exchanging leather aprons for a screen and mouse, Disquiet Junto is a fresh update on an old, but still very much alive and relevant, idea, applying social and improvement to music remixing.

Variations on the phrase “social club dedicated to mutual improvement”are routinely associated with Franklin’s Junto, based on phrasing originating in his autobiography. I’ve been employing it myself when talking about the origins of the term. What Nelson does is great. She unpacks the phrase. She locates within the word “social” a premonition of social media, and matters even broader than social media: the modern, digitally enabled network culture that characterizes creative life on the Internet. From “improvement,” Nelson notes the sense of iterative development inherent in the sequential and recombinant essence of remixing. That is, in brief, some excellent cogitation.

At the end of her piece, Nelson thanks twitter.com/lrjp for “additional music reporting,” so I will as well. Read the full piece at hilobrow.com. Follow Nelson on Twitter at twitter.com/otolythe. And read at theatlantic.com how she got her “otolythe” moniker. It involves hearing and physiology and little fish and the evolution of self-identification on the Internet.

So Percussion Remixes So Percussion (MP3)

Free download of the ensemble turning its drone into an electronic stomp

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is much to enjoy and appreciate in So Percussion‘s freely released remix project, Amid the Noise Remixes, a collection of reworkings of their album Amid the Noise enacted by three of the four members of the group: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, and Jason Treuting (only member Adam Sliwinski isn’t credited on the collection’s dozen remixes). The first remix on the record makes for helpful comparison with the original, because the original is also available for free download, from cantaloupemusic.com, the website of the releasing record label. The original record came out toward the end of 2006. The remix collection came out in December 2011.

The original, “June,” is a percussion (but not percussive) exploration of tone, thick ringing globules of tone that announced Amid the Noise as something other than So Percussion’s listeners had come to expect. To upend expectations, they opened the album on a track essentially lacking in plosives: in verbal terms, it’s all extended vowels, virtually absent of consonants (MP3). Even at a narrative level, it is willfully remote, a stretch of concentrated stasis in place of thematic development. It is splendid.

[audio:http://www.cantaloupemusic.com/mp3/ca21039.mp3|titles=”June”|artists=So Percussion]

The remix, by So Percussion member Quillen, upends the upending. It takes the original and gives it the jitters, and then once the jitters have set in but good, it adds a heavy thud of a beat that builds over time. If the original version refuted development, this one welcomes it, altering as it proceeds, transforming at a swaggering and geometric pace. Like the original “June” on the original album, the “June” remix announces the remix album’s intentions. In this case, that would be a fun night out.

Get the full set for free at sopercussion.bandcamp.com. More on So Percussion at sopercussion.com.

Lisbon & Comments: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of February 2012

Lisbon remixed, two songs for 2/22, open comments, and other reader favorites

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The most popular post of February 2012, out of 28 total posts for the month, was (1) the announcement of a new Disquiet-commissioned project, LX(RMX) / Lisbon Remixed, in which eight musicians under sixteen names remixed the sounds of urban Lisbon. The project was a collaboration with artist Jorge Colombo.

Also among the 10 most popular posts were (2) an overview of the fifth in the ongoing Disquiet Junto series, this one involving adding sounds to a pre-existing documentary recording of everyday noise, (3) an announcement that this site no longer requires a comment to be approved by a moderator before being published, and (4) liner notes that I wrote for a two-song project by musicians Corey Allen and Marcus Fischer.

Three of the site’s daily Downstream MP3 recommendations made the top 10: (5) one on the persistence of the wind chime in instrumental hip-hop, (6) another on the drone-industrial complex, and (7) a third on music for koto, pitch pipe, and samplers.

Rounding out the top 10 most popular posts of the month: (8) the list of the 10 most popular posts of the preceding month, and (9, 10) two of the automated Saturday repostings of twitter.com/disquiet.

The most popular searches of the month were: harold budd live, junto, souns, autechre, bars, Buddha Machine, rjdj, dubstep, Maximin, virant, would-be messiahs, amon tobin, astralwerks, curated, flyer, gareth dickson, grouper, iron chef of music, mashup, mixtapes

Cross-Country Dreamtime (MP3)

Matthew Barlow tracks a sonic course

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The less we know, the easier for the imagination to draw seemingly self-evident correlations. Two points make a straight line, and in the case of musician Matthew Barlow, who goes by AllDaySleep, those two points of late have been Sedona, Arizona, and Asheville, North Carolina. Barlow and his wife just moved from the former to the latter. “Clouds Moving Across an Endless Sky” was recorded in one or the other, at the start or end of the trip, or perhaps somewhere in between. The track’s title certainly suggests the way the world’s ceiling presents itself during an extended journey: an unbroken cover whose expansiveness challenges the brain’s comprehension of space, time, and proximity. And the music, a cautious cumulus of light textures, telegraphs the odd mixture of stasis and momentum that characterize a lengthy drive, especially one that marks a point of transition in one’s life.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/matthewbarlow. More on Barlow at matthewbarlow.tumblr.com/.

The Museum Never Sleeps (MP3s)

John Kannenberg documents the sonic archeology of an archaeology museum.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Few sounds are as dutiful as those of simple machines working properly. John Kannenberg captures the workaday, slow-motion apparatus that is the semi-automated storage facility at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

The sounds he recorded carry with them several meanings. To begin with, they are in stark contrast with the more general, ambient noises that Kannenberg has documented at various museums around the world, from the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, an ongoing homage to John Cage’s famed 4’33”. While so much documentary audio captures the wide swath of noise at a specific location, there is little in Kannenberg’s Kelsey shelf documentation aside from the creak of gears, the rattling of wheels, the sedimentary slamming of heavy metal structures. The sounds are, furthermore, significantly distant from the more politically charged museum recordings that served as Kannenberg’s memorial for Ahmed Basiony, the artist slain in the early days of the Egyptian uprising a year ago. And finally, and perhaps foremost, the mortuary aura of these sounds reflects the archeological subject matter of the Kelsey’s holdings.

Kannenberg uploaded the shelf sounds along with another set of library noises, those of a separate mechanical procedure, one in which a human handles the chores. It is the sound of pages being turned in an original edition of the Description de l’Égypte, the 1798 collection of findings from the Napoleanic Expedition. (It isn’t Kannenberg turning the pages, but Egyptologist T.G. Wilfong, who is also credited with “shelf manipulation” on the first track.) The volume is part of the Kelsey holdings:

There is a special beauty to Kannenberg’s sound work here, because he has captured the ephemeral noises, the intangible byproduct, of an institution dedicated to preserving physical artifacts. He has documented the sonic archaeology of an archeology museum.

Both files were posted to Kannenberg’s soundcloud.com/stasisfield account. More on the Kelsey at lsa.umich.edu. This coming month, Kannenberg will have an extensive exhibit, which involves performance, at the museum. More on that exhibit, titled Hours of Infinity, at hoursofinfinity.tumblr.com. I wrote the foreword to the exhibit’s catalog. More on Kannenberg at johnkannenberg.com.

(The above image is a detail from a mummiform coffin, part of the Kelsey collection, dating from 525 BC.)