The Birthday Gift (MP3)

Piano-infused bliss on a happy occasion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Thomas Raukamp knows how to make friends. On the occasion of the birthday of one such friend, Fabrizio Paterlini, he recorded a thick swath of piano-infused bliss. One can only imagine how many friend requests he received after having done such a thing. The track mixes the piano — itself a combination of clearly heard notes and slowly decaying echoes — with a bright, holiday sensibility, the shards of chimes at times suggesting late December. The ending is particularly beautiful, as the more self-evidently musical element of the piano finally is one final time, after which the underlying sounds, quite like some little mechanical device, play on until fading away.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/thomasraukamp. More on Raukamp, who is based in Rendsburg, Germany, at his Tumblr page. Paterlini is himself a musician, based in Mantova, Italy. He’s at soundcloud.com/fabrizio-paterlini.

The Dada of the Buchla (MP3)

A series of brief experiments with the modular synthesizer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Pretty much the full run of recent tracks posted by the near-anonymous ngngngngngngng (from: “easthampton, United States”) share a single tag designation: “Buchla,” as in the modular synthesizer. Many of the tracks are annotated with little more than the numerical signifiers of which modules are being employed. For example, “secreters” is listed as “259e 266e 281e 292e,” to which is appended a more human-readable “ping pong delay.”

Another, more chaotic series of beeps and bloops, titled “Plastic Walls,” is labeled “Playing the 259e with the 222e through the 250e’s external inputs.” And it adds, showing that memory can be even more obfuscating than a desk of patch-cord spaghetti: “At least I think that’s what’s happening, this is an older recording i just found.”

As for the image up top, it’s from a track titled “272e01”: “Very simple patch. 281e pulsing quickly through 3 station presets one tuner of the 272e.” It’s like a super-fine radio dial switching back and forth, like the most taut pause tape you might imagine.

More from ngngngng at soundcloud.com/ngngngng. The small pieces are well worth following, especially given the promise of something more substantial down the road.

Disquiet Junto Project 0007: “Subtraction and Sculpting”

The Assignment: Create a new track by removing from an existing track.

/ 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 seventh Junto was by far the most restrictive. Everyone shared a track, and the restriction wasn’t merely a matter of not being able to work in additional sounds. The goal was that everyone would create a new track only through the process of removing material from the existing track. Hence the name: “Subtraction and Sculpting.”

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, February 16, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, February 20, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0007-subtract. As of this writing, there are 72 tracks associated with the tag.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0007: “Subtraction and Sculpting”

Instructions:

Deadline: Monday, February 20, at 11:59pm wherever you are.

Plan: The seventh Junto project is a shared-sample project. Everyone will work from the same source audio, which is provided below. You will take the provided sound sample and from it make an original work. You will do this only by subtracting sound from the sample. You won’t add anything to it. You won’t slow it down. You won’t speed it up. You won’t cut it up, and you won’t otherwise reorganize its contents. You won’t play it backwards. You will only “remove.” The word “remove” is up for interpretation — but generally speaking, I’d say that it means various acts of lowering the volume of a narrow or wide band of the audio spectrum for either a short or long period of time. And, of course, “lowering the volume” can mean be interpreted to mean “muting.” The act here of “removing” is the sonic equivalent of sculpting something from a marble block.

Please use the WAV file at the following URL:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

Length: Your piece will, due to the nature of the assignment, be the exact same length as the original recording on which it is based: two minutes (02:00).

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0007-subtract”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:

The source audio for this composition is a recording by Luftrum of waves crashing on the shore of Kalundborg Fjord at Røsnæs, Denmark:

http://www.freesound.org/people/Luftrum/sounds/48412

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

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

The results were interesting — not just the sounds, but the context in which those sounds arrived. On the one hand, it was by far the most active of the projects thus far, at least in terms of number of tracks. Within 24 hours there were as many tracks, and it was almost the case again after 48 hours. Some contributors of tracks noted that there may have been less comments for this project than previously, and it appears that the individual tracks were listened to less than in the past. That is all quite possible, and not contradictory.

I probably listen to too much of the more arid regions of the catalogs of musicians such as Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto to be a fair judge of such things, but I found the minor variations between tracks to be very interesting to observe, especially as they proceeded in sequence in sets of ten down the search-return pages of Soundcloud. A contributor named High Tunnels managed to get a groove in his (“Erosion”), and the contributor jet jaguar (in “Tide’s Out”) managed to get beats by shaping, as it was put in the track’s liner note, the volume.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The SSD fridge: http://t.co/lIKR64Tf (courtesy of @debcha) #
  • New generative sound app/project from @earslap, creator of Otomata: http://t.co/8tNIYsLZ It’s called Circuli. #
  • “SSD fridge” pluses/minuses. RT @atlastop: @disquiet what really fast at freezing things, but never enough space to fit all your stuff? #
  • René Margraff replied to my SSD/fridge comment: “Do you really want a fridge with very little storage space for a high price?” #
  • Wondering if someone would, please, release the SSD equivalent of a refrigerator. #
  • Quak channels Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” & Hopper takes “breathless” approach to Junto 8 (Benjamin Franklin remix): http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • 7 sentences from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography have been chopped and screwed so far in the 8th Disquiet Junto: http://t.co/lSzqLIp5 #
  • Cannot remember the last time I typed www. #

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

The Data of the Buddha (MP3)

The first edition of the drone box gets a late-model remake.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Early on in “Pure Buddha Data,” a recent piece of music by Stephen Stamper, a four-note riff comes briefly into sonic view. The fourth of the notes is so subdued that it might not even exist. That final note trails off into the lush ringing field that is the majority of the work, a thick lawn amid which the riff occasionally blooms. The brief melody is not dissimilar to the theme from the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, those Morse-like tones with which aliens and humans find a common if rudimentary language by employing math transformed into music. In the movie, the music is harmonically sound, which lends the meeting the air of good will.

The notes in Stamper’s piece will be familiar to anyone who has turned on the first of the Buddha Machines. It is a rare melodic moment from the device, designed by the duo FM3 to emit swaying drones and drone-like effluence until its batteries run out. In the brief note appended to the track, Stamper mentions that the sounds we’re hearing are “A first generation FM3 Buddha Machine left to run through my Pure Data performance patch.” (Pure Data is the name of a graphic programming environment.) That patch appears to be the same software process that he employed in the production of a recent contribution he made to the Disquiet Junto project, when the collective remixed a track off the recent Marcus Fischer album, Collected Dust:

Listening to both tracks is to let the mind slowly reverse engineer what it is, exactly — well, more to the point, inexactly — Stamper’s patch is doing. It isn’t a destructo approach. It’s more of a thickening and quickening agent. It speeds up the material in a manner that it loops back on itself, accruing layers into a sonorous denseness that, somehow, doesn’t fully lose the gentle qualities of the original source material.

Both tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/bitsnibblesbytes. More on Stamper, who is based in London, at bitsnibblesbytes.wordpress.com and
twitter.com/bitnibblebyte.