The Tumblr Album (MP3)

Sol Rezza's free-download album makes expert personal use of the ubiquitous curatorial tool

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is a techno heart somewhere deep in Sol Rezza‘s “The Existence of the Light Part III.” It’s in the wisp of a beat that patters along beneath everything else, a pixel tick tock. There’s a current of a beat above that, too, a more thorough pulse, one that fades in early and out late, that again has some semblance of techno to it. But the music is, after a brief moment at the start that suggests a clear genre slot, adventurous and spacious and adventurous in its spaciousness.

There’s plenty use of techno’s flavors, notably gurgling synth and those bauble beats, that bring Underworld to mind, that ability to have one foot in the rave and another in the gallery, both in the same pair of shoes.

This single track is, as its title suggests, part of a large-scale “album,” more a collection of images, still and moving, and text fragments as well as voluminous sounds that makes extremely creative use of the Tumblr publishing system’s inherent promise as a cabinet of curiosities. This screenshot below is just a narrow band of Rezza’s generous spectrum:

Track found via devinsarno.com. The large-scale project is housed at light.radio-arte.com, a subset of Rezza’s radio-arte.com webiste. She is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Grouper Takes Dead Moon’s “Demona” Literally

A punk favorite goes through the ambient pulper

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Grouper has covered an old punk-rock song. Grouper has channeled has an old punk-rock song into something akin to a deep drone. Grouper has accomplished this task not by undermining the original but, in fact, showing it deep respect — by, in essence, taking the song’s lyrics literally, especially the lines about how the title figure “comes in shallow light and disappears” and, later, the cryptic vision of a “silent chamber.” The song, “Demona” by Dead Moon, is in her rendering (Grouper is one person: Liz Harris) a deeply fuzzed out figment, less a song than the song equivalent of the illusion of water that results from hot tarmac being viewed at a distance on a sunny day. The melody and chord structure and overall shape are retained, but they’re produced in a way that makes the term “shoegaze” insufficient — this is “shoehaze” or “shoedrone” or “songdrone” or what-does-it-matter because trying to place the song in a tidy box is very much at odds with the ephemeral quality of the sound that it aspires to (MP3). It sounds like you’re hearing it through a thick wall. It isn’t wall-of-sound; it’s wall-as-filter.

[audio:http://media.xlr8r.com/files/downloads/mp3s/Demona.mp3|titles=”Demona”|artists=Grouper]

The track was made available for free download by Yeti, the magazine in whose latest issue it appears as part of an enclosed 7″ (along with three other songs, apparently not available for free promotional download).

Found via xlr8r.com and thefader.com. More on Grouper at her site. The original can be heard on youtube.com. It is redolent with a particular quality of guitar playing, one that is at once lackadaisical and jarring, and is distinct to a certain realm of non-hardcore punk

Industrial/Drone/Chimes: The Top 10 Posts & Searches of January 2012

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There were 38 posts on Disquiet.com in January 2012, and the most popular were as follows:

(1) a consideration of white noise in the work of Phil Julian (“A Variety of Noises, White and Otherwise”), (2) a “Sneak Peek at New Disquiet.com Project: Disquiet Junto,”, (3) the fuzzy beats of Would-Be Messiahs (“Hairshirt Industrial”), (4) a work for dual wind chimes by Josh Davison, aka Stringbot (“Chimes and More Chimes”), (5) Alarm Will Sound performing a syncopated work by Liza White (“When a Chamber Ensemble Sounds Like a Jazz Ensemble Sounds Like Breakbeat”), (6) a pair of tracks off Michal Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly), (7) “Russian Post-Turntable Turntablism” by Mizontiq, and (8) “Sketch of a Drone / Drone as Sketch,” on a piece by Pacers that at times sounds like a church organ being tuned by an especially patient and exacting workman. Also: not (9) one but (10) two automated selections of what has happened in the previous week at twitter.com.disquiet.

The most popular searches (searches that didn’t yield null results) were: harold budd live, junto, autechre, best of 2010, In the Echo of No Towers, souns, mark harris, saito koji, Kahlen, weir, would-be messiahs, airport, brian eno, Carrie Underwood, compilations.

Disquiet Junto Project 0004: “Remixing Marcus Fischer”

The Assignment: Rework a track from a 365-day project that inspired Junto's creation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


The fourth Disquiet Junto project returned to the shared sample — or in this case, 10 shared samples.

Marcus Fischer, the accomplished musician based in Portland, Oregon, generously agreed to provide the constituent parts of one of the tracks off his latest album, Collected Dust, which was released this month on the Tench record label. The track, “Nearly There,” was the second-to-last entry in a year-long daily creative project he undertook from January 2009 through 2010.

Fischer’s music is elegant and elegiac, and its gentleness belies its complexity. As the project began, it was clear that it would be interesting to see how people worked with the material. How much would they make it their own, or how much would they attempt to extend what they perceived Fischer had begun. There was, at a psychological level, the additional awareness that individual who was the source of the sounds was active on Soundcloud and would, almost certainly, be checking in. That proved to be the case in one particularly unexpected way — but before we get to that, here are the instructions that were provided to Junto members:

“Nearly There” is a track off Marcus Fischer’s new album, Collected Dust, released this month on the Tench label.

Fischer has provided 10 constituent parts of the track in the following downloadable Zip file:

http://mapmap.ch/disquiet/junto_MFischer.zip/

Each participating Junto member will contribute an individual remix of the track, using as much or as little of the original as they choose.

Title: Your track should be titled “Nearly There (Disquiet0004-mfischer TBD Remix)” where the “TBD” is between one and three words of your choosing. (It could, for example, be your name or a descriptive phrase.)

Tag: Please associate the tag “disquiet0004-mfischer” with the file.

Source Material (i): No, you don’t have to use every file that Fischer has provided, just as many as you would like.

Source Material (ii): Yes, you can add sounds beyond those provided.

Length: The length of your remix is up to you, but under 10 minutes seems wise. For reference, the original track is a little over six minutes long.

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

License: Per an agreement with Fischer and with Tench, any track submitted for this Junto should be associated with the following Creative Commons license with your track: “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).”

Information: When you post the track, please include these three links:

http://mapmap.ch/
http://www.tenchrec.com/TCH05.html/
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Additional Background:

The track “Nearly There” is not just an example of Marcus Fischer’s Collected Dust album. It originally appeared as the penultimate entry in the 365-day creative project he presented online, and material from it was part of the final entry in that same year-long series. That marathon creative experiment of Fischer’s was a big influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto, this idea of setting a significant challenge to oneself as a means to stoke creative output. “Nearly There” was recorded on “lapharp + ebow looped using the monome 128 w/ the wonderful MLRv application,” explains Fischer. The two tracks, for the curious, can be heard here:

http://unrecnow.com/dust/2374/
http://unrecnow.com/dust/2380/

And there’s more information on Collected Dust at the Tench website:

http://www.tenchrec.com/TCH05.html/

As the project’s deadline neared, Fischer himself joined in, remixing his own music:

In addition, there was a pleasant surprise when the accomplished sound artist Stephen Vitiello participated. He has exhibited at MASS MoCA, The High Line, The Project, the Bienale of Sydney, the Whitney Biennial, and PS 1/MoMA, and released music on such labels as 12k, New Albion, and Sub Rosa.

The fourth Junto led to a great conversation, in the project’s Discussion tab, about what exactly a “remix” is. It started off with a query from Brian Biggs, aka dance-robot-dance.

In the process, Ted James posted this audio piece as a response. It opens with him talking about what a remix is, until his talking becomes source material for a beat:

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 26, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 30, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0004-mfischer. As of this writing, there are 59 tracks associated with the tag.

Visit, listen to, and consider joining the group at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

A full list of Junto projects is housed on Disquiet.com.

(Image adapted from the photo that accompanied the version of “Nearly There” that appeared on Marcus Fischer’s unrecnow.com website as his 365-day project was reaching its end.)

Disquiet Junto Project 0003: “The Expanded Glass Harp”

The Assignment: Pay tribute to Benjamin Franklin and his armonica

/ By Marc Weidenbaum


Each assignment in the ongoing Disquiet Junto series of projects serves several purposes. The underlying purpose of these initial ones is to help define what, exactly, the Junto is all about.

Certainly it is about the use of constraints to stoke creativity. That is the Junto’s stated purpose. But one constraint was to be avoided from the start: the Junto is not a sample-of-the-week endeavor. And thus, at the risk of being met with mass disinclination, the third project was designed to test some boundaries. It required the participants to record a live performance. This meant no post-production, which is something of an anomaly in a realm of music-making that, oftentimes, takes place entirely in a creative zone that would be considered “post-production.” Despite some initial concerns on my part about potentially limiting turnout, almost three dozen musicians uploaded finished tracks.

These were the instructions:

This project is in honor of Benjamin Franklin, after whose Junto Society our little group was named.

In an effort to expand and refine the glass harp, Franklin developed his own lathe-like glass harmonica, which he called the “armonica.” Marie Antoinette took lessons on it and Beethoven composed for it, but Franklin’s invention proved expensive and fragile, and it had a limited lifetime. And it may have given its frequent users lead poisoning.

You are *not* being asked to build a Franklin armonica. But like Franklin, we are going to expand on the glass harp. In our case, we are going to do so digitally.

You’re being asked to use the more common instrument, the glass harp. That involves the familiar “rubbing the top of a wine glass that has water in it” approach:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_harp

The Junto assignment is to record a live performance on the glass harp, and to employ live processing in the performance. There should be no post-production. And there is no length limit for the piece, though I would suggest that anything over 15 minutes may limit the size of your potential audience.

We could just as easily — more easily, really — used samples of glass harps and harmonicas as pre-made building sonic blocks for the piece. But the goal was to be true to Franklin, whose Junto lent its name to our collective endeavor. Franklin was as famous for his inventions and scientific inquiries as he was for his role in the development of the United States government. (An inveterate constructor of organizations — not just of his Junto, but of fire departments, militia, schools, and lending libraries — it’s quite possible to see the U.S.A. as the largest club he helped invent. Our ambitions are not so large.) And since the armonica was developed by him as an instrument for live performance, it seemed only right to use the glass harp in a live setting. (Just as a side note: the title of the piece was inspired by the concept of “expanded cinema.”)

Here, for further background, is an excerpt on the armonica from the Benjamin Franklin biography written by Walter Isaacson:

The assignment was made late in the day on Thursday, January 19, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 23, as the deadline.

View a search return for all the entries: disquiet0003-glass. As of this writing, there are 35 tracks associated with the tag.

Visit, listen to, and consider joining the group at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto.

A full list of Junto projects is housed on Disquiet.com.

(The images up top are from the tracks contributed, going clockwise from upper left, by: Matthew Barlow, Mark Rushton, Brian Biggs, and Ted Laderas)