The “sinfonietta” tag on Soundcloud.com doesn’t get a lot of love. At this moment, the tag brings up just one track, but it’s a doozy. “Sinfonietta” is one of a half dozen tags selected by Alarm Will Sound, the adventurous chamber ensemble, in association with a recording of their performance of the composition “Step!” The piece of music, by Liza White, was taped last summer at Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, and is heard here in a crisp five and a quarter minutes. It opens with suspended strings and arhythmic accents from horns and percussion, before the crux of it hits: a hard, almost robotic, ever surprising shuffle. (For the record, this is a website where “robotic” is a compliment.) The strings and horns are extensions of, compatriots of, the drums, the whole thing syncopated like Leonard Bernstein or Alex North at their most rhythmically vibrant and succinct.
According to composer White, who participated in a discussion about the festival at alarmwillsound.com, the jazz feel is deserved from step routines:
The musical material in this piece is derived from step team routines, which use combinations of stomping, clapping, speech, and patting different parts of the body in a choreographed way to execute collective rhythm. Step is related to hip-hop, which I’ve always been interested in. The piece is also about race relations the way I’ve experienced them. So its use of step routine material is both a musical influence and an extramusical one.
The step routine, filtered through jazz tradition, then funneled through chamber instrumentation, arrives at the ear with an ecstatically herky jerky feel. The result suggests the way jazz has been sampled by turntablists and other breakbeat musicians, bits and riffs cut up and reassembled with an intense verve. The image up top, from coverage of the festival at newmusicbox.org, shows White rehearsing with the group.
Update (2012.03.21): The JACK Quartet is due to do a public reading of a new piece by White at Northwestern this spring. That is, it will be a live performance, just not a fully rehearsed one. White will post details at her lizawhitemusic.com site as the event comes approaches.
This space will be used to occasionally collect information about Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards, following its launch at 6:03pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, December 28. Within 48 hours, it had been listened to over 4,000 times on soundcloud.com and downloaded over 500 times at archive.org.
Coverage:
¶ Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com wrote a considered, thoughtful piece about the project on the last day of the year. It opens:
Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?
Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”
Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.
¶ Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz at called it a “lovely collection”: boingboing.net. One of the commenters correctly guessed the subject of the cover photo. Another compared a track to the music from this video game: visitproteus.com.
¶ One of the more unexpected outcomes of the Instagr/am/bient project: being listed as an example of what Soundcloud.com is all about in coverage of the company’s new round of venture-capital funding: readwriteweb.com
¶ The mothership, instagram.com, mentioned it under “Around the Community” in its The Week in Instagram section.
¶ Over at coveringterrain.wordpress.com, the project is described by Jim Gerlach in a context alongside the Seattle Art Museum’s Record Store listening room (seattleartmuseum.org) and Stelios Manousakis’ network-art exhibit at the Jack Straw Media Gallery (jackstraw.org).
¶ Now this is crowd sourcing: A listener named Jon Dowland made a revised version of the archive.org edition of Instagr/am/bient to upgrade the quality of the embedded images: archive.org. Update: more on his process at his site, jmtd.net.
¶ Among the places the project has also been discussed, leaving aside numerous passing mentions on Twitter and elsewhere: at synthtopia.com (on its facebook.com page, Synthtopia called it a “must download”), at the message boards of elektron-users.com, at hubski.com (where the idea of adding lyrics was talked about), and at freemusicarchive.org.
Posts by Participants:
¶ Linda Aubry Bullock, at shadowselves.net, writes of her contributions to the compilation:
”˜My Instagram was used for Track 12; the music, “Some Found Things”, is by Warren Craghead III. My track is #21, called “Near Cedar”. The photograph was taken by Christopher Bissonnette.
My Instagram was taken in early 2011 in Jamaica Plain, MA at a service station late one evening. The piece that I composed for “Near Cedar”was a recording of traffic (as I waited near Cedar Street) combined with a processed vocal track.
I imagined the lighter patterns at the center of the photograph as periods in time, and in the composition they’re the repetition of the door chime of the bus. The vocal track in the background was inspired by the dark areas of the photo. In another track I filtered the sound of the bus brakes, which corresponds to the horizontal white area at the top of the image.
I recorded the traffic and bus using the iProRecorder app on my iPhone, and the voice element consisted of several heavily processed tracks, using VoiceLive Touch. I used Audacity for the final mix.’
I was sneaky and turned in a manipulated drawing, not a photo, but since this is mostly what I post in instagram it made sense. My drawing is from a photo I saw online of a battle in Libya earlier this year. … Christopher Bissonette made a wonderful sound piece for it (listen here).
I got a great and evocative image from Linda Aubrey Bullock to make my sound piece from. ”¦ I’m not a musician but I have become fascinated with field recordings and manipulated sound over the part few years. ”¦ I’ve especially liked, and drawn from, the work of Aaron Ximm aka Quiet American. He does a great job of keeping a strong connection to the recorded sound while still composing and creating something new and alive; something to rival the original field recording.
I’ve been making simple field recordings and posting them at SoundCloud (my kids playing, a train, some animals). Doing these documentations seemed like drawing in my sketchbook to me – to remember, to aestheticize a little, to try to make something out of them.
For instag/am/bient I looked at the image I was given of a car side mirror, ice/rain and weird light and went out looking for sounds to record that could work with the photo. I ended up with some rain and car sounds, a hum of a powerline and some other mechanical rumbles I found by walking around my neighborhood late at night. I sometimes go on “drawing safaris”and this felt like that. SNEAKY.
I smashed all the sound together and tried to “compose”it. Weirdly, doing that felt natural – like making comics or books. In comics and music there’s a pace and composition over time and that I got. I might be fooling myself, but I think I understood at least the basics of it from all the drawing work I’ve made.
¶ Over at his jonmonteverde.com site, Jon Monteverde (aka XYZR_KX) wrote, in part:
I received a photo (taken by Earsmack, seen below) and in response, I composed a new track called “Fly”under the XYZR_KX moniker. Equipment used: a Commodore 128 with Cynthcart for the main pad sound, a circuit bent Danelectro BLT Slap Echo guitar pedal used as a sound generator for the low rumbling noise near the end, an iPhone running Voice Memo to record the field sound, and a MacBook running Ableton Live for edit and mix.
The picture of a streaking object in the open sky brought to my mind the idea of flying; the sounds evoke the human dream of flight from the perspective of our earthbound state, looking up. In addition, I wanted to hint at a contrast between how effortless flying can seem in nature, and the enormous energy expenditure required to actually put people in the air. “Fly,”in the insect sense, is also a pun on the cicadas in the field recording.
William Gibson said recently that science fiction is a way of examining the present without having to cope with the reality of looking directly at it. I think Instagram is a bit like this. Except with Instagram we’re not really looking at or thinking about reality. We’re looking at what today might look like if we found it in a beaten up shoebox full of old photographs in the attic.
My assigned image … was taken by Jon Monteverde. It seemed to suggest that cool shivering excitement one feels when offered a vista of a city in the hazy early morning. With this in mind, I built a song around a blackbirds call recorded at dawn from a rooftop in Madrid, Spain kindly provided by Dobroide at freesound.org. Another recording of morning traffic heard from my bedroom window in Dublin, Ireland was also placed very low in the mix, reduced almost to the bare hiss of white noise.
The bell and synth sounds that duel (duet?) with the blackbird come from the amazing Aalto synth created by Madrona Labs.
On top of these sounds various gauzy digital layers were heaped: a digital guitar pedal called the el Capistan that emulates the sound and warmth of old tape delays, a VST called the Glue that mimics the sound of SSL buss compressors, and other such wonders of the modern age. Brave new simulacra of venerable old tools.
Stephen Quinn mastered the track at his Analog Heart studio.
¶ Over at his benjamindauer.tumblr.com site, Benjamin Dauer went into depth regarding process, from a technical and creative standpoint:
Inspiration: When I received my ”˜assignment’ for this project I knew immediately what I wanted to do. This image makes me feel as though I have arrived early for a performance/presentation of some kind. Not being allowed into the main space just yet, I enjoy the angle of peering around a corner, over a stack of chairs, and seeing/hearing someone talking. I tried to capture some of this feeling in my track – the faint sound of someone’s voice, muted guitar and pads as if musicians were warming up, and other environmental noises. I hope it gives the sense of subdued excitement or anticipation one gets when they’re waiting at a show.
¶ Ted James Butler, who records as Ted James, posted background information on his track at his betteroffted.tedjames.info site:
I contributed a short piece titled “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”which featured various field-recordings and my Harvestman modular synthesizer.
In “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”, I depict the blurred portion of the image through a “musical”theme that never quite resolves. Like the image, this piece is also framed by field (street, in this case) recordings. Raindrops, footsteps, creaky doors and wind are easy to pick out, yet the brunt of the track highlights the inferred. A mental picture that is never quite clear.
¶ At twitter.com/earsmack, Joe Zobkiw, aka earsmack, shared a shot of his software patch (in Max), and explained (via email) “It was then manipulated in the Elektron Octatrack before a final fretless bass melody was added”:
¶ Jonny Butler, who records as J Butler, provided some background at his site, j-butler.com:
On ”˜Sundown’ I used field recordings of fire layered with a series of drones and an electric piano. The drones were created by a lapharp with contact mic, the Exs24 in Logic (using the very basic sine tones in the default patch), and the deep sound was created from a recording I made of a metal bowl.
¶ Smyth, aka Jared Smyth, posted at his site, uprlip.com, a photo of the old-school tape loop setup he used to achieve his piece, and he wrote by way of explanation in a follow-up email: “my whole track was assembled from 1/2″ open reel loops containing digitally pre-processed loops. pretty fun. and the parallels to instagram photography just don’t end.” Also included in the post is a one-minute excerpt of the work-in-progress.
¶ Mark Rushton wrote, at markrushton.com, about how he used an outdated (“$20”) iPhone to take his picture, which served as the source inspiration for Benjamin Dauer’s “In Reference to Time.” Rushton’s musical composition was based on a photo by Oootini. He drew on his own experience with flotation tanks:
I wanted the overall sound you hear to have that same feeling one gets while floating in relatively calm water. It also had to be a total composition. The piece had to have some travel in it. I also like the idea of the music creating an out-of-body experience when it comes to the viewer/listener relationship.
¶ The OO-Ray, aka Ted Laderas, at his 15people.net site, talks about the visual inspiration provided by Naoyuki Sasanami’s photo:
This photo, with its silhouettes and shadows, inspired me to use more discrete transformations such as digital editing and pitch shifting in my piece. The main phrase in the piece is a digitally edited and pitch shifted piano figure, highlighted with several cello tracks treated with a mixture of overdrive and reverberation. Looking at the photo reminds me of those moments right after waking where everything is out of focus and reality snaps into place after a second. I tried to recreate an extended recreation of that transition from dream state to reality, when sunlight floods the room and the day starts anew.
¶ Evan Cordes posted, at flickr.com, video footage of his Pd (or Pure Data) software while he was working on his track:
And over at his pheezy.com site, Cordes explained a bit more about his compositional process:
The New New Chromelodeon II’s are programmed in Pure Data (Pd) after Harry Partch’s specifications in Genesis Of A New Music. The traffic is recorded from a rooftop in Emeryville, CA.
The Instagram photo is read by Pd and each byte of the image file translates to one of the eighty-eight keys on the New New Chromelodeon II. Two recordings at different, relational tempos are made of the sequence of keys played according to the image file. A three-minute- long sequence is taken from each of these recordings and mixed with the sound of traffic.
¶ At the boondesign.com blog, graphic designer Brian Scott (who designed the PDF booklet, including the set’s cover and back cover, and who contributed his own Instagram photo as the cover shot), wrote about the design process:
Instagram has become one of my daily rituals, a way of sharing moments with friends and documenting my obsessions: typography, food, architecture. The immediacy and restrictions are part of Instagram’s inherent charm. …
Via Twitter, Weidenbaum invited 25 musicians to create “sonic postcards”that are in fact musical responses to each other’s Instagram photos. The resulting recordings are moody and addictive, much like Instagram itself.
Regarding our process, we had the benefit of designing while listening to the music, and while we debated many cover options before selecting the HWY 101 split overpass, the feeling of driving at night while musically intoxicated may have influenced our thinking.
Keep an eye on this page for future post-release coverage of Instagr/am/bient. And get the full set for free at disquiet.com and soundcloud.com.
A new year calls for a stellar dawn, a gaping-maw drone that captures the power of change caught at its attenuated fulcrum, when night turns every so slowly into daylight. In other words, it calls for Saito Koji‘s Guide, his recent release on the estimable restingbell.net netlabel. The album contains eight drones, all slow as could be, and brief, too, keeping to under three minutes (not unlike the approach undertaken on the Instagr/am/bient compilation). There are occasional beats to be heard here, like the echoed presence of what sounds like a wooden stick rattling on a track titled “Saihate,” but otherwise this is music that locates the white-noise space between cicadas and church organs. And though the three-minute maximum length keeps the project as a whole moving, there are no admonitions against setting any one of them on loop. Here, by way of example, is “Peace,” which has a circulating melody that sounds like a bellow instrument, and a thick wash of what could be a nearby waterfall (MP3).
For several years now, the heart of this site has been its Downstream department, which celebrates specific instances, on an almost daily basis, of freely and legally downloabable music — most of which are in the MP3 format, and many of which originate on netlabels. What follows are my 10 favorites of 2011.
To constrain the field, to make it knowable, this list is limited to recordings that are “of the web.”The following were not considered for inclusion: individual promotional tracks (and excerpts) posted from existing or forthcoming commercial albums (special “mixes”were considered for inclusion, as were situations in which entire commercial albums were made available for free download, as in “choose your price” scenarios in which zero is an accepted amount), downloads that were placed online for a stated limited period of time, audio that is streaming-only, and dated archival material (work that would be considered a “reissue” in the commercial world, such as the majority of what is housed at ubu.com). Also not considered for inclusion were tracks whose links have subsequently gone offline. (An intelligent case has been made that there is no such thing as “streaming” — that all audio is downloaded, in that it is at some point resident on your computer. However, for the purposes of this list, the focus is music that is fully intended to be downloaded.)
All of which is to say, everything on this list is of recent vintage and is available to download, for free, right now.
These 10 are listed here in the chronological order in which they appeared on Disquiet.com. Given the fluid nature of publication, attribution, and collation on the Internet, I cannot be certain that these audio files first appeared online in 2011, but many of them did. And if some of them are older than that, at least this mention might gain them a new audience. Click through to each original Downstream entry for more information, and to the release’s source to get the tracks.
Duet for Viola and Sculpture: Consider this a love letter to a love letter. I’m increasingly certain that my favorite single track of recorded music from 2010 was “Homage to Jack Vanarsky” by Garth Knox, off his album on the netlabel SHSK’H (shskh.com), Solo Viola d’Amore. Despite the album’s title, this particular track is, technically, not a solo viola work. It’s a duet for Knox’s viola and a small mechanical device. The device was created by artist Vanarksy, a sculptor who was Knox’s late father-in-law. It makes a distinct creaking sound, like metal coming occasionally into contact with wood. As the device makes this sound, for close to eight minutes straight, Knox’s viola glides in and out.
An Ambient Collaboration: Unlike a lot of collaborations by ambient musicians, the dual effort by Devin Underwood and Marcus Fischer, Correspond, sounds, in fact, like more than one person is doing the work. In general, ambient music is about the sublime: maximum effort for minimum impact, a surface of almost ignorable refinement masking all manner of activity buried deep below. Individual ambient musicians strive to make something that is both worthy of attention and capable of being relegated to the backdrop. Two musicians working together in an ambient mode need to find a balance without so forsaking their individual voices that the fact of the collaboration becomes almost a distraction from the singularity of the finished work.
Country Songs Minus the Songs: Like the work of Scott Tuma and the Boxhead Ensemble, the four tracks that make up Widesky‘s EP Floating in Being sound like country songs minus the songs. It’s as if a crack Nashville session band had found themselves, while tuning up, so enamored of the sounds they were emitting, they they just stuck with tuning up, with hearing how the lightest touch of a guitar, and the mere movement of percussion instruments, would yield a thing of such beauty that they needn’t concern themselves with lyrics about broken down pick-ups and love gone bad. On perhaps the strongest track on Floating in Being, which would be “A Torpid Memoir,” the voices of children open and close the piece (they also provide transitions elsewhere on the recording). The effect is to frame the associative dreamstate of the rest of the work with literal calls back to reality, even if the reality is itself a thing of playfulness.
The Wild West: They rattle like the wheels on an old covered wagon. What we’re hearing, though, is not wheels but what the wheels might have trampelled, the brittle foliage of the west. There is in the track, according to its brief descriptive note, “wild fennel, pine trees and thistle,” the latter of which provides the track’s name. The result is a survey of rough scratching, tactile noises that edge toward erasing the ephemeral nature of digital recording. And while wagon wheels play no role in “Thistle,” which was created by Oakland, California, musician Jen Boyd, a record player (as pictured above) does.
If It’s Broken Beats Don’t Fix It: If ever there were art music disguised as downtempo broken beats, it is Paul Crocker‘s Equilibria, recorded under his Dustmotes moniker and released for free download by the estimable dustedwax.org netlabel. On “Inner Tuning,” a mix of plaintive violin, post-rock exotica percussion, and a soundbite recording of a crime report all collide into a dramatization that’s less about narrative and more about frozen time. Early on, a slowed-down siren makes its way from one ear to another. At first, it’s just an effect rendered for its sonorous musicality, but then it reveals itself to have been a premonition of ill deeds. It’s the siren you hear as an everyday soundmark of urban life, only to be confronted later by the specific stark reality of that siren’s meaning — noise revealed as signal — when you flip on TV after dinner.
Remote in the Reeds: The netlabel Stasisfield, at stasisfield.com, run by John Kannenberg, has ventured deep into rarefied sonic territory in the past, but its current release may be its most sonically remote yet. Recorded by Coppice, a duo from Chicago, it is an extended survey of small tones. Coppice is Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer, and they based the work, titled Vinculum (Courses), on what is described as “bellows and processed reeds” (the full materials were, apparently, an “8-channel installation with shruti box, free reeds, accordion, acoustic filters, and electronics”). As those materials might suggest, the sounds are delicate, venturing into the realm of pure tone, one after another, starting so quiet as to be mistaken for dog whistles, and slowly growing in intensity.
Streampunk Ambient:Stephen Vitiello (interview: “In the Echo of No Towers”) has a long-term installation he recently unveiled at MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. The work, titled All Those Vanished Engines, is a collaboration between Vitiello and the novelist Paul Park, who wrote a narrative that Vitiello then set to sound. This edit removes the spoken vocal, to reveal the underlying current of pneumatic activity, a kind of steampunk ambient music.
The Bees of War / The War of Bees:Apostolos Loufopoulos‘s “Bee” has been recognized with an Award of Distinction by this year’s Ars Electronica. It is a thrilling feat of audio imagery, putting the listener on the wings of its title subject. Much of the experience involves the illusion of motion through a three-dimensional space, but it isn’t all fast-passing objects, virtual wind, and the razor flutter of forewings. There is a martial beat that brings another illusion to the fore, the illusion of anthropomorphism. We don’t just settle onto the bee’s back for this ride. In Loufopoulos’ telling, we appear to swear allegiance to the Queen and proceed quickly into a state of warfare. There is martial drumming that clearly intends to signal active battle. There are rat-a-tat-tat percussives that may be rooted in the rhythms of wings, but they also bring to mind machine-gun fire. There is a tonal hum that could be the kind of rapid action that presents itself as a mirage of stillness, but it also posits a psychological toll. And then there are hints at orchestral scoring, bringing to mind the big screen WWI and WWII dramas of the past. Loufopoulos’ technical mastery is state-of-the-art, but it works precisely because his allusions and entertainment instincts are splendidly old-school.
Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson at the Crossroads: The radiodiaries.org series outdid itself by commemorating the 75th anniversary of November 23, 1936, when two men sat down and had their solo performances documented in audio recordings. These men were Robert Johnson, the legendary blues guitarist and singer, and Pablo Casals, the pathbreaking cellist and master interpreter of Bach. They never met in person, but certainly did meet at the crossroads of antiquity and technology. And to tie it all together, Brendan Baker contributed a “mashup,” combining two of the 1936 recordings, imagining the duo as if playing side by side. The term “mashup” suggests a kind of violence, a yoking together, when in fact the result is fittingly lovely and reflective.
43 Sequences from Today’s Future: The excellent electronica site futuresequence.com compiled the second of its massive, overstuffed collections of alternately ethereal and unnerving sound. Sequence2, as the album is titled, collects some 43 tracks by numerous musicians who will be familiar to readers of this site (among these contributors being Nils Quak, the Oo-ray, Nobuto Suda, Guy Birkin, and Specta Ciera), and there are many more who will provide welcome new experiences. Rhian Sheehan‘s “Liber” (track 2) is one of many dawn-break efforts in widescreen ambience here, and it is distinguished by its pizzicato texturing. Beautiful Bells‘s “Panic Attack 2” (track 10) has the muted future-jazz horn of an early Ben Neill. The sing-song nature of Josh Mason‘s “Freedom Time” (track 37) sounds like Brian Eno’s career in reverse, as if elegant pop experiments were slowly emerging from ambient explorations.
Among the most popular posts on this site in 2011, out of a total of 386, were one posted just at the start of the year, and another just at the end. In early February, there was (1) documentation of the death during the Egyptian uprising of sound artist Ahmed Basiony, with related field recordings by John Kannenberg. And at the end, there was (2) the late-December collection Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards.
Also popular: (3) a manifesto of sorts about the management of netlabels (“If You’re Thinking of Starting a Netlabel …”), (4) an interview with the coder/musician (Istanbul, Turkey’s Batuhan Bozkurt) behind the wonderful Otomata app (“When Cells Collide”), and (5) thoughts on the absence of a microphone in the Kindle Fire and what it means for the role of sound in Android development (“The Kindle Fire Is Deaf”).
A new year calls for a stellar dawn, a gaping-maw drone that captures the power of change caught at its attenuated fulcrum, when night turns every so slowly into daylight. In other words, it calls for Saito Koji‘s Guide, his recent release on the estimable 
