Interesting Goings-on at Uncertainform.com

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

David Nemeth is doing something very interesting a uncertainform.com, which is subtitled “The Culture of Creative Commons Music.” He is employing the Creative Commons to explore and promote the Creative Commons. The site, which launched in the past few days, exists as a collection of works on the Creative Commons that had themselves been licensed in the Creative Commons (the site will also publish newly produced pieces). In general, this Creative Commons license allows the material to be shared for non-commercial usage. And so I am honored that my “netlabel checklist” (title: “If You’re Thinking of Starting a Netlabel …”) is among the pieces with which Nemeth is launching the site. Other initial pieces on the site include Rick Falkvinge on “The Copyright Industry: A Century of Deceit,” Fernando Fonseca on how “PIPA Is the New SOPA,” and Adam Porter on “Making a Case for Sharing.”

Each piece is accompanied by an illustration or photograph, itself made available thanks to the Commons (in the case of my article, it is a flickr.com-hosted photo by Ed Yourdon).

I originally published the list-as-essay here, on Disquiet.com, on April 11 of this year. The next month it was translated into Italian, unbeknownst to me, at indieriviera.it. In mid-June it was reprinted at netlabelism.com, as it has been at other sites, including angeldustrecords.com. And earlier this month it was translated into Japanese. And that’s not counting the various discussion sites where it has appeared.

It’s exciting to see it in a new context at Nemeth’s uncertainform.com site. The context is new because it’s a site about “Creative Commons music” that isn’t putting the music front and center (as I tend to here, and as Nemeth does at both actsofsilence.com and theeasypace.com). It is putting the Creative Commons front and center.

When It’s Oscillator vs Guitar, the Listener Wins (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The soundcloud.com page of Chicago-based musician Nicholas Davis is an assortment of self-contained sonic types. There are welcome urban field recordings of the city’s celebrated trains. There is wonderfully strange exotic folk-drone music. And there are, among other emerging categories of musical adventure, various short improvisations filed under the promising section header “Oscillator vs Guitar.” There are, as of this writing, five of these match-ups in total. And given that the opening one includes the word “tuning” and the closing one the word “outro,” it’s safe to listen to them under the assumption that they comprise a whole, and should be listened to in sequence. (They are numbered 1 through 5.) That said, they differ widely, even though each is indeed a mix of guitar improvisations and the presence of noise from what one presumes is an oscillator.

The exercises provide a good example of a moment when the meaningfulness of the waveforms that are intrinsic to the Soundcloud site can be called into question. A track like “Oscillator vs Guitar pt4” seems, by gauging its fairly blockish waveform, likely to be less antic than, say, the more vibrant and varied “Oscillator vs Guitar pt3.” The opposite proves to be the case. No close reading of number 3 in the series would prepare the listener for the way the opening oscillator gives way to light figurations that, while angular and active, nonetheless comprise an overall meditative and monastic whole. Number 4, by contrast, is certainly static, but its stasis is woven from anxiety.

The guitar and oscillator series might be read as a series of duets for man and machine, or of a guitarist utilizing the oscillator as a kind of tonal metronome, a drone-keeper that sets a very slow pace.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/passerby. They were all recorded live on October 31 of this year, and are listed as “rehearsals.”

In the Clouds

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This site covers often ethereal music and sound, so it makes sense that it is now, as of today, hosted in the cloud.

The technological switch from standard hosting to cloud hosting may result in some turbulence, so if you happen upon any broken pages or other issues, please report them to [email protected]. Thanks.

Listening and Watching (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Crimea-based musician Kir Belevich also goes by the name deepsweet, and he has a site, titled Meditations in Sound (housed at around.soulshine.in), where he collects documents of the world around him. Some of these documents are visual, and the remainder are aural. The elegance of the site’s subtitle, “fieldrecording and phonography,” emphasizes a parallel that deserves more attention (a parallel that becomes even more apparent when one swaps out “field recording” and swaps in the gaining-in-favor term “phonography”).

As Belevich ventures from pure real-world recordings of soundscapes to edited ones, the parallel gets even more interesting. The manipulation of documentary visual imagery — with filters, and cropping, and color adjustment — is an understood part of photography. In sound, however, editing and post-production lends a more commonly perceived layer of artifice. Hence a track like Belevich’s “Crimea Sound Collage,” for all its familiar noises of cars and so forth, will be most memorable for the distorted speech that is heard at times.

Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/deepsweet. Photo of Belevich’s gear, shown above, from an unrelated post at around.soulshine.in. Earlier Disquiet coverage of Belevich/deepsweet: “The Sound of Airports, Planes, Trains & Train Stations.”

43 Sequences from Today’s Future (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The excellent electronica site futuresequence.com has 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. The sheer amount of music can be overwhelming, so what follows are five favorites drawn from the collection. It is intended not so much as a list of sure-fire “best tracks,” and more as a tool to navigate the embarrassment of riches by highlighting touchstones of its variety. (Sequence1 had 42 tracks, and was released earlier this year.)

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. Like Sheehan’s track, Zvuku‘s “Cold” (track 6) willfully jeopardizes its softness, here with not only what appear to be rough field recordings, but also modulations that seem take the apparent softness and manipulate it like the raw material it is. Thisquietarmy‘s “Aeronaut” (track 33) might be termed 8bit drone, at least for stretches of its admonitory run.

Get the full set at futuresequence.bandcamp.com. More on the Sequence2 project at futuresequence.com.