- Yeah, Apple's mail doesn't mark replies consistently, which is why (well, one of the whys) I've used Thunderbird. #
- Ambient music is especially meaningful when perpetrated on tools that were previously relegated to a supporting role. #
- Thunderbird is proving just as (un)stable in OS X Lion as it was in Windows 7. #
- For Black Friday all MP3s in Disquiet.com's Downstream department available for free download. Oh wait, that's true every day. #
- Digital thanks for Soundcloud HTML5 player, genial Twitter correspondence, revival of Delicious, and 15 years of Disquiet. #
- "Audio cassette" jack in back of cash register. http://t.co/GvdPr3kQ #
- Foil on pies in back of car rattling like snare drums. #
Tools Formerly Relegated to a Supporting Role (MP3)
The 20th issue of the journal Vague Terrain (at vagueterrain.net) has 10 entries. They’re divided between, one might say, thought and art, between essays (plus one interview) about art, and then art itself. (One of the essays is mine. It’s titled “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” and I wrote a bit more about it, and the overall Vague Terrain issue, earlier this week.)
This proposed distinction between “thought” and “art” is confused in part because the art here is, in most cases, accompanied by an essay written by the artist who committed it. Of the entries that fit in the “art” category, the MP3 provided for free download by David Kristian is placed in an especially self-aware context. Kristian knows his influences (“i.e Fripp & Eno, Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze’s early works,” he writes), and he explains how his career developed to the point where instruments are beside the point:
I use very little in terms of traditional electronic musical instruments to generate sound, preferring instead to rely on an ever-growing collection of effect units and guitar pedals. Everything you hear in the piece I submitted to Vague Terrain was made using pedals, with no actual synthesizers or sequencers, at least none with keyboards or other standard performance controls.
Which is to say, it isn’t so much a matter of instruments being beside the point as it is of traditional instruments being put aside in favor of less traditional ones. Even without the knowledge of the instrumentation (displayed up top, in the photo that accompanied the essay), the track, titled “In Your Sleep,” sounds heavily technologically motivated. The sine-wave phasing that provides much of its sound could easily be the noise on a song recorded in a poorly grounded studio. But in place of a song we have the noise. Or, more to the point, the noise becomes a song. With each subsequent listens the piece, which is just under 20 minutes in length, displays increasing variation, increasing warbles and inconsistencies in what initially seems to be an automated whole.
Between the track and the essay, one thing becomes clear: it makes perfect sense that much as ambient music draws attention to background sounds, ambient music is especially meaningful when perpetrated on tools that were previously relegated to a supporting role — tools such as the ones used here: “a variety of oscillator pedals, a sequenced ring modulator, fuzz(es), flangers, phasers, filters, choruses, delays, and reverbs.”
Get the track for free download in a Zip file, and read Kristian’s full essay at vagueterrain.net. More on Krisian, who has created music and sound for film and video games (including Splinter Cell: Conviction; Army of Two: The 40th Day; and TERA: The Exiled Realm of Arborea), among other things, at davidkristian.com.
All Rorschach Butterfly (MP3)
The waveform that accompanies “Dawn Chorus” by Nathan McLaughlin is, of course, well matched to its subject. The waveform isn’t an artistic impression of the sound, isn’t a depiction of the music mediated by an individual imagination. It is a mapping, an incomplete one, certainly, as are all mappings, and yet its fluttery shape, all Rorschach butterfly, prepares the listener for the work’s delicate flow of inconsistent repetition. That inconsistency, the “human” aspect, may be owed to the give-and-take that provides the track’s base, a to and fro like that of a moored raft in a light current. It sounds like the product of a bellows instrument, or a gently sawed string one (the tone brings to mind the cello work discussed here yesterday). And then there is the rough field recording that provides a base to that base. It’s a sound at once natural, in that we hear birdsong, and yet electronic, in that it seems mediated, tweaked with minor glitchy effects, perhaps a loop set on a semi-irregular repeat. The result is a play not only between foreground and rear, a common conceit, but on perceptions of artificiality. And it’s quite lovely.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/nathandmclaughlin. More on the release at the website of the cassette label that made a commercial version available, fono.tihiiomut.ru.
Annotating the Sounds of Las Vegas and New York in Vague Terrain
I have an essay about the sonic environments of New York and Las Vegas in the 20th issue of the excellent journal Vague Terrain. This issue of Vague Terrain takes as its theme a single word, “ambient,” and the invitation to contribute led me to focus on the sounds in the background that come to the foreground. It opens as follows, before proceeding to annotate various sonic experiences during a two-week period this past August when I listened to no pre-recorded music — well, no pre-recorded music that I myself actively elected to play:
Music is sound that someone has taken the time to organize. Generally speaking, that person is called a musician. Not all sound is immediately enjoyable as music, which means that achieving the goal of music can require widely varying levels of exertion and ingenuity on the part of the musician. Some everyday sound has an inherently musical quality, such as the beat of a windshield wiper or the hum of an apartment radiator. This sort of sound is so self-evidently musical it can be said to self-organize, requiring no effort on the part of a musician, or on the part of the listener.
Everyday sound is the sound nearly universally thought of as background noise, noise even further back than background noise ”“ it is the sonic backdrop to background noise. Such noise can take on the qualities generally attributed to music depending on the effort a listener is willing to make. Far less effort is usually required on the part of a listener than on the part of a musician. What helps sound take on the appearance of music is the model provided by music.
Read the full piece, “New York and New York, New York: A Midsummer Sound Diary,” at vagueterrain.net. As a format, the sound diary has a precedent here in the well-received “Tokyo Sound Diary” I published back in 2007.
I’m proud to be in Vague Terrain, a great resource for considered reflection on technologically mediated culture. This is a particularly strong edition. Here’s a quick overview:
In my favorite of the batch, Michel McBride-Charpentier listens to the everyday sounds of a video game, Half Life 2, and considers the artificial reality in the context of R. Murray Schaefer’s research on soundscapes. In a fascinating turn, reminiscent of some of Jane McGonigal’s perceptions, the narrative turns the tables on reality: “The sound of traffic in an actual city isn’t just atmosphere, but subconsciously processed evidence of radiating streets forming blocks and neighbourhoods, giving us confidence in our unperceived reality.” (I actually pitched a similar subject when approached to contribute to the issue of Vague Terrain, but McBride-Charpentier had beat me to it. I hope to write about the artificial sonic environments of video games in the near future.)
Musician David Kristian contributes a free download, which I’ll be covering in this site’s Downstream section in the near future.
Andrea-Jane Cornell provides a track, and an admirably detailed and open self-critique of her attempt to record it (“I was too intent on recreating the ambiance of a live performance of a piece”).
Andrew Lovett-Barron pulls back, fortunately, from sound and discusses ambient interaction (“the subtle gesture, the shifting of weight, and the tone of voice which tell your friend that something is wrong”), and pushes into the manner in which such interactions can be enhanced or insinuated with digital tools.
Jim Bizzocchi, like Cornell, is an artist describing a practice, in his case ambient video, drawing a direct connection between what he is attempting to do, and the aspirations of Brian Eno’s genre-defining work.
Leonardo Rosado talks about his own music-making, and how his art production aligns with his work as the administrator of a netlabel, the estimable Feedback Loop.
Little Oak Animal is the duo of Robert Cruickshank (projections) and Dafydd Hughes (sound), who contributed a series of short pieces in which neither part (the image or the audio) is intended to take a more prominent role than the other.
Michelle Teran is interviewed by Greg J. Smith (the editor for my piece) on the art of surveillance and finance, among other fascinating subjects.
And Scott M2 contributes two audio-visual works developed on the iOS operating system.
75 Years Ago Today Pablo Casals Met Robert Johnson at the Crossroads of Antiquity and Technology (MP3s)
The radiodiaries.org series outdid itself today. Apparently 75 years ago, on November 23, 1936, 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.
Their stories are not parallel, but in some ways that lack of a parallel is part of the story. Casals was famous, while Johnson was unknown. Casals was three decades Johnson’s senior. Johnson was recorded on the fly, shoehorned between other quick sessions — he himself reportedly waxed two separate renditions of eight songs in a single hour — while Casals took his seat in one of the premiere recording studios of the day, the Gramophone location in London later made famous by the Beatles’ Abbey Road. (The radio program refers to the studio as Abbey Road, but it wasn’t named that until after the Beatles recording. I am currently reading Geoff Emerick’s memoir of his work with the Beatles, Here, There, and Everywhere, and he confirms the naming chronology.) Casals completed two of the Bach cello suites in his allotted hour. Johnson would be dead in two years, and following a period of fame his recordings would be largely forgotten until the early 1960s, while Casals would almost make it to his 100th birthday — the latter’s recordings would never go out of print, or style, but his versions helped rescue the suites from their previous popular standing as mere exercises.
And both sessions continue to this day to be among the most revered. They seem archaic by today’s standards, so deep is the imprint of recording technology, the hiss and static and other noises that one learns to listen through, but that at their time were nearly invisible (“inaudible” doesn’t do the trick) to their audience. The Radio Diaries episode (MP3) speaks with a variety of informed parties who help us listen back through history, including blues musician Honeyboy Edwards, who knew Johnson, and cellist Bernard Greenhouse, who studied with Casals (both Edwards and Greenhouse died this year). Also heard are Paul Elie, who reportedly introduced the coincidental date to the producers of Radio Diaries, and musicians Scott Ainslie and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons. (Elie introduces himself as the author of Sound About: Reinventing Bach, and to my knowledge it has not yet been published.) There are great descriptions of the nature of recording at the time. Greenhouse reflects on the unforgiving nature of wax, which doesn’t allow for splicing and correcting. Also mentioned is how Johnson consciously tailored his songs to the short length of the available technology.
[audio:http://www.radiodiaries.org/wp-content/uploads/CasalsJohnson1.mp3|titles=”Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson”|artists=Radio Diaries]
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 (MP3).
[audio:http://www.radiodiaries.org/wp-content/uploads/Casals-Johnson-Mashup.mp3|titles=”Casal Johnson Mashup”|artists=Brendan Baker]
More on the episode at radiodiaries.org.