Of Whorls and Drones (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Resting Bell netlabel’s four-part milestone marker, commemorating its 100th release, comes in the form of a pair of whorl-like compositions. Call them drones if you must, but the patterning is too recursive, too self-digesting, too senses-enveloping to adhere to the standard tenets of stasis suggested by “drone.” The beauty of the drone is that it is both melody and harmony at once, both a horizon-driving force, and a sea-to-sky expanse of haze. The whorl, in contrast, is constant motion disguised as stasis. The distinction is not either/or. Music can have aspects of both, and often does. In fact the most trenchant of the two pieces on the Resting Bell set, the opening track “GrimGrim,” becomes more drone-like as it comes to a close, moving from its shifting centrifugal main body to something sedate and remote (MP3). According to a brief liner note the work, attributed to Appalachian Falls, was performed live on “an array of distortion pedals and tape machines.” The combined effect has elements of the hypnotic pulsing and layers of classical minimalism, as if enacted by a shoegazer band.

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/rb100-4/01-GrimGrim.mp3|titles=”GrimGrim”|artists=Appalachian Falls]

Track originally posted at restingbell.net. Visit for additional information, including a second track, “Antonym.” The set is titled GrimGrimAntonym. (Information on the recording artist is scant. A brief bio on the label’s website reads as follows: “Appalachian Falls is the work of I, sometimes with the help of A and some other friends.” There is no forwarding link.)

Fragments from the iMaschine (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Small software, small experiments, small files. Mike Rotondo recently tweeted a new recording, and it turned out to be 35 seconds of beat bliss. Arguably shorter than that, given its loop-based construction — and arguably longer, given its inherent temptation to be set on loop for an extended period of time.

Titled “Flip Throw In,” it has the feel of a hip-hop production waiting for vocalists, but one secretly more than happy to keep the pace all by itself. There’s a robot heartbeat of a pulse, and what appears to be a sample of piano. Not only does the looseness of the analog piano recording align at best roughly, and therefore rewardingly, with the tensile routine of the tiny beat — so, too, does the lush low fidelity of the recording, a kind of muslin filter, pair against the beat’s pixel precision. The result is promising: a little of J Dilla’s underkey metrics, a little of Kanye West’s alchemical ability to turn sloppy into louche, a little of DJ Premier’s fetish for imperfect ivories. “Flip Throw In” was recorded in an inexpensive iOS app called iMaschine that its developer describes as a “beat sketchpad,” pictured up top. From little things, lovely little things grow.

Track originally posted at Rotondo’s soundcloud.com/treehouses account. More on iMaschine at native-instruments.com.

An Alan Lomax of Lost Technology (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The term “field recording” has two particular meanings in regard to audio. There are the so-termed phonographers who toil in the physical world, documenting soundscapes and incidents. And there are those of the Alan Lomax variety (Lomax being the legendary documentarian of blues, folk, and gospel), who record indigenous music for posterity. These two ventures can be seen as quite different from each other, as archivists in the worlds of sound (the phonographers) and of music (let’s call them the Lomaxes). And the distinctions can lead to annoying confusions and consequences, when that box set you ordered arrives and it turns out that “field recordings of the high desert” include not rattling sagebrush and coyote calls but old-time religion and cowboy poetry. But they have some things in common as well, things far more important than their differences, foremost the precious nature of sound. For both the phonographer and the Lomax are capturing something soon to be gone. Both are invested in preserving a record — in the broader sense of the term “record” — of sonic reality.

Richard Devine recently posted a host of recordings of ancient and becoming-ancient devices. Titled “The Sound of Data Transmissions-Electromagnetic Fields” it contains the sounds of (as he lists them) “printers, scanners, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation, Mac-book hard drives, 5 different wireless modems, fax machines, iPhone, iPad, and computers.” If you follow along the waveform of the recording, he has annotated when each new sound initiates:

To compare the sound of a modem to the song of an impoverished blues musician is not to elevate the former or denigrate the latter. It is simply to note that in the latter case, the documentarian was of use because for a variety of reasons the commercial recording industry had found no use for the blues musician. His song went underheard. And the phonographer is dedicated to the underheard, to the sounds that exist around us but are taken for granted.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/richarddevine, which is where the above photo was sourced from. More on Devine at richard-devine.com.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Apologies for limited Disquiet.com coverage this week. Spent much of it battling a fever. #noiseparent #
  • Judging by the microphone distortion, there is either a sports event or a political rally occurring at the nearby high school. #
  • "Director of Previsualization": movie credit of the evening #
  • #occupyclassical RT @operafella: Nilsson award to Muti? Another who doesn't need $1,000,000. A reward for being successful and rich? Dumb. #
  • Between jazz fan played by Danes in Homeland & temperament of Caviezel in Person of Interest it's a very Eastwood season of TV #
  • Many sirens in the Richmond District. Anyone know what is up? #415 #

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

45 Seconds of Unaugmented Reality

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Sometimes the most virulent augmented reality is simply reality itself. When Robert Thomas stops for a moment in London’s Paddington Station and records three quarters of a minute of a big band’s performance, the result — uploaded to his soundcloud.com/dizzybanjo account for free streaming and downloading — is a blissful murk. The audio is slightly muddy. The sounds are blurred, as if nostalgia were a kind of post-production audio effect, an effect intended in this case to suggest that the fog of memory had briefly broken and allowed through a snippet of antiquated pop.

There’s nothing more to the track than audio, recorded on the fly in public, just like the photo shown here, on Thomas’ iPhone. Those who observe phonography — the practice of audio field recordings — often draw a comparison to photography (just one letter difference), and they might not find a better parallel than this image and sound: two casual documents slightly out of focus. The iPhone’s microphone, unintended for high-fidelity recording, has condensed the sound, much as the phone’s camera has done its best to reproduce the scene below the allotted data cap.

Context is its own sort of filter. We know that Thomas is CCO of Reality Jockey, the company that produces the iPhone app RJDJ, perhaps the premiere augmented reality sound application (as well as its Inception-themed fork, and an iPad sibling, Voyager). Thomas is an individual who works by day in augmented reality. He could have done any number of things to this brass band he experienced out in the world: turned it into techno, echoed it around his head. But when he reached for his phone, he just pressed record — to capture, enjoy, and share a moment.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/dizzybanjo. More on Thomas/Banjo at dizzybanjo.wordpress.com. More on RjDj at rjdj.me.