- 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 #
45 Seconds of Unaugmented Reality
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.
A Series of Glitchy Twitchy Switchbacks Through a Steady Stream of Low-level Pulses
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/Soundmutationsportal0/Portal0.mp3|titles=”Portal #0″|artists=Soundmutations]
That sense of data quickly being parsed and shuffled and spat back as a quick stopgap response, fending off overload by collating and managing, rather than digging in deep and taking time to sort out the details and patterns. That’s what “Portal #0” from Soundmutations comes across as, a needfully quick gloss on urgent information flow. It’s a series of glitchy twitchy switchbacks through a steady stream of low-level pulses. Released on the consistently solid Absence of Wax netlabel, it is a brief snippet of a single, just one and one quarter minutes of anxious, hesitant, portentous sonic processing (MP3).
There are moments in club-minded techno when sound is celebrated for its own sake, rather than doing primary duty as a score for late-night social activity. And there is a moment in sonic experimentation when it’s as if a club had broken out in a digital Petri dish. It’s not clear which of these best describes “Portal #0” — it’s right in between.
Kudos to Absence of Wax for its ingenious download setup, which provides not an MP3 but a Zip archive containing in addition two alternate audio formats (an oversized AIFF and a compact OGG), two cover images (one full size, one thumbnail), and a pair of metadata files — and the track is also streaming at the netlabel’s website, devinsarno.com/absenceofwax. Get the various files individually, such as the MP3 linked to above, at archive.org. More on Soundmutations at soundmutations.com.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
- The third time you hear "Mustang Sally," it's probably time to move to another cafe. #
- Is Tower Heist the Easy Rider of the #occupy movement? #
- Album a lot less interesting texturally once I realized my earbuds were reproducing external noise picked up by laptop's mic. #
- Apparently my hometown (Huntington, NY) has the highest U.S. per capita consumption of video games http://t.co/K0vpY0Nv via @industrygamers #
- There should be a placid Blue Angels event, just silent rainbow-colored air balloons passing to and fro all weekend long. #
- The Blue Angels' #OccupyClouds noise-art performance work persists. It's like the Blue Man Group meets Transformers up there. #
- Apparently this is not the debut year of the Prius Blue Angels. #
- Delay/distortion on VoIP headset just slow enough that it sounds less like an echo of my voice and more like an imitator. #
- Humidifier & construction next door creating peals of low-level audio beading: nanotech Steve Reich approaching grey-goo stage. #
Upload Through the Red Door (MP3)
It isn’t just Metallica and Phish making their live concert sets readily available in a slightly slower version of the (peculiarly emphatic-yet-redundant) “day-and-date” digital publishing strategy being newly employed by comic-book publishers — or, for another current example, the multi-platform approach that has Universal Pictures releasing the comedy Tower Heist (surely destined to be the East Rider of the Occupy Movement) to on-demand cable a few weeks after the movie’s theatrical debut.
No, the power of Soundcloud.com — along with ustream.com, and Google+ Hangouts, and countless other tools, including any good old FTP server, for that matter — lets experimental musicians in distant enclaves spread their feedback-laden performances further and more quickly than ever before. As the FTP comment suggests, this is nothing new. Yet something new is happening. Naysayers to perceived cloud hype regularly comment that the cloud is just an FTP server with a fresh coat of paint. But of course the cloud is about more than that — and among those other things it’s about is multiple digital services employing each other’s API (that being the computer-code equivalent of a handshake deal) to share information.
What is new is the manner in which simultaneity — of services, of content availability, of cultural experience — is becoming the norm: the delay between hardcover and Kindle, between theater and living room, between concert hall and earbuds, is shrinking faster than you can say Moore’s Law. At the moment, this is largely, for at least the big businesses involved, a matter of throttling piracy and maximizing revenue opportunities. The implications are a long way from resolving themselves. Almost certainly new forms of culture will emerge, and along with them new legal imbroglios. (Tower Heist‘s cable-rental fee to the consumer is approximately $60, meaning that people are at once being invited to treat their homes as makeshift movie theaters, yet also being tempted to venture into becoming under-the-table commercial enterprises. Can’t you foresee a surly MPAA representative showing up at a suburban home’s front door demanding one beer from each six pack brought by attending friends?)
All of which came to mind during repeated listens to a solo concert performed yesterday evening by Mysterybear (aka Dave Seidel) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at a club called the Red Door. Seidel lives a couple hours away in the town of Peterborough. I live 3,000 miles away in San Francisco. Thankfully, Seidel earlier this afternoon uploaded a recording of the show to his soundcloud.com/mysterybear account.
It’s a rangy, deeply felt venture, digging into thick, sinuous bands of feedback and teasing out fragments of noise, melody, drone, and hush. Feedback is its media; it’s Seidel’s instrument — and feedback is also the media by which the file is being distributed. Its online distribution taps into a subsequent feedback loop. Were just one musician doing what Seidel is doing, the MP3 (available not only for stream but for download and subsequent redistribution) would be a mere archival document. Instead, it’s part of the natural course of the concert-performance experience. Who knows how many people showed up for Seidel’s Thursday-night gig? I live in San Francisco, which is home to an especially supportive community of experimental-music concert-goers, but I’ve been to plenty of Thursday-night shows even here where I was the only person in the audience who was neither a musician performing that evening nor one of those musician’s significant others. Whoever attends Seidel’s live show, he knows that an audience awaits on Soundcloud.com.
And in time, the live audience and the Soundcloud audience will merge, or at least commingle, in the musician’s mind. The live show is if nothing else a means to try out new material and get it out in the world, with the knowledge that an online audience larger than that available in most towns and cities is just waiting to hear what the musician is up to. It can be said that the concert didn’t end last night when Seidel packed up his equipment. It just took a break before it began resounding anew online.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/mysterybear. More on Mysterybear/Seidel at mysterybear.net and twitter.com/daveseidel. (The red door up top is not from the so-named club in New Hampshire. It was photographed in Guatemala and is reproduced courtesy of suttonhoo.blogspot.com and the Creative Commons.)