More Than Haze for Haze’s Sake (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These may be the least drone-like drones in recent memory — or, perhaps more to the point, the most drone-like melodies in recent memory. Certainly the music on Neil Wiernik‘s Broken Strings, Plastic Tubes and Bedside Serenades has the thick slow-motion ooze of the best down-spectrum haze, of the most bass-veering ambient music: dense figurations that hover just above the ground, more Tule fog than cumulous cloud. “Sunshine White Out Sequence No 207” in particular brings to mind the submerged pianism of Harold Budd at his least treacly (MP3). But there’s more here than just haze for haze’s sake, not that there’s anything wrong with purist sound design unto itself. (The contrast between “pure” sound design and “purist” is intentional: the word “pure” might mistakenly suggest that the optimal sound design is the ethereal music-of-the-spheres HVAC/distant-traffic/circulatory-system drone, while “purist” seems to embrace that idea more explicitly.) Instead, perhaps preeminently on “Endangered Species List No 387,” there’s a sense of sinuous threads of developing sonic and melodic content being given just enough energy to progress but not so much that they move into the foreground (MP3).

[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/fbl018NeilWiernik-BrokenStringsPlasticTubesAndBedsideSerenades/01EndangeredSpeciesListNo387.mp3|titles=”Endangered Species List No 387″|artists=Neil Wiernik] [audio:http://www.archive.org/download/fbl018NeilWiernik-BrokenStringsPlasticTubesAndBedsideSerenades/03SunshineWhiteOutSequenceNo207.mp3|titles=”Sunshine White Out Sequence No 207″|artists=Neil Wiernik]

Get the full release at archive.org. More details at the releasing netlabel, feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com. More on Neil Wiernik, who is based in Toronto, at phoniq.net.

Music for Drawing (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Following up a recent interview with Kid Koala about the intersection of scratchboard comics and turntablism scratching, here’s another audio interview with the Canadian musician and longtime Ninja Tune Records roster member on the occasion of his new graphic novel and accompanying soundtrack, Space Cadet (MP3). He was interviewed for the excellent Panel Borders comics podcast series, part of the generous offerings of resonancefm.com. Koala is a thoughtful participant in and observer of the more sedate vestiges of street culture. He spins a good tale about the origins of his “Music to Draw to” series, in which he DJs downtempo music to inspire the artists and other creative types who show up for the special live shows, held in places like art galleries. The series began during a Canadian winter, as a way to inspire his friends to get out of their apartments and do something creative together — or at least side by side. It isn’t just for artists. He reports that fashion designers, video-game coders, and writers have joined in. At least once, someone brought along a loom. The first rule of “Music to Draw to” is: be prepared to do something creative. The second rule of “Music to Draw to” is: no dancing.

[audio:http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/podpress_trac/web/7571/0/panelborders_kidkoala.mp3|titles=”Kid Koala (Panel Borders Interview)”|artists=Kid Koala]

MP3 originally posted at resonancefm.com.

The Sonic Trajectories of Birds (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s enough to test the quality of your laptop’s speakers — not their ability to withstand sonic assault, but, quite the contrary, their ability to make quiet noises discernible. What seems to be the wheezing of a broken circuit on an external speaker becomes a self-contained sound world under the influence of headphones, the audio turned inside out, viewed from inside rather than heard from a distance.

The sounds that comprise “Quem Conta Um Conto, II” by Sara Pinheiro are fragile, indeed, bits of far-off activity, and the closer apparition of birds. The above image accompanies the file on the website it first appeared, the great Chicago-based podcast at theradius.tumblr.com, but even without its assistance, there’s no doubt that the shuffling and cooing would be mistaken for anything other than what it is. There is fluttering, too, so for every bird heard close by, there is the sense of one further off.

How those sounds and the non-avian ones correlate is what Pinheiro is after. She has quite the ambition for her subjects (stating in an accompanying text that the noises follow “film theorist Chris Vogler’s twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey”), but the audio itself remains, blessedly, modest: small scrapings that in their relative abstraction still manage to push the imagination toward the sense of a scene, of things coming and going, and of the causes and impact of such motions.

Track originally posted at theradius.tumblr.com, where it is episode number 14 (also at soundcloud.com). More on Pinheiro at sarapinheiro.com. She is originally from Portgual and has, as of last year, been pursuing a masters degree in sonology at the Royal Conservatory of Music – The Hague (The Netherlands).

The Vinyl Record Album Is the Heart of the Guitar

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Ted Linus Farber‘s “Let Old Blue Sing His Song” is part of a group exhibit currently on view at the library at Sonoma State University.

The works in the exhibit, which is titled Metamorphosis, broadly draw from a theme of biological process. Farber’s piece is a large-format construction: part painting, part collage, part installation, part sculpture. A record album, albeit without a turntable needle to give it voice, rests inside the outline of an acoustic guitar, which itself sits alongside the rough structure of what appears to be an old man’s face. Presumably the horizontal slash across the face is a harmonica — as the work’s title suggests, the blues is its subject — though at the close range of the depiction, it also resembles the neck of the guitar. Covering his mouth as it does, it suggests muteness, a reading that aligns with the music-less vinyl record. The guitar neck extends above the album like a weather vane or an antenna — receiving a signal rather than projecting one.

There’s a little switch to the left of the guitar neck, a somewhat ironic detail given that the guitar is an acoustic one, not an electric one. (You might miss it if you don’t look at the wall text, which lists the work’s constituent materials as: “woodcut, painting, electronics.”) When switched on, the vinyl album spins, but there is no music, just the slightly grating mechanism that makes the LP turn. There’s a tension worth pondering about the placement of the record at the center of the guitar, as if the turntable were the heart — perhaps merely, at this stage of history, the pacemaker — keeping the guitar alive. The vinyl record can’t contain Old Blue’s song, which goes nameless. The rumble of that rotating mechanism serves as a requiem for a variety of fading technologies.

Metamorphosis runs through November 6, 2011. More details at sonoma.edu.

Looped Loops, Coiled Coils (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In explaining the everday sounds of his nearly hour-long work “L-C (loop coil),” its composer, Darius Ciuta, quotes that bounty of everyday knowledge, Wikipedia: “A coil is a series of loops. A coiled coil is a structure where the coil itself is in turn also looping, these objects are used commonly and are very important.” Dogs bark, voices express simple facts, waves crash, bicycles ride past. This is how “L-C (loop coil)” proceeds, each entry following the previous with an unclear sense of certain division between elements, and a steady level of sonic voyeurism that’s more eavesdrop than first-hand experience, except when the stray sound comes suddenly if momentarily into (sonic) view, as when the bicyclist veers a little too close for comfort.

And then, on rare occasion, there are musical tones — loftily held chords as well as slow melodic figures — that unfold themselves, like soft blankets laid out on a beach, or a color being added to an old black and white picture (MP3). The tones are like glue, like tape, like thin bits of cellophane adhesive holding together fragments of reality.

[audio:http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/029/ihab029-darius_ciuta_-_l-c_loop-coil.mp3|titles=”L-C (loop coil)”|artists=Darius Ciuta]

More information, as well as a massive “lossless” FLAC version of the file, at impulsivehabitat.com.