Disquiet – Page 1117 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Piano Torque, from Bulgaria (MP3s)

June 4, 2011April 12, 2012 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Repetition is often at its most effective when it ceases to be repetitive. That is, repetition can, having lulled the listener into a state of routinely fulfilled expectations, shift the listening experience without immediately divulging that the routine has, in fact, been dispensed with. At both a micro and macro level, this is precisely what Two, a recent collaboration between Martin Lukanov and Mytrip, has accomplished. The first track opens with piano phrases so firmly enacted and widely spaced that you can read the waveform (over at soundcloud.com) like a musical score. In time, though, those pulses are morphed into something undulating and droning. Yet the ear is so attuned to stasis that the move is less of a rupture than this description might suggest. The opening track on Two accomplishes this very feat, but so too does it set the mode for the album as a whole. At times, as in track four, the piano returns, but as sublimated chords whose constituent elements are pulled like taffy, twisted this way and that until they become almost unrecognizable.

More on the musicians, who are based in Bulgaria, at soundcloud.com/mytrip and pftidk.com. More details at the releasing netlabel, abandonmentlabel.blogspot.com, and file-hosting service, archive.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

June 4, 2011June 4, 2011 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Summon Dragonfly #shittywizardspells #
Not only seeing the X-Men movie today, but (1) it's a short walk and (2) there's dim sum en route. #richmonddistrict #415 #
Was much more of a Fantasy Trip kid than a D&D kid. #
RIP, jazz pianist Ray Bryant (b. 1931). #
Morning sounds: fridge chirping and droning like a field of insects, wind playing in the chimney, vehicles passing cautiously on wet street. #
All my kid's electric toys that make noise should come with a "simulated low battery" setting. #
Craigslist photo compression makes every posted item look like it is stolen. #
RT @ario: Every time a piece of tempting audio content is made available as stream-only with no download option, an angel loses its wings. #

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

Taylor Deupree Live in Tokyo (MP3)

June 2, 2011 / By Marc Weidenbaum

In an interview a few months back with self-titledmag.com, musician and label head Taylor Deupree, of 12k, says the following in regard to the evolution of his creative process:

Once I got into the professional music world, I had been doing techno and ambient music and, yes, that lead its way into computer-based music, which was just coming up and offered such new possibilities. But after a while of that, I began to tire of the sterile sound and missed noise and imperfections and started going quite organic with my music, which is where I’m at now — recording to tape and experimenting with different signal paths and staying away from the computer as much as I can.

To accompany the article, the self-titledmag.com site posted, at soundcloud.com/selftitledmag, a quarter-hour recording by Deupree, titled “Live in Tokyo,” that exemplifies what it is that he’s describing. (It’s available for free download and streaming, so proceed to the link to listen — the embeddable player didn’t port cleanly to this post.)

Opening with foghorn pulses, sonar alerts, and rattly wood, it then proceeds at length through water-logged sine waves that traverse the brain from one ear to the other and back. It’s a track built from the sparest of spare parts. Around the four-minute mark, which is to say a quarter of the way through, some sharp shards of synth tones make themselves briefly heard. In a lesser work, this is where the starkly defined parameters commonly referred to as “melody” would make themselves plainly heard and then persist until the close, but instead that moment is immediately revealed as just that: a mere moment that has come, and passed, and is to be heard as one among myriad such tiny moments.

There’s a delicacy to Deupree’s work that somehow is as philosophically robust as it is sonically threadbare, and aside from an uncharacteristically abrupt close, this track is an especially fine example of it.

Top 10 Posts & Searches from May 2011

June 2, 2011 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Grid, Unlocked: Video footage of Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata audio-game in action.

By far, of the 27 posts this past month, the most popular was (1) the extended interview with the developer of the browser-based generative sound application Otomata: “When Cells Collide.” Even though it was published after the midpoint of the month, it’s already the second most popular post on the site for the last 60 days (after the “netlabel checklist”, which is also the most popular post of the last 90 days). Not surprisingly, (2) an entry in this site’s daily Downstream department, focused on free legal downloads, that was related to Otomata also made the top 10: “When a Generative Track Takes On a Life of Its Own.”

(3) An introduction to my newmusicbox.org article on “Luciano Berio, Crate Digger” also ranked particularly high. It explores matters of generation perspectives and the fluid nature of copyright in a classical context, in relation to Berio’s Sinfonia.

These additional free MP3 recommendations made the list: (4) drones by South Korea”“based musician Fescal, (5) evidence of Heddy Boubaker‘s progress on the modular synth, after health concerns required him to stop playing saxophone (6) a field recording of the voting process by Bulldozia, aka Glasgow-based Alasdair Pettinger, (7) a ukulele remix, (8) a sampled flute, and (9) avant-turntablism by Jay Sullivan.

And, as happens occasionally and without clear explanation, (10) one of the automated weekly summaries of activity at twitter.com/disquiet.

Top search requests of the month (excluding, as always, those that yield null returns): harold budd live, alan morse davies, outra-g, Kalte, steve reich, autechre, biosphere, concrete, darkwinter, exhibition, inteam, loscil, mille plateaux, pessoa, Scanner.

The Delphic Drone (MP3)

May 31, 2011 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A variety of drones and drone-like sonorities make up Resonances, the recent five-track set by Savaran, aka Wales-based Mark Walters. Some are environmental, some digital, many hybrid, and the one that may be the most striking is the closing entry, which is titled “Delphic.” Even without reading the detailed liner notes that accompany the album, it wouldn’t be a stretch to associate the sublimated female voice heard on the track with that of the Oracle herself — not the one who baked cookies in The Matrix, but the one who occasionally shared prophecies with ancient Greeks. Heard here, the voice is part of a ritualistic blur of light percussion and swelling tones (MP3). Part of the sense of ritual is how the track frames the presence of the voice — how it builds to the voice’s appearance with bell tones (pings and gong-like swells), and also how it cossets it, the voice emerging from a deep field of processing, as if a curtain were being pulled back.