Sketches of Sound 10: Justin Orr

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is the tenth occurrence of a little monthly Disquiet.com project called “Sketches of Sound”: inviting illustrators to sketch something sound-related. I post the drawing as the background of my Twitter account, twitter.com/disquiet, and then share a bit of information about the illustrator back on Disquiet.com. Call it “curating Twitter.”

The above speaker drawing was done for me for this project by Justin Orr, who makes his home on the web at jusscope.com.

The previous “Sketches of Sound” contributors were, in alphabetical order, Brian Biggs, Warren Craghead III, Dylan Horrocks, Megan Kelso, Minty Lewis, Natalia Ludmila, Darko Macan, Hannes Pasqualini, and Thorsten Sideb0ard.

The Performance of Everyday Industry (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

David Velez recognizes the sense of performance inherent in everyday life. He’s in particular interested in the performance that is part and parcel of repetitive tasks, a matter that isn’t necessarily something its enactors are even conscious of. Velez recently released a musically enlivened field recording of “industrial processes” via the impulsivehabitat.com netlabel. Titled Funza, it is a 40-plus-minute exploration of ordinariness, an ordinariness that is lightly augmented with musical tones, much like a documentary film that has a proper score and that occasionally implements editing techniques rooted in fictional drama (MP3).

[audio:http://impulsivehabitat.com/releases/017/ihab017-01-david_velez_-_funza.mp3|titles=”Funza”|artists=David Velez]

Writes Velez of his undertaking:

Part of my job involves taking photographs of industrial processes to illustrate a series of manuals with production instructions and guidelines that the company gives to the machine operators. Parallel to taking the photographs. I capture the sounds from those processes most of them involving steam and pneumatic powered machines whose sonorities I found quite interesting for their percussive nature and their high pitched textures respectively.

These recordings reveal an interesting obvious and irrelevant phenomena that captures my interest: parallel to making a product, the operator is performing a sound score using the machines as instruments.

The operator is unadvisedly reading and performing a score unadvisedly written and encoded in the instructions and guidelines.

While aware of “a performance” I advisedly record it.

Track originally posted at impulsivehabitat.com.

Two Maverick Institutions: John Cage & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Nature)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The new issue of Nature, dated today, January 20, 2011, features a dual-book review I wrote. (That’s issue 469 of Nature, which has been around since the tail end of 1869.) The books are Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Oxford) by Louis Niebur and Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (Knopf) by Kenneth Silverman. Unfortunately, the piece, titled “Music: Pioneers of Sound,” at nature.com is behind a subscriber paywall, but the gist of the review is as follows: both Cage and the BBC Radiophonic were maverick institutions in experimental music, both met their ends during the same decade, and both came to those ends (Cage in 1992, the Radiophonic in 1998) to some extent as an unfortunate consequence of their own expanding notoriety.

Yet despite their similarities, their paths rarely crossed. Cage was, for all his own open-mindedness, a figure in the living pantheon of the mid-century avant-garde, whereas the BBC Radiophonic was by its very charter determined to be populist — a goal more than achieved with its indelible theme song for Doctor Who.

Ironically, the books are the opposites of their subjects: Silverman’s is very much a general-reader survey of a great man’s life and career, whereas the BBC book is an academic inquiry enacted by a professor of musicology. That said, don’t let the latter’s occasional deep dive into tonal analysis scare you off; its real achievement is how Niebur charts the manner in which the Radiophonic navigated the cutthroat bureaucracy of the BBC. Fun fact: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was not spun out of the BBC Music Department; the Radiophonic owes its existence to the shepherding of the Features and Drama departments. “Every good story needs a villain,” writes Niebur, “and here the Music department fills the role admirably.”

Between Silverman’s biography, the Kyle Gann book on 4’33” (No Such Thing a Silence, Yale), and the year-end Cage Against the Machine cause célèbre in England, 2010 was a pretty great year for his ongoing legacy. Oh, and my favorite sentence from Silverman’s fairly declarative telling of Cage’s life is this one: “Only five feet two inches tall, he was deemed the greatest living authority on the history of Alaska.” He’s describing the father of Cage’s one-time wife, the striking Xenia Kashevaroff.

And again, if you have subscription access, the piece is at nature.com.

Pazz & Jop: 3 Out of 10 Ain’t Bad

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The annual Village Voice Pazz & Jop critics poll is out. Of my top-10 album selections (previously posted here, with some comments), just three have votes from other participants. This is par for the course: of the 1,839 albums listed in the poll’s ballots, the majority have only one or two mentions. In contrast, the winner, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, has 266 mentions, for 3,250 points. Critics have 100 points to divvy up between the up to 10 albums they select. (Ditto for singles, a poll in which I didn’t participate.)

The three albums I shared with other voters were:

¶ Yellow Swans‘ Going Places, with 15 mentions, for a total of 141 points;

¶ Scott Tuma‘s Dandelion, with 3 mentions, for a total of 30 points;

¶ Oval‘s O, with 2 mentions, for a total of 20 points (Oval’s Oh was also on the list, with one mention for 10 points).

The list of critics is extensive — more than 700 — and if you peek around, you’ll find some neat variations from the standard music journalists, among them musician Elliott Sharp, who in addition to having five albums on his list for which no one else voted, did a smart thing in his list of favorite singles: he simply selected a favorite track from each of his top 10 albums.

Right now there seems to be a technical glitch on the Voice site, so the album pages linked to from individual critics’ ballot pages don’t list the other critics who voted for the albums. There’s been no major upgrade to the system that the Voice uses to publish the polls, which is unfortunate: no tools to fine-tune comparison between ballots, no links from critics’ ballot pages to their own sites, no links from critics’ ballots to their ballots from previous years, no “artist” pages to collect information on various releases, comments only on article pages (not on ballot or release pages).

Before the rise of the Internet, the annual Pazz & Jop poll was a rare source for music discovery. The ready availability today of opinions makes the poll far less valuable than it once was, but rather than embrace the tools of the web to make the most of its key virtue (the impressive expanse of participants), it’s gotten technologically stagnant. Maybe next year?

A taste of what the poll could be, as a correlated index of opinion, can be had at needlebase.com. That site’s Glenn McDonald is credited with tabulating the poll, and on the needlebase.com page goes into greater depth. In addition to some nifty sorting, it provides individual pages for ballots (here’s mine), including an “empathy” factor that tries to align one critic with others that share some sort of consensus. That consensus, of course, is measured solely by the hard data of specific albums rather than, say, genre or average BPM, and it doesn’t take into consideration, by definition, information the poll neglected to ask about, like, for instance, albums that we were disappointed by (for example, my top “empathy” colleague loved at least one album I couldn’t stand). Again, maybe next year the official Voice poll’s presentation will be enlivened by some of the sorting and collating that needlebase.com touches on.