Live Improvisation with Buddha Machine (Zither Edition)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The third generation of the Buddha Machine, pictured above, suggests itself as the least amenable to adoption by musicians, electronic or otherwise, for the simple fact of its content.

Whereas its two predecessors contained loops that hewed mostly to a drone or drone-like composure, edging occasionally toward rhythmic, the third generation, named Chan Fang (禅房), contains the sounds of the Chinese zither, a string instrument. So whereas the previous two were of a type with electronic music, and lent themselves naturally to use as both sound source and backing/foundation material, the new one is by nature foreground material. But Dave Seidel, aka Mysterybear, dispenses with any concerns about the third FM3 Buddha Machine with a pair of live solo improvisations in which the device plays a central role, abetted by the second-generation edition and other tools (for the initiated: Auduino, Memory Man delay box, MoogerFooger ring modulator). Titled “Following a Line,” the piece is an extended (almost 15 minute) romance for the zither, the looping samples of which frequently appear center-stage, either adorned by or interacting with a variety of meditative sounds:

And just this morning he posted a second piece in the series:

More on the device at fm3buddhamachine.com. More on Seidel/Mysterybear at mysterybear.net. Tracks originally posted at Seidel’s soundcloud.com/mysterybear account.

Update: As it turns out, the music is now the first installment of Seidel’s new mysterbear netlabel: mysterybear.net and archive.org.

(Image from boomkat.com, one of the many distributors carrying the Buddha Machine.)

“A Sakha Shaman Hears His Ancestors Whilst Travelling” (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sound may suggest the human voice, but according to composer Alan Morse Davies, the source material in his “A Sakha Shaman Hears His Ancestors Whilst Travelling” is not speech or song, but instead the Russian mouth harp known as the vargan. Once that fact is known, the deep imposing glottal drone is suddenly familiar — despite which familiarity, Davies makes from that sound a work of extraordinary patience and solemnity (MP3).

[audio:http://www.at-sea.com/today/15%20-%20A%20Sakha%20Shaman%20Hears%20His%20Ancestors%20Whilst%20Travelling.mp3|titles=”A Sakha Shaman Hears His Ancestors Whilst Travelling”|artists=Alan Morse Davies]

He says in his brief descriptive note, “I don’t believe in god but I’d like to make music that sounds like the voice of a god.” What he’s getting at is the the near-inhuman solitude, the sheer blissful intensity of the undertaking.

According to that same note, the track consists of four layers of sampled harp, which have been “stretched, retuned and edited.” The result is like a hologram of a recording of a vargan, a near-static sonic image of it, into which we step. It may shimmer, but it’s a shimmer that seems like it could shred flesh.

Track originally posted at alanmorsedavies.wordpress.com.

Four Caribou Variations (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Caribou (aka Daniel Victor Snaith) was last heard of here after remixing a Four Tet track. Caribou is no less enamored of letting his work take a spin in the imaginations, and technologies, of others, and he’s been slowly posting commissioned renditions of tracks from his 2010 album Swim, released on the Merge record label. Particularly active in remix circles has been “Bowls,” a hit of loungey exotica with prayer-bowl beats and harp flourishes:

As with the Stonesthrow Beat Battles that get an occasional mention here, the pleasure in hearing the variations spun from the original is precisely in the variety. As of this morning, when Four Tet tweeted the existence of an Icarus remix of “Bowls,” there are at least three distinct iterations since the original. One by Holden opens and closes with a sharp snap of that prayer bowl, a come-to-trance gong that introduces and occasionally bisects a mix of heavy acoustic beats and backwards-masked warbles. Nearly twice the length of the Caribou original, the Holden version grabs hold of little details and plays with them at length:

Gavin Russom‘s version is more self-evidently dance-able, its two main sections separated by a bit of ecstatic stasis. The opening is all gamelany, low-key counterpoint; the second half dives into My Life in the Bush of Ghosts territory, with a pulsing bass and ritual whirlygig sounds:

Which brings us to the Icarus edit, the sole one of the four tracks mentioned in this post that is available for free download. It’s the most dessicated of the batch, and willfully so, a defiantly remote take on the original. It moves, spookily, from a looped snatch of overheard conversation to dense Michael Mann cinematics: rumbling subaural texture and automated percussion. It shares with the Holden version a taste for extreme specificity (neither track sounds merely like loops set on hold), but is much more abstract in its plotting:

More on Icarus at icarus.nu.

2011 Resolutions: 1. Upgrade Streaming Music

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

These aren’t quite resolutions, but there are several things I intend to do a better job of on Disquiet.com in 2011 than I have in the past:

1. Feature more streaming-only music. True, there is arguably no such thing as streaming music. It’s all downloadable, since the audio you’re hearing is on your computer (or other web-enabled device) by some means. In many cases, all you need to do is look at a streaming-only page’s source code (Ctrl + U in the Firefox browser) to locate the URL for the streaming media.

But even if the distinction between downloadable and streaming is artificial, an illusion, it is still a distinction made consciously, one way or the other, by people who post their music online. This site honors such decisions, aside from the occasional gray-market tip regarding particularly remarkable items that have long been out of print. This site also favors, to a great degree, downloadable music over that which is only intended for streaming. (There’s a whole department dedicated to it, Downstream, much as there is for commercial music, The Crate, which has far less coverage, and there’s no section for streaming-only.)

Part of this decision to pay more attention to streaming audio is curatorial: There’s an enormous amount of streaming-only music available. Part of the decision is practical: Once upon a time, the distinction between downloadable and streaming-only was a matter of what was and wasn’t portable: downloadable music you could pop onto your iPod (or semi-equivalent MP3 player), whereas streaming music was only available while you sat in front of your computer. With the rise of the smartphone, especially in our age of 4G/Mobile-WiMAX/LTE/etc. connections, it’s arguable that the tables have turned: the downloadable file is now a weighty object that needs to take up precious space on a device, whereas streaming audio is available (allowing for some hyperbole) in any place at any time.

In the past, there’s been this sense that downloadable music is part of a community that takes open-source culture seriously and that non-downloadable (i.e., streaming-only) music can, as a result, have a sense of being promotional, but that divide no longer seems to hold. (Please don’t read anything into this about the fate of the Downstream section — it will continue to exist, a new item each weekday.)

In any case, I’m hoping that in 2011 I’ll spend more time acknowledging, critiquing, recommending, and otherwise paying (and directing) attention to audio that is streaming-only … such as this track by Chris Herbert, titled “Shortwave Study for Scott Morgan.” Scott Morgan is better known loscil, and he and Rafael Aton Irisarri are compiling a compilation titled Air Texture II for spring 2011 release, and this is a rough sketch of something that Herbert is working on for them. It’s a lovely, low-key bit of near-silent ambience, all slow gusts of aether with occasion additional tones and textures and bits of voice.

More on the track on the page where it is hosted, soundcloud.com/chrisherbert.

Recording Sound without a Sound Recorder (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Walk Men: President Theodore Roosevelt (left) and John Muir at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, 1903

A not uncommon refrain on Twitter is, “Why didn’t you record it?”

This question is always in response to something someone has described overhearing, especially field-recording-friendly sounds like church bells, jet fighters, police helicopters, surf, rain, broken domestic appliances, babies laughing, and so forth.

My response to such a response is always the same: I did record it, with my keyboard (and, by extension, my pen or pencil). Field recording isn’t just about using an audio recorder to capture the sound. It’s about making note of a sound by notating it, not necessarily by copying it but by describing it. To underestimate the word’s ability to reproduce sound is to overestimate the microphone’s.

At twitter.com/disquiet, I’ve experimented with re-tweeting these typed-recordings, the implication being that I’ve “recorded their recording,” by marking them with a hashtag like #eartwit, which Harold Schellinx, at twitter.com/soundblog, in particular has made use of. Again, my intent with #eartwit is not to mark my own described sounds, but to note those of others. For a while I tried to use an alternate hashtag term, #twittear, which seemed a little more witty than #eartwit, but as it turns out, that word is used by a lot of Spanish-speakers in the context simply of talking about tweeting, so it’s proved less useful than #eartwit. As it turns out, #twitthear seems unused, so perhaps I’ll try that down the road; #twittolith is probably too obscure a joke, and it’s another valuable letter longer than #twitthear.

In any case, the renowned environmental sound recordist Gordon Hempton touches on this subject of recording sound with one’s words in a wide-ranging talk that he gave at BASEbot in San Francisco, which has been released as a free download: MP3. At around the 25-minute point, Hempton begins to talk about what Muir described as “the most eloquent voice of nature,” on the occasion of Muir’s first encounter with a mountain stream. Says Hempton, “John Muir really was a sound recordist. His recordings are so accurate. … I was reading all of them, and cataloging them.”

[audio:http://www.basoundecology.org/listen/podpress_trac/web/137/0/BASEbot_004_Gordon_Hempton.mp3|titles=”BASEbot Lecture”|artists=Gordon Hempton]

This is but one small part of Hempton’s overall talk, and the MP3 also includes a lot of great cross-conversation by BASEbot participants, and the full thing is highly recommended.

Lecture MP3, along with annotation, originally posted at basoundecology.org. More on Hempton’s book, One Square Inch of Silence, written with John Grossmann, at onesquareinch.org.

(Above image from the Library of Congress, via the National Park Service website, nps.gov.)