The Glass Bees are the multi-instrument, multidisciplinary duo of Chris Williams and Jason Das. Together with Ranjit Bhatnagar they recorded a track titled “Calle Sol” that is a splendid example of lofi fourth world music — not just the ersatz indigenous sound that Jon Hassell pioneered, but pursued with a sense of threadbare economy that makes it all the more enticing, and for that matter believable (MP3). Not that there’s an explicit illusion inherent in “Calle Sol,” but there is an implicit one, that this is a kind of folk music, a kind of communal activity. Mixed in with accordion and various string sounds are echoing fragments of noise and found sounds. I asked Bhatnagar to untangle all the parts and explain who was doing what. He wrote back, helpfully, “On ‘Calle Sol’ I played the accordion, stretched between my feet and hands like a rowing machine. (I probably also did a bit of percussion on the accordion face and ribs.) Chris Williams played laptop, effects, and percussion, and Jason Das played cello and percussion.”
[audio:http://media.glassbees.com.s3.amazonaws.com/Glass_Bees_Calle_Sol.mp3|titles=”Calle Sol”|artists=Glass Bees with Ranjit Bhatnagar]
This is the ninth occurrence of a little 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 Stylophone drawings were done for me for this project by Natalia Ludmila, who was born in Mexico City and currently resides in Australia, where she is studying toward a Masters in digital design. She has a degree in visual arts from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in which she specialized in painting. Her work has been exhibited in several solo and group shows in Mexico, Brazil, Spain (and elsewhere in Europe), and Australia. She was the second prize recipient at the XVIII Ibiza Biennale with the dfm e.p project.
Posted my latest boingboing.net piece yesterday, this time focused on seaquence.org, a lovely and nifty petri-dish-themed music sequencer produced under the auspices of gaffta.org. It’s browser-based and free, which is to say it has resisted the lure of iOS that so much interactive music has succumbed to in recent years. I’ve been interviewing the developers of Seaquence as part of the series of music-app investigations I pursued recently in regard to the iOS apps Thicket and ShapeSeq.
In the boingboing.net piece, I inserted a video produced by the Seaquence crew that serves as an introduction. Here’s another video, this one produced apparently by someone not associated with the production of the software:
Balancing Act: Depiction of artist Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows installation in the bridge at the SFMOMA
In a recent one of its Artcasts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interviewed sound installation artist Bill Fontana about the alchemy inherent in his work, and in particular the beauty of mechanical sound (MP3).
He discusses his use of the accelerometer in his piece “Sonic Shadows,” which he describes as a “kinetic acoustic wall drawing.” (There’s also an M4A version of the podcast, which includes embedded images.) The above photo is a still from a massive (114 MB) video document of the installation, available for download (MOV), and showing the set-up from a variety of angles. It opens with the question “What ambient sound does the museum generate?”
“Sonic Shadows” was commissioned by SFMOMA as part of its 75th anniversary. As the museum describes the piece: “This sound sculpture uses moving ultrasonic speakers and vibration sensors to transform the space below the dramatic circular skylight, surrounding the fifth-floor pedestrian bridge, into an acoustic drawing in real time. As visitors cross over the bridge, their footfalls contribute to real-time recordings of ambient sounds.”
Work such as Fontana’s seems especially appopriate for an anniversary of an institution, as it will be impressive to individuals who have spent significant periods of time in the building previously yet not been aware of this sonic aspect of the place.
A press release attributed to curator Rudolf Frieling goes into more detail:
Speakers installed in the ventilation holes above the bridge are paired with moving ultrasonic speakers below whose narrowly focused audio beams reflect off of the surrounding surfaces, creating what the artist describes as a transparent, acoustic wall drawing in which “the shapes of the architecture become sound.”As visitors cross the bridge their footsteps contribute to the live composition. Exploring the internal resonance of structural elements, the piece mixes real-time recordings of sounds produced by the bridge, the walls, and the pipes in the boiler room hidden behind the opposite wall. Whereas some of the artist’s past sound sculptures integrated recognizable sounds from nature or urban locations, this site-specific piece transforms more abstract, mechanical noises into an ever-changing dreamscape complemented by shifting patterns of sunlight and shadows. Fontana activates this transitional, non-gallery space, producing an immersive sensory experience of the museum itself.
There’s also video of Fontana working in the bowels of the museum at sfmoma.org, in which he discusses the influence on his work by Italian Futurists and their symphonies of industrial noise.
Future Present: An image of artist Bill Fontana in the boiler room of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The piece opened on November 20, 2010, and will run through October 16, 2011. More at sfmoma.org.
A dozen musicians respond to an article in the Telegraph that attacked Susan Philipsz, winner of the 2010 Turner Prize.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Featuring new original music from: all n4tural, Kate Carr, He Can Jog (Erik Schoster), John Kannenberg, Mystified (Thomas Park), Tobias Reber, C. Reider, Cheddar Rimtorn (Stephan Richter), Mark Rushton, Subscape Annex (Steve Burnett), Robert M Thomas, and Stephen Vitiello
On December 6 of this year, 2010, Glasgow-based artist Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize for her work “Lowlands.”
It was the first time ever that a work of sound — a sound installation, or piece of sound art — had won the award.
The next day, art critic Richard Dorment of the Telegraph wrote, “I loathe the kind of think-me sensitive tuneless stuff Ms Philipsz sings.” He wrote a lot more, mauling an adventurous and long-running series on BBC Radio 3 called Late Night Junction, and dispensing with folk music as a whole. (Philipsz’s “Lowlands” involves several overlapping recordings of her singing the 16th-century lament from which the piece takes its name.)
Dorment apparently feels obliged to question the status of Philipsz’s “Lowlands” as a work of art. That’s fair, even if fretting over what is and is not art is a time-consuming parlor game that keeps people busy when they might be looking for the art in things. It’s equally fair to say that what Dorment wrote is not art criticism; it’s a rant, a bullying and uninformed one that is more an expression of the author’s personal taste than an investigation of the subject at hand.
Of Philipsz’s win, Dorment wrote dismissively, “Cue a long low collective sigh from art lovers across the country.”
We took that cue seriously, as lovers of art across the world, and admirers of Philipsz’s work.
And in taking it seriously, we took it literally. This is a compilation of a dozen recordings by musicians incensed by Dorment’s assault.
Each recording on this compilation was recorded for this project, and uses the human sigh as its source material. That is Lowlands: A Sigh Collective. The words here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts of the participants. Their response is in their music, in their sound.
PS: Dorment’s article can be read at telegraph.co.uk. More on Susan Philipsz’s “Lowlands” and the Turner Prize at tate.org.uk. Special thanks to Geeta Dayal, Sean Lester, and archive.org.
The Glass Bees are the multi-instrument, multidisciplinary duo of Chris Williams and Jason Das. Together with Ranjit Bhatnagar they recorded a track titled “Calle Sol” that is a splendid example of lofi fourth world music — not just the ersatz indigenous sound that Jon Hassell pioneered, but pursued with a sense of threadbare economy that makes it all the more enticing, and for that matter believable (MP3). Not that there’s an explicit illusion inherent in “Calle Sol,” but there is an implicit one, that this is a kind of folk music, a kind of communal activity. Mixed in with accordion and various string sounds are echoing fragments of noise and found sounds. I asked Bhatnagar to untangle all the parts and explain who was doing what. He wrote back, helpfully, “On ‘Calle Sol’ I played the accordion, stretched between my feet and hands like a rowing machine. (I probably also did a bit of percussion on the accordion face and ribs.) Chris Williams played laptop, effects, and percussion, and Jason Das played cello and percussion.” 
Posted my latest 
