- Sony "reportedly ceased production of all cassette Walkmans and will stop selling them in Japan as soon as the current inventory runs out." #
- In this week's The Good Wife, alarm of car being battered by character beats in time with song on soundtrack. #tvsonics #
- In this week's NCIS, binaural audio of recorded gunshots used to identify murderer's rifle. #tvsonics #
- Alarmed, so to speak, to hear Tues-noon city-wide emergency siren on Thurs at 10:20am, not realizing it's a quake drill: http://is.gd/gbvVK #
- Back from Sacramento, where I ran into someone at a concert from whom I had borrowed a paperback book in, like, 1993 or 1994. #
- Cold night, most homes' windows closed, but on walk home there's communal if disparate cheering, no doubt related to Giants game. #
- Digging into advance copy of forthcoming Brian Eno album. #
- The more extremely vertiginous of Wayne Thiebaud's paintings have come to seem, to me, of a piece with Leb Woods's impossible architectures. #
- When visiting Sacramento from San Francisco you need to adjust your ears to filter through sound of (seasonally present) air conditioning. #
- The beautiful extension of the Crocker Art Museum (classic building with sleek contemporary wing) is like an expanded version of @sjmusart #
- Photo of those four great Fred Dalkey portraits of (unidentified) Joseph Beuys at ccasac.org: http://ow.ly/i/4KdM #
- Great quartet of portraits by Fred Dalkey of (unidentified) Joseph Beuys at ccasac.org in Sacramento. #
- Waking to motel's combination of vacuum cleaners and leaf blowers. And news of GarageBand's metric equivalent of AutoTune. #
- ♫ Afternoon tunes: the tasty broken-funk mixes and mashes of Mogillah at http://soundcloud.com/mogillah #
- Hotel sounds: freeway motion, passing service staff's keys, refrigerator rattles, children talking rapidly (correlates with pool proximity). #
- Driving solo to Sacto; recalling what @andybattaglia9 once said to me about moving to NYC from ATL & missing solitude of car surround sound. #
- The noon sirens are echoing formidably today, all 104 of 'em. #
- Headed up to the state's capital (CA, that is) for 36 hours for some research. If anything #sound ish is going on, please lemme know. #
- Rock'n'roll legend Leon Russell: "My hobby is silence" http://is.gd/g8qjV #
- Karen M. O'Leary's amazing cut-out maps: http://is.gd/g8j1S Corresponds well with earlier Jill Silvia spreadsheets & way up @bldgblog alley. #
- When I first read of @tylergreendc re-installing @sfmoma collection I thought it was some cool new web-based application http://is.gd/g8iAV #
- Don't upgrade OS or install significant new software before trip. Don't upgrade OS or install significant new software before trip. Repeat. #
- RIP, jazz saxophonost and Coltrane alum Marion Brown (b. 1935. via @pheezy #
- Alfred Molina was a good Mark Rothko (hampered by script that played for laughs) but I really wanna see his mordant funnyman Morton Feldman. #
- The issue with Android OS for me isn't fragmentation. It's that the root (so to speak) build remains a largely inaccessible Platonic ideal. #
- Two more tracks from forthcoming Brian Eno CD, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, ("Horse," "Emerald and Stone"), now streaming: http://is.gd/g6TX8 #
- Excellent. Michael Brook scored the new David O. Russell film, The Fighter. #
- Jill Silvia's dissected spreadsheets are like Agnes Martin mashed up with Bartleby the Scrivener: http://bit.ly/9fFL9e via @creativeapps #
- Steve Layton, composer & frequent @sequenza21 contributor, has participated in the Steve Reich remix contest: http://is.gd/g5CfL via @aworks #
- RIP, fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (b.1924), via @osakimandias via @Ihnatko #
- Ooh, not just a new netlabel. A new netlabel from Oakland: @onyudo http://onyudo.com/ #
- #APE highlights: Megan Kelso panel; Justin Parsons' I Ching; Jimenez Lai's architecture comics; new Clutch McB split (w/ Nicole J Georges). #
Listen to the Weather (MP3)
The Listen to the Weather project asks musicians to create new music from sound-related data and one additional element, “their favourite song about water.” That’s how the formula is described at listentotheweather.com by the project’s curator, the Australia-based sound artist Kate Carr. Among the entries in the project is this one by Guy Birkin, whose work has been featured here previously (including a granulated guitar drone in February of this year and a deeply nostalglic remix of a children’s TV-show theme song in April). This time around, Birkin has taken as his material numeric data of the “light level, temperature and relative humidity” during a 24-hour period in Sneinton, Nottongham, in the U.K. He then used the data as a controller for a variety of sound manipulations. As he describes it, in brief:
Light level controls grain amplitude; temperature controls grain location within the sample; relative humidity controls grain density. 24 hours of data is compressed to four minutes of sound, with the result that the track starts quietly at midinight, becomes louder as the sun rises, changes with the atmospheric conditions, and settles down to a calm, warm evening, before finally fading away again.
While the piece includes sampled sound (“four minutes of ambient sound from the same location, and percussion made with that sound plus filtered noise and sine waves”), it’s a fine reminder that when we talk about “field recordings,” we’re talking about more than just audio documentation; we’re talking about all manner of observation.
Original track at soundcloud.com.
Japanese Fashion via Janek Schaefer (MP3)
Currently on display at the Barbican Art Gallery in London is the exhibit Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion, for which Janek Schaefer composed an installation score at the invitation of Barbican curator Catherine Ince. The exhibit space involves four different stereo loops, each about 45 minutes in length, playing on eight speakers (four pairs) spread around the gallery. The shifting gauze of Schaefer’s score, available for free download (MP3), provides a sonic parallel to both the eternally gauzy textiles and milestone-marking technological innovations inherent in fashion.
[audio:http://dl.groovygecko.net/anon.groovy/clients/barbican/unfolding-thefuturebeautysoundtrack.mp3|titles=”Unfolding”|artists=Janek Schaefer]
Schaefer titled his piece “Unfolding” and writes of it at his website, audioh.com, “Unfolding was inspired by the ephemeral unfurling fabric of fashion, viewed through the vertical veils of the Future Beauty exhibition design.” Note that the downloadable version is simply a single stereo mix of the overall score, a snapshot of what is, in fact, a much more random and disparate field of sounds.
More on the exhibit, which opened on October 15 and closes February 6, 2011, at barbican.org.uk. The above image is a 1993 dress design by Koji Tatsuno.
Found via vancooten.com.
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
- I'm interviewing Megan Kelso at noon today at #APE & I made a mini-comic of the Disquiet "Sketches of Sound" series http://ow.ly/i/4CLB #
- Morning sounds: cooing (baby), whirring (computers), stapling (stapler). #
- Best thing about a new Clint Eastwood movie (Hereafter)? New Clint Eastwood score. #
- .@Big_Pause Cool Attenborough clip on tech-mimic lyre bird, especially because of incongruous preceding Medal of Honor ad http://j.mp/b2q8iM #
- There's a bird outside that sounds like tiny fireworks. #eartwit #
- 3 bucks for browser app with dual panes. The iOS business plan can seem like a micropayment economy for every single keystroke and gesture. #
- Squeaky bicycle passing by, or geese passing overhead? #eartwit #
- Downward-torquing score cue in tonite's "Electric Sheep" Fringe ep when Olivia learns senator-shapeshifter isn't dead was totally a Lost cue #
- Playing with soon-to-release upgrade of great music app; pondering how narrative of iterative change is part of app-consumption process. #
- If Win7's marketing plan made us think we made it, the Notion Ink Adam's is to make us think the 1st product is the 3rd or 4th gen already. #
- Great casual set of photos of Ava Mendoza performing live http://is.gd/g2pCC I still need to write about her strong new full-length record. #
- Anyone in San Francisco able to recommend a good turntable-repair shop? #
- ♫ Afternoon tune: a favorite from several weeks ago, the slow-day urban blues of Mike Rotondo's "Goodbye Mission Dub": http://is.gd/g2dTx #
- Baby's gurgles from the front of the house, birds squawking past in the back. #
- Morning sounds: bird song. Quite literally, as in concertedly singular. One bird, one song. #
- New Steve Reich remix contest is cool, but nothing against Bang on a Can, wish they'd used @eighthblackbird track instead http://j.mp/9h6Oxz #
- Susan Philipsz now the first sound artist nominated for Turner Prize: http://nyti.ms/bIhIG9 (Winner to be announced Dec 6.) #
- Wish people would stop saying T-Mobile G2 has "stock" Android 2.2. It doesn't. It may not have a corporate skin, but it lacks Froyo hotspot. #
- Really interesting this Nazi-reenacting-politician story takes place at the same time as this EA Medal of Honor war-play story. #
- ♫ Afternoon ambient stream: "binaural harbour recordings" + "contact mic stuck to…neck of a guitar" http://is.gd/g0TdX by @cjherbert #
- 407,380: The number of horns required to fell the walls of Jericho, according to @wnycradiolab http://is.gd/g0C7s #sonicwarfare #
- Freesound.org has passed the 100,000-sound milestone, in just over five years. #
- Composer Andrew Violette only really likes the second movement of 4'33"; "The others, he says, are too short": http://is.gd/g0u46 #
- New "European sound art network" now centered at http://resonancenetwork.wordpress.com/ and @resonancenet #
- .@tricil @dizzybanjo Partly think Underworld is 100% correct (excepting @justinlassen's point re: contests). Wish stems always available. in reply to tricil #
- Where does Underworld charging $3.99 for the stems in its "Bird 1" remix contest sit on the "prosumer" continuum? http://j.mp/bB10wT #
- Thanks to Megan Kelso for the kazoo background image at twitter.com/disquiet as part of "Sketches of Sound" series: http://j.mp/bA2gqL #
- If you haven't heard, Steve Reich's 2×5 (essentially two rock bands set in minimalist opposition) is available for remix: http://j.mp/9h6Oxz #
- Nearing midnite. Dishwasher, mid-cycle. Washing machine, end-cycle. Both past their prime & all the more endearingly rattly for it. #eartwit #
- .@soundblog Yeah, that's what I'm getting at — for original tweets and retweets. #soundtwit is good. Maybe #eartwit — a little shorter. in reply to soundblog #
- So, @emusic signs up another big label, and raises prices again. Search still abysmal (e.g., can't combine keyword and genre in search). #
- Wanted: A sensible #hashtag for when re-tweeting descriptions of quotidian sound. #twittear #tweetscape #twittscape #twittaural #
- RT @heyexit Urban hum extra loud & spikey tonight. Some pretty serious lightning in the background. Thunder just hangs forever. #twittear #
- Reminder: I'll be interviewing Megan Kelso noon this Sat., 10/16, at #APE Her kazoo drawing will adorn my Twitter page starting tomorrow. #
- Matmos on Wobbly/Lesser collaboration, Simultaneous Quodlibet: "Privileging flows and dissolves over crowded rest stops": http://j.mp/bVJp3I #
- Morning listening: the new Corridors (aka Byron Westbrook) album on Sedimental. Liner notes require headphones or widely separated speakers. #
- Many thanks to Paul @apfrod for having submitted to my music-app interrogation regarding his wonderful ShapeSeq: http://j.mp/shpsq #
- Reply from @creativecommons regarding CBC dust-up about non-commercial licenses: http://j.mp/bNCxsh #
- Tom Phillips show (Flowers NYC: 10/7-30) includes '69 piece in style of his Starless & Bible Black (King Crimson) sleeve: http://j.mp/a9rKH2 #
- Every time I try a different step sequencer, I end up trying to make a fake Alva Noto track. Right now, that's in TweakyBeat (iOS). #
- Something oddly intimate when people's Kindle annotations pop up in Twitter — like they're on the can or in bed. #
- After Fleet Week ("after," he writes, hopefully), that jumbo jet in the sky looks and sounds absolutely lumbering. #
- “I miss the sound of the electric train.”Former army captain Vu Trong Thuan, 80, on the lost Hanoi: http://j.mp/dvKXOz #
- The city of Hanoi, Vietnam, celebrates its 1,000th anniversary today. (I really want to go back. It's been eight years.) http://is.gd/fV8rK #
- .@alexismadrigal "Major estate sale finds yesterday … three-LP set of train sounds"? Please post some of this. in reply to alexismadrigal #
- Ah, there was no cross-browser CSS issue with Chrome; it just needed to be refreshed. This is the start to a good day. #
- Fog horns especially maudlin this morning. They must be mourning Solomon Burke (RIP; b., 1940). #
- Wondering why the photo-caption CSS I devised looks lovely in Firefox, and not so in Chrome. Yet to look at it in Safari or IE9… #
- Looking into @cbc @creativecommons dustup. Interesting Sept 2009 CC doc about term "noncommercial" I'm now digging into: http://is.gd/fUhhT #
- Got new Wobbly/Lesser/Matmos LP from @aquariusrecords but it's too beautiful outside to stay inside and listen to vinyl. Even orange vinyl. #
- Oh to be in Milan, Italy, at the end of Oct: "Field Recording Workshop: 'Movement of acoustic images'" http://bit.ly/9Zra6S via @usoproject #
Hazy Weird Folk MP3
A few months ago, I wrote liner notes for an album by Landrecorder, morning-afternoon-evening. Now, 2010 isn’t 1980, which means we needn’t wait another year for another record. A few Landrecorder pieces have drifted out since that one, including the four-song EP Fern Battles, which opens and then proceeds with a looped mix of elements. There’s a halo of breathy chanting, a strum of guitar, and what appear to be resonant field recordings. Small snatches of harmonica frame the piece, helping put it in the weird-folk tradition, and to make it all the more the sort of thing that Low fans dream of in between that band’s far more infrequent release schedule. The track is titled “Rita”:
What distinguishes it is how the least prominent element, that hazy background that may or may not be sounds of the “real” world, is in fact the most active element, in that it subsumes what rough edges persist in the chanting and strumming, making the whole thing a sonic cloud of near-pop effluvia.
Check out the previous Landrecorder album at feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com.