- Wasn't sure if I should shave my post-flu beard or update my avatar(s). Decided to shave the beard. #
- I wish when I bought physical books they all included access to an ebook version. #
- Magical post office box offers up books from Japan and CDs from Russia. Good start to the day. #
- Saturday morning sounds: heater (rumble), hard drives (laptop, dvr: whine), refrigerator (rattle), distant cars (whir), birds (cackle). #
- ♫ Noon tune: downtempo, ringing percussion, tweaked moans = Nanaqui's "5:24 (Ligeti's Donkey)" http://j.mp/9mUYB7 @soundcloud #
- Last night's Fringe: Yes (Chris Squire's bass still sounds good on my cheap TV) + The Singing Detective + turntable-as-memory/hypnosis-aid. #
- Sound in the dusk: is that a water feature or a drain? #
- More hospital sounds: elevators, HVAC, enough beeping to fill a chiptune compilation, monotone announcements, rattling wheel-based tables. #
- Day starts with surprise Mille Plateaux PR & ends @sfmoma with Tony Cokes' 2004 video 1! layering Deleuze-ian ideas + military training film #
- C'est La Morton Feldman Records #
- Morton Feldmantronix #
- What year is it? First a new Autechre album, then a new Oval, and now I wake to news of Mille Plateaux Clicks & Cuts 5? #
- Visited friend in hospital. Not a quiet place. (Was there recently myself, with the flu.) The IV machine sounded like it was from the 1800s. #
- Jelly Roll Morton Feldman #
- Only just now realizing that "Fourteen Black Paintings" by Peter Gabriel was about Rothko Chapel. Where's the Morton Feldman mash-up? #
- If I thought about color the way I think about sound, each month the two new shades on the SF MUNI pass would be my focal point. #
- Céleste Boursier-Mougenot doesn't play on new Oval LP but he OK'd use of his art on its cover: http://j.mp/bHmdEg (& scroll to postscript). #
- Morning sounds: wind, rain, hard drives. #
- It's Monday night, so my brain is automatically playing the theme song from Damages, even though the season ended last Monday. #
- All that signage outside the Popeyes on Divisadero, and not a single shout out to JazzFest. #
- Morning sounds: heater expanding metal, hard drive spinning, cars passing, dryer rotating. #
- Sent out first Disquiet.com email newsletter in a year last night. As a heavy RSS user, have to remind myself that email still is important. #
- PHP & WordPress-type folk: Anyone know how to give a pretty face to the otherwise excellent Mailman software? i.e., http://j.mp/178Eb #
- The "copyleft sonic activism" mentioned y'day is going well. If you make music from existing sounds, reply or get me at [email protected]. #
- Got membership invites via mail to museums where I'm a member. How do I direct my financial support so that it improves their databases? #
- RIP, Alan Rich (b. 1924), music critic best known for long residency in L.A. Here he is, late last year, on Arvo Pärt: http://j.mp/9Qi7hv #
- Personally, favorite part of Kick-Ass was the tandem shout-out to Shojo Beat / Scott Pilgrim @radiomaru #
- Sunday morning sounds: hair dryer, hard drives, dish washer, various netlabel MP3s, typing, birdsong, cars, planes. Yow. #
- Prop plane circling overhead. I know how a crop feels. #
- Sounds of Richmond District: Russian anti-Obama protesters on corner: "[Garble garble] 'bailout' [garble garble] 'Hitler' [garble garble]." #
Quote of the Week: On and Beyond New Tools
Over at createdigitalmusic.com, the website’s founder, Peter Kirn, dives deep into the changes in music-performance technology. The piece is appropriately titled “The End of Laptop Hegemony in Live Computer Music.” Here’s just one chunk of the article, the fourth of four reasons “Why everything will change”:
Reason #4: Build it, and they will come. The hardware is going to be out there: cheap, flexible, numerous in quantity and variety. People will use it and do stuff.
But whereas laptop musicians today sometimes seem like armies of look-alike MacBook users, I don’t think this brave, new world is going to look the same way. The Mac laptop (and to lesser extent, its PC brethren) became popular with good reason. But now, as digital performance techniques become more widespread and the artists make greater demands on their gear, maybe variety is exactly what’s needed. I think you may soon see everything from strange hardware boxes to iPads to slates and tablets and handheld gadgets and more showing up onstage.
Musical invention, when it’s healthy, doesn’t lead to one or two designs. It leads to absurd, insane chaos. Take even the piano, an emblem of standardization and mass instrumental consumption. The piano has spawned endless mutations, sizes, manufacturers, sounds, and so on. Or the guitar: the icon of the 20th century mass music culture was at its best when people were abusing it and feeding it through boxes that destroyed its sound and breaking every rule of how you’re supposed to play it. And that’s about as conventional as instruments get.
The musical applications that start to get most interesting:
* Boxes with physical controls ”“ think stomp pedals, faders, knobs, the like ”“ but programmable computer brains
* Intelligent, cheap synths, effects, and the like that can be easily reprogrammed
* The return of the hardware sequencer (as evidenced by the minicommand), now with the intelligence and flexibility and customizability of software
* Tablet computers, from the iPad to new devices that also handle inputs like the stylus, that ”“ far from being just a controller ”“ take the role of the computer, an all-in-one digital brain for a performance. Via hardware support, they could still connect to high-quality audio outputs, headphone monitoring, and external MIDI keyboards or physical drum pads. They could become interactive canvases that would make Xenakis proud.
* Computers that can double as physical instruments, music stands, amps (like the Orange) or other musical devices.Trivia note: in 1977, Xenakis implemented his UPIC graphical system on a Hewlett Packard computer. In 2010, HP will introduce the Slate. I have no idea if the Slate will be any good, but all of this has happened in roughly the span of my lifetime. Sometimes, technology takes time.
While the article as a whole is required reading, that section in particular singles out key issues — among them the rise of touch-screen interfaces, the compact period of time in which computer music has come of age, and the return of non-computer electronic-music hardware.
What elevates the piece, though, is the graph that immediately follows that fourth “reason,” one in which Kirn notes the confines in which he his making his comments:
I realize I’m making an argument about musical practice based on technology, and that that argument isn’t entirely complete ”“ but that’s what blogs can be for. I just want to introduce the idea first. I actually have some ideas about technologies that could enable the sort of performance changes I’m talking about, and ways they could be more musically useful (which is what really matters). But I’ll keep that for another day.
What he’s saying, in effect, is that he’s writing about technology, not genre; equipment, not aesthetics; gadgetry, not art (except to the extent that many of these tools are works of art unto themselves). What people do with the material and immaterial tools he’s describing is a parallel topic. The adoption of these new tools is noteworthy; we are in a period of intense and rapid technological change, and musicians and other artists are at the forefront of adopting technology, showing us where we are headed. But the rise of these machines is just part of the story.
French Frogscape MP3
The intrepid Frenchman Yannick Dauby‘s frog recordings are the subject of a recent episode of the Frameworks podcast, dated April 11 of this year. The warm, kitten-like purrs of frog calls are interspersed with spoken descriptions of the experiences of the sound-hunters who tracked down the frogs — amid, from all appearances, thunder, lightning, rain, and no small amount of hiking.
The recordings aren’t all raw field recordings, though. They’re mixed in with electronic compositions built from the frogsong: remixes of nature that build on the rhythms and tones inherent in the otherwise uninterpretable frog conversations (MP3).
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/2010.04.11FrameworkRadio/Framework_April_11th_2010.mp3|titles=”2010.04.11 framework radio”|artists=Yannick Dauby]
The above drawing is by Wan-Shuen Tsai (蔡宛璇). It is part of a recent CD, Songs of the Frogs of Taiwan — Vol. 1, that Dauby released; the booklet is viewable, in full, at calameo.com. Image below from Dauby’s online photo gallery:
This podcast segment was produced by Dauby with Marc and Olivier Namblard. For more on Dauby’s activities, visit kalerne.net, where the photo gallery is housed. More details at archive.org and murmerings.com.
Urban Mutescape MP3
This is an older piece by Thomas Park, who under the name Mystified has recorded a large amount of music, some of which has been featured on Disquiet.com in the past. “Mutescape,” as the piece is titled, dates from February 2006, and it came to my attention as I looked into “acoustemology,” the reduction of “acoustic epistemology” that served as a conceptional framework for the article on the soundscapes of New Orleans by Matt Sakakeeny, featured here this past weekend (disquiet.com). That research led me to the website of Steve Bradley, Associate Professor in the department of Visual Arts of University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who employs student soundwalks as a core part of his pedagogy. (It was Bradley’s website, at umbc.edu, that led me to a concise definition of “acoustemology” by Steven Feld, the man who coined the word, in an interview conducted by Carlos Palombini.)
All of which is to say, Park’s “Mutescape” is a softened urban soundscape — it’s less a soundwalk than it is a midday soundsleepwalk, all the activity of modern city living, with the rough edges smoothed off, and the dynamics reduced until what had been cacophonous has become mellifluous (MP3). If “acoustemology” is a sonic means to know a given place (the way specific sounds and qualities of sound combine to a place-specific sonic gestalt), then “Mutescape” is a kind of artistically applied acoustemology.
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/Mutescape/01_Mutescape_vbr.mp3|titles=”Mutescape”|artists=Thomas Park (Mystified)]
Writes Park of the process that led to the piece’s composition:
As I live on a very busy streetcorner, and love the sounds of music and silence, I have wondered from time to time if it would be possible to take the world around me and to ask it to be a little more quiet. Could I mute the street traffic, the dogs barking, and the folks out waiting for the bus?
In “Mutescape”, I took a single field recording of my neighborhood, over 33 minutes long, and subjected it to a series of compressions, eq shifts and effects. My goal was to replace my surroundings with a quieter, dronier version of themselves– perhaps as a sleep aid, a relaxant, or just as an object of interest.
The result, I think, works– the filters and effects emphasize the tonal quality of my sonic environment, and there is a pleasing consistency to the piece. I hope you agree!
More on the Park/Mystified release at archive.org. Visit his website at mystifiedmusic.com.
Zimoun: Maximum Effort for Minimal(ist) Impact
“Drone” is not the correct term for the work of Zimoun, the Bern, Switzerland-based artist and musician. But if his rough noises don’t count as drones, what are they?
Zimoun’s primary instruments are entirely of his own making, each a large-scale installation of small mechanical devices — tables lined with whipping little bits of tubing, small sets of fetishistically situated mini-motors. They are architecturally precise and their beauty is forged by that precision. They are achievements in minimalism that share an aesthetic realm with the stark paintings of Robert Ryman, the digital chiaroscuro of Carsten Nicolai, the imposing structures of the architectural firm Morphosis. Exertion in the cause of simplicity: maximum effort for minimal(ist) impact.
The meticulous engineering of Zimoun’s work is a set-up — not an end unto itself, but a staged step toward its end result, an orderly step enacted so as to let chaos flourish. His chaos takes place in close settings, in carefully defined spaces, in systems as thoroughly considered as a laboratory experiment. And the sound emited by them is not an after effect, or an afterthought. It’s a core principal of his practice.
Shown here are three such motion sculptures, captured in short-form video. They’re beautiful to watch, and to listen to.
The recent “97 polysiloxane hoses 3.0mm, compressed air” (2010), shown up top, looks like a gaseous emission from afar, and sounds like steady, insistent rain (vimeo.com).
Softly creaking plastic being ruffled is what “30”²000 plastic bags, 16 ventilators” (2010) sounds like, but the simutaneous action across so much surface area ultimately lends it a feel along the lines of some kind of coarse cloud (vimeo.com):
And as for “5 prepared dc-motors on different materials” (2009), the rattling is the result of the motors purposefully being not fully secured, allowing for jittery, uneven motion (vimeo.com):
Zimoun’s work, especially the recent “97 polysiloxane hoses 3.0mm,” must strike fear in the hearts of those who stay up late contemplating the potential ill side effects of nanotechnology. To watch those myriad plastic ribbons flail is to see no discernible pattern; it is to witness something approaching true randomness — which to say something if not “lifelike,” let along sentient, then surely at least in some way “natural.” The effect is far more realistic than any CGI ocean waves or smoke fumes that I have ever seen in a movie. And if a bunch of tubes from the local hardware store can do this, then what would infinitesimally small particles be capable of?
The word for this wildly variegated effect is “texture.” That is what Zimoun achieves in his work, especially in his work with sound. You could label them “drones,” given their emphasis on monotony and uniformity, but they’re really something else entirely, a sound art that aspires to the state of static.
More on Zimoun at zimoun.ch. More video at his vimeo.com/zimoun channel.
Here’s a previous Zimoun-focused entry, with still images: disquiet.com. And here’s an interview with Buddha Machine creators FM3, from back in 2005, in which they talk about Zimoun, with whom they collaborated on the album Live 19.06.2004 (Leerraum): disquiet.com.