SoundCloud: Justin Hardison/My Fun’s Seaworthy Drone (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This week on Disquiet.com, all five daily Downstream entries are going to be culled from the great resource soundcloud.com, an increasingly prominent online hub where musicians share their work. I’m at soundcloud.com/disquiet.

Justin Hardison (aka My Fun), who has a special fondness for gentle electronic textures, is a veteran of various online sound formats, having run a netlabel and recorded for several. Among his recent ports to his soundcloud.com/the-land-of page, named for his The Land Of label, is “The Sea, the Sea,” which may or may not have been written under the influence of the Iris Murdoch novel of that name. At just over nine minutes, it’s a water-logged sine wave of a track, the sonic equivalent of grainy footage, swaying to and fro, the static-like sound of gurgling fluids matching, intermingling, and eventually overtaking the lush lull of Hardison’s audio synthesis.

More details on the track at soundcloud.com/the-land-of. The file can be downloaded using the little down arrow in the above SoundCloud interface. More on Hardison at thelandofmyfun.org.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Why is the Dyson Ball vacuum cleaner not called the Dyson Sphere: Missed opportunity? Copyright issue? In-joke? #
  • Watched 3 Days of the Condor last night for the first time. Seriously reconsidering my lack of attention to Dave Gruisin. #
  • Listening from living room to early-morning traffic; wondering what would be the loudest sound in the house if I got a quieter fridge. #
  • Yow, another fight on my MUNI bus route — a drunk passenger beating up on the driver before running off. #
  • Happiness is a People Under the Stairs instrumental slowed in the Sonorasaurus app with echo decay and delay on at the highest level. #
  • Glenn Branca, former noise hero; now, based on this NYT piece, oddly uninformed curmudgeon: http://bit.ly/6d6oE7 via @jdkun & @jesshopp #
  • Morning sounds: internal HVAC, passing airplanes, and nearby motorcycles — together in perfect harmony. #
  • Just drove 25 straight blocks on Geary Blvd (in San Francisco) with green lights the whole way, a first. Bonus: not a single honk. #
  • Very much appreciating the recent addition of favicons to Google Reader. #
  • RIP, Don Voegeli (b. 1920), composer of one of the most-recorded melodies: All Things Considered theme http://is.gd/52FbJ http://is.gd/52FcA #
  • There's nothing like coming home to a box full of books from MIT Press. #
  • Now I understand what the SoundCloud DropBox is for. Mine's at http://soundcloud.com/disquiet — thanks for the explanation, @mrbiggsdotcom #
  • There's something distinctly civilized about page proofs, even in the age of the emailed PDF attachment. #
  • Enough helicopters overhead to form a small chamber ensemble. #
  • Vinyl LP sales up: "$57 million in sales in 2008, … double the previous year and the best for the format since 1990": http://is.gd/51UKy #
  • Saw movie '(Untitled)' w/ Adam Goldberg as avant-sound composer. Great David Lang score. Funny in-jokes. Not sure it has a point of view. #
  • The passing helicopter is a rock band. The humble office is a speaker with a rattling tweeter. (Pun acknowledged but unintended.) #
  • Pitch control is nice, but I wish my Buddha Machines had a switch to simulate the effect of near-dead batteries. #
  • Just remembered that last night I dreamed I found the complete tab for all of Billy Childish in a bookstore & intended then to buy a guitar. #
  • RIP, Jeanne-Claude (b. 1935), flame-haired partner and wife of immersive installation artist Christo. #
  • Tristan Perich's forthcoming gadget-in-a-CD-jewel-box maybe not the wisest thing to pull out of your bag on a plane: http://is.gd/50vqf #

The Three Repetitions of Hopen (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Repetition is a powerful force. The opening track on Hopen‘s What’s Happened to Mat Collishaw? may prove too powerful for some. It’s a tight loop of a voice. The voice says, “New York City.” This being a loop, the voice, which could be that of a train conductor or bus driver, says it again. And again. The track is titled “New York, Do You Understand?” and at almost three and a half minutes in length, it is Steve Reich as interpreted by the literal-minded — or, perhaps not. In time, that loop does evidence change, the hallucinated transformations that occur as patterns become immersive. It draws attention to all the accentuated moments and tonal markers that have absolutely nothing to do with language and textual meaning, and everything to do with sound (MP3).

There’s a stark, brash, nerve-shattering interruption shortly into the otherwise lightly metronomic “3 PM,”track two of the EP’s three — after that kicked bucket, sure to spike your volume meter and your arm hair, comes a beeping, churning, rattling roil. It’s a repetition free of the stasis inherent in true repetition — it’s the fractured repeat of a defeated machine, maybe a laser printer on the fritz (MP3).

And then comes the perhaps inevitable combination: the closing track, “Early.”It has no formal repetition, but instead the broken beat of something that has the nuance of the repeated (a voice like a sample; drum pads that fail to kick in, until they do, at which point they spasm), but that declines to do the expected. The “New York City”tape reappears, buried in and eventually piercing the mix (MP3). Amid the chaos, the voice may even be welcome.

[audio:http://www.adozen.org/releases/adz009/%5Badz009%5D-01-hopen_-_new_york_do_you_understand.mp3|titles=”New York Do You Understand?”|artists=Hopen] [audio:http://www.adozen.org/releases/adz009/%5Badz009%5D-02-hopen_-_3_pm.mp3|titles=”3 PM”|artists=Hopen] [audio:http://www.adozen.org/releases/adz009/%5Badz009%5D-03-hopen_-_early.mp3|titles=”Early”|artists=Hopen]

Get the release at adozen.org. More on Hopen (aka Childe Grangier) at irrigationworks.net and myspace.com/hopenchilde.

Image of the Week: Paul Madonna’s Album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is one of several images from Paul Madonna‘s current art exhibit at Electric Works, a gallery in San Francisco. It was used for the show’s promotional postcards, and it’s also the cover of his new book, titled Album:

Images of old audio equipment are a staple of this collection of Madonna’s nostalgic paintings and drawings, which also include video games, novelty items, and other children’s toys. The overall tone lends some additional understanding to the feel of Madonna’s best-known work, the All Over Coffee series of drawings he contributes weekly to the San Francisco Chronicle, each depicting a different San Francisco street view, with an emphasis on its weathered architecture.

In the Electric Works exhibit, which is titled Album 01: In What Era Will You Get Stuck?, there are several pictures of record players, and one of an old computer disk, the latter tagged with a phrase that cements the exhibit’s approach: “Totally old school”:

More at sfelectricworks.com and paulmadonna.com. The show runs through January 9, 2010.

Quotes of the Week: Twitter Ambience

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

No social network is right for everyone, and Twitter is just one among many. What’s interesting about Twitter is how by doing very little it has provided numerous sorts of interaction — that is, it’s used differently by different groups of people.

Especially with the advent of its “lists” function, which allows users to compile related Twitter profiles (“musicians,” “san francisco area food,” “green politics,” “novelists”), it’s an amazing place to alternately parse and absorb reams of tangentially related material. The first list that I created at Twitter was twitter.com/disquiet/ambient, which takes the word “ambient” as a wide range of sound-for-sound’s-sake people, sound art, quiet-music, and so forth. This ambient list currently follows 109 feeds. And these are merely a few of the comments that have surfaced from that flow during the past week:

Chris_Randall: I think if you need to use the word “bit” as a descriptor of your music or instrument, I’m reaching for the “Skip” button.
twitter.com/Chris_Randall

Chris_Randall: (Just an opinion, mind, but I don’t think I can take another bare-ass naked square wave.)
twitter.com/Chris_Randall

DaveSeidel: Been walking and driving with a buddha machine playing in the pocket of my fleece vest. Not visible, just barely audible.
twitter.com/DaveSeidel

experimedia: Is questioning if agreeing to exclusive distribution in this scene is counterprodutive or not.
twitter.com/experimedia

robinrimbaud: Philips have re-rendered their body horror film, tattoo possibilities of the future, with my soundtrack :-) http://tiny.cc/H59yk
twitter.com/robinrimbaud

audiobulb: Read my latest @madmimi newsletter: http://mim.io/ae791
twitter.com/audiobulb

Some work individually (comments, observations, news, links), while others aren’t really quotable here because they mean more in how they either intersect and overlap (i.e., when posts from a certain event provide a kind of awareness of what’s occurring there). Others still are only meaningful to the extent that you value a given individual’s work-in-progress, but if there’s a musician you enjoy who uses Twitter, it can be a great way to find out where they are at, not just geographically and socially, but creatively and psychologically.

There’s a certain humor to the fact that the word “ambient” is, as well, a word often applied to Twitter itself, and to like-functioning social networking tools, by which it’s mean that they provide a kind of passive informational awareness of individuals, scenes, events, and so forth. While the two types of ambient — the purely sonic and the broadly informational — are only somewhat related, the former provides metaphorical heft to the latter, and observations about our audio environment do lend themselves to wider consideration.