MP3 Discussion Group: ‘Monochromes Vol. 1′ (Line) by Tu M’

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

For the next few days, some fellow ardent listeners will join me here for the latest edition of Disquiet.com’s “MP3 Discussion Group.”We’ll be comparing notes on the recent Tu M’ album, Monochromes Vol. 1, which consists of four lengthy, drone-like chamber compositions. The album was released in June 2009 on Line, a subsidiary of the 12k record label. Tu M’ is a duo, consisting of Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, who live in Pescara, Italy; they’re credited on the album as both having performed on “laptop, mixing board.” There are video works associated with the Monochromes‘s music, viewable at tu-m.com/monochromes. The videos are a kind of abstract geography that matches the subdued pace of the music.

Also at the tu-m.com site are two sample MP3s of the music heard on Monochromes:

[audio:http://www.tu-m.com/download/TUM_Monochrome00_2008.mp3|titles=”Monochrome # 00″|artists=Tu M’] [audio:http://www.tu-m.com/download/TUM_Monochrome03_2009.mp3|titles=”Monochrome # 03″|artists=Tu M’]

There are more details on the album at the label website, 12k.com/line.

The week’s discussion will occur in the comments section below, and participation is, certainly, open to anyone who would like to offer an opinion.

Thanks to the folk who have agreed in advance to join me this week:

Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.”

Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.”

Clippy Self-Programmed Blip Pop MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is experimental music, and there is experimental programming, and there is the music that arises from experimental programming. John Keston, of the audiocookbook.org website, set out to build himself a simple sequencer in the popular software Max/MSP, and the resulting audio he’s shared with his audience is less a composition by intent, than it is a proof-of-concept for his programming. Still, it’s an excellent little song (MP3).

[audio:http://audiocookbook.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/clippy_step_sequence.mp3|titles=”Clippy Step Sequence”|artists=John Keston]

The sequencer Keston had in mind is a step sequencer, which is to say a simple grid of sound patterns. The sequencer he ended up with allowed for such variables as BPM and note length, and he posted it for general use at his website along with — for the more general listener — that sample bit of audio. While the interface for the software sequencer, reproduced below, seems complicated, it’s quite easy to picture the green grid in one’s mind as the sample clip plays out — the music quite purely is data as sound.

The audio is essentially either on or off, with minimal allowance for harmonic complexity. It begins like some rudimentary digital mechanism, before speeding up like a car easing its way from a frontage road onto a highway. And Keston shows he’s as much a composer as a programmer by bringing the piece to a musically logical close, essentially backing the work back to its starting position.

Read the full post at audiocookbook.org.

Image of the Week: Frank Bretschneider’s Visual Geometry

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Raster-Noton’s Frank Bretschneider was among the performers at the Decibel Festival in Seattle late last month, and this image is representative of his “audio-responsive digital geometry”:

As the complex figure’s shape suggests, it needs to be experienced in motion to be fully appreciated. Festival report, including video of Bretschneider’s performance, at xlr8r.com. Image courtesy of raster-noton.net. More on Bretschneider at frankbretschneider.de.

The Internets of Fernando Pessoa

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Back in 1996, when I launched Disquiet.com, part of its foundation was an ongoing experiment in comparative literature focused on the poet from whom the website derives its name: Fernando Pessoa, best known for his The Book of Disquiet.

Part of that subsite, available at disquiet.com/pessoa, is a side-by-side series of multiple renditions in English by various translators of one single, brief Pessoa poem, “Autopsicografia.”

Thanks to reader Douglas Storm, there are now 16 different versions of the poem — well, 17, including Pessoa’s original, in Portuguese.

Storm forwarded the translation to me this morning. It’s by Richard Zenith. The comparison is posted at disquiet.com/thirteen.

Quote of the Week: Sound Toys for Tots

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The editors at I.D. magazine, for its current (September/October) issue, asked over two dozen people to recollect an “iconic toy” from their childhoods, and to provide an “emotional design critique” of that object. The full collection of 27 such childhood recollections, each with illustrations by Maayan Pearl, such as the one below, is available at id-mag.com. Contributors to the I.D. feature included John Maeda, designer; Syd Mead, responsible for visuals in the films Tron and Blade Runner; Rob Walker, author and friend-of-Disquiet; and Nicholas Negroponte, who having recommended his own XO laptop, might not have fully grokked the brief.

This is the contribution by Ron Arad, architect and designer:

    I had a toy called a Big Ear. It looked like a satellite dish: a tripod attached to a big bowl, with earphones, earplugs, and a headset. When you pointed it in any direction, you could hear conversations between people some distance away. It even went through walls, and seemed to me like something from the future. I was 7 or 8 years old, and I was a spy! I was so amazed that a dish that like that could hear through walls that it made me think differently about walls themselves, about materiality and immateriality, and about how informaiton travels through space.

The subject of Arad’s reminiscence is the sole one among the 27 objects in I.D.‘s survey that involves sound, which for all the tin xylophones and My First Sony toys of the past, brings to mind a question: Are there more sound-making toys today than there were in the less electronically mediated past? Think of how today there are so many noise-emitting, audio-constructing devices in our age of computer games, portable apps, and widespread electronic music-makers. My presumption is that abstract, undirected musical play is much more common today than ever before. The question, now, may be whether kids raised on sonic toying and audio-games will continue, as they get on in years, to include them as part of their lives, habits, and art — or whether the instinct to play with sound will become something left behind in the toy box, if not the dust bin, rather than discovered later on in life.