Images of the Week: Tape Art

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Perhaps the term “mixtape” hasn’t fully outlived its suffix. There’s been a small flurry of cassette-only releases in recent months, what with the Odd Nosdam split tape on Sanity Muffin (which makes its home page on myspace — at myspace.com/sanitymuffin — another technology prematurely reported dead), and the launch of the cassette-only label Tapeworm, with initial release by Philip Jeck, Stephen O’Malley, and Simon Fisher Turner, among others (tapeworm.org.uk).

There have also been design fetish objects, like lamps (see transparenthouse.com/design) and, more recently, jewelry (details on Stephanie Simek’s work at 18kt.wordpress.com).

And then there is the tape-ography — that is, the typography in tape form — of Ankara, Turkey-based artist Ersinhan Ersin. It’s an inspiring collection that makes the most of the fragile mechanisms at the core of tapes, the stark differences between the hard plastic gears and the slender ribbons:

Via behance.net (via psfk.com).

More on the responsible artist at behance.net/ersinhanersin.

Quote of the Week: Electric Lullaby

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A Twitter post by Aaron Ximm, aka Quiet American:

    listened to my 18-month-old daughter hone her pitch and tempo to sing along perfectly with a bleating car alarm. Childhood in the city…!

There’s scientific evidence that some birds follow highways, the way they once followed waterways (cell.com). So, it’s no surprise in a world increasingly permeated by electronic sound, that baby’s first word might, in fact, be “Beep.”

Originally at twitter.com/quiet.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • The rumbling of the Outside Lands concerts — from inside the house, it's all tribal pounding. No melodies, no riffs, no hits. #
  • Compiling tracks for a friend's wedding party: instrumental hip-hop, various strains of country. Pondering a third, broadly defined genre. #
  • Commute audio synchronism: woman teaching son English & Japanese with talking dictionary; guy next to me practices bartender flash cards. #
  • A/B: Autechre's "Cfern" — original: http://fizy.com/s/139p10 & cover excerpt by Alarm Will Sound from a/rhythmia album: http://is.gd/2CpUn #
  • RIP, Ellie Greenwich (b. 1940), Phil Spector Wall of Sound colleague ("Leader of the Pack," "River Deep, Mountain High"): http://is.gd/2AqcJ #
  • Earth Wind & Firefox, Swell IMAPs, RSS Kelly, PowerPoint Station #internetbands #
  • USB40, FTP-FUNK, Atom and the Ants, POP Will Eat Itself #internetbands #
  • Best audio-visual chance synchronism of the day: taxi driver doing exercise squats in Tenderloin in time with Nas instrumental on my iPod. #
  • 2nd best audio-visual chance synchronism of the day: bus makes stop outside my home just as nextmuni.com announces its arrival in browser. #
  • Description of a surprise gunshot from Stark/Westlake's 12th Parker novel: "a flat, echoless clap in the middle of the sunshine." #
  • Evening sounds: hard drives, dish washer, the ping of an arriving email, the fizz of a bum fluorescent bulb. #
  • Just dialed the 212 phone number shown in Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 painting Desk Calendar, on view @mocalosangeles. It's been disconnected. #
  • The 16-screen Christian Marclay audio-video installation at @mocalosangeles is a must-see/-hear. All sounds and images of everyday objects. #

Heavily Modified Klezmer MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

You’d never know the source material of “Tanger at Night” is “resampled klezmer,” as the song’s composer, NQ, describes it. Unless, of course, you peer deep into the track’s dark, horror-cue intensity and recall that klezmer is the party music of a historically displaced people.

NQ is Cologne-based Nils Quak, whose “Tanger” is the latest “Single of the Week” over at luvsound.org/singles (MP3). The song opens with eerily shimmering chimes, pulsing like lights reflected on rough water, and slowly raises and lowers its intensity for upwards of four minutes, before fading out into an extended windswept denouement of chance noises.

[audio:http://ia301509.us.archive.org/3/items/luvs017/tanger_at_night.mp3|titles=”Tanger at Night”|artists=Nils Quak]

Writes Quak of the piece’s construction:

    “It’s a two bar klezmer loop i found on a flexi disc. I made a couple of versions of it and automated their levels with a lorenz attractor driven lfo. the outcoming piece was played back into my appartment and recorded with a cheap iphone recording software over and over again, drowning the entire piece in ambient noise, room resonances and the noise and errors of shitty software converters and microphones.”

More on NQ at nhlsqaik.com.

Guitar-Loop MP3 from Taylor Deupree

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Once upon a time, there were proper full-length albums, which were milestone documents, often passed over in favor of singles, which captured the moment rather than cementing it. Then, with the rise of Internet culture, came netlabels, with their free, easily accessible releases — often short albums of either abstract or intensely genre-focused material, generally as thorough as a proper album, but with the immediacy of a single, due to the absence of physical packaging or retail distribution. And now, with hosting services such as soundcloud.com, comes an immediacy that’s all the more compelling — music posted on Soundcloud has the feel of a studio soundboard recording, an experiment that the musician, or band, posts, just to float something out there, sort of the way a DJ might issue a white label to give something a trial run in a club. Taylor Deupree, for example, has uploaded some tracks at soundcloud.com/12k, including a guitar-loop one that’s four minutes of highly recommended consonance: circles of soft-loud-soft tones, little pops of percussion. It’s less a song than a test pattern, and all the more enticing for its ethereal nature (MP3).

[audio:http://media.soundcloud.com/stream/Ayipaycs5TiE?referer=http%3A//disquiet.com/%3Fp%3D4987%26preview%3Dtrue&show_comments=true&url=http%3A//soundcloud.com/12k/august-21-guitar&color=0039ff&auto_play=false&consumer_key=sc_player|titles=”Velcro Flow”|artists=Diego Bernal]

More on Deupree at 12k.com.