Tangents: Arduino, Joy Division, Sound Art…

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Interview with Massimo Banzi, Inventor of the Arduino (digicult.it): The Arduino is a small, programmable gadget (pictured below) that's fueling a host of art-tech projects. Says its inventor, Massimo Banzi, in this interview: "We are still exploring the world of open-source hardware, which is quite a virgin field. The examples of open-source hardware are quite rare and definitely not widespread among the mass." Arduino home page at: arduino.cc. (Via twitter.com/usoproject.)

● Peter Saville / Unknown Pleasures Visualizer (mrdoob.com): A browser-based visualizer produces a real-time image of Peter Saville's famous cover to the Joy Division album Unknown Pleaures (image detail below), triggered by audio from the album. It keeps running even after the song ends. For related reading, Touch Records director Jon Wozencroft wrote about the cover and its cultural context back in 2007 at tate.org. All in all, further evidence that each generation realizes the metaphors of its predecessors. (Via twitter.com/compactrobot.)

● SoundWalk 2009 Applications Due July 1 (soundwalk.org): The annual Long Beach SoundWalk exhibit of sound art will occur on October 3, 2009. Applications for submissions are due by July 1. Check out soundwalk.org for details.

● More on New Langton ‘Art of the Score’ Exhibit (sfgate.com): Kenneth Baker, back in February, on the avant-garde score exhibit at New Langton: "a timely — and much more visually compelling — follow-up to the recent 'The Art of Participation,' the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's survey of late 20th century and contemporary art that asks for direct viewer engagement."

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

Quote of the Week: Harold’s End

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The composer and critic Kyle Gann finished transcribing Children of the Hill, a 1982 solo piano piece by Harold Budd. Gann sent the score to Budd, and Budd wrote back:

    I couldn’t play that in a thousand years!

More by Gann on the intellectual pleasures (and cultural politics) of transcribing improvisation at artsjournal.com.

Single Solo Polyfuse MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The self-released One Quiet Moment by Polyfuse (aka Justin McGrath) begins as a tenuous, ever so slowly throbbing sine wave. The sound is about as thick as your arm and long enough to wrap around a tractor trailer several times. Over time, just about 18 minutes in all, it moves from frazzled FM noise with an underlying pulse, to humorously oscillating fuzz, to fritzy layers of extrapolated sound aura, to deep bottom-scraping loads of undulation (MP3).

[audio:http://www.polyfuse.net/releases/oqm/1.mp3|titles=”One Quiet Moment”|artists=Polyfuse]

The individual segments are intoxicating, and the real pleasure is in hearing the way the transitions are made. More info at polyfuse.net.

Monolake Video Game MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There are some musicians who seem to make more music than most people listen to, among them the ever admirable Robert Henke (aka Monolake), who continues to post free monthly downloads at his monolake.de website. The latest is a score he did for a flight simulator developed for Lufthansa. More info at monolake.de/installations. The track is midtempo techno, with disparate beats, foreboding pounding, and the ongoing appearance of plane noise and pilot-airport dialog.

He describes the simulator as follows:

    A joystick allows players to navigate themselves from outer space down to earth and fly around the globe, whilst observing all flights of the Star Alliance fleet. The position and movement of the planes is an exact model of the real situation, based on the current flight plan of the Star Alliance members. The player can speed up the movement, freeze it, or tell the simulation to display all or a selection of the fleet as lines connecting source and destination airports. In all cases the player can move their point of view freely around and observe the situation from any point in space.

Henke posts these free tracks with certain rules, including an admonition against linking directly to the MP3 file, so just proceed to monolake.de/downloads. It should be up at least through the end of the month.

Tangents: DJ Hero, Jarmusch’s Limits, 64kbps …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

● Archive.org No Longer Producing 64kpbs MP3s: The massive storehouse of cultural data announces on April 14 that, among other upgrades, it is no longer providing 64kbps MP3 compressions of its audio holdings: "This was a judgement call [sic] — given how poor the sound quality is for these files and the fact that most people are getting more and more bandwidth to their devices and computers." It probably makes sense, but given how many people are accessing files via their phones, and with even a 3G connection being of middling speed, I've found 64kbps to be of value to previewing things, and for listening to spoken-word audio.

● Covers for (not of) the Term Netlabel Releases: A designer at bitphitz.org created "covers" for all the free albums released thus far by the netlabel Term, which is run by Taylor Deupree as a sideline to his 12k record label (at 12k.com/term).

● ‘DJ Hero’ Announced (engadget.com): New Guitar Hero-style video game with a DJ interface (a turntable controller that resembles a stripped down Technics 1200). Description of DJ Hero says it allows "'original mixes' of songs," further blurring the space between gaming and music-making. (The djhero.com website is still just in a holding pattern.)

● Manhola Dargis on Jim Jarmusch‘s ‘The Limits of Control’ (nytimes.com): "Philip Glass has said that repetitive music 'must be listened to as a pure sound-event, an act without any dramatic structure.' At least for its first hour, before its repetition strategy turns tedious, the same could be said of 'The Limits of Control,' a nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event." … The album's score, it's worth mentioning, is credited to Boris.

● Plumbing the Beatles‘s "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)" (www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes): Detailed notes by Alan W. Pollack on the famously repetitive Beatles song. I still remember my mother asking me many years ago whether something was wrong with my turntable, due to all the repetition. That repetition — which foretold sludge metal (Earth, Boris) and minimal techno (Monolake, Alva Noto), among other since codified forms — was probably my first taste of minimalism as a child.

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.