Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

As of today, this site will automatically post on Sunday afternoon the posts I’ve made during the past week at twitter.com/disquiet. It won’t do all of them — not personal “direct” Twitter posts, nor (at least for the time being) posts that are intended as public direct replies to (or public direct posts aimed at) individuals (those would be the ones that open with an @ sign). And for an ongoing attempt to collate ambient/electronica-related (and sound-art) Twitter accounts check out this post: disquiet.com.

  • Dang. Biz Markie ! is playing at the 1st anniversary of Hard Knox, blocks from my house on Thursday, and I’ve got a ticket to Jews on Vinyl. #
  • I rarely sign Internet petitions. Google Android discussions are less petitions than tallies. Support external keyboards: http://is.gd/uFZn #
  • Sunday morning sonic singularity: laptop purring not wheezing, birds outside tweeting not shouting, fridge in momentary quiet mode, no cars. #
  • I have a sound-art piece @Crewest Gallery (in Los Angeles). Closing party is tonight (Saturday, April 25). More info: http://is.gd/uBpL #
  • Gym music: recent Metallica, again — and stuff from unfamiliar netlabels. #
  • Saturday morning sounds: laptop fan, fridge hum, distant cars, a bird that may think it’s Thom Yorke. #
  • Pondering: Duplicity on small screen, old Soderbergh on smaller, San Rafael for pizza, extended trumpet in Oakland… What to do tonight? #
  • Wiped last night, and only made it through half of Throbbing Gristle, but it was great. (Genesis P-orridge has become Marianne Faithfull.) #
  • #followfriday: Portugal netlabel @pedroleitao; music crit @gsandow; NYC art-song @dargel; laptop-guitar @willits; “Radio” killer @trevorhorn #
  • Spending too much time with my Nintendo DSi fiddling with instrumental of the Timbaland/Danja-produced Xzibit track “Hey Now (Mean Muggin).” #
  • For folks interested in Steve Reich’s Pulitzer-winning Double Sextet, here’s video of eighth blackbird recording it: http://is.gd/tAqp #
  • DSi first impressions: embedded sound tools = insanely cool. I taped the bus on the ride home, and turned it into a whistle. Much potential. #
  • Steve Reich wins the Pulitzer: http://www.pulitzer.org/awards/2009. Don Byron and Harold Meltzer were runners-up. #
  • Four days until Throbbing Gristle at Grand Ballroom in San Francisco. After Cluster & now TG, what’s my next “band I never thought I’d see”? #

PS: The Trevor Horn entry above has since been learned to not be by Trevor Horn himself, but by a parodist.

Infinite Libraries Exhibit, Reception Report

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Tonight is the closing reception for the exhibit Infinite Libraries at the Crewest Gallery in Los Angeles. I have a piece in the exhibit, which was curated by Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca. I can’t make it down to LA for the closing, but I was there for the reception on April 4. I posted an announcement in advance of the exhibit (disquiet.com). The show officially ends April 30. Below are some photos I shot at the opening party, and additional information about the exhibit:

Infinite Libraries is based around 14 libraries of Vaca’s invention. He invited about 30 artists (well, about 29 artists plus me) to interpret the libraries, and the show includes prints, photography, painting, sculpture, and several sound pieces. I selected his Library of Instrumental Music as my subject. For my piece, pictured here, I burned a CD with 17 tracks, all MP3s that had, at some point, been uploaded to the Internet by their respective composers, with the intention that they be downloaded:

The work consists of a CD player, a pair of headphones, and a small box of index cards. It is titled “Re: Selected Holdings from the Instrumental Music Library.” Each track on the CD is represented by an index card, which details such things as its creator, the bit rate at which it was compressed, and approximate time of its first appearance on the Internet. Each card also includes “tags” that reference the track (things like “downtempo,” “sound art,” “beatcraft,” “ambient,” and so forth), as well as a description. All 17 tracks were derived from the Downstream section of this website, and the musicians featured are: Aitänna77, Pierre Bastien, Diego Bernal, Charlie Schmidt, allthatfall, Robert Lippock, John Kannenberg, Janek Schaeffer, Christina Kubisch, Jason Kahn, Jel & Odd Nosdam, Raz Mesinai, Darren McClure & Hiroyuki Ura, Family Tapes, the Beets, Craque, and Polina Voronova.

There are two additional cards in the piece. One is instructions (along the lines of what’s described above), and the other is a brief email from a librarian at the Library of Instrumental Music to someone, presumably a young student, who had sent in a request for information. It’s from that email that the piece takes its title (hence the “Re:”). The email provides a fictional context for the collected music. It is dated 2013:

Here are three more views of the piece. The top one was shot from the outside of the gallery. Pictured are a member of Two Rabbits (left — they did live screen printing during the opening; tworabbitsstudios.com) and Man One (right; manone.com), the famed graffiti artist and owner of Crewest:

There were two other artists who contributed sound pieces to the show.

Detroit techno musician Jeff Mills created 14 different short sound pieces for his “Infinite Libraries: Galaxies.” He wrote of the work, “Each composition references the 14 conceptual theories of the purpose and future of the libraries.” The tracks are intended to cycle through, and they’re played on a small disassembled stereo that is hidden inside stacks of books. Mills also produced a small number of CDs of the music:

Shane Cooper‘s “The Library of Time: Echo” is an ingenious sound-art interloper. A tall, unassuming pedestal, it records sounds and then plays them back “at the same time and day of the year,” according to his brief description of the piece. This is what it looks like:

Here’s Vaca doing live painting (far right) alongside Natalie Brechtel, to music by the Shibuya Club DJs (myspace.com/shibuyaclub). The DJs played hip-hop and funk, and toward of the end of the night spun 7″ singles:

Special thanks to Paul Donald (of branchhome.com), who happened to have the perfect wooden box available when I was working on this project.

There are more photos at the Crewest Gallery’s flickr page, at flickr.com. The photos are by Vic Macias, who is a far better photographer than I am. Here’s one of his shots, showing me (holding microphone) next to Vaca, the show’s curator and inspiration:

More on the show at crewest.com, and on Vaca at chamanvision.com.

Quote of the Week: Spock’s Song

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Star Trek‘s Spock, reminiscing in a short comic published in the May 2009 issue of Wired:

    By the time I joined Starfleet years later, I had become quite proficient at the harp.

    However, I noticed an interesting effect of the music on the human mind. For Vulcans the music was a means of purging emotions by giving them logical, ordered musical forms…

    Whereas for humans, the music was a trigger of emotions. I saw otherwise calm and reasoned shipmates become quite animated when exposed to music.

The comic is by Paul Pope and K/O, and the Wired issue was guest edited by JJ Abrams, director of the upcoming new Star Trek film. K/O is a pseudonym for the screenwriters of the new film: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, both longtime Abrams associates who worked on Alias, Mission: Impossible III, Fringe, and other projects. Read the full comic, six pages in all, at wired.com.

Microsonic MP3 from [neuma]

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Mourning Star is a single-song release by [neuma], but that single song is intended to be heard in three parts. The song/album’s cover divides it into exact sections, the timing down to the 100ths of a second. Part one ends at 4:01,394 and part two at 8:06,318. The full length is a little over 10 and a half minutes — 10:03,111, to be precise. The song is an exercise is atmospheric microsonics. It opens with quiet noise, before adding a thread of rudimentary knocking, less a rhythm than a pounding, and then fading in some synthesized tones, before the whole thing fades out like a dying radio signal (MP3).

[audio:http://biodata.microbiorecords.net/b_23/%5bneuma%5d%20-%20Mourning%20star.mp3|titles=”Mourning Star”|artists=neuma]

What’s remarkable is that the transitions in no way threaten the piece’s internal consistency; each change is a step forward, not a step aside. In the end, the triptych is a matter of noise, beats, and tones — the holy trinity of contemporary experimental electronic music. More info at the releasing netlabel, biodata.microbiorecords.net.