More of Taylor Deupree’s Daily Sound MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Some resolutions stick, and some don’t. And some benefit from amendment. Taylor Deupree, musician and head of the record label 12k, started the new year with a plan to post one sound each day, and he’s pretty much stuck to it (at 12k.com/onesoundeachday).

Initially, these were all “found” sounds, plucked from the ether by his field-recording equipment, like one of the trains that he uploaded on Tuesday of this week: “one of my least favorite sounds in the world. … the sound is hellish and piercing. if you have to wait a while for the right train you get bombarded with these sounds. this recording does not do justice to the physical sensation of being there” (MP3).

[audio:http://www.12k.com/onesoundeachday/february/feb_03_2009.mp3|titles=”Feb_03_2009″|artists=Taylor Deupree]

The day prior, Monday of this week, Deupree slightly altered his daily regimen for the second time this year, by allowing for unnatural, electronically mediated sounds, rather than just raw audio — a loop of a ukulele: “i am still recording these sounds with my field recorder, so they retain a sense of removal, noise and otherwise roomy tone” (MP3).

[audio:http://www.12k.com/onesoundeachday/february/feb_02_2009.mp3|titles=”Feb_02_2009″|artists=Taylor Deupree]

It has the pulse of a Buddha Machine track, and would make for a good ring tone, which I mean as a compliment, in that it’s the sort of soundbite that one wouldn’t mind hearing throughout a given day, signaling the arrival of something nice, like a friend’s call or text message, or for that matter an automated reminder on a to-do list.

Image of the Week: PhotoShopping Sound

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

John Keston, over at audiocookbook.org, talks about using Photoshop to process sound:

Click through to the above link for examples of the sounds that result: “Gaussian blur and Liquefy created some unique effects,” writes Keston, “but my favorite of the bunch was Glowing Edges. This filter seems to transform the electric piano into a haunting choral passage.”

10 Ways of Drawing Music (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Below are 10 images shot on opening night of the Every Sound You Can Imagine exhibit, currently running at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. These are just two handfuls of the avant-garde sheet music on display. I ran one previous image, of a Morton Feldman work, on the evening of the show: disquiet.com.

Karlheinz Stockhausen:

Conlon Nancarrow (“Pencil on hand-punched piano roll”):

Gavin Bryars‘s The Sinking of the Titanic, a personal favorite. This is, clearly, the “performed” part of the work, not the taped part:

A detail from a Joan Jeanrenaud piece, with instructions on how to implement technological aspects, specifically the processing of the cello, which is her primary instrument:

Gordon Mumma instructions:

Cornelius Cardew:

Steve Roden (“Pencil, watercolor, and collage on vintage musical notation paper”):

Stephen Vitiello:

Yasunao Tone:

Robert Ashley:

More coverage likely to follow.

Also on display is work by William Basinski, Alvin Curran, Philip Glass, Ryoji Ikeda, György Ligeti, Christian Marclay, Barry McGee, Phill Niblock, Carsten Nikolai, Raster-Noton, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Iannis Xenakis, and others. The show was curated by Christoph Cox and Robert Shimshak, and was organized and previously exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. More details at newlangtonarts.org.

Quote of the Week: White Noisemakers

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Applications programmed for the first Google-OS phone, the Android-powered G1, can be rated between one and five stars by users. Following are some of the comments by G1 users who gave one star to White Noise 1.2.0, a white-noise generator:

    “Good app if you like to fall asleep to static!”

    “This makes no sense at all”

    “Explain to me how this (a recording of white noise) cancels real world noise while listening to your music, genius.”

    “Can someone tell me how to work this thing so that it helps with sleep and other stuff?”

    “Might have raised the score if it made sense”

More on the programmer of White Noise, Grant Midwinter, at grantmidwinter.com. I’m testing a G1 right now — you can follow my experience, if that’s of interest, at g1for30days.tumblr.com

Two Live D’Incise MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s the taut plinking of strings that confirms a guitar was employed in the production of “Stase” (MP3). That’s a track, one of two, on the EP Stase / Contre Stase, by D’Incise, released on the Resting Bell netlabel (restingbell.net) last year. The tensile power, with its contained energy and spring-like effect, brings a brittle thrill to the steady-paced goings-on. Those strings are heard crackling amid bending metal and droning static, the internal workings of some infernal machine. D’Incise is the electronic musician whose laptop was part of the trio Diatribes (which puts him in the context of a drummer and pianist), whose recent full-length release was the focus of a Disquiet Downstream entry earlier this week (disquiet.com). To hear Stase / Contre Stase is to have an opportunity to extract D’Incise’s laptop from the embrace of his acoustic colleagues, to hear it on its own. As for “Contre Stase,” the music is noisier and more rambunctious (MP3), like a field recording of a factory tour. Both tracks were recorded in Geneva last year. More on D’Incise at dincise.net.