Live Cello-Tronic MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The same evening that Kranky Records solo laptop artist Chris Herbert opened for the duo Stars of the Lid in Birmingham, England, Ted Laderas was doing his electronified solo cello stuff in Portland Oregon, playing with the duo Unrecognizable Now. And 24 hours later, as with Herbert (see the Memorial Day disquiet.com entry from earlier this week), the Laderas set was available for free download.

From David Darling to Hank Roberts to Zoe Keating, the cello has suggested itself as a focus of electronic manipulation, no doubt due to its rich, deep sonorousness. Laderas uses electronics not simply to enhance the cello’s sound, but to obscure it. (He has christened this technique he’s developed as the Oo-ray.) If you dive midway into the May 21 performance, recorded at the space Holocene, you may take it to be one of those multi-guitar Glenn Brance symphonies. There is a searing noise, as if the bow’s edge were serrated. It’s hard to tell when the texture of that bow ends and the saw waves of whatever electronic processing is involved kick in (MP3). The performance is not just about generating cacophony, though; it veers from layered plucking of strings to orchestral might, from sour melodic activity to gently bowed divination. In a post on his 15people.net site, Laderas describes his mode succinctly: “As always, this set is pretty much completely improvised on the fly. No prerendered loops, no nothing. Just me and my looper.”

Before & After Chime Transformation MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On her website regarding her Soundbook One project, soundbookone.com, composer Jennifer Stock describes the process behind her effort, which places the laptop in an ensemble setting, including electric guitar, cello, drums and, occasionally, vocals:

The idea of a “Soundbook” was to process a specific set of found sounds in Max/MSP and then to notate the acoustic aspects of the score for a revolving cast of musicians (usually electric guitar, cello, and drumset). For example, I might take a sound of chimes that I recorded and run it through a granular synthesis patch I made and use the result as the basis for a composition.

She also links within that paragraph to documentation of the mentioned “before” chime, the “after” chime-based composition, and the patch in the Max/MSP audio-manipulation software that turned former into the latter.

The original is a 13-second recording of lightly resounding wind chimes (MP3). Set to loop, it reveals background noise — what could be passing cars and nearby bird song. And between each ringing tone is the sharp punctuation of one dangling piece of the chime striking another: the short jolt that is, paradoxically, necessary for the lovely, bell-like music to be produced. (The chime makes an interesting choice for source material, given its role as a distant precedent for what, today, is called generative music.)

Here is a detail of the screenshot of the patch in question. In Max/MSP, the various paths that a sound travels and the effects implemented on that sound are presented in a visual manner, like a flowchart:

Transformed and, in the process, expanded to the length of 1:11, the result, not surprisingly, on first listen bares little resemblance to the original. Yet, after a few repeated listens, one would be hard put to not confuse the two. The background noises are largely gone, and in their place is a lulling swell, something organic, almost like breathing; the chimes are still front and center, but have become something somewhat other, neither lovely tone nor short jolt, but a combination thereof, like taut, drum-like but melodic beat (MP3).

Three provided excerpts of Stock’s ensemble work with Soundbook One, which she dates as taking place between 2006 and 2007, display how the maninpulated field recordings are mixed with live improvisation by the players Karen Siegel (voice), Koven Smith (drums), Mark Dancigers (guitar), Ezra Seltzer (cello) — and, of course, Stock herself, on laptop. A link to a track titled “improvisation” leads to a file titled “Pynchon,” featuring echoed sounds of piano amid sensitive collaborative playing, a cello plucked and bowed, alongside dynamic percussion (MP3).

Live Chris Herbert MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On May 21, Chris Herbert opened for Stars of the Lid in at a concert in Birmingham, England, and the very next day he posted a 45-minute MP3 of the set — “I managed to record the indistinct buzzing noises from my laptop,” as he put it on his myspace.com/chrisherbert blog entry. The file is available solely via a generic file-transfer service (sendspace.com, MP3), which means it’s there for a fairly limited, and indeterminate, period of time. As of this writing, all 85 megabytes of it are still online — and it isn’t merely, or even specifically, a collection of “indistinct buzzing noises.” There is buzzing, and crackling, and industrial sound, yes, like the atmosphere of a construction site being shut down for a long weekend. But those sounds are triggered in Herbert’s laptop amidst a series of utterly un-terrestrial atmospheric settings, opening with a haze-of-dawn burst of sparkling energy, through a generously syrupy space of slow undulations, through dank minimal-techno maze, and various other mysterious elsewheres.

Cliff Caruthers’s ‘Bug’ Sound Design (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When the SF Playhouse shudders, physically, during its current run of the Tracy Letts play Bug, the source of that mix of noise and physical sensation isn’t the actors wandering around a creaky stage, or the audience shifting in their well-worn seats. It’s the thick buzzing sound that is used, along with the traditional blanketing darkness, to note the transition between scenes. I saw the play, directed by Jon Tracy, this past Friday, and was struck by the production’s use of sound, not just to move from one segment of the tautly told story to the next, but to fill each scene with a sense of place and, true to Bug‘s emphasis on surveillance and paranoia, of foreboding.

The entire play takes place in a single, seedy motel room. It tells the story of the quick and intense bonding of two emotionally damaged individuals: a single woman, whose ex-husband had been released from prison, and a younger man, who reveals deeper levels of paranoia with each confession. The title subject refers to both the insect and the listening device, and to the frightening idea of a combination thereof.

From the circling helicopters, to nearby Latin American techno, to an occasionally used boombox on the motel room floor, to the substandard air-conditioning unit that is so constant in its mechanical whir that it serves double duty as the play’s score, the sound in Bug is as much a part of the production as are the actors and the set. The sound in Bug isn’t just background; in a dramatic sense, it has a narrative agency all its own.

As it turns out, the sound design in the production, which runs through June 14, is by Cliff Caruthers, an accomplished locally based musician who’s performed at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (where he is technical director), the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (where he is co-curator), and 964 Natoma (Aaron Ximm‘s former curatorial venue in San Francisco).

More on the production at sfplayhouse.org.