Guitar x Cello x Pandemic

The Equation of Time by Anthéne and Simon McCorry

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Equation of Time presents the guitar of Anthéne (Brad Deschamps) and the cello of Simon McCorry combined through processing and done so across a great distance. (Of course, for what collaboration wasn’t this the case during the pandemic?) The album’s six tracks let moments of brief ferocity and sharp detail peek out amid vast cumulus gatherings of shoegaze-rich cloud cover. Amid that ambient intensity, riffs can still be located, despite being buffeted by sonic winds. A gray mass reveals, for example, tiny little repetitive, keyboard-like cues toward the end of “Time Past,” the opening cut. On “Time Future,” the penultimate track, the audio processing is dialed back, especially where the cello in concerned, the plucking and sawing heard clearly amid cavernous echoes and artfully tortured extrapolations. “Drift of Stars” has a muted, compressed quality, the sound as if experienced from the other side of thick glass at first, before yielding something in higher resolution, waves of sounds overlapping, converging. The whole set — each track’s title apparently borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s *Four Quartets* — is beautiful from start to finish.

Album originally posted May 22, 2021, at [whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com](https://whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com/album/the-equation-of-time). More from Deschamps at [twitter.com/braddeschamps](https://twitter.com/braddeschamps) and McCorry at [simonmccorry.com](https://www.simonmccorry.com/).

Disquiet Junto Project 0493: AudioCorrect

The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 14, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 10, 2021.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0493: AudioCorrect

The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music.

Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this project.

Step 1: Think about how autocorrect works on your phone, how it sometimes does indeed take your haphazard typing and recognize what you had intended, and yet how also (probably more often) it subtly or even drastically alters the meaning of your intended message.

Step 2: There are numerous existing musical equivalents and approximations to autocorrect that exist as algorithms, such as pitch and tempo quantizers, and autotune. Consider the ones you have used or want to explore.

Step 3: Create a piece of music by either (A) using/abusing one of the musical autocorrect concepts from Step 2 or (B) imagining your own autocorrect algorithm and creating what the result might sound like.

Seven More Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:

Step 1: Include “disquiet0493” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.

Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0493” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.

Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.

Step 4: Post your tracks in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:

[https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/)

Step 5: Annotate your tracks with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #disquietjunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.

Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Additional Details:

Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, June 14, 2021, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, June 10, 2021.

Length: The length of your finished track is up to you.

Title/Tag: When posting your tracks, please include “disquiet0493” in the title of the tracks, and where applicable (on SoundCloud, for example) as a tag.

Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).

For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:

More on this 493rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — AudioCorrect (The Assignment: Think about the utility and the useful failures inherent in autocorrect and apply this to your music) — at: https://disquiet.com/0493/

Thanks to Alan Bland for proposing this project.

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: [https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/](https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0493-audiocorrect/)

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet) for Slack inclusion.

A Truly Ethereal Chorus

Robin (Scanner) Rimbaud on the radio as an instrument

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Even as conventional broadcast radio is on the decline with the rise of streaming services, it is experiencing unprecedented utility as a tool for making music. That observation is central to [the article I wrote for *The Wire*](https://disquiet.com/2021/06/08/writing-about-radio-as-an-instrument/) about musical instruments featuring radio reception as part of their design. The article covers a wide range, including dedicated synthesizer modules, like the ADDAC102 (from the Lisbon, Portugal, company ADDAC) and the 272e (from the storied San Francisco Bay Area firm Bucha), and other devices, such as the Polyend Tracker (out of Poland) and the KOMA Field Kit (from Berlin), that include radio amid a broader range of tools, with varying degrees of integration.

In the latter camp is the OP-1, from Stockholm-based Teenage Engineering, one of whose founders, Jens Rudberg, I interviewed for the article, along with representatives of all four other firms listed above. While the collective experience of these designers was important to the research, so too was the work of musicians who employ the tools. I spoke with numerous in the process of working on the story, and quoted three in the piece, including Thomas Dimuzio, King Britt, and Robin Rimbaud, who is best known as Scanner, for his early work with another sort of radio: police-band conversations snatched from the ether.

In the context of a wide-ranging back and forth via email on the topic of radio and synthesizers, Rimbaud shared the above video as an example of his work. He said the live set began with him “randomly skipping through the frequencies until I found something in real time that felt like it might work.” What he stumbled upon was the haunting group vocalizing heard at the start of the piece. “It was a choral work on a classical radio station,” explained Rimbaud. “I then looped it and began playing across it live too.”

He continued: “As with my earlier use of the radio scanner in my works I especially enjoy the unexpected and letting these sources take me in a direction I might never expect, using radio frequencies in the ether, these indiscriminate signals that I just pull down in real time and improvise around. It could simply be a voice or a harmony, but every opportunity can never be predicted and keeps an element at risk on the surface level which has always been important to me.”

There’s a lot more material in my conversation with Scanner, and with everyone else listed above, than made it into the article. I want to find time soon to get more of it posted here on Disquiet.com, to supplement the article in *The Wire*.

The video was recorded on March 23, 2019, at Iklectik London and originally posted at Scanner’s [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA884zTCbTw) channel. More at [scannerdot.com](http://scannerdot.com/).

Writing About Radio as an Instrument

For the latest issue of The Wire

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest issue of *The Wire*, July 2021, is out, and it’s all about radio. I wrote a piece for it on musical instruments that have radio reception built in. I interviewed five instrument designers (Andre Goncalves at ADDAC in Lisbon on the ADDAC102, Joel Davel at Buchla in the San Francisco Bay Area on the 272e, Christian Zollner at KOMA in Berlin on the Field Kit, Piotr Raczynski at Polyend in Poland [can’t recall the city] on the Tracker, and Jens Rudberg at Teenage Engineering in Stockholm on the OP-1), plus three musicians (King Britt, Thomas Dimuzio, and Robin Rimbaud). I think this is the first time something I wrote for *The Wire* got mentioned on the cover.

A Rainy Night in Japan

Courtesy of Rambalac

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

You hear the cars before you see their lights. You hear the footsteps, a deep, constant pulse in contrast with the pointillist rain. You hear the pressurized air, when it comes into view to clean off the lens. You hear a small thudding, somewhere between footsteps and raindrops, this being the sound of the rain hitting, no doubt, an umbrella or a broad-brimmed hat. You look for a reflection, a shadow, to confirm this inference. This is the Rambalac video “Rainy backstreets of Japan at night 5.” Rambalac has nearly half a million viewers on YouTube, admirers of often hour-long, unedited footage of long, winding walks that are, like this one, generally set in Japan. Sound is a byproduct in these videos, a part of the document, but more frame than focus, more color than subject. Still, here the crackling — the sort that always, oddly, sounds more like fire than rain — is very much a centering component. One can be tempted to just watch, and sometimes I do have one of these running, perhaps at quarter speed, on a side monitor as eye candy, but the full audio-visual experience is where it’s at.

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhzYkXE1i4).