There’s a frivolity at the root of this track that makes it stand out. The little blurp of sonic gymnastic play with which it opens slowly repeats and then expands excitedly as it goes. It runs through the first time, then pauses, and then begins its looping transformations, at times settling down to something approaching ease, and then suddenly bounding about. It has a sweet disposition, like a little robot plaything running free, out of the clutches of the overly affectionate child it spends daylight hours attending to. It flutters and burbles, pings gleefully and flits about with an infectious eagerness. “Rings into Clouds (an obligation)” by mafgar presumably takes its name from the synthesizer technology from which it was made: a ring modulator and a granular sound processor. The melody doesn’t develop so much as it veers wildly while still adhering to a core tonality, much of it with a plectrum-like quality.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/mafgar](https://soundcloud.com/mafgar/rings-into-clouds-an-obligation). More from mafgar, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at [mafgar.bandcamp.com](https://mafgar.bandcamp.com/), [spotify.com](https://open.spotify.com/album/6gW3SoysJ7zWIDqmZnx5ps), and [Google Play Music](https://play.google.com/music/m/Av52vmxvkpaff3wjoe2ffia4gqa?t=Mafgar).
Electronic music is science fiction, sometimes more than others
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Bidding farewell to the great Ursula K. Le Guin. I was so young when I read her the first time, I didn’t know about genre conventions. My imagination was pretty close to a clean slate. I simply recognized the transition as I entered into another world, and I never fully returned.
Later in life, as I got interested in [Monome music equipment](https://monome.org/) and related software, I came to sense [like minds](https://llllllll.co/) when I recognized familiar names among the tools, such as the [Earthsea](https://monome.org/docs/modular/earthsea/) and [Ansible](https://monome.org/docs/modular/ansible/) synthesizer modules.
Brona Martin puts her mouth where her synthesizer is.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Electronic musicians searching for interesting sound sources need only look in the mirror. There they should easily find one of the most underutilized yet readily available tools: a mouth. Brona Martin explores the potentials for vocal processing made possible by digital audio software in her track “Lament.” Part of the processing here isn’t even electronic. It’s simply a matter of the tones that Martin elects to perform, from her soft breaths, to high choral o’s, to throaty gurgles, to occult moaning, just to give reference names to a few of the myriad sounds that make themselves heard in “Lament.”
Those sounds are, in turn, turned into other things entirely: a tender vowel stretched beyond its capacity, a breath set on mechanical loop, a warm utterance that dissipates into pure atmospherics — a hush, made soundscape. Some of the transformations, from severe insectoid noise to supple bell tones, leave behind entirely where it was that they originated. To Martin’s credit, this all comes together. “Lament” isn’t a parade of effects, or a survey of possibilities. Part of why the piece works is how it is all layered, lending congruences and a sense of verticality to the progression.
Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/brona-martin](https://soundcloud.com/brona-martin/lament). More from Martin, a composer and sound artist based in Irleand, at [bronamartin.org](https://www.bronamartin.org/).
An automated ambient performance for synthesizer, guitar, and tape loop.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Music that slowly develops as it proceeds is often described as “generative,” due to the way that development is autonomous, and the way we as humans have a tendency to attribute sentience to things that seem to act under their own guidance. Another useful rubric might be “systems music,” which is to say music that is the result of some combination of technological apparatuses working in tandem free of the continued presence of human agency. This “systems music” consideration puts aside, or at least lessens, the emphasis on an organic functionality, and looks instead at the functions, at the congruent parts and the whole that they constitute.
In the case of this video, that combination consists of guitar, tape loop, and modular synthesizer, the modular synthesizer being itself a system, a collection of interconnected devices. This is the work of Marcus Fischer, whose music often sits at the intersection of performance and installation, happening and recording, technology and sculpture.
The music here is a digital guitar loop, 11 seconds long if you want to keep pace at home, which is then being lent an echo thanks to that large reel-to-reel machine. The birdsong is a separate digital audio source, and all of it is being filtered, per the brief note accompanying the video. The music is sing-song, warbling, at time pushing well past the edges of what would commonly be thought of as audio fidelity, and in the process pushing into a whole new sensibility where artifacts are surfaced and left to be considered for all their newfound sonic loveliness.
Fischer’s mix of loops and tonalities, textures and reference points has no firm structure. It’s simply and elegantly a sequence of elements transforming as they proceed. This is music that is the end product of a system set up and then left, quite literally, to its own devices.
This is the latest video I’ve added to [my YouTube playlist of recommended live performances of ambient music](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJxihgJkCPEnehAPvjoF71-). The video originally posted to Marcus Fischer’s new [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9TPk2ILB6M) channel, which launched in mid-December of last year and currently has five segments, all worth taking in. Fischer is based in Portland, Oregon. More from him at [twitter.com/marcus_fischer](https://twitter.com/marcus_fischer), [marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com](https://marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com/), and [mapmap.ch](http://mapmap.ch/). I should mention that Fischer was the composer on a science fiction film, *Youth*, for which I was the music supervisor and, with him, co-sound designer.
This is the third Weekly Beats of 2018 — the third week of the biennial series wherein people upload tracks they’ve recorded as part of a communal challenge. It’s a bit like one of those largely non-competitive marathons where the majority of the people are just there to run alongside each other, and the only person anyone is gauging their performance against is themselves. (Which is to say, it’s like the Disquiet Junto to some degree.) For this week, I continued my efforts to combine electric guitar and modular, to run my guitar through my modular synthesizer in a manner that is, in essence, a very large effects pedal. My main goal this week was to incorporate a third element into the guitar + modular combination. The third element is piece of software called Rack, available for free from [vcvrack.com](http://vcvrack.com). It’s a virtual modular, for which at this stage well over a hundred different modules have been created, most of the available, like the software itself, for free download. I have a physical module in my rig that lets me send and receive both audio and CV (control voltage) signals, and so I hooked that up to Rack and used Rack-based modules to augment the sounds being processed by my physical modular synth. [Last week I ran the full guitar line through a looper](https://disquiet.com/2018/01/14/fever-pitch/), whereas this week I experimented with just sending two bands of the audio spectrum. It’s still very much a test case, but I thought it more important to get something up this week, to maintain the Weekly Beats cadence, than to skip a week out of self-editing. There’s some overdub toward the end, where I layered in material from an alternate take. That latter material involves no live playing. It’s all the circuit afterglow of the recording, where the guitar fragments caught in the system cycle through, morphing a tiny bit as they go. I didn’t upload this piece to SoundCloud, but you can give it a listen on the Weekly Beats website at [weeklybeats.com/disquiet](https://weeklybeats.com/disquiet/music/gain-entrance-test).
This is what the virtual modular setup looked like:
And this is what my modular synthesizer looked like:
