Marcus Fischer Live in His Home Studio

A video shot last fall in Portland, Oregon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Marcus Fischer is currently participating in an artist residency at the [Rauschenberg Foundation](www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/residency/artists-residence) on Captiva Island off the Florida coast. His [Instagram feed](https://www.instagram.com/marcusfischer/) is filling up with images and brief videos captured during his time there: Sugimoto-like pictures of the sea and a studio as white as a Rauschenberg painting. He’s suspending tape loops from the ceiling and quoting his fellow residents about the changes afoot in American politics.

The Instagram materials constitute beautiful slivers of his goings-on, but fortunately Datachoir is filling the void with a 17-minute video of Fischer alone in his Portland, Oregon, home studio — one continuous solo performance for electric guitar, synthesizer, pine cones, and other tools. The constituent parts are far more than the sum total of the sounds. He takes near-silent textures and generates light dustings from them. He strokes the guitar once, and then transforms the chord into something muted yet majestic. And while he plays, the videographer tours his studio, focusing in on his instruments, on a matrix routers and additional guitars, on cabling and boxes of spare parts.

I’ve worked on several projects with Fischer myself, and I recall an instance where someone we were newly working with asked what his primary instrument is. I struggled to explain there wasn’t a single focus of his music-making imagination. That studio is his instrument, and watching him employ it at length is a true pleasure.

It’s on the [Datachoir Sounds YouTube channel](https://youtu.be/hZziybgEXE0). I’ve added it to my (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAgCxRbmR1MJqCQ_Frl-hv-GiFC59u3a5). More from Fischer at [mapmap.ch](http://mapmap.ch/) and [marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com](https://marcus-fischer.bandcamp.com/). Previous Datachoir videos have featured Summer Mastous, Nate Dalton, and Jeremiah Green, among others.

“Avril 14th” from Above

A rendition by Josh Cohen

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Back on January 14 I wrote about the Australian pianist Josh Cohen’s [fantastic cover of Aphex Twin’s “Aisatasana,”]((https://disquiet.com/2017/01/14/josh-cohen-aphex-twin-aisatasana-piano/)) the quiet closing track from the 2014 album *Syro*. Cohen captured not only the understated melody, but the way distinct silences frame and bisect that melody. Now he has put his nimble hands to a far more famous Aphex Twin piano work, “Avril 14th.” It’s a beautiful rendition, paced appropriately, to neither bliss it out nor rev it up. Cohen’s version hints at Erik Satie’s proto-minimalism as much as it does at mid-century (that is, mid-1900s) popular music. It’s parlor music: nostalgic, personal, touching. The real pleasure of the performance is the presentation. Like all of Cohen’s videos, it’s shot from above, his hands in full view, each of them playing its distinct part, the left doing its routinized duty while the right edges at various roles.

Video originally posted at Cohen’s [YouTube page](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97FBWB4vv3s). More from him at [joshcohenmusic.com](http://joshcohenmusic.com). Cohen lives in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.

Snowfall in Kyoto

A track by Norihito Suda

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Norihito Suda’s “Light Snowfall” is ten minutes of soft pads. There are organ-like notes that take forever to fade, and gentle vocal-oid choral effects throughout, and strums that bring to mind an acoustic guitar, though the mental image of the latter lasts longer than does the sound’s actual presence. At times there’s a tremulous quality, when the inner functions of a waveform briefly let slip a quiet fury of activity. There’s no structure to “Light Snowfall,” nor structural give and take, just a fade in and a fade out and the steady stream in between. But don’t mistake it for a drone; it’s more of a composite than a drone, more an assemblage than a singularity. At ten minutes it’s also anything but fleeting. It seems to hold time in place, a suggestion reinforced by an occasional sense of a light ticking, like a clock is being turned back on itself, pushing for time to resume.

Track originally published at [soundcloud.com/norihitosuda](https://soundcloud.com/norihitosuda/light-snowfall). More from Suda, who is based in Kyoto, Japan, at [norihitosuda.bandcamp.com](https://norihitosuda.bandcamp.com).

The Radiant Explosion of W. Zabarkas

A new album on the Glistening Examples label

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a radiant explosion at the heart of W. Zabarkas’ *The Origin of Dreams*, a recent release on the Glistening Examples label. Much of it has an overwhelming industrial churn, even if you don’t make good on Zabarkas’ liner-note appeal: “The artist requests that you listen to this album at maximum volume,” it reads. Each of the tracks — “Autumn Invades the House,” “FOREST-91,” “2 0 9 4,” “Whereof One Сannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent” — opens with an expansive, hyperactive static. For the most part they also see that massiveness, that ebullient chaos, through to the end. “Whereof One Сannot Speak, Thereof One Must Be Silent” closes on a long fade. “2 0 9 4,” after peaking with something akin to a post-rock band’s third-encore climax, also fades at the end. “Autumn Invades the House,” the opening track, fades as well, if fairly quickly by the standard set by the others. Only “FOREST-91” gives way to something else, something elegant, something other than the sense of a knob dutifully, patiently rotated to cold zero; it’s a few notes on repeat, the world’s slowest arpeggio, It’s so apart from the rest of the album that its quietness has the opposite effect: it ends up perhaps the main thing, other than the overall sense of being caught in a cyclone, that the listener may remember. It’s hard to tell what’s buried in that noise. There may be ritual chanting amid “FOREST-91,” or it’s a trick of the ear, human presence imagined as a pattern in the vast randomness. Zabarkas’ suggested patterns are rousing, powerful, fully mechanical, yet charged with purpose and momentum.

More from Glistening Examples at [glisteningexamples.com](https://glisteningexamples.com/). More from Zabarkas at [soundcloud.com/wzabarkas](https://soundcloud.com/wzabarkas) and [vk.com/zabarkas](https://vk.com/zabarkas).

This Week in Sound: Sonic Illusion + Stonehenge Simulation +

+ audio birding + theater geeks + jack politics + more

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A lightly annotated clipping service:

**Sonic Illusion:** “[W]hat we imagine hearing can change what we see” is the layperson’s summary of an investigation by Christopher C. Berger & H. Henrik Ehrsson (“The Content of Imagined Sounds Changes Visual Motion Perception in the Cross-Bounce Illusion”) noted in [Nature](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep40123). The article lays out various experiments involving response bias and auditory imagery. (I’m immediately drawn to wonder just how much, in turn, we can attribute to the role sound informs our experience of narratives and places.)

**Stonehenge Simulation:** Rupert Till of the University of Huddersfield has created a virtual experience of what Stonehenge might have been like “with all the stones in place,” writes David Sillito for the [BBC](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38530755). “He has now developed an app which will help people blot out the sounds – including those made by tourists, and cars on the nearby A303 – and go back to the soundscape of 3,000 years ago.” (The project brings to mind Bassel Khartabil’s work on revisiting the ancient city of Palmyra.)

**Avian Few:** Birds thought long ago to have gone extinct, having disappeared from their native England, live on in New Zealand. “By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago,” reports Georgia Brown in the [Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/12/lost-british-birdsong-discovered-in-new-zealand-birds?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss). (Via Tim Prebble)

**Good Lick:** According to the postal service of Greenland, only 10 to 15 albums of music are released each year by citizens of the island nation: “The bestselling of these are issued in a number of 5,000. copies. Rather impressing in at country of only 56,000 inhabitants.” So it is that the post office has released [music-themed stamps](http://www.stampsshop.gl/templates/pricelist.aspx?GroupGuid=10), ranging from “drum song” to accordion music. (Via Michael Rhode)

**Jacked Up:** The headline to Rita El Khoury’s article at AndroidPolice.com says it all: [“[Because that doesn’t sound ridiculous] HTC has an app to update the firmware of its USB-C to 3.5mm adapter.”](http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/01/13/doesnt-sound-ridiculous-htc-app-update-firmware-usb-c-3-5mm-adapter/) It’s worth noting that as of this typing, the article has 137 comments.

**Audio UI:** That cool hockey puck that comes with Microsoft’s Surface Studio may have gotten old quickly: As Juli Clover reports at [MacRumors.com](http://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/12/adobe-research-team-voice-based-ai/), Adobe is working on voice-enabled search and editing of images.

**Dust Up:** Artist Nina Katchadourian has produced a sound tour of the MoMA in Manhattan in which she details the battle against dust at the venerable museum. As Aruna D’Souza writes at [4columns.org](http://4columns.org/d-souza-aruna/nina-katchadourian), two years of research yielded a 30-minute recording with numerous stops, among them “the main lobby, a closet holding air purifiers, the soaring atrium, the helicopter that hangs on the second floor, a window ledge.”

**Theater Geeks:** Putting aside the [Wired](https://www.wired.com/2017/01/happens-algorithms-design-concert-hall-stunning-elbphilharmonie/) article’s clickbait title suggestion of autonomously created large-scale buildings, Liz Stinson writes up the marvel that is the Elbphilharmonie. That’s a new theater in Hamburg, Germany, and its acoustic panelling was produced with hyper-detail computer aid: “No two panels absorb or scatter sound waves alike, but together they create a balanced reverberation across the entire auditorium.” The architecture firm of Herzog and De Meuron collaborated with acoustics expert Yasuhisa Toyota on the project.

**Primate Directive:** Researchers have found that human and baboon voices have far more in common than was previously believed to be the case, writes Colin Barras for the [New Scientist](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23331084-500-baboons-recorded-making-key-sounds-found-in-human-speech/). Joël Fagot (Aix-Marseille University) and Louis-Jen Boë (Grenoble Alps University) have identified previously unrecognized vowels among 1,300 baboon subjects.

**# FADE OUT**

Recent deaths of note.

RIP, musician [Tommy Allsup](http://lubbockonline.com/entertainment/2017-01-11/friend-allsup-guitarist-who-toured-holly-used-life-after-coin-flip-good) (b. 1931), who lost the coin toss that would have put him in Holly/Valens/Bopper’s plane

RIP, Bronski Beat keyboardist [Larry Steinbachek](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38597071) (56)

RIP, pianist and singer [Buddy Greco](https://nyti.ms/2iufqwS) (b. 1926)

RIP, songwriter [Greg Trooper](http://tnne.ws/2jNuMdU) (b. 1956). He wrote, among others, “Everywhere,” a war heartbreaker I know from Billy Bragg’s great cover.

RIP, conductor, composer, and scholar of Australian music [Richard Divall](http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/richard-divall-has-died) (b. 1945)

RIP, [Hans Berliner](https://nyti.ms/2jSmod0) (b. 1929), chess champion and early computer-games figure

RIP, [Keyboard Magazine](http://cdm.link/2017/01/demise-keyboard-magazine-42-years/) (42)

RIP, [Dick Gautier](https://nyti.ms/2jSUq0E) (b. 1931), played rock star in *Bye Bye Birdie*

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the January 17, 2017, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*