Greg Davis & Keith Fullerton Whitman Live in 2002

"the live set was recently unearthed"

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Greg Davis and Keith Fullerton Whitman have posted a half-hour set from 2002, recorded on WVUM in Miami, Florida, during a spring tour from March and April of that year. It’s an early document for both. Davis released his first album, *Arbor*, in 2002, on the Carpark Records label. And while Whitman had been since the late 1990s making recordings (generally self-released), 2002 would also see the release of his breakthrough, *Playthroughs*, on Kranky.

According to the brief note on [Davis’ SoundCloud account](https://soundcloud.com/greg-davis/hrvatski-keith-fullerton-whitman-greg-davis-live-on-wvum-miami-fl-march-2002), “the live set was recently unearthed.” The two are heard “trading off playing live tracks.” These veer between gentle folktronic material from Davis (ruminative field recordings, guitar above a pixelated beat), and more frenetic, often IDM-flavored material from Hrvatski (rubbery breakbeats, scattered metric logicistics). The tag team approach is emblematic of their camaraderie.

I was fortunate to have seen them play when they hit New Orleans later that month at a show at the Mermaid Lounge. The full tour itinerary is archived at [the microsound discussion list](http://vze26m98.net/archives/microsound/html/2002/2002-03/msg00313.html). It started at Bard College mid-way through March and ended in Montreal at La Sala Rossa toward the end of April. The microsound-list announcement humorously depicts the tour as a trio, splitting Whitman between his given name and his Hrvatski moniker. Here’s part of the announcement:

hello microsound listers. i’m going on tour starting tomorrow, will most likely end up in a town near you some time over the next few weeks. if you’re in the area come and say hello… -k

starting very soon: spring tour.

featuring:

hrvatski (planet-mu, reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge).

greg davis (carpark, autumn).

keith fullerton whitman (kranky, apartment b).

hrvatski will be performing material from his forthcoming album swarm & dither (planet-mu).

greg davis will be performing material from his recently released debut album arbor (carpark).

keith fullerton whitman will be performing material from his forthcoming debut album playthroughs (kranky) on select dates.

greg davis and keith fullerton whitman will be performing material together as a duo on select dates (as they see fit).

If you want something to read while listening to the performances, I interviewed Davis later that year ([“Woodshedding”](https://disquiet.com/2002/11/22/woodshedding/)), and Whitman in mid-2001 ([“Army of One”](https://disquiet.com/2001/08/15/army-of-one/)).

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/greg-davis](https://soundcloud.com/greg-davis/hrvatski-keith-fullerton-whitman-greg-davis-live-on-wvum-miami-fl-march-2002).

The Drone as Amber

By Maine-based Bryan Hilyard

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Bryan Hilyard’s “Asleep in Amber” is a gentle drone. To say it’s a drone is to say it subsists on waveforms. To say it subsists on waveforms is to say that it pulses. The pace at which it pulses provides an internal contrast to the sounds themselves, which are gentle, hazy, soft, true to the slumber made explicit by the track’s title. The pace of the pulse, in contrast, is fairly quick, the main waveform moving more like water pushing at a pier as the tides shift than like a ripple on an otherwise still pond. It’s insistent for much of the track’s first third, at which point it dives. The pulse remains, but it’s deep, shadowed by the dense shimmer that Hilyard takes artful pains to accumulate. There seem to be voices in the mix, though they’re never remotely intelligible. They’re trapped even deeper down than is the pulse — like the title says, “Asleep in Amber.”

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/hilyard](https://soundcloud.com/hilyard/asleep-in-amber). More from Hilyard, who is based in Mariaville, Maine, at [hilyard.bandcamp.com](https://hilyard.bandcamp.com/) and [twitter.com/hilyardmusic](https://twitter.com/hilyardmusic). (Track found via a repost by [soundcloud.com/themonkbythesea](https://soundcloud.com/themonkbythesea), aka Ivan Ujevic of Zagreb.)

This Week in Sound: Sounds of and for the Cosmos +

hospital music + phone hiss + speech recognition + Smule + sound grands + notable deaths

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

*A lightly annotated clipping service:*

**Bedside Manner:** Medicine X is Stanford University’s initiative to explore “the future of medicine and healthcare.” As summarized by Andrea Ford at the school’s [Scope](http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2016/09/17/medicine-and-the-senses-conversations-on-space-and-hospital-soundscapes/) publication, MedX has an artist in residence, Yoko Sen, who is addressing issues of noise pollution in hospitals: “She played the audience a track of beeps, buzzes, alarms, and mumbled voices; other hospital sounds include patients screaming, and the empty silence after bad news is delivered.” 

**Phone Hum:** Much of the yap about the iPhone 7 is its haptic (touch) improvements, but as Matthew Hughes reports at [the Next Web](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2016/09/18/iphone-7-plus-reportedly-hissing-owners/) it “makes an audible hissing noise whenever under intense strain.” Hughes credits the detection to Stephen Hackett, who “eventually realized that the noise wasn’t coming from the speaker, but rather from the logic board itself.” Hughes quotes Marco Arment correctly likening it to the sound a laptop fan makes when the CPU is being overly taxed. Other theories exist, too, the most colorfully named being “coil whine.”

*(via Warren Ellis’ Sunday email newsletter)*

**Always Listening:** “How we learned to talk to computers, and how they learned to answer back” — those are the questions that Charles McLellan seeks to answer in his detailed [TechRepublic](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-we-learned-to-talk-to-computers/) piece, tracing it from the dissection of human speech through computer recognition, the role of neural networks in passing the WER (or “word error rate”) test, on through natural language understanding, and a sense of where AI is headed.

**V’ger’s Greatest Hits:** The Voyager space probes carried a “Golden Record” conceived by Carl Sagan that contained exemplary sounds of our planet to hypothetical intelligent civilizations far beyond our modest solar system. David Pescovitz of Boing Boing is leading a [Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ozmarecords/voyager-golden-record-40th-anniversary-edition?ref=NewsACSep2216) project to make the record available closer to home, a gorgeous box set with three vinyl LPs and a collection of images from the probes.

*(via Rob Walker, Bruce Levenstein, others)*

**Smule’s Pitch:** At [forbes.com](http://www.forbes.com/sites/mnewlands/2016/09/20/smule-has-changed-the-music-industry-completely-heres-how/#558069a437cb), Murry Newlands interviews Smule’s CEO and co-founder, Jeff Smith, about the business side of the social-oriented music-app developer, looking at matters of profitability, misperceptions about the scope of the music market, and the unique nature of the sounds they produce. Says Smith, “For example, because our community is creating the music, we’re not using that master recording, and we’re not licensing the master recording from the label. Instead, we’re licensing the copyright to the composition from the publisher, from the writer. And we pay royalties out to all the writers.” 

**Sound Awards:** At least three of this week’s announced [MacArthur Grant winners](https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class/class-2016/) work in sound and music: Daryl Baldwin, a linguist working on cultural preservation in a culture that “lost its last native speaker in the mid-twentieth century”; Josh Kun, a cultural historian of popular music (I helped out on the pop-up Tikva Records store Kun and others at the Idelsohn Society put together in 2011); and Julia Wolfe, composer and co-founder of Bang on a Can.

**Tome On:** While physical and ebook sales are slipping (paperbacks have risen), Alexandra Alter reports in the [New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/business/media/audiobooks-turn-more-readers-into-listeners-as-e-books-slip.html?smid=pl-share) that audiobooks sales are up.

**Olde Tyme:** The Internet Archive (which is housed walking distance from my home, and just a block from where I first lived when I moved to San Francisco in 1996, 20 years ago) [reports](http://blog.archive.org/2016/09/02/saving-the-78s/) on the process of saving 78-rpm records in collaboration with New York’s ARChive of Contemporary Music.

*(via Joseph Witek and Michael Rhode)*

*Recent notable deaths:*

RIP, [Don Buchla](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/16/don-buchla-modular-synthesizer-pioneer-dies-aged-79) (b. 1937), synthesizer legend

RIP, [Charmian Carr](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/movies/charmian-carr-liesl-von-trapp-in-the-sound-of-music-film-dies-at-73.html) (b. 1942), aka Lisel von Trapp from The Sound of Music

RIP, [Trisco Pearson](http://hiphopdx.com/news/id.40474/title.trisco-of-pioneering-rap-group-force-mds-passes-away-after-cancer-battle) of the Force MDs

RIP, [Curtis Hanson](http://variety.com/2016/film/news/curtis-hanson-dead-la-confidential-1201866310/) (b. 1945), 8 Mile director

RIP, actor [Terence Bayler](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/sep/22/terence-bayler-obituary) (b. 1930), aka Leggy Mountbatten, manager of fictional Beatles-parody band The Rutles

RIP, songwriter [John D. Loudermilk](http://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2016/09/22/songwriter-john-d-loudermilk-dead-82/90826022/) (b. 1934); songs played by Paul Revere & the Raiders, Nashville Teens, Roy Orbison, Marianne Faithfull

RIP, Earl Smith Jr., aka [DJ Spank Spank](http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2016/09/22/earl-dj-spank-spank-smith-of-phuture-has-died/), of acid house group Phuture

RIP, [Haakon Sørbye](http://www.arrl.org/news/view/world-war-ii-resistance-member-haakon-s-rbye-la8y-sk/) (b. 1920); as a member of WWII-era Skylark B, he relayed German troop information to London

I tweet notable passings (among other things) from my [twitter.com/disquiet](http://twitter.com/disquiet) account as I come upon them. I’ll see about collecting them here, as well, henceforth.

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the September 23, 2016, edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*

This Is “Glisten”

A track off R Beny's new Full Blossom of the Evening

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s likely no actual guitar on “Glisten,” a track off R Beny’s superb new collection, *Full Blossom of the Evening*. There are, in the extensive list of equipment, some potential sources for the sharp, high-pitched, tightly plucked, string-like sounds that are the focus of the track. We may be hearing a synthesized string from the Teenage Engineering OP-1, for example, or a sample played from his iPad. The sharpness of those sounds, the brittle, fiercely resistant tautness, brings to mind the artificial guitar heard on Oval’s 2010 album *O*. Both Oval’s record and this track off Beny’s new one explore the textures of the guitar in a digital space, a seeming simulacra of the familiar, rendered as a kind of sonic fiction, and the Oval reference gets additionally rich when a certain glitchiness is applies to the recording, when it temporarily seems as if the playback is failing. What makes the track distinct from Oval’s work is the core of the music. Oval’s reference was largely rock, pop, and folk. Beny has created a synthesizer chamber music, something that feels like it was plucked from the renaissance. When it glistens, per the title, and it does so quite often, it’s like light hitting stained glass — virtual stained glass, perhaps, but the beauty is real.

The full album is at [rbeny.bandcamp.com](https://rbeny.bandcamp.com/). “Glisten” is simply a recommended entry point. More from R Beny, aka Austin Cairns of the San Francisco Bay Area, at [soundcloud.com/rbeny](https://soundcloud.com/rbeny).

OP-1 Is the Instrument, Not the Opus

A looping piano piece by Nuun

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This processed piano track, by Nuun, can be heard as a complement to one from earlier in the week, [Carl Mikael’s “Live Looping Improv.”](https://disquiet.com/2016/09/19/the-piano-among-the-patch-cables/) Mikael’s posting was a full, multi-camera video that captured his performance in intimate detail. Nuun’s, “OP – 1 092116 Piano En Loops,” doesn’t include video of the execution. Nonetheless, the combination of elements in Nuun’s piece, of gently played piano and of lightly glitching effects applied to that piano, is so diagrammatic, you can almost see the procedures as they are enacted. (The “OP -1” in the title refers not to the opus number, but to the device, from the boutique Stockholm-based firm Teenage Engineering, that’s providing the processing.) The piano is the root of it. The piano line lands in the Venn Diagram overlap between neo-classicism and minimalism, between appealingly emotive and motorically repetitive. The piano riffs themselves are repeated enough to be, at times, indistinguishable from the echo and more fractured reflections that Nuun then imposes on them. That parallel is part of why the overall combination works, how the piano presupposes the digital effects imposed upon it.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/nuunnuun](https://soundcloud.com/nuunnuun/op-1-092116-piano-en-loops).