Disquiet – Page 751 – Listening to culture. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

When the Looped Is to Be Looped

A track from An Imaginal Space

February 21, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

The track is titled “Looping,” and looping it contains, what sounds like a brief guitar sequence, a brief trace of notes, above a waft of synthesis, the series set on repeat, their paths overlapping in varying ways. A note can be heard, here and there, to stray, to be pulled at length, extended from the sequence. It stretches from its original place and becomes part of the waft. It’s just gorgeous how it unfolds. It’s titled “Looping” because that is what it contains, but it is also to be set on loop itself.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/an-imaginal-space](https://soundcloud.com/an-imaginal-space/looping-210216). More at [animaginalspace.com](http://animaginalspace.com/).

Drones That Aspire to Sound Design

Which is to say, not "music," whatever that might mean

February 20, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

In space no one can hear you scream, but plenty of sounds bring space to mind nonetheless. The sounds we’ve heard from space in recent years, between the [Einstein chirps](https://disquiet.com/iMZjB) and the [plasma songs](https://disquiet.com/6vYur), were beyond our hearing initially, the frequencies shifted after the fact so we could experience the original waveforms in a manner that we’d more naturally categorize as audio.

Still, a century of film, not to mention television and radio drama, has provided a sonic signature to space, a sonic context for extra-planetary exploration. This is what one might make of “Iris Study,” a drone-like two-minute sketch in audio by William Boldenweck. There is much drone music, in particular on SoundCloud, and much of it aspires to a compositional state. Such drone music can be heard as a descendant of Olivier Messiaen and Mortan Feldman, traversing Eduard Artemyev and La Monte Young toward an aesthetic of stasis.

What Boldenweck has recorded here is apart from that. “Iris Study” sounds like it transpires not in musical time but in narrative time. It’s less a composition than it is the sound of a deep-space ship being walked late in the non-night/non-day of interplanetary travel. It captures the echo and contours of physical space, of systems humming with a vast vacuum just outside the door. Then again, this could be program music, the program being the footsteps of an astronaut pacing, the drone matching the protagonist’s emotional arc as well as the physical map of the stroll.

More likely Boldenweck has some other story entirely, some other design and structure, in mind, but the piece’s inherent absence leaves plenty of beautiful space for the mind to fill.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/boldenweck](https://soundcloud.com/boldenweck/iris-study). More from him at [baseltrash.tumblr.com](http://baseltrash.tumblr.com/).

Processing Music as if It Were a Field Recording

Taylor Deupree takes on Kodomo

February 19, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

Taylor Deupree’s is not a name one immediately associates with remixes. The founder of 12k Records, he has a singular vision that manifests itself in solo records and occasional collaborations and, through 12k, his support of like-minded musicians. But hearing his take on Kodomo’s “Endless Waves,” the correlation between his own work and remixing makes perfect sense. So much of Deupree’s music released under his own name is about processing something pre-existing, source material, often field recordings and the pure tones of standalone acoustic instruments making their way through his equipment, ultimately yielding something more akin to erasure than accrual. That is exactly what he does with the Kodomo piece, etching away the pop-infused original until what we hear are small bits echoed and looped, frayed and otherwise dissected.

And here, [for reference](https://soundcloud.com/kodomo/11-endless-waves), is the original version of Kodomo’s “Endless Waves,” a pulsing, droning piece that wavers between arpeggio momentum and film-score synthesizer atmospherics. The track is from Kodomo’s 2014 album, *Patterns & Light*. It can be informative to locate the source moments of a remix in the original, a bit like solving a puzzle, and it can be all the more so to locate the source aesthetic — how the first version inspired the approach of the second. Here, at 1:35 into the 2:07-long track, there’s a fleeting moment, a final swell experiencing an elegant torque, just before the piece’s long fade. It has in it a touch of Deupree’s own favor for gently warped wisps.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/kodomo](https://soundcloud.com/kodomo/endless-waves-taylor-deupree-remix). More from Kodomo, aka Chris Child of Brooklyn, New York, at [kodomomusic.com](http://www.kodomomusic.com/). There are two other remixes in the series, by Kodacrome and Allies for Everyone.

Disquiet Junto Project 0216: Thin Layers

The Assignment: Add a thin foundational bed to beats of pin-prick audio.

February 18, 2016February 18, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

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Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on [SoundCloud.com](https://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/) and at [disquiet.com/junto](https://disquiet.com/junto/), 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. 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.

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project was posted at noon, California time, on Thursday, February 18, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 22, 2016.

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

Disquiet Junto Project 0216: Thin Layers

The Assignment: Add a thin foundational bed to beats of pin-prick audio.

Step 1: For this project you’ll be adding sounds to a pre-existing track of your choosing. Select one track from the previous Junto project, in which beats were made with five tiny, pin-prick sounds:

https://disquiet.com/0215

Step 2: Confirm the track you selected in Step 1 is available for creative reuse. If you’re not sure, correspond with the musician. If you’re short on time, select a different track.

Step 3: Create a new track by adding a thin layer, or several thin layers, of an ambient foundational bed to the pre-existing track. Don’t alter the pre-existing track significantly. Maintain its original length.

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process — identify the source track and include a link to its SoundCloud page.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project was posted at noon, California time, on Thursday, February 18, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, February 22, 2016.

Length: The length of your track should be the same as that of the source track.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, and 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.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0216-thinlayers.”Also use “disquiet0216-thinlayers”as a tag for your track.

Download: It is preferable that your track is set as downloadable, and that it allows for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).

Linking: When posting the track, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 216th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Add a thin foundational bed to beats of pin-prick audio”) at:

https://disquiet.com/0216

This Week in Sound: The Chirp Heard ‘Round the Universe

+ standoff audio + sound cards + bee music + SoundCloud's fortune + patents

February 18, 2016 / By Marc Weidenbaum

A lightly annotated clipping service — and as with last week’s this is going to be a bit more rangy and a bit more cursory. Then again, maybe it should be more rangy and cursory in the first place:

Screen-Shot-2016-02-11-at-11.15.49-1-e1455189857342-800x546

**Little Bang:** The big news this week, the chirp heard ’round the universe, was scientists announcing that they had recorded sonic evidence of two black holes colliding, confirming something that Albert Einstein predicted before anyone reading this had been born. More at from Dennis Overbye at nytimes.com and Nicola Twilley at newyorker.com.

**Tea Stream:** A heated showdown ended in Oregon, where the armed occupiers of federal land live-broadcast their final hours before handing themselves over to the FBI. The full audio of the ongoing process was streamed live at the YouTube channel of an activist. It was quite bizarre — both distancing and intimate — to listen in on the conversations, not surreptitiously through a police scanner but actively because one of the parties had decided to make the full event public. The main memory I have is of someone asking for a pizza. Details at oregonlive.com and nytimes.com.

**Blast from the Past:** Ernie Smith at tedium.com unpacks the origins of personal computers making music, dating it to the 1989 introduction of the Sound Blaster from the Singapore company Creative Technology: “he PC peripheral that helped turn the modern computer into a multimedia powerhouse.” (Via Micah Stupak-Hahn.)

**Drone Drones:** Kev Bales and Wolfgang Buttress are using a beehive to make a symphony, reports theguardian.com. “The first time you lift them out there’s this incredible, visceral hum. I thought it might just be an irritating bzzzzzz sound, but it’s so low it just kind of gets you,”says Buttress. (Via Christian Bok.)

**Cloudy Forecast:** News broke of SoundCloud’s financial misfortunes. There’s no clear sense of where this is headed (factmag.com).

**Wrist Amplitude:** Apple has filed a patent (image up top) that “depicts an Apple Watch automatically adjusting an iPhone’s audio volume or other alert characteristics based on ambient sound samples”(macrumors.com).

*This first appeared, in slightly different form, in the February 17, 2016 (it went out a day late), edition of the free Disquiet “This Week in Sound”email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet).*