Maria Chavez Listens to, Rather Than Through, Vinyl Surface Noise

Check out her transfixing "Kids- TRIAL 18 (Unfinished)."

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20160102-bk17_fob_music2

“[E]ven without engaging the motor one can still create interesting sounds simply by placing the needle on the surface area of the platter and turning up your volume. It becomes a giant contact mic, reacting to the physical sonic characteristics of whatever you place on top of it. This versatility, along with countless other little features that the turntable provides, makes the turntable a valuable instrument in my opinion. Vinyl is a detail to me, a sound vocabulary that I can manually manipulate.” That’s sound artist and turntablist Maria Chavez explaining, early last year, to Kristin Iversen of [bkmag.com](http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/03/the-language-of-sound-an-interview-with-maria-chavez/) both why and how the turntable is central to her sonic activities.

You can hear Chavez’s exploratory efforts in “Kids- TRIAL 18 (Unfinished),” a transfixing mix of brittle, foregrounded surface noise and warped, melancholic melody. The vinyl static and buzzy textural imperfections are like hard cold icy rain hitting the window of a parked car, as heard from the inside. That sound is precise and sharp and it comes in clusters, each wave suggesting that maybe just maybe the flurry of noise will finally recede, until the ear eventually makes peace with the fact that the noise is the music. For Chavez, that vinyl noise is what you listen to, not what you listen through. You listen for its patterning, its physicality, the slight variations in timbre, volume, and depth.

Amid that dusty precipitate in “Kids- TRIAL 18 (Unfinished)” is a soft, narrow melody, a mere riff that is repeated, cut up, looped, and heard in varying degrees of completeness, both forward and backward. It gives the ear enough familiar song-like content to satisfy an underlying, culturally accumulated need for something tonal, but it is by no means sufficient on its own. It is there as a foil for the surface noise of the vinyl, something that it purposefully never comes close to rising above.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/maria-chavez](https://soundcloud.com/maria-chavez/kids-trial-18-unfinished-by-maria-chavez). More from Chavez at [mariachavez.org](http://mariachavez.org/),
[twitter.com/chavezsayz](https://twitter.com/chavezsayz), and
[instagram.com/chavezsayz](https://www.instagram.com/chavezsayz/). Photo by Maggie Shannon, from an article at [bkmag.com](http://www.bkmag.com/2015/03/03/the-language-of-sound-an-interview-with-maria-chavez/).

Finding the Tension in the Ambience

In a New Year piece by Benoît Pioulard

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Screen Shot 2016-01-04 at 9.01.43 PM

First day of the new year, many are all quiet on the social media front, while others are already getting going on the next 12 months’ productivity and creativity. Those two, of course, are not mutually exclusive. Benoît Pioulard has posted “Madrigal” for the new year. It’s a piece he recorded just yesterday, December 31, 2015. Judging by the time stamp, this went up shortly after the ball dropped. It’s a piece for “guitar and tape,” per the brief liner note. “Madrigal” is a soaring series of wafting swells, one after another after another.

The momentum is colorfully at odds with the placidity. Likewise, while it has the pace of clouds, the texture is closer to that of rough sandpaper, the tones like the static shaved off of a shoegazer performance, the sampling stretched within a micron of its source material. Those tensions are what elevate this ambient music well beyond clouds-for-clouds’-sake haze.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/pioulard](https://soundcloud.com/pioulard/madrigal). More from Benoît Pioulard, aka Thomas Meluch, who’s based in Seattle, at [pioulard.bandcamp.com](https://pioulard.bandcamp.com/) and [pioulard.com](http://pioulard.com/). Photo from an interview at [fracturedair.com](http://fracturedair.com/2015/04/27/chosen-one-benoit-pioulard-2/). (Track found via a repost from Tim Dwyer [[soundcloud.com/offland-1](https://soundcloud.com/offland-1)].)

Disquiet Junto Project 0209: Audio Journal 2015

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20151231-BarrySilver

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.

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

This project was posted just before noon, California time, on Thursday, December 31, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 4, 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 0209: Audio Journal 2015

The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments.

This week’s project is a sound journal, a selective audio history of your past year.

Step 1: You will select a different audio element to represent each of the past 12 months of 2015. These audio elements will most likely be of music that you have yourself composed and recorded, but they might also consist of phone messages, field recordings, or other source material. These items should be somehow personal in nature, suitable to the autobiographical intention of the project; they should be of your own making, and not drawn from third-party sources.

Step 2: You will then select one five-second segment from each of these dozen audio elements.

Step 3: Then you will stitch these dozen five-second segments together in chronological order to form one single one-minute track. There should be no overlap or gap between segments; they should simply proceed from one to the next.

Step 4: In the notes field accompanying the track, identify each of the audio segments.

(Level Up: Alternately, you can use more than 12 audio segments — do two a month, or one a week, or one a day. Whatever you choose, just keep them evenly distributed across the year. You might make the segments shorter, to keep the full track length to 60 seconds.)

Step 5: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 6: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project was posted just before noon, California time, on Thursday, December 31, 2015, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, January 4, 2016.

Length: The track should be 60 seconds long.

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 “disquiet0209-journal2015.”Also use “disquiet0209-journal2015”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 209th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments”) at:

Disquiet Junto Project 0209: Audio Journal 2015

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

https://disquiet.com/forums/

Photo associated with this project by Barry Silver used via Creative Commons license:

journals

Japanese Tufts and Flares

Hirotaka Shirotsubaki, from a split release with Sleepland

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The beautiful track “Kalte Luft,”German for “cold air,”comes from Kobe, Japan”“based Hirotaka Shirotsubaki. It’s a nearly eight-minute drone with a loose, organic tonality. By “organic”is here meant that there are enough layered elements that the texture is ever changing, the effort throughout evident in a micro-scale level of detail, all tiny, incremental shifts and alterations. At a more macro level, the piece is a sequence of tufts and and flares, billowy, morphing waves and sharp, piercing grace notes. It’s a highlight of the album *Étude 1*, available for free download from Bandcamp, which is a four-song split between Shirotsubaki and his fellow Japanese electronic musician Sleepland:

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/infection](https://soundcloud.com/infection/kalte-luft). More from Shirotsubaki at [hshirptsubaki.bandcamp.com](https://hshirptsubaki.bandcamp.com/) and [twitter.com/tubakihiroki](https://twitter.com/tubakihiroki). More from Sleepland at [soundcloud.com/sleepland](https://soundcloud.com/sleepland) and [sleepland.bandcamp.com](https://sleepland.bandcamp.com/). (Found via a repost by Mexico-based Autumn Clouds, [soundcloud.com/autumnclouds](https://soundcloud.com/autumnclouds).)

Aphex Twin Holiday Treat

The freely downloadable track “pianopkupt1 [norm]” appears via user18081971.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

With the cheerful and characteristically gobbledygook sign off “spladgyklax,”Aphex Twin yesterday posted, as a holiday gift, a freely downloadable percussive little piece titled “pianopkupt1 [norm].”Accompanying it is this short message: “thanks for all your lush messages on here and the PM’s.”At least the track was there as of this typing, which I’ve set to post early on Friday, California time. Tracks have been coming and going on his slightly concealed, pseudonymous [user18081971 account](http://soundcloud.com/user18081971) for months now. At one point there were more than 250 tracks, and then the cupboard was suddenly bare, and in recent weeks some older tracks have begun to reappear, along with some new ones, like “pianopkupt1 [norm].”(This past Monday, the 21st, I happened, around 4:30pm California time, to see all 269 tracks listed as available, and then a few minutes later they were gone, reduced to 9. As of today there are 10.) Of course, “new”is a qualified term, as much of the music Aphex Twin has been posting as user18081971 appears to be archival material, providing peeks into his process and alternate takes on familiar music, like “Avril 14th” and aspects of the *Selected Ambient Works Volume II* album. The newly arrived “pianopkupt1 [norm]”track has no year associated with it. It’s possible that the “pkupt”in the title refers to the use of pickups inside a piano, hence the exceptionally echoey sound of the keys. *(Update 2015.12.27: pickup theory confirmed in comments below.)* The continuum between the evident piano and the more neutral beats is a gentle reminder that the piano is, in essence, a well-tuned and mechanically complicated percussion instrument.

Track originally posted to [soundcloud.com/user18081971](https://soundcloud.com/user18081971/pianopkupt1-norm).