Teaching Sound / Spring 2016

I'll be doing my sound course in San Francisco for 15 weeks starting February 3.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150217-week3

I’ll be teaching my course on “the role of sound in the media landscape” — aka “Sounds of Brands / Brands of Sounds” — again this coming spring 2016 at the Academy of Art here in San Francisco.

The semester runs from February 1, 2016, through May 21, 2016. The class meets on Wednesdays from noon to 2:50pm, which means the first class meeting is February 3 and the final class meeting will be on May 18. There’s no class on March 23, which is spring break, for which I’ll probably assign a close-listening analysis of Cliff Martinez’s work on the score to *Spring Breakers*. Just kidding. Well, maybe not kidding.

Last semester we had one of the heads of the Mutek festival ([Patti Schmidt](https://disquiet.com/2015/07/08/in-the-province-of-real-time-electronica/)) address the class, as well as someone from the software developer Cycling ’74 and someone from Facebook’s virtual-reality team, among others. The previous semester we had someone from BitTorrent and someone from SoundCloud, and we took a field trip to an anechoic chamber at the local research lab of an audio company. The guest speakers aren’t generally lecturers; I usually interview them in front of the students, who also ask questions. The semester prior both the sound artist Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) and the voice actor Phil LaMarr (*Samurai Jack*, *Static Shock*) visited via Skype.

Here’s the course outline from last year:

20150204-syllabusbreakdown

I teach the course to a mix of MFA and BA students. This is the seventh semester that I’ve taught the course, after taking off last semester with the intention of teaching it once a year rather than twice a year, to leave room for loads of other projects.

You can read summaries and documentation from past semesters using the [“brands of sounds”](https://disquiet.com/tag/brands-of-sounds/) and [“sounds of brands”](https://disquiet.com/tag/sounds-of-brands/) tags here at Disquiet.com.

Industrial Techno from Machine Woman

The crunch of gears not digits at 120bpm

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20151130-machinewoman

Much of the unaffiliated techno that appears on SoundCloud is a tease. Devoid of a record label or even a descriptive liner note, it generally opens with an enticing mood-setting tone, and then very quickly flexes a beat. Light variations occur as the beat proceeds, but as for that tone, at best it returns for a late-in-the-track break, or perhaps at the eventual fadeout.

Machine Woman’s “Untitled – 30 11 2015 22.36” drops that opening tone entirely. There’s no void to fill for Machine Woman. There is just the beat. Her techno is of the industrial variety, the rhythm mechanical, true to form, and the texture rough and ragged. It’s the routinized crunch of gears, not of digits.

“Untitled – 30 11 2015 22.36” opens straight off with its 120bpm beat, and the cycle varies barely at all for the subsequent six and a half minutes. There’s a tidy, tiny horn-like solo, and an even smaller snippet of Latin-ate stick percussion and a castanet-like rattle, but otherwise the variation is left to a series of subtle white-noise flourishes that bring to mind brushed snares.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/machinewoman](https://soundcloud.com/machinewoman/untitled-30-11-2015-22-36). More from Machine Woman, aka Russian-born Anastasia Vtorova, at [twitter.com/mmachinewwoman](https://twitter.com/mmachinewwoman) and [facebook.com/machinewoman](https://www.facebook.com/machinewoman/).

That Time I Interviewed Brian Eno in 1990

And John Cale, regarding their Wrong Way Up collaboration

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20151130-wrong

Twenty five years ago I stood on the rooftop of the Diva hotel in San Francisco and interviewed Brian Eno while a photographer did his best to take advantage of the light.

We were there to discuss *Wrong Way Up*, the album Eno had just released with John Cale of the Velvet Underground. I was on assignment for *Down Beat* magazine, and the article appeared in the January 1991 issue. I’ve just now uploaded it to [Disquiet.com](https://disquiet.com/1991/01/29/eno-cale-wrong-way-up-down-beat-1991/), backdating it to the original publication — hence this small note of its (re)appearance.

The record is a lot of fun, but apparently the daggers depicted on the cover were appropriate, as neither Eno nor Cale came away from it with warm feelings. Said Cale, whom I interviewed by phone:

>“With Brian, I think what happened is that he would listen to what you said, but he really didn’t have much patience with it. His idea of listening to what you said was eventually, you know, slam the door and come out with a solution. I haven’t figured out yet what Brian’s notion of cooperation, or collaboration, is.”

Read the full piece: [“Reconcilable Differences.”](https://disquiet.com/1991/01/29/eno-cale-wrong-way-up-down-beat-1991/) If I can track down my tapes of the interviews, I’ll transcribe them and post them, too.

A New Album of Shoegazer Cello Beauty

From the OO-Ray, aka Ted Laderas of Portland, Oregon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20151130-ooray

Ted Laderas, who goes by OO-Ray when he’s piping his cello through layers of effects and, in turn, breathing out reams of lovely music that’s half classical and half shoegazer, has a new EP out soon, a half-hour cassette titled *Vespers*. The album’s name, taken from the early evening prayer, is certainly appropriate, as his music often has the aura of a cathedral, in both its sense of space and its contemplative presence. This two-minute sample of *Vespers* does not disappoint, with deep echoing of subsumed sawing, the effect as much like an organ as like a chorus.

*Vespers* comes out December 4 at [lifelikefamily.bandcamp.com](https://lifelikefamily.bandcamp.com/). Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/ooray](https://soundcloud.com/ooray/vespers-teaser). More from Laderas, who is based in Portland, Oregon, at [twitter.com/ooray](https://twitter.com/ooray) and [15people.net](http://15people.net/).

An Ambient Roil

Gaseous clouds at a fast pace – from Russia

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Murkok’s “A Forest with Water and Rocks” is nearly five minutes of ambient roil — it is at once soothing and seething, placid and active. It’s almost all gaseous sounds, but they churn at a rapid rate. The result is a sense of heightened awareness, as if a storm is coming in and you’ve just noticed it on the horizon. Slipping through the overwhelming cloud effect are micro shards, like a rain of distilled white noise, and occasional sharp moments, a bell hit hard, a seeming chorus or slammed door heard from deep in the mix, a high tone flying overhead. The track continuously lulls you and alerts you, over and over, often at the same time — a lullaby on a rocky ship.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/murkok](https://soundcloud.com/murkok/a-forest-with-water-and-rocks). More from Murkok, aka Ilya Glebov of Vyborg, Rusia, at [murkok.bandcamp.com](https://murkok.bandcamp.com/), and [petroglyphmurkok.wordpress.com](https://petroglyphmurkok.wordpress.com/).