Do Aviaries Dream of Electric Tweets?

An experiment in "unreal field recordings" by Andrew Pekler

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Andrew Pekler has a synthetic menagerie, an electronic aviary. He has made “unreal field recordings” — his excellent phrase — that consist of chatty birdsong, except there are no actual birds, just his machines, his software, however it is that he constructed the sounds. They’re modeled, certainly, on familiar bird noise: the quick reverberating of their tiny speech organs, the inherent echo of the natural environment, the layered density of a forest. As the piece proceeds, his artificiality gets more self-evident, the songs bring to mind pictures not of small birds but of small synthesizers. At which point the brain switches from bird to synthesizer is unclear, and arguably unimportant. In either case, we simply hear Pekler’s lovely birds sing across the uncanny valley.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/pekler](https://soundcloud.com/pekler/synthetic-birdsong). More from Pekler, who has recorded for ~scape, Kranky, Entr’acte, Matador (under the name Sad Rockets), and other labels. at [andrewpekler.blogspot.de](http://andrewpekler.blogspot.de/).

Kate Moore’s Serrated Clouds

A vocal piece gains mass – and an edge

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Netherlands-based Kate Moore has uploaded segments of her “Voiceworks.” They are beautiful pieces in which layered vocals, pitched high and thin, combine into something cloud-like yet with a serrated edge to it. The thinness keeps the overtones to a relative minimum, and allows the individual layers to be somewhat discernible as the formation gains mass. In a brief accompanying note, she explains it was performed by her at the Media Lab of University of New South Wales in Kensington, Australia, and in Paddington, Sydney, Australia. Moore earned her PhD at the Sydney Conservatory of Music.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/kateemoore](https://soundcloud.com/kateemoore/voiceworks-ii-2015). More from Moore at [katemoore.org](http://katemoore.org/).

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This pair of photos doesn’t come close to doing justice to the scene of this user-interface crime. The image on the right is of the gate of a two-story multi-unit residence. The image on the left is to its left, and mounted perpendicular against the frame into which the gate is set. Buttons like those on the right, hollow after decades of use, are common. So, too, is the accrual of doorbell devices over time. Less so is leaving the entire doorbell structure in place to serve as an instruction. Accumulated poster detritus on telephone polls is sometimes likened to “urban moss.” Doorbells such as these are urban barnacles.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.

A Compendium of Complications

From a forthcoming album by Guy Birkin and Sun Hammer

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20150531-guybirkinsunhammer

What makes a piece of music in question complex? The misdirection here, in this track from Guy Birkin and Sun Hammer, begins early, just 10 seconds into the recording, when, after a semblance of a theme emerges, it cuts out and begins again.

And the explicit complexity isn’t all about the audio zigging when your ears expect a zag. There are bright sprays of noise and jittery manifestations of latter day glitch. It’s a compendium of complications, all in service of thinking that Birkin and Sun Hammer have put into, in recent years, the whole concept of complexity. That is, what makes a piece of music complex? What earns it that adjective? The track is off their forthcoming album *Complexification*, on the estimable Entr’acte label. It’s actually two samples of the record, combined into one file. The recipe for their exploration of complexity is as follows:

>The Complexification project explores musical
complexity through a collaborative process
based on a set of rules:
>
>1. Make a short, simple piece of music.
>2. Swap copies of the pieces with the other person.
>3. Modify the given piece to make it more complex (the given piece must be used, but it can be trans-
formed in any way, and new sounds may be added).
>4. IF the result is more complex (as agreed by both participants), GOTO 2, otherwise HALT.
>
>In this project, complexity is understood in
terms of the quantity and variety of musical
elements or patterns. The result is two
parallel threads of music, each representing
a progression of increasing complexity.

The above visual accompanies Birkin’s announcement post on his [blog](https://aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com/), in which he writes, “The aim of this project is to explore musical complexity through a creative approach rather than an analytical one.” The image appears to show an increasingly complex sequence of related visuals, suggesting a means of comparison. There’s also a more lengthy [PDF](http://www.entracte.co.uk/E187.pdf) summarizing their approach to the subject. More on the record at [entracte.co.uk](http://entracte.co.uk/projects/guy-birkin–sun-hammer-e187/).

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/entracte](https://soundcloud.com/entracte/e187). More from Birkin at [aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com](https://aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com/), [twitter.com/guybirkin](https://twitter.com/guybirkin), and [soundcloud.com/notl](https://soundcloud.com/notl). More from Sun Hammer, aka Jay Bodley of Portland, Oregon, at [sunhammer.com](http://sunhammer.com/), [twitter.com/sunhammer](https://twitter.com/sunhammer/) and [soundcloud.com/sunhammer](https://soundcloud.com/sunhammer).

What Sound Looks Like

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Now, “dot dash dash” is Morse code for the letter W. Here, however, it is three doorbells of two different makes, set on a residential front gate with no helpful address numbers. If you look closely on the leftmost of these, you’ll see the faded remnant of a series of numerals. One more rainy season and they’ll be entirely gone. The Morse code is probably the most hopeful interpretation: You arrive at the gate and communicate with the inhabitant by tapping out a message with the arcane alphabet.

An ongoing series cross-posted from instagram.com/dsqt.