Madeleine Cocolas & Monolyth & Cobalt, Monthly

A new series from the Australian and French musicians

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Madeleine Cocolas — born in Australia, based in Seattle — has begun a new monthly music series, each track of which is a collaboration with Monolyth & Cobalt. There are two tracks in their effort so far. The series follows Cocolas’ previous “Fifty-Two Weeks” project (see [madeleinecocolas.blogspot.com](http://madeleinecocolas.blogspot.com/)), which took longer than one full year for her to complete, but during which she managed all manner of musical exercises. Like the most memorable of the Fifty-Two Weeks music, the first track in her new series with Monolyth & Cobalt achieves a natural, patient balance between classical ambient music and, well, actual classical music, of the chamber variety. Lens-flare synthesis finds its match in elegant, patiently revealed arrangements for more “traditional” instrumentation. The second track opens with a texture that seems alien to the first one, the rough sound of dirt, of gravel, of vinyl surface noise. That sound, which suggests slow toil and a state of disrepair, underlies an angelic vocal line, amid soft, lightly transformed touches of piano, until closing with a horn like that of a forlorn lighthouse.

Month one:

Month two:

Both tracks originally posted at [soundcloud.com/madeleine-cocolas](https://soundcloud.com/madeleine-cocolas/). More from Cocolas at [madeleinecocolas.com](http://www.madeleinecocolas.com/), and more from Monolyth & Cobalt, aka the French composer Mathias Van Eecloo, at [soundcloud.com/monolyth-and-cobalt](https://soundcloud.com/monolyth-and-cobalt) and [monolythcobalt.com](http://monolythcobalt.com/).

This Week in Sound: Hawking, Antarctica, Automobiles, Screams

A lightly annotated clipping service.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

When I first started to plot bringing back [the Disquiet.com email newsletter](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet), I almost turned it entirely into this one sub-section, This Week in Sound, which I imagine to be a possibly intriguing, maybe even useful, memo about various aspects of the role of sound in the media landscape. In the end I decided This Week in Sound would be core to the newsletter, but still just one part of it, mixed in with short essays, lists of things worth listening to — all the other stuff that’s been in the newsletter since it reappeared in your inbox last month. Well, if you were already a subscriber — there have been many new subscribers since re-launch, and thanks for your attention, very much.

**Text-to-Speech Supervillain:** The big news about Stephen Hawking this past week was his stated desire to play a supervillain in the next James Bond film, but the more engaging Hawking news was his work with the developers of the software SwiftKey “to write and speak with greater ease for longer periods and minimise typos.” It’s especially fascinating that the muscle Hawking uses to control his communication is in his cheek: even when he is transmitting text, it’s centered in a part of the body associated with speech.

[http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/](http://swiftkey.com/en/blog/swiftkey-reveals-role-professor-stephen-hawkings-communication-system/)

**Radio Free Antarctica:** Michelle Fournet, a PhD candidate in acoustics, has been aboard a Korean ice breaker headed to Antarctica to recover an ocean-bottom hydrophone. As she explains, “The seemingly impossible recovery task is accomplished by chirping. We’ll be using something called an acoustic release. What that means is I have a piece of equipment on the deck of the ship with an acoustic element that gets slung overboard to ”˜chirp’ into the water. The right chirp, at the right frequency, and the right timing, will wake up an element built into the hydrophone on the ocean bottom. If it hears the right signal, it chirps back a predictable reply.” Better yet, she is blogging the entire journey and mission. As of this morning she had arrived at Jang Bogo Research Station in Terra Nova Bay.
[http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/bioacoustics/2014/12/09/antarctica-part-iv-continent/](http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/bioacoustics/2014/12/09/antarctica-part-iv-continent/)

**Luxury Lofts Killed the Recording Studio of the Stars:** The London studio where Brian Eno’s *Another Green World*, Led Zeppelin *IV*, and Queen’s “We Are the Champions”were recorded is being shut down to make way for fancy apartments. The studio was founded in 1969 by Island’s Chris Blackwell and has since 1982 been owned by producer-musician Trevor Horn (The Buggles, Yes, Art of Noise). Between Eno and Horn alone, that’s a place closely associated with the role of the recording studio as an instrument unto itself. While luxury flats are certainly the immediate cause of the studio’s end, the broader cultural scenario, in which home recording has supplanted and financially undermined the major-league studios, is one that owes a debt to folks like Eno and Horn in the first place. (Thanks to Geeta Dayal for the *Another Green World* reference.)

[http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/12/silence-falls-london-recording-studios-201412467831715.html](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/12/silence-falls-london-recording-studios-201412467831715.html)

**Sound and Automobile Design:** It was one thing when the BMW-sponsored section of Medium happened to include a detailed, car-related story in the form of Nate Berg’s explanation of how roadside barriers function to make highways and freeways quieter. It was another when BMW itself got a byline for a story about how door sounds are fine-tuned (interesting note: “consumers subconsciously tend to interpret imbalance as structural weakness, not protective strength”). Either way, I’ll be using both articles in the sound course I teach.

[https://medium.com/re-form/muting-the-freeway-e18ee195bd38](https://medium.com/re-form/muting-the-freeway-e18ee195bd38)

[https://medium.com/re-form/click-clack-clunk-how-the-perfect-car-door-sound-is-made-and-why-it-matters-2cf867983a34](https://medium.com/re-form/click-clack-clunk-how-the-perfect-car-door-sound-is-made-and-why-it-matters-2cf867983a34)

**Scream Team:** The National Film Board of Canada, the NFB, has produced a celebration of screaming called, naturally, Primal. It’s an open Internet collaboration in which people are invited to, well, scream. It reads, in part, “Go ahead. Liberate yourself. Give it all you’ve got.” It’s a more immediate, visual, active, immediate rendering of what Hans Zimmer was up to several years ago when he crowd-sourced chants for *The Dark Knight Rises*. The NFP project was co-produced with Encuentro, the TV station of Argentina’s Ministry of Education.

[http://primal.nfb.ca/en/about](http://primal.nfb.ca/en/about)

**SoundCloud InterfaceSpotting:** Last week I mentioned that SoundCloud had added single-track repeat to its service, and this week I noticed that shuffle play has also joined the product offering.

[https://disquiet.com/2014/12/08/soundcloud-introduces-shuffle-play/](https://disquiet.com/2014/12/08/soundcloud-introduces-shuffle-play/)

*This first appeared in the December 9, 2014, edition of the free Disquiet email newsletter: [tinyletter.com/disquiet](http://tinyletter.com/disquiet). Unfortunately, the publication was held up for some reason by TinyLetter’s “abuse prevention system.” I didn’t even curse.*

Brian Eno Mid-1990s Mega-Mix

From Clark

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that the Brian Eno albums *Nerve Net*, *The Shutov Assembly*, *Neroli*, and *The Drop* are not on a lot of people’s lists of their favorite works by him. The records came out as a fairly steady series beginning in 1992, after an extended break from solo studio work. His previous album to 1992’s *Nerve Net* was 1985’s *Thursday Afternoon*, a personal favorite, but a lot happened in the intervening years. In any case, those four records have all been made available as bonus-track-laden reissues by All Saints, and if they in initial form struck your ear as more a collection of interesting individual ideas than standalone listens, then perhaps this track by Clark is what you’ve been waiting for. It’s a mix of highlights from the eight discs that comprise the reissue program, 34 minutes in all:

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/all-saints-records](https://soundcloud.com/all-saints-records/enoclark-mix). More on the reissues at [allsaintsrecords.com](http://www.allsaintsrecords.com/). The reissue remix also serves as a promotion for Clark’s new self-titled album, which Warp released last monght. More from Clark at [throttleclark.com](http://throttleclark.com/).

SoundCloud Introduces Shuffle Play

Apparently single-track repeat wasn't the only new feature added to SoundCloud.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20141208-icon

Another welcome addition to the SoundCloud interface: shuffle play. Just [last week](https://disquiet.com/2014/12/01/soundcloud-single-track-repeat/) I noted the appearance of the ability to [repeat a single track](https://disquiet.com/2014/12/01/soundcloud-single-track-repeat/). At least since the [*Instagr/am/bient* compilation album](https://disquiet.com/2011/12/28/instagrambient-25-sonic-postcards/) was posted back in late 2011, I have hoped for a shuffle option on SoundCloud sets. The *Instagr/am/bient* album, by way of example, has 25 tracks by 25 different musicians, and the first track, “Up Above the Hill-Sky” by Marcus Fischer, has as of this writing 9,412 listens, while Christopher Olson’s “Swanoji” hovers well under 1,000, at 633. While Fischer’s track’s popularity is well-deserved, overall it’s clear that the declining rate of listening corresponds almost directly with track placement. The only serious exception is the OO-Ray’s “Silhouettes,” which has 3,714 listens, compared with 1,974 for the track after it and 1,063 for the track preceding it.

In any case, shuffle play, along with the single-track repeat, is a welcome addition. We’re making use of the single-track option in [this week’s Disquiet Junto project](https://disquiet.com/2014/12/04/disquiet0153-groovelock/), which explores the notion of [locked grooves](https://disquiet.com/2014/12/04/disquiet0153-groovelock/), or the practice back in the days of vinyl of having a short single-revolution loop that repeats. The shuffle play will make [the resulting set](https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0153), along with all other SoundCloud sets, all the more enjoyable for listeners to explore.

20141208-screen

Neither of these two tools seems to have yet been introduced to the embedded player, or the mobile app, but it seems likely that’s down the road.