Disquiet

Start your day with a stereo presentation of six channels of audio documenting the watery reality of Sequoia National Park. The nearly five minutes of sound were recorded by Micah Frank, who is based in Berlin, Germany, in the California park. Once the immediate mental images of water, flowing and burbling, have made their impression, the piece reveals itself as deeply rhythmic. This is in particular due to the foregrounded percussive sounds that suggest some micro-scale, organic gamelan or kalimba, not to mention the underlying rush of the water, which makes for several layers of roiling white noise.

Frank lays out the channel technology as follows:

>We only hear varying perspectives on the water geophonies.
>
>2 Channels Schoeps M/S, decoded and mixed in post-production.

>2 Channels Hydrophones.

>2 Channels stereo Binaural Microphones.

Start your day with it, then put it on repeat throughout the day.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/micahfrank](https://soundcloud.com/micahfrank/acoustic-ecologies-6-channel-installation-sequoia-national-park). More from Micah Frank at [twitter.com/micahfrank](https://twitter.com/micahfrank).

It’s been half a year since Kent Sparling posted something to his SoundCloud account. That gap is probably good news for film-goers, since Sparling is an excellent sound designer and film composer (see his extensive credits at his [IMDB page](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0817070/)). But fortunately he took a break enough for a couple minutes of new, film-less work, in the form of this fluid, lulling piece (title: “Oregos in Fog”) that seems to play several different billowing sounds against each other — lush sounds that, in turn, billow at different rates, allowing for chance overlaps and tensions. According to a brief liner note it is the first of a 10-day plan to record as many one-minute pieces. This tracks in at closer to two minutes, but who’s going to complain? (As a side note, he lists the components as follows: “Simple analog and digital synths from the 1980’s, a rack of outboard signal processors and a Hohner Piano 36 melodica were the playthings.”)

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/purling](https://soundcloud.com/purling/oregos-in-fog). For reasons beyond me, he only has 66 followers on SoundCloud, so please consider adding his account to your cue. More from Sparling, who lives in Berkeley, California, at [jicamasalad.net](http://www.jicamasalad.net/).

The month-old beats of Marihiko Hara’s track “Remember Me” were of particular interest. This was because several of the more recent tracks in the musician’s feed were gentle, plaintive, concertedly still [solo piano improvisations](https://soundcloud.com/marihikohara/20140325-piano-improvisation-take-1). The #beats tag intrigued. Not because there is some significant, inherent gap between sample-based beat-making and solo piano. The divide between perceived dance-floor sounds and perceived classical influences has been closing — been increasingly recognized as an unhelpful illusion — for decades. If anything, crate diggers and solo piano players have in common a taste for the past. And, in fact, the beats of Hara are built from samples of what sound like old parlor jazz, muffled, and muted, and made all warpy like a damaged record, like a rusty machine, like a weak memory. The use of antiquated samples is all the more nostalgic when the muddying makes them sound like we’re hearing radio signals that got lost behind a cloud, or down a dark alley, and not only took decades to reach their destination but were threadbare by the time they arrived.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/marihikohara](https://soundcloud.com/marihikohara/remember-me-radio-edit). More from Hara, who is based in Kyoto, Japan, at [marihikohara.com](http://www.marihikohara.com/).