Midwinter Blues

A work-in-progress from Toronto's Colab

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

**Colab**’s “Midwinter” is posted as a work-in-progress teaser from a forthcoming album, *Fat Tuesday*. Judging by that title, he has a little over a month to go. The track is a solid little piece, a mix of minimal-techno rhythmic play and industrial mecha-vocalization. The percussion is pointillist and vibrant, if icily so. The pings ricochet in slow motion and bound about in patterns that are less succinct than they might at first seem. The vocal, similarly, is less welcoming than is initially suggested; it remains just out of the reach of comprehensibility. As “Midwinter” progresses, an occasional piano figure nudges the track toward downtempo chaos, at time sounding like something else entirely is leaking in from a neighboring studio. It’s one more element of artfully implemented misdirection.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/colab](https://soundcloud.com/colab/midwinter). More from Colab, aka **Mikael Hansson** of Toronto, Canada, at [twitter.com/colab_toronto](https://twitter.com/colab_toronto) and at his [ccmixter.org](http://ccmixter.org/people/colab) page.

Disquiet Junto Project 0053: Ice for 2013

The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it (redux).

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Ice in a drink glass

*Each Thursday at [the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-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](http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/).*

This assignment was made in the early evening, California time, on Thursday, January 3, 2013, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, January 7, as the deadline. Below are translations into five languages in addition to the original English: Croatian, French, Japanese, Polish, and Turkish, courtesy respectively of Darko Macan, Éric Legendre, Naoyuki Sasanami, Grzegorz Bojanek, and M. Emre Meydan.

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 0053: Ice for 2013
>
>Happy new year! This week’s project is as follows:
>
>Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
>
>Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single sentence as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series on the first Thursday of 2012. Revisiting it a year later provides a fitting way to begin the new year. A weekly project series can come to overemphasize novelty, and it’s helpful to revisit old projects as much as it is to engage with new ones. Also, by its very nature, the Disquiet Junto suggests itself as a fast pace: a four-day production window, a weekly habit. It’s beneficial to step back and see things from a longer perspective.
>
>Deadline: Monday, January 7, 2013, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
>
>Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 4 minutes in length.
>
>Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, 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.
>
>Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0053-ice2013”in the title of your track, and 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, be sure to include this information:
>
>More on this 53rd Disquiet Junto project at:
>
>https://disquiet.com/2013/01/03/disquiet0053-ice2013/
>
>More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
>
>http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Continue reading “Disquiet Junto Project 0053: Ice for 2013”

… A Form of Change Repetition Is …

A sample track from the new Aboombong album

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20120102-aboombong

“K1” is tagged as “minimalist” by its composer and performer, the Seattle-based musician **Aboombong**, and that it is — though more in a literal than a genre sense of the term. “K1” is nearly four minutes long, during which a gurling riff of digital effluvia serves as a fond reminder that repetition is a form of change. As the riff moves along, its fragmentary subparts become familiar if not entirely recognizable, the frog-like rising burble that is its core, the downbeat bass note that suggests use in big-eared lounges, the bit of stereo play between speakers (or, better recommended, headphones) that especially delights the ears. Only for the final minute does the track diverge significantly, into a lightly flanging, quiet roar of drone, like a church organ heard from a great distance, obscured by some computer-enabled curtain.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/aboombong](https://soundcloud.com/aboombong/k1). The song is the first of seven tracks on the new album
[*Adumbral: Études Dans le Contrôle Imprécis*](http://aboombong.bandcamp.com/album/adumbral-tudes-dans-le-contr-le-impr-cis).

Synth Pop Turned Inside Out (MP3)

A study in verbal decay from L.A.-based musician Katie Gately

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20130101-katiegately

From within an opening mass of cloudy digital fragments comes a nimble if martial beat. It’s adorned, in time, with squiggly computer noise and a humorously sublimated vocal. The track is titled “Y’all” and it’s by **Katie Gately**, who’s based in Los Angeles and whose work here comes across like synth pop turned inside out. There are words caught in endless echo-repeats, phrases uttered and forgotten, raw syllables left to their own devices. The voice, which is to say the voice’s comprehensibility, slowly decays over the course of “Y’all,” and it ends up sounding like HAL 9000’s little sister crashing hard after a multi-day bender. What makes the track so great is how it seems like pop music even though it’s almost devoid of a proper song structure (there is something akin to a chorus, but it only occurs twice, and the second time it falls apart quickly). Even better is how the vocal line’s disintegration is treated as part of the music’s overall compositional development, how the words — or lack thereof, as it progresses — function as rhythm, melody, instrument, sound.

Track originally posted for free download at [soundcloud.com/fionamoocow](https://soundcloud.com/fionamoocow/saturday-night-yall). The above photo is from Gately’s bio as part of the team behind a video game called [*The Moonlighters*](http://moonlightersgame.wordpress.com/meet-the-team/).

With a Blip

This is how the year ends.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

20121231-gifrepeat

The year ends with not a bang or a whimper, but a blip. There are four blips, in fact: two pairs of the same tone, two low, two high, and they alternate to suggest a seesaw effect. There’s a gap between the pairs and this lends the decidedly electronic affair something that nonetheless might be suggestive of swing. The blips are at relative ease, their pacing slow, even if the overall recording is just 15 seconds in length. They’re best experienced as a loop, which adds a third beep: the seam that marks the slight incongruity between repetitions. And then there’s the light noise of foundation that permeates the space in which their transit takes place, sound that seems to be as if the blips themselves are heard coming into view and just as efficiently exiting it, the sonic equivalent of headlights and vapor trails. The recording is the latest in the innovative GIFBites series, in which each recorded MP3 is intended as the score to a pre-existing GIF image, in this case the nostalgic Pong image shown above.

Track originally posted at for free download at [soundcloud.com/gifbites](https://soundcloud.com/gifbites/enhanced-blip). There’s a bit more about the project at its homepage, [gifbites.com](http://gifbites.com/post/39311494112/enhanced-blip-conceived-by-r-d-and).