Disquiet

A little over a year ago, a simple live performance video made a strong impression. Using just two synthesizer modules, Peter Speer took brief moments from “Om Shanti” by Alice Coltrane and pulled them like one might Silly Putty, bending and stretching the audio until it was mere strands of its original state. In the process, he yielded something both utterly transformed and yet true, in tone and effect, to the source material. Speer’s latest video, posted two days ago, on March 30, has no familiar origin, but also delights with its simplicity. It’s a fairly compact and well-circumscribed synthesizer setup, the Serge Animal, played throughout, his hand guiding voltages and volume, and from them coaxing a drone étude, a gaseous cloud of arching textures.

Video originally posted at vimeo.com. More from Speer, who is based in Asheville, North Carolina, at diode-ring.com and instagram.com/peter.speer.

Two observations: First, YouTube definitely doesn’t count repeat plays by individual accounts in its “views” for a video, because this archived live stream from the musician Junklight (aka Mark John Williamson) was on repeat here all day, filling the home office from before work on to after, and it’s still registering under 20 plays, despite being not even 10 minutes in length. Second, if there’s a piece of seemingly quiet but actually quite layered and bountiful music that can run all day, at varying volumes, and serve both as not just background music but domestic sound design and, when turned up, as it is now that the day has begun to close, as something to dive into and study, then it is the very definition of ambient: loops of granular synthesis played like a futuristic pipe organ.

This is the latest video added to my ongoing YouTube playlist of live performances of ambient music. Video originally posted to YouTube. More from Junklight at junklight.bandcamp.com and twitter.com/junklight.

Nathan McLaughlin’s performance this Sunday was a highlight of a weekend packed with free live online shows. There are many more such shows to come during our time of widely distributed isolation, and I recommend not only a listen to his gig, if reflective solo guitar sounds up your alley — but also one if you’re planning on playing live online yourself. He does so much, so simply, and (audio glitches in the archived transmission aside) with enviable concentration, that it’s a model for such a thing as destination viewing. The video is just him, in a wooden chair, with an acoustic guitar in hand, and enough (largely off-screen, though there is a reel-to-reel machine rolling along against the wall) equipment to lend his already raga-like playing a nimbus of graceful echoing. There’s a clear aesthetic connection between his minimalist finger-picking and the hall of sonic mirrors in which it occurs — so clear that the two factors in fact blend together. Close to the end, he ruptures the fabric of performance by stopping his picking. He turns the guitar up in his lap, as a recording of his playing plays on. And then he takes a bow to the strings, and creates a drone that consumes all that came before, and then he gets up from the chair and walks off-screen, leaving the drone to drone, until he slips back in to lower the volume to a finish. I’ve been listening to and writing about Nathan McLaughlin’s music at least since January 2006, back when he went by the name Doogie, and, at least to my ears, he’s never sounded more thoughtful and focused.

Video originally posted at the YouTube channel of the Decentralized Sonic Quarantine Network. More from Nathan McLaughlin, who is based in Hudson, New York, at nathanmclaughlin.bandcamp.com.