My 33 1/3 book, on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II, was the 5th bestselling book in the series in 2014. It's available at Amazon (including Kindle) and via your local bookstore. • F.A.Q. • Key Tags: #saw2for33third, #sound-art, #classical, #junto • Elsewhere: Twitter, SoundCloud, Instagram

Listening to art.
Playing with audio.
Sounding out technology.
Composing in code.

This Is the Starship Ambience You’ve Been Looking For

"Another Carefree Day On The Nostromo" by Boson Spin of Brisbane

[ March 12, 2016 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

If the hotel you’re staying in doesn’t have quite the spaceship-quality, hermetic, time-slowing HVAC system you’re accustomed to, you still have the option to augment your sonic reality. In most hyper-developed cities, temporary stay means submitting to climate control so optimized for depersonalization that it serves to emphasize just how much you are a visitor, just how much you are not part of the place you call, for a brief spell, something akin to home. If the building lacks that welcome, saturating drone, you could do worse than to pipe “Another Carefree Day on the Nostromo” by Boson Spin into your capsule. At 20 minutes in length, it is packed with a fearful stasis, a forbidding hollowness that moans with the exhaust of some massive engine whose traveling velocity approaches the speed of light while, in a literally cosmic sense, it is barely moving at all.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/boson_spin, in all its Alien glory. Boson Spin is Stan Magendanz of Brisbane, Australia. More at bosonspin.bandcamp.com.

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What Sound Looks Like

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

[ March 12, 2016 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

The sign used to read “No Dial Tone,” in case that wasn’t self-evident. I like to think that had it provided a dial tone, the general public might be able to make use of it.

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

Music by Scanner for radio science fiction drama about the future of gender

[ March 11, 2016 / Department: downstream / Comments: 2 ]

As mentioned here back in early February, upon the death of Denise Duval, the electronic musician Scanner is an especially apt choice for scoring radio dramas. Much of his early electronic music involved lending scores to real-life conversations plucked — well, sampled, really — from the ether. Commissioned scores allow him to apply that experience and those techniques to more formalized narratives. That February entry was about Scanner’s take on the Cocteau play La Voix Humaine, the opera of which starred Duval in its first incarnation. More recently, Scanner provided the score to a BBC Radio 4 story by science fiction author Geoff Ryman. The Ryman story, “No Point Talking,” isn’t currently online (bbc.co.uk), but Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud) has posted nearly 11 minutes of the score, a cooly atmospheric outing, with plenty of echoing synthesizers, though the main thread is a sequence of what sounds like electric guitar. Around the seven-minute mark, unintelligible voices intrude, passing as if by the window of the studio where Scanner is recording. The voices play an interesting third-party role. They are neither speaking parts from Ryman’s story, nor are they score. They are human presence as score, voices as sound design. And after they fade, the guitar proceeds forward, bending until it comes to resemble another voice of sorts: the call of seagulls.

Here’s the BBC’s description of Ryman’s tale:

Award-winning sci-fi writer Geoff Ryman’s new story for the BBC, imagining a future world where California has been split in two, each half with very different political outlooks.

His conservative hero finds himself in a place he doesn’t like or understand, where everything he holds dear is challenged: relations between men and women, and even the very definitions of ‘he’ and ‘her’.

This story was written as Geoff was investigating the portrayal of gender in utopian science fiction, as part of BBC Radio 4’s Utopia season. That documentary which accompanies ‘No Point Talking’ is called ‘Herland’.

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/scanner. More from Scanner, who is based in London, at scannerdot.com.

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Disquiet Junto Project 0219: Breath Dance

The Assignment: Working with artist Paolo Salvagione, create the audio backdrop for a piece of choreography utilizing only the sound of soft breaths.

[ March 10, 2016 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

copyrightKristenBell-Junto0219

Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com and at disquiet.com/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. There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time.

Tracks will be added to this playlist for the duration of the project:

This project was posted in the early afternoon, California time, on Thursday, March 10, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 14, 2016.

These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto):

Disquiet Junto Project 0219: Breath Dance
The Assignment: Working with artist Paolo Salvagione, create the audio backdrop for a piece of choreography utilizing only the sound of soft breaths.

The artist and engineer Paolo Salvagione is currently working on an extended piece of choreography. This Junto project is the first of likely several that might serve as sonic backdrops for the dance performance, and also as a form of research into the materials and ideas being explored by Salvagione and the dancers. (Audio produced for this Junto project will not be used by Salvagione without its composer’s permission.)

Step 1: You will be creating a short, roughly five-minute piece of quiet music. First, take into consideration the setting. Visualize that the piece would be performed by a young solo female dancer. She is dancing in a large space. The sounds of this Junto are the only sounds accompanying her movement. The sounds should be quiet — they should suggest quietness, peace — yet also work, when amplified, at a volume loud enough to fill the space.

Step 2: Using the sound of soft breaths, make a piece of sound/music roughly five minutes long that meets the criteria of Step 1.

Step 3: Upload your completed track to the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.

Step 4: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.

Step 5: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.

Deadline: This project was posted at noon, California time, on Thursday, March 10, 2016, with a deadline of 11:59pm wherever you are on Monday, March 14, 2016.

Length: The length should be roughly five minutes.

Upload: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, only upload one track for this project, and be sure to 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. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.

Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please in the title to your track include the term “disquiet0219-breathdance.” Also use “disquiet0219-breathdance” 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, please be sure to include this information:

More on this 219th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Working with artist Paolo Salvagione, create the audio backdrop for a piece of choreography utilizing only the sound of soft breaths”) at:

http://disquiet.com/0219/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:

http://disquiet.com/forums/

The photo associated with this Junto is by dancer Kristen Bell, who is part of this Salvagione project.

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A Nautilus of Percussive Expressivity

The fractal music of Erika Nesse

[ March 9, 2016 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Erika Nesse makes fractal music. She codes the music — “coding” being a term that has as much application these days as do “writing” and “composition” to the production of sound. This following playlist collects over a dozen examples of her algorithms set to work on a variety of audio sources. Listen as sounds ranging from white noise (“Fifty One”) to verbalization (“One two three”) to gentle bleeps (“It goes bop”) cycle through patterns within patterns, coming back around to familiar riffs even as they expand continuously outward, a nautilus of percussive expressivity.

For context, Nesse, who’s based in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote the following about the process behind What the Machine Replied, a five-track EP of her fractal music:

This album was generated entirely with fractals, nesting beats within beats to create a self-similar system. I give a small seed pattern of a couple of notes to the machine, and it goes deep into the tree of recursion and echoes back a dizzying track minutes long. Thus, “what the machine replied”.

Here’s a video visualization that aligns the sounds with images, helping the mind trace the patterns:

SoundCloud set originally posted at soundcloud.com/conversationswithrocks. Keep an eye on Nesse’s fledgling fractalmusicmachine.com website.

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