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The saying goes that a broken clock is right twice a day. The thing about a fully functioning clock is that it means different things at different times of the day. The noon bell, for example, is a midday alert. Even if the noon bell also happens to signal, say, a Latin mass, it provides a secular timekeeper for everyone within earshot. Other times might be synchronized with things other than the nearly universal 24-hourly intervals: religious events (services) and semi-secular ones (weddings) generally fall off the strict hour/half-past regularity. Even when slight, discrepancies in timing can feel significant, or at least meaningful. In the neighborhood where I live, the noon bell rings each Tuesday just after a noon siren calls out across the city (actually a network of sirens, all slightly off sync). The noon church bells always start slightly after the alert ends (the siren consists of two parts: an alarm, and then a spoken announcement). It's unclear if the alert comes early or if the bells late, but they long ago reached some sort of sonic armistice.
The great Touch Radio podcast noted the end of 2012 with an extended recording of bells (MP3), recorded in the belltower of St. Mary's Church, Walthamstow. They were no doubt intended to signify the close of a year, but they were, in fact, if the data in the RSS feed is correct, released eight days prior, and in fact recorded a full month prior. The bells rang any number of times between November 30, when they were recorded, and January 1, 2012 -- and thanks to the podcast MP3, they will continue to be heard into the future, each time signally something slightly different: coinciding with an event, looking ahead to one, or bringing to mind something from the past.
And, for that matter, the bells find themselves occasionally excepted from timekeeping duties, and listened to for their sonic properties. There is a particularly eventful sequence at around the eight-minute point when decay and overlays combine to create illusions of more bells than are in fact ringing -- the reverberation almost takes on the appearance of backward masking, which is ironic given the association of backward masking with Satanism.
Track originally posted ("With thanks to Denis Hewitt & Ewan Marshall") at touchradio.org.uk.
The great ongoing Radius broadcast/podcast often takes radio its subject. Those entries carry additional meaning because the series' name suggests a circumference of available signal, and because the catchy glitchy sound that opens each episode is derived from broadcast technology (see "Entering and Exiting the Electromagnetic Spectrum"). "Rise and Shine" is just such a segment: a live and improvised performance by Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell that concerns itself with the way the landscape shapes radio signals. The result is an extended conversation played out between thick, wavering tones and momentary snatches of disruption.
At the hosting site, the duo explain the narrative that informs the performance:
The piece responds to the clarity of local signals in Montreal that are obscured in areas directly adjacent to the main radio tower transmitter site atop Mount-Royal. The areas situated in the shadow of the mountain, where there are no sight-lines to the tower, have poor reception because the signal must pass though the ground to reach the receivers. The signal is only received in mono and occasionally cuts out intermittently for indeterminate periods of time.
Rise and Shine begins with undulations, like the intermittent signals in the mountain’s shadow; a rising and falling, an ebb and flow of tones meditatively sweeping through the frequency range that stretch the spectrum that is most receptive to the combination of signals. Once the space is carved out, the piece unfolds at a languorous pace, evocative of a hot summer night when the air is thick and sleep comes in waves carrying episodic dreams linked together by a common thread.
More on the piece at theradius.tumblr.com. Emilie Mouchous and Andrea-Jane Cornell are based in Montréal, Québec.
The "sinfonietta" tag on Soundcloud.com doesn't get a lot of love. At this moment, the tag brings up just one track, but it's a doozy. "Sinfonietta" is one of a half dozen tags selected by Alarm Will Sound, the adventurous chamber ensemble, in association with a recording of their performance of the composition "Step!" The piece of music, by Liza White, was taped last summer at Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, and is heard here in a crisp five and a quarter minutes. It opens with suspended strings and arhythmic accents from horns and percussion, before the crux of it hits: a hard, almost robotic, ever surprising shuffle. (For the record, this is a website where "robotic" is a compliment.) The strings and horns are extensions of, compatriots of, the drums, the whole thing syncopated like Leonard Bernstein or Alex North at their most rhythmically vibrant and succinct.
According to composer White, who participated in a discussion about the festival at alarmwillsound.com, the jazz feel is deserved from step routines:
The musical material in this piece is derived from step team routines, which use combinations of stomping, clapping, speech, and patting different parts of the body in a choreographed way to execute collective rhythm. Step is related to hip-hop, which I’ve always been interested in. The piece is also about race relations the way I’ve experienced them. So its use of step routine material is both a musical influence and an extramusical one.
The step routine, filtered through jazz tradition, then funneled through chamber instrumentation, arrives at the ear with an ecstatically herky jerky feel. The result suggests the way jazz has been sampled by turntablists and other breakbeat musicians, bits and riffs cut up and reassembled with an intense verve. The image up top, from coverage of the festival at newmusicbox.org, shows White rehearsing with the group.
This space will be used to occasionally collect information about Instagr/am/bient: 25 Sonic Postcards, following its launch at 6:03pm Pacific Time on Wednesday, December 28. Within 48 hours, it had been listened to over 4,000 times on soundcloud.com and downloaded over 500 times at archive.org.
Coverage:
¶ Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com wrote a considered, thoughtful piece about the project on the last day of the year. It opens:
Imagine receiving a postcard in the mail. Ok, back up: remember the mail? Remember postcards?
Right, now imagine them. On one side, an image: a faraway place, an iconic sign, people smiling, a sunset. Perhaps someone has even scribbled on it, adding their own moustaches, thought bubbles, or other postal graffiti. “Having a wonderful time,” it inevitably says, “wish you were here.”
Or, does it? Turning it over, ostensibly to read, you find instead that it — sings.
¶ Boing Boing's David Pescovitz at called it a "lovely collection": boingboing.net. One of the commenters correctly guessed the subject of the cover photo. Another compared a track to the music from this video game: visitproteus.com.
¶ One of the more unexpected outcomes of the Instagr/am/bient project: being listed as an example of what Soundcloud.com is all about in coverage of the company's new round of venture-capital funding: readwriteweb.com
¶ The mothership, instagram.com, mentioned it under "Around the Community" in its The Week in Instagram section.
¶ Over at coveringterrain.wordpress.com, the project is described by Jim Gerlach in a context alongside the Seattle Art Museum's Record Store listening room (seattleartmuseum.org) and Stelios Manousakis' network-art exhibit at the Jack Straw Media Gallery (jackstraw.org).
¶ Now this is crowd sourcing: A listener named Jon Dowland made a revised version of the archive.org edition of Instagr/am/bient to upgrade the quality of the embedded images: archive.org. Update: more on his process at his site, jmtd.net.
¶ Among the places the project has also been discussed, leaving aside numerous passing mentions on Twitter and elsewhere: at synthtopia.com (on its facebook.com page, Synthtopia called it a "must download"), at the message boards of elektron-users.com, at hubski.com (where the idea of adding lyrics was talked about), and at freemusicarchive.org.
Posts by Participants:
¶ Linda Aubry Bullock, at shadowselves.net, writes of her contributions to the compilation:
‘My Instagram was used for Track 12; the music, “Some Found Things”, is by Warren Craghead III. My track is #21, called “Near Cedar”. The photograph was taken by Christopher Bissonnette.
My Instagram was taken in early 2011 in Jamaica Plain, MA at a service station late one evening. The piece that I composed for “Near Cedar” was a recording of traffic (as I waited near Cedar Street) combined with a processed vocal track.
I imagined the lighter patterns at the center of the photograph as periods in time, and in the composition they’re the repetition of the door chime of the bus. The vocal track in the background was inspired by the dark areas of the photo. In another track I filtered the sound of the bus brakes, which corresponds to the horizontal white area at the top of the image.
I recorded the traffic and bus using the iProRecorder app on my iPhone, and the voice element consisted of several heavily processed tracks, using VoiceLive Touch. I used Audacity for the final mix.’
I was sneaky and turned in a manipulated drawing, not a photo, but since this is mostly what I post in instagram it made sense. My drawing is from a photo I saw online of a battle in Libya earlier this year. ... Christopher Bissonette made a wonderful sound piece for it (listen here).
I got a great and evocative image from Linda Aubrey Bullock to make my sound piece from. … I’m not a musician but I have become fascinated with field recordings and manipulated sound over the part few years. … I’ve especially liked, and drawn from, the work of Aaron Ximm aka Quiet American. He does a great job of keeping a strong connection to the recorded sound while still composing and creating something new and alive; something to rival the original field recording.
I’ve been making simple field recordings and posting them at SoundCloud (my kids playing, a train, some animals). Doing these documentations seemed like drawing in my sketchbook to me - to remember, to aestheticize a little, to try to make something out of them.
For instag/am/bient I looked at the image I was given of a car side mirror, ice/rain and weird light and went out looking for sounds to record that could work with the photo. I ended up with some rain and car sounds, a hum of a powerline and some other mechanical rumbles I found by walking around my neighborhood late at night. I sometimes go on “drawing safaris” and this felt like that. SNEAKY.
I smashed all the sound together and tried to “compose” it. Weirdly, doing that felt natural - like making comics or books. In comics and music there’s a pace and composition over time and that I got. I might be fooling myself, but I think I understood at least the basics of it from all the drawing work I’ve made.
¶ Over at his jonmonteverde.com site, Jon Monteverde (aka XYZR_KX) wrote, in part:
I received a photo (taken by Earsmack, seen below) and in response, I composed a new track called “Fly” under the XYZR_KX moniker. Equipment used: a Commodore 128 with Cynthcart for the main pad sound, a circuit bent Danelectro BLT Slap Echo guitar pedal used as a sound generator for the low rumbling noise near the end, an iPhone running Voice Memo to record the field sound, and a MacBook running Ableton Live for edit and mix.
The picture of a streaking object in the open sky brought to my mind the idea of flying; the sounds evoke the human dream of flight from the perspective of our earthbound state, looking up. In addition, I wanted to hint at a contrast between how effortless flying can seem in nature, and the enormous energy expenditure required to actually put people in the air. “Fly,” in the insect sense, is also a pun on the cicadas in the field recording.
William Gibson said recently that science fiction is a way of examining the present without having to cope with the reality of looking directly at it. I think Instagram is a bit like this. Except with Instagram we’re not really looking at or thinking about reality. We’re looking at what today might look like if we found it in a beaten up shoebox full of old photographs in the attic.
My assigned image ... was taken by Jon Monteverde. It seemed to suggest that cool shivering excitement one feels when offered a vista of a city in the hazy early morning. With this in mind, I built a song around a blackbirds call recorded at dawn from a rooftop in Madrid, Spain kindly provided by Dobroide at freesound.org. Another recording of morning traffic heard from my bedroom window in Dublin, Ireland was also placed very low in the mix, reduced almost to the bare hiss of white noise.
The bell and synth sounds that duel (duet?) with the blackbird come from the amazing Aalto synth created by Madrona Labs.
On top of these sounds various gauzy digital layers were heaped: a digital guitar pedal called the el Capistan that emulates the sound and warmth of old tape delays, a VST called the Glue that mimics the sound of SSL buss compressors, and other such wonders of the modern age. Brave new simulacra of venerable old tools.
Stephen Quinn mastered the track at his Analog Heart studio.
¶ Over at his benjamindauer.tumblr.com site, Benjamin Dauer went into depth regarding process, from a technical and creative standpoint:
Inspiration: When I received my ‘assignment’ for this project I knew immediately what I wanted to do. This image makes me feel as though I have arrived early for a performance/presentation of some kind. Not being allowed into the main space just yet, I enjoy the angle of peering around a corner, over a stack of chairs, and seeing/hearing someone talking. I tried to capture some of this feeling in my track - the faint sound of someone’s voice, muted guitar and pads as if musicians were warming up, and other environmental noises. I hope it gives the sense of subdued excitement or anticipation one gets when they’re waiting at a show.
¶ Ted James Butler, who records as Ted James, posted background information on his track at his betteroffted.tedjames.info site:
I contributed a short piece titled “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away” which featured various field-recordings and my Harvestman modular synthesizer.
In “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”, I depict the blurred portion of the image through a “musical” theme that never quite resolves. Like the image, this piece is also framed by field (street, in this case) recordings. Raindrops, footsteps, creaky doors and wind are easy to pick out, yet the brunt of the track highlights the inferred. A mental picture that is never quite clear.
¶ At twitter.com/earsmack, Joe Zobkiw, aka earsmack, shared a shot of his software patch (in Max), and explained (via email) "It was then manipulated in the Elektron Octatrack before a final fretless bass melody was added":
¶ Jonny Butler, who records as J Butler, provided some background at his site, j-butler.com:
On ‘Sundown’ I used field recordings of fire layered with a series of drones and an electric piano. The drones were created by a lapharp with contact mic, the Exs24 in Logic (using the very basic sine tones in the default patch), and the deep sound was created from a recording I made of a metal bowl.
¶ Smyth, aka Jared Smyth, posted at his site, uprlip.com, a photo of the old-school tape loop setup he used to achieve his piece, and he wrote by way of explanation in a follow-up email: "my whole track was assembled from 1/2" open reel loops containing digitally pre-processed loops. pretty fun. and the parallels to instagram photography just don't end." Also included in the post is a one-minute excerpt of the work-in-progress.
¶ Mark Rushton wrote, at markrushton.com, about how he used an outdated ("$20") iPhone to take his picture, which served as the source inspiration for Benjamin Dauer's "In Reference to Time." Rushton's musical composition was based on a photo by Oootini. He drew on his own experience with flotation tanks:
I wanted the overall sound you hear to have that same feeling one gets while floating in relatively calm water. It also had to be a total composition. The piece had to have some travel in it. I also like the idea of the music creating an out-of-body experience when it comes to the viewer/listener relationship.
¶ The OO-Ray, aka Ted Laderas, at his 15people.net site, talks about the visual inspiration provided by Naoyuki Sasanami's photo:
This photo, with its silhouettes and shadows, inspired me to use more discrete transformations such as digital editing and pitch shifting in my piece. The main phrase in the piece is a digitally edited and pitch shifted piano figure, highlighted with several cello tracks treated with a mixture of overdrive and reverberation. Looking at the photo reminds me of those moments right after waking where everything is out of focus and reality snaps into place after a second. I tried to recreate an extended recreation of that transition from dream state to reality, when sunlight floods the room and the day starts anew.
¶ Evan Cordes posted, at flickr.com, video footage of his Pd (or Pure Data) software while he was working on his track:
And over at his pheezy.com site, Cordes explained a bit more about his compositional process:
The New New Chromelodeon II's are programmed in Pure Data (Pd) after Harry Partch's specifications in Genesis Of A New Music. The traffic is recorded from a rooftop in Emeryville, CA.
The Instagram photo is read by Pd and each byte of the image file translates to one of the eighty-eight keys on the New New Chromelodeon II. Two recordings at different, relational tempos are made of the sequence of keys played according to the image file. A three-minute- long sequence is taken from each of these recordings and mixed with the sound of traffic.
¶ At the boondesign.com blog, graphic designer Brian Scott (who designed the PDF booklet, including the set's cover and back cover, and who contributed his own Instagram photo as the cover shot), wrote about the design process:
Instagram has become one of my daily rituals, a way of sharing moments with friends and documenting my obsessions: typography, food, architecture. The immediacy and restrictions are part of Instagram’s inherent charm. ...
Via Twitter, Weidenbaum invited 25 musicians to create “sonic postcards” that are in fact musical responses to each other’s Instagram photos. The resulting recordings are moody and addictive, much like Instagram itself.
Regarding our process, we had the benefit of designing while listening to the music, and while we debated many cover options before selecting the HWY 101 split overpass, the feeling of driving at night while musically intoxicated may have influenced our thinking.
Keep an eye on this page for future post-release coverage of Instagr/am/bient. And get the full set for free at disquiet.com and soundcloud.com.
A new year calls for a stellar dawn, a gaping-maw drone that captures the power of change caught at its attenuated fulcrum, when night turns every so slowly into daylight. In other words, it calls for Saito Koji's Guide, his recent release on the estimable restingbell.net netlabel. The album contains eight drones, all slow as could be, and brief, too, keeping to under three minutes (not unlike the approach undertaken on the Instagr/am/bient compilation). There are occasional beats to be heard here, like the echoed presence of what sounds like a wooden stick rattling on a track titled "Saihate," but otherwise this is music that locates the white-noise space between cicadas and church organs. And though the three-minute maximum length keeps the project as a whole moving, there are no admonitions against setting any one of them on loop. Here, by way of example, is "Peace," which has a circulating melody that sounds like a bellow instrument, and a thick wash of what could be a nearby waterfall (MP3).
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Get the full release from Fukushima, Japan–born Koji at restingbell.net.
A new year calls for a stellar dawn, a gaping-maw drone that captures the power of change caught at its attenuated fulcrum, when night turns every so slowly into daylight. In other words, it calls for Saito Koji's Guide, his recent release on the estimable