Disquiet

The 17th Pessoa “Autopsicografia”

Marc Weidenbaum — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:50:42 +0000

There now are 17 translations of the poem “Autopsicografia” by Fernando Pessoa in the Disquiet.com Pessoa subsite, at disquiet.com/thirteen.html. The ancient frame-based structure of that HTML feature allows simultaneous comparison, side-by-side, of multiple versions (interpretations, remixes) of the original poem. This 17th version is the automated rendition, courtesy of Google Translate (translate.google.com), made at the suggestion of reader Douglas Storm. The inclusion of a machine-rendered version is true to Pessoa’s Futurist interests — and, perhaps, to the potential misreading by some readers of the author’s intention, given the “auto” (i.e., “self”) in the poem’s title. (Thanks, Douglas.)

Disquiet.com was founded in 1996, its name borrowed from The Book of Disquiet (occasionally The Book of Disquietude, originally Livro do Desassossego) by Pessoa.

Images of the Week: Graphic Lewis Gesner

Marc Weidenbaum — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:15:32 +0000

Almost exactly a year ago, the Studio Soto gallery in Boston, Massachusetts, hosted a survey of graphic scores by composer Lewis Gesner. Images from that exhibit were recently uploaded to Flickr by the Mobius.org collective:

More at the gallery’s site (studiosoto.org). Full photo set at flickr.com.

Special thanks to Mobius (mobius.org) for permission to reproduce the images here.

Quote of the Week: Famous to a Few

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:00:56 +0000

In an interview with the duo Les Freres Courvoisier, member Joshua Smith is quoted as saying of his LFC colleague, Jonathan Canupp:

Jon is one of the bigger names, I think, in IDM these days, which means, really, that 5,000 dudes with glasses have downloaded your music from Soulseek.

Full interview at westword.com. More on the group at soundcloud.com/les-freres-courvoisier and acrerca.com/lesfrerescourvoisier.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Just had that "wish there was something I could listen to while I'm listening to this" feeling. Must be a word for that. #
Finally saw Visual Acoustics, great doc film on architecture-photographer Julius Shulman. Good lite-glitchy score by Charlie Campagna. #
Morning sounds: five hard drives whirring, three ice cubes crackling, one bus passing. #
Was wondering about recent Japanese/日本語 Tenori-On chatter. It's "TNR-O," a cheaper edition: http://is.gd/4OtNL http://is.gd/4OtP1 #
One step closer to the Throbbing Gristle–FM3 Gristleism machine. Video of the gadget: http://is.gd/4Ooas #
♫ Free afternoon audio-stream: The No Type collective organizes catalog by theme ("beats," "loud," "soothing," etc.): http://is.gd/4O15I #
Wishing iPod Touch audio-game apps worked their algorithmic magic on songs contained inside the firewalled fortress that is iTunes. #
♫ Free afternoon audio-stream: dubby gitch (glitchy dub?) and epic whorls from Kallabris/Legowelt on Entr'acte: http://is.gd/4McrN #
The 193 other things that "IDM" can stand for, in addition to "Intelligent Dance Music": http://is.gd/4NdEb #
Morning sounds: typing, bird song, bus rattle, hard-drive hum, old-timey Chinese music on radio passing by front of house. #
RT @rddy Shimokitazawa redevelopment debate, clarified: http://bit.ly/4bxS5M (i.e., what's happening to one of Tokyo's most happening hoods) #
Yow. Evernote 3.5.0.567 for Windows (aka 3.5 Beta 3) major improvement over predecessor. If you de-installed 3.5, good time to jump back in. #
Any word on when YamiPod will work with the iPod Touch? #
Week's best TV sound design: office full of ringing phones (Mad Men, 11/1); futurist-Muzak version of theme song (Good Eats, 11/2). #
MP3 Discussion Group this week is of two recent and lush drone albums, both by Mountains: Choral and Etching. Join in at http://is.gd/4LGIr #
New Don DeLillo book, Point Omega, due in 2010. Like Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, sounds like literary Fringe: http://is.gd/4L5SG #
Halloween night, and what sound wasn't heard? The doorbell ringing. #
Gym music: bunch of netlabel releases, new Forced Exposure stuff, & an old Enduser / Larvae 12" (2006) — @adnoiseam addiction continues. #
Listening to John Kannenberg field recording on repeat. Wondering if the loud birdsong confuses the winged creatures in the backyard. #
Gym music: new Broken Note album on Ad Noiseum, increasingly a favorite label of mine. Humorous number of candy wrappers on the gym floor. #

Japanese Drone via Paris (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:30:33 +0000

The Taalem label circulates its music in various ways. There are CD-Rs, FLAC files, a streaming radio station. No MP3s, aside from excerpts, but since we’re talking about Taalem, we’re talking to some extent about drone music, which means an excerpt, at upwards of five minutes, is longer than what many musicians working in electronica would consider a proper song. Case in point, “Jule 0″ by Pollypraha, off the Jule album, one of three released by Taalem on Halloween. (Taalem is based in Paris, so this may not have been a meaningful date — it may simply have been October 31.) Pollypraha is Japan’s Takeyuki Hakozaki, and “Jule 0″ is an extended, slowly executed wave form, a series of wave forms, really, that strive in loose conglomeration to avoid any semblance of a down beat without ever fully evaporating (MP3). And it — or, that is, they succeed.

Download audio file (alm59-01.mp3)

Full details on release at taalem.com. More on Hakozaki at myspace.com/pollypraha.

A Little Brainwave Music (MP3s)

Marc Weidenbaum — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:57:36 +0000

A lot of electronically mediated music and sound is described as “brainy,” usually with the term employed to suggest (or perhaps cover) dismissive intent. The word, though not the negative connotation, applies fully to Ganzfeld State by FSK1138, aka musician Donald Baynes. To record the lightly rhythmic works, Baynes used electroencephalography to map his own brainwaves back in August, and then used that data as the basis for the album’s sound. Some of the tracks add in vocal samples, among them an opening remix (a “Roshak Edit” of a song titled “Beneath Me,” which features a voice over from the Watchmen movie adaptation) and a track titled “I See Calculus,” in which the phrase is spoken over the electronica equivalent of an old radiator spewing metallic rhythms and hiss.

The standout track may be “Hushed,” which dispenses with the verbal toying and puts all its eggs in a fragile basket true to its title (MP3), a lightly flanged whir over the tribal beats of dust mites.

Download audio file (pan041-fsk1138-2-hushed.mp3)

Get the full release at the Panospria netlabel (notype.com) or at its archive.org page.

Jazz-Tinged Populist Techno from Etienne Jaumet (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:15:34 +0000

It’s rare that an act manages to pull off what Underworld does — locate a place where populist techno pulses its way deep into a noirish zone. There’s a whole lot of Underworld inside Etienne Jaumet, whose Night Music EP came out recently. Case in point, the collection’s lead track, “For Falling Asleep,” an upbeat-yet-dreamy swath of head-nodding 4/4 fun, all the flurrying synth action of a Dario Argento soundtrack, and enough Tangerine Dream–style counterpoint to keep things interesting (MP3). There’s also layers of saxophone that bring to mind Spring Heel Jack before they went deep into the realm of free improv. More on Jaumet at myspace.com/etiennejaumet and at dominopublishingco.com.

Download audio file (08f9t4.mp3)

Dave Seidel’s Complex Silences (MP3s)

Marc Weidenbaum — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:15:39 +0000

The Complex Silence series is an effort by the TimeTheory netlabel and musician-curator Phillip Wilkerson to engage musicians in long-form compositions that explore the titular aesthetic. The sound on the four entries thus far is at once quiet yet dense, understated yet nuanced, singular yet rich. The latest, Complex Silence 4, is by Dave Seidel, whose contribution takes the Golden Ratio as its starting point. Its two pieces, “Meridian Transit” (MP3) and “Solar Midnight” (MP3), are super-slow drones — their beat, such as it is, proceeding at a gap of several seconds. What’s complex about the unassuming simplicity of Seidel’s pieces is the variety intrinsic in those seemingly ordinary drones — there are numerous overlapping waves in each track (to my ears, even more in “Meridian Transit” than in “Solar Midnight”), which means that when played loud, the room fills with overlapping patterns. It’s a bit like staring for a long while at some massive cliff and slowly making out the striations that have occurred over vast periods of time.

Download audio file (tmth06A-mysterybear-01-meridian_transit.mp3)
Download audio file (tmth06A-mysterybear-02-solar_midnight.mp3)

Get the full release at archive.org. More on Seidel at mysterybear.net. More on TimeTheory at archive.org, jon7.net/timetheory, and myspace.com/timetheorynetlabel. More on Wilkerson at phillipwilkerson.net and phillipwilkerson.blogspot.com.

MP3 Discussion Group: ‘Choral’ & ‘Etching’ by Mountains

Marc Weidenbaum — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:12:53 +0000

This week, the Disquiet.com MP3 Discussion Group returns to collectively given a listen to two albums released this year by the duo Mountains: Choral (cover at left — on the Thrill Jockey label) and Etching (cover below — and which Mountains self-released). Mountains is Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp, and they traffic in a rich and unique realm of drone-music, in which rural guitar atmospheres and acoustic elements mingle amid lush, beautiful harmonic fields. A previous Mountains album, Sewn, was one of the top-10 albums of the year on Disquiet.com in 2006 (disquiet.com). More on Mountains, including streams of several pieces of their music, at myspace.com/apestaartjemountains.

Participating in this week’s MP3 Discussion Group are: Julian Lewis: “I write much of Lend Me Your Ears, a UK/Spain-based MP3 blog that appreciates less obvious music.” Alan Lockett: “I write music reviews and commentary on ambient/drone, the more adventurous end of techno/house, post-dub, and IDM. Based in Bristol, epicentre of the Dub-zone in the Wild West of England, I can mainly be read on igloomag.com and furthernoise.org.” Joshua Maremont: “I record as Thermal and pursue my musical and other obsessions in San Francisco.” The conversation will play out in this post’s comments section. This is by no means a closed discussion, so do feel free to join in.

Nana/Lämgren’s Ontology of Noise (MP3)

Marc Weidenbaum — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:15:12 +0000

Listen in quick succession at least twice through — not just to, but through — the relatively brief (just over three minutes) track “The One Substance” off The Ontology of Noise (MP3), released earlier this year on the record label Touch. It’s an exemplary opportunity to hear how quickly a series of repeated listens can make even the simplest of noises come to life. At first, the track, composed and performed by Nana April Jun, may come across very much as just one of those soft-to-loud studies in dynamics: the ear responds to the shift from quietude to overwhelming volume in a way that emphasizes the distinctions between the two, and masks the detail in either end of the spectrum.

The piece opens with quiet static that slowly takes on a lush feel. A small sliver of high-pitched sound comes to the fore, followed by another rising element, this time a ring of undulation that sets in motion several iterations of waves upon waves, before settling down for a moment. Then comes a hearty bellows of white noise, something like the histrionic drama of some classic prog-rock song (Nana April Jun has posited Ontology of Noise as a kind of consideration of black metal), albeit played entirely in a palette of hisses.

Download audio file (The%20One%20Substance.mp3)

Well, that’s not quite what it sounds like the first time ’round. At first it’s just haze, then wave form, then static. Only in time and with attention does the variation within the track make itself present, if not entirely self-evident.

Nana April Jun is a pseudonym of Christofer Lämgren, who is based in Malmö, Sweden. More on Jun/Lämgren at nanaapriljun.com.