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Tech NewsMess with the Meter of a 1918 New Orleans Jazz Record
Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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. Tracks by participants will be added to this playlist as … Continued
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Tech News
Mysterious Miniatures from Funabashi
The SoundCloud account known simply as Corruption and self-identified as originating in Funabashi, Japan, continues to post intriguing amalgamations. The tracks mix noise and melody, splatters of disaffection and elements of nostalgia and sentimentality. Whether they’re sketches of works in progress, or parts of an overarching single work, remains unclear. The accompanying text, when there … Continued
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Tech NewsAn Arcade of Reflection
The composer Bryant O’Hara participates in the Sunday Assembly — a kind of non-religious church, as it were — in Atlanta, Georgia, where some aspects of the secular service involve music. He wanted to think of another means to introduce music into the communal activity, and came upon the idea of a collaborative video game … Continued
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Tech News
P Is for Phonogene
The ellipsis in the title of the track “e for …” can be read as referring to several things, among them both the operational status of the work itself, and the means by which it accomplishes its goals. The track in question is less a finished work than it is a step toward something. As … Continued
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Tech News
Cover a 100-Year-Old Blues Song
Disquiet Junto Project 0125: Yellow Disquiet Blues Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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. Tracks by participants … Continued
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Tech News
An Insect Lullaby at Dusk
The lovely drone “Individuality of Butterflies” is a series of slowly developing swells amid a light crush of white noise. Recorded by Elian, it appears as part of the recent free compilation Endless Intermission, released by the netlabel Subterranean Tide. The piece has the ebb and flow of a tide, and the warm enveloping aura … Continued
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Tech News
A Free Leyland Kirby Album for 40 Days (and Nights)
In time for his 40th birthday, Leyland Kirby uploaded a 40-track set — one composition for each year — of short works under the umbrella title We Drink to Forget the Coming Storm. It’s an elegiac collection of nameless songs, each comprised of, as he describes it, “the same elements piano, digital strings and synthesized … Continued
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Tech News
A Noob’s Tale: Fiddling with My First Modular Synth Rack
I’m just getting started fiddling with modular synthesis. Everything I know up to this point is pure book-learning. I’m like the Prioress in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. She has no firsthand experience of the culture (“And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, / After the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe, / For Frenssh of Parys was … Continued
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Tech News
A Gathering Beat
The momentum inherent in the title of EGA’s “Northward” is not undermined by the track itself. The piece by the Bratislava, Slovakia, musician has a methodical, forward-pushing sense of movement — a track with a purpose. Its steady, slowly insistent pace doesn’t just suggest motion — so, too, does the track expand as it proceeds, … Continued
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Tech News
Derive and Thrive: Remix 3 Netlabels This Weekend
Update 2014.05.16: Please note there were two text errors when this project was first posted. The netlabel Audiotalaia was misidentified as Audioitalia, and the Kayaka track “O” was misidentified as “Blackening.” Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over … Continued
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Tech News
Help Gizmodo Create the Soundscape of the Home of the Future
Disquiet Junto Project 0123: All Tomorrow’s Domesticity Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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. Tracks by participants … Continued
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Tech News
Two Disquiet Nights in Portland: May 7 + 8
I’m excited to travel to one of my favorite cities later this week. I get in on May 7, Wednesday, in time for a Disquiet Junto concert we’re having at Townshend’s Tea (2223 NE Alberta St), and then on Thursday I’ll be reading from my recent 33 1/3 book on Aphex Twin’s album Selected Ambient … Continued
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Tech News
Music for “Poltergeist Meets Wreck-It Ralph”
Disquiet Junto Project 0122: 8bit Undead ET Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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. This project was … Continued
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Tech NewsApple
Is There Such a Thing as a Sonic QR Code?
There are at least two things that Sony Pictures marketing executives did not consider when preparing a cross-promotion between its new Spider-Man film and the song-identification app Shazam. I first read about this promotion this morning on io9.com, because pretty much the first thing I read every morning is Morning Spoilers on io9.com. The film … Continued
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Tech News
Tape Delay in Progress
Often as not, some of the best listening on SoundCloud is simply of people trying their hand at new tools. One person’s test run of a fresh plug-in is someone else’s arm-chair, near-first-hand peek at the creative process. Take Brian Biggs, aka Dance Robot Dance, who is documenting his efforts at old-school tape delay. The … Continued
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Tech News
What’s More Frightening Than Breaking Glass?
The sheer brittle cascade of “KEYS” by Radio Free Ul-quoma is enough to cement it in memory. It’s like glass breaking in a constant swirl of activity, over two minutes of crackling noise. A deep swell of a drone seems to arise out of the constant activity, eventually subsuming the crackle into its own lulling … Continued
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Tech NewsAliens + Interrogative Music @ SETI
When you reference Ezra Pound’s statement that “The artist is the antennae of the race” at SETI, the “antennae” part takes on a whole richer meaning. SETI hosts weekly colloquium at its Mountain View, California, offices, and a few times a year those talks put aside interstellar science and are, instead, organized by SETI’s artist-in-residence. … Continued
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Tech News
Two Projects In Collaboration with Edward Frenkel (of Love and Math)
Disquiet Junto Project 0121: Math Rock Each Thursday at the Disquiet Junto group on SoundCloud.com 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. Tracks by participants will … Continued
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Tech News
Experimental Music + Extraterrestrials + Earth Day
Tomorrow night, April 22, at 7pm I’m giving a guest talk at SETI, famously the acronym for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. It’s free if you’re in the neighborhood, by which I mean Mountain View, California, not our galaxy. April 22 happens to be Earth Day, and what better day than Earth Day to address … Continued
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Tech NewsTrevor Cox Knows Who They Were and What They Were Doing
This isn’t new, but it’s worth a listen, especially if you’ve (1) never participated in a soundwalk or (2) not yet read Trevor Cox’s sonic travelogue, Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound. Cox visited the offices of the Guardian and proceeded to take the editors on a blindfolded guided tour — except he was … Continued
Marc Weidenbaum
Marc Weidenbaum's posts