dubverk3

There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco's Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa.

Unplanned Drone

Third day of Jamuary, working just in  VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma. 

Source audio here:

- https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/unplanned-drone
- https://freesound.org/people/disquiet/sounds/840803/

Re: Generators

Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack. 

Source audio recorded in San Francisco in late December 2025 and early January 2026.

Chatter Boxing

The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real. (The bathroom photographed here is not the same as the one where the recording was made.)

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco.

Bird Bathroom

My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025.

Two Block Drone

I've lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I'm not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I'm not sure I'd share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I've done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion. 

Source audio recordings made on an iPhone 13 Pro and an iPhone 17 Pro sometime in 2024 or 2025.

Ives Talkin'

God Memories LIVE at Tarantella XXI

This is a step forward from yesterday. Rather than two source field recordings, there are three. The beat, per se, is a pair of white noise equivalents (interior drone of a refrigerator and a fan in a bathroom) cut up and swapped back and forth. The third element is the same street musician as last time, pitched differently and brought more to the foreground. As the track proceeds, the speed at which the sampling of that third element occurs gets faster, which alters the way it sounds in playback (a little more cut-up, even jittery). And then, as with yesterday's track, at the end it goes back to the original speed, which is a shortcut to a kind of closure. This was a lot of fun to put together, and especially interesting was trying to locate patterns that surfaced the most musically interesting elements of the source audio.

Recorded around the end of 2025 or start of 2026, depending on the audio, in San Francisco. 

Traveller Feller

Stereo audio render from the generative system used in Precipice, a sound installation on display at the RISD Museum as part of the biennial RISD Faculty Exhibition and Forum. Comprised of weightless tones and bits of sonic dust, Precipice is a generative composition existing at the edge of perception. This piece utilizes six hyperdirectional speakers and custom software running on a single-board computer to create a highly spatial experience of sound that is nearly as absent as it is present.

Precipice (2018)

Mark Cetilia is a sound / media artist working at the nexus of analogue and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems in art, design, and sound creation, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. Over the past decade, he has worked to develop idiomatic performance systems utilizing custom hardware and software, manifesting in a rich tapestry of sound and image. Mark is a member of the electroacoustic ensemble Mem1, recipients of a 2008 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Project Grant Award and the experimental media art group Redux, recipients of a 2006 Creative Capital grant for their Callspace project. He received his MFA with honors from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D in computer music and multimedia at Brown University. He has taught classes and workshops on programming, sound and video art at the Rhode Island School of Design, TELIC Arts Exchange (Los Angeles) and Spullenmannen (Amersfoort, NL). 

Cetilia’s work has been screened and installed at such galleries and festivals as SoundFjord (London), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Laptopia (Tel-Aviv), the Sol Koffler Gallery (Providence, RI), the 1912 Gallery (Emory, VA) and SoundWalk (Long Beach, CA). He has performed at venues such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral (NYC), Spectacle (Boston), Issue Project Room (NYC) and the Knitting Factory (Los Angeles). His solo sound works have been published by Iynges, Anarchymoon and Quiet Design. Throughout their career, his group Mem1 has collaborated with a variety of artists including the Penderecki String Quartet, Steve Roden, Jan Jelinek, Frank Bretschneider, and Stephen Vitiello. Age of Insects, a full-length album with Vitiello, is now available by Dragon's Eye Recordings. Together, Mem1 curates the experimental music series Ctrl+Alt+Repeat and the record label Estuary Ltd.

Precipice (2018)

Mark Cetilia

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