Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

. . .

More on this 562nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism

Disquiet Junto submissions

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism

I don't think you can mention Magical Realism and music and not mention Jon Hassell. A little Hassell in this weeks project in terms of style and the means of production. Eno introduced Hassell to the Eventide Harmionizer in the late 70's, and used many incarnations of the Harmonizer over the years. Recently I've been playing around with VSig (Eventides development tool) making algorithms for the H9000, this weeks track uses a resonant reverse panned delay I've been working on. Simple chord progression played on a Modal 002, spectral filtered delay on the percussion, bass from a PolyBrute, H8000 harmonizing a Yamaha VL1 Sax patch.... and some whistling.

APOB - Riff Kan [disquiet0563]

Featuring Jorge Luis Borges' voice, reading his text "Borges y Yo"
I spent the late night of Thursday and some very early hours of Friday 14th/Oct developing this impromptu composition, my "live" upright piano, some synth and samples and Borges voice from his text "Borges y Yo" from the AMB release "Borges Por Él mismo"

https://www.discogs.com/release/6042573-Jorge-Luis-Borges-Sus-Poemas-Y-Su-Voz

(c) AMB/Miguel Yanover

Composed and performed by DD,

Acoustic upright piano (Yamaha)
Subdivine
Valhalla Supermassive
Thrill (K inst)
Symphobia (K inst)

@disquiet
@yanomito

https://instagram.com/amb_yanover

El Otro Borges (disquiet0563)

An electronic sequence put together using Samplebrain & Audacity.

More on this 562nd weekly Disquiet Junto project – Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) – at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/ 2

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

Magic Metro (disquiet0563)

More on this 563rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/

The cover image for this project is from DALL·E 2. The prompt: “sleeping person floating horizontally above suburban home, night, streetlight, highly realistic photograph.”

flash remail

halF realisM [disquiet0563]

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

After discarding two tracks, which where just “too magic” (https://soundcloud.com/winterer/rippling-along and https://soundcloud.com/winterer/time-drowning-mechanism, if someone is interested), I went to this one, which may have “too much realism”. The idea of Digital Magical Realism was to combine realistic field recordings that don’t match realistically, plus synths that mimic real instruments, but not realistically enough, because of … digital reasons or so.

Cover track image made with DALL·E, "a man carrying a synthesizer walking at a seashore at night, photorealistic". What a fun tool…

More on this 563rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Digital Magical Realism (The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?) — at: https://disquiet.com/0563/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0563-digital-magical-realism/

disquiet III?

melodic walking [disquiet0563]

Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

Track notes:

Along with the writers mentioned under the broad umbrella of magical realism, I would also count two of my favourite writers (Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco) as falling - if not squarely into - frequently against the margins of the genre.

Immediately works by Calvino came to mind. After all, I named my home studio after one of the cities from Invisible Cities(Maurilia), so parts of my creative world takes a fair chunk of inspiration from his wonderful mind.

Aside from Invisible Cities, I was reminded of my favourite book of his, the meta-novel, If On A Winter's Night.. (1979) where the reader and the story itself progressively becomes a slippery boundary, before both worlds collapse into each other. With this is mind and this week's prompt I thought about sound collages, musique concrete and field recordings, with material sourced from digital technologies.

I pulled up a personal archive of field recordings made with several different technologies, ranging from lo-fi to hi-fi sources (old phones, digital cameras, minidisc players, handheld digital recorders, nice mic rig.) 

I selected recordings which evoked aspects of If On A Winter's Night.., mostly restricted to ambiences and sounds which possess double-meanings or are general indistinct as to their source. There's also literal references to some of the objects/events/phenomena that feature throughout the book, such as: the sound of trains, streetscapes, the ocean, wind, etc. In some instances the sounds have been manipulated a rendered in more tonal/sonorous forms along with discrete synth textures.

I wanted to create a dense collage of these sounds, much like a hectic dream, where time is compressed and where one skips, zooms and pulls in and out of several environments, seemingly in quick succession. Some transitions appear to blend together, whilst others are more abrupt.

I took the title of this piece from one of the chapters of this book, the beautiful and very poetically named "Without fear of wind or vertigo".

[Disquiet_Junto_0563] Without fear of wind or vertigo

Disquiet Junto Project 0394: You & Me

The Assignment: Accompany the music made by a species other than your own.

This is a project for World Listening Day.

Step 1: Think of an animal you would like to accompany. It may be one in your possession, like a household cat, dog, or bird, or perhaps it might be one for which you’ll need to locate a recorded example.

Step 2: Acquire audio of the animal you selected in Step 1, either by making a recording or locating one.

Step 3: Create a new piece of music by playing along with the audio acquired in Step 2. In the final mix, you and the animal you accompany should be heard at equal levels of prominence (of course, you may also trade off).

--------------

Track notes:

This track was created with audio extracted from a video my partner had made of our cat, Neko snoozing in the afternoon. Her snore is supringly musical. I looped the recording in Max with a fzero~ object employed to detect the fundamental frequency of Neko's snore. The fzero~ is then delayed and used to provide the frequency for a triangle wave; in effect, creating a call and response to Neko's snore. In addition to this, each time a fundamental frequency is detected by fzero~, this triggers a snapshop~ with the output control the waveband of a noise filter. A couple of signal buses are also set up with tapout~ feedback set to near-infinity, creating a consistent sonic texture. Panning of the channels is controlled with cycle~ objects, whose respective phase are constantly shifting.

The title of this track is taken from a quote I came across recently by Japanese sound artist, Toshiya Tsunoda: "If you think about it carefully, the activity of an actual space always moves. [...] Place is always moving, like a sleeping cat." [1]

[1] https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/quiet-storms_toshiya-tsunoda

Tristan Louth-Robins, July 2019

[disquiet0394] (place is always moving) like a sleeping cat

Disquiet Junto Project 0395: Acoustic Expanse
The Assignment: Make music with (samples of) the biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere.

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0395-acoustic-expanse/24269

This project was proposed by Jason Richarson. There’s just one step:

Step 1: The biggest guitar in the southern hemisphere is in Narrandera, Australia. Junto member Jason Richardson recorded a wide range of samples of the guitar and made them available under a Creative Commons license. Now it’s time for you to play this guitar. Get the samples at big-guitar.com/download.

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Track notes:

The inspiration for this piece comes from my childhood/teenage observation of my dad's guitars hanging in the living room and how human voices, impulse-like sounds and other musical instruments would - depending on their loudness and/or proximity - ocassionally cause these stationary instruments to resonate sympathetically and sound.

I started by selecting a few nice resonant tones from the Narrandera big guitar. Looping these in Ableton so that they drifted in and out of phase with each other, I removed the attacks from each of the notes to create a continous drone that pulsated periodically. I sent the output from Ableton - via a 20w amp - to a Digitech exciter (i.e. transducer) which I placed on the soundboard 'sweet spot' of one of my dad's old guitars. This guitar has been in my possession for over 20 years - a 1976 Tama acoustic.

The surface of the Tama in effect becomes a resonater for the Narrandera guitar tones as they are 'transplanted' into the acoustic body of the Tama. Throughout the recording I occasionally strum the strings of the Tama - slack tuned and in approximate harmony with the Narrandera guitar tones. I also physically move the transducer from the Tama's sweet spot to other areas of the soundboard surface; which in effect, articulate different resonant qualities of the Narrandera guitar tones, and also makes audible some of the discrete artefacts of the Narrandera recordings.

[disquiet0395] acoustic transplant

I was wracking my head on the drive down to my mum's farm this weekend. I'd made plans to start building a much-talked about aeolian harp on the property using found materials and various bits and pieces I had lying around my home studio. I was (over) thinking aspects of resonance, wire lengths, fundamental tones, harmonics, etc and in between this I was also thinking about this week's challenge.  A couple of days work resulted in the MiddlePhone* (see pic and footnote below) and an outcome for this weeks Junto challenge.

I attached one end of a slinky to the chimney flue on the MiddlePhone, and the other to a tin can. I fixed a contact mic to the interior surface of the chimney flue and pointed a shotgun mic off into the distance. Hitting record, I stretched out the slinky/can and hummed an improvised melody into the can for about a minute.

In the recording you can hear two simultaneous recordings which have been mixed together: the slinky's contact with the flue, and the shotgun mic; which is fixed on my position with the stretched slinky/can. I've mixed the track so that you hear only the shotgun mic recording at first (w/peripheral sounds) and then gradually crossfade into contact mic; the latter revealing the reverberent/harmonic effects of the slinky, as well the articulation of resonances. Which most of the resonances are derived from the flue/slinky combo, I'm fairly certain the network of stretched wires have had some effect too.

The MiddlePhone*

Yesterday afternoon, I deviated dramatically from my original design plan for the aeolian harp; to such an extent that it resembled a completely different instrument - which you can see pictured in the track cover. It comprises of an old tallowwood fencepost jammed between the branch stumps of a Melaleuca tree. The post has thin wires attached to it which are tightened and fixed to the ground, as well as run over an oil drum and also connected to a chimney flue. The wind interplays with it discretely, but is most effective as a ridiculous percussion instrument. However, attaching contact mics to it reveals a variety of resonances and sonic perculiarities. More recordings of the MiddlePhone to feature in the near future!

[disquiet0396] elastic hum

Track notes:

A quick and dirty one this week. I used an iOS 808 emulator, sent it through a stereo amp driving a couple of my corked speakers, using the vibrations to move and rattle objects. I stuck some old guitar strings in the cork of the left speaker to wobble about and strike a tambourine; on the other speaker I layered a tin foil bowl to rattle about. Then I move the objects around and incorporate a bit of tinfoil. I’m quite fond of the outcome; my partner, not so much.

Assignment notes:

Disquiet Junto Project 0397: Numbers Racket
The Assignment: It’s 808 Day. Do it up.

Step 1: It’s 808 Day today, August 8, the start of the latest Junto project. Let’s make it last through Monday.

Step 2: Make music with or about or somehow in the spirit of the Roland TR-808.

[disquiet0397] 808 junklet

For this week's challenge I decided to continue some explorations of the cycle~ object in Max where I've been using it (at very low rates) to control float values which oscillate back and forth; and subsequently transpose this float value to wider ranges to control things like frequency, amplitude and panning.

When thinking about the idea of 'rauschen', a lingering poetic over the past week had been a line from the song 'I Remember Me' by the SilverJews (aka, David Berman):

The tape hiss of the trees

There's always been something so striking and evocative about that line, and for me it does a wonderful thing of bridging the tricky gaps in (the English) language when it comes to accurately describing sounds. Sure, I guess imagining 'tape hiss' is pretty subjective and experiential, but for me it's such a strong (albeit, slightly surreal) poetic expression.

The objective for this week's challenge was for me to evoke the sound of wind through the trees using the hiss of a blank cassette tape. 

I set about building a little Max patch of four noise modules ,with the noise source derived from a hiss of a blank cassette played back on my old Tascam 424 Portastudio. The tape hiss recordings are routed to a bandpass filter, whose frequency range and amplitude are constantly moving. These (along with the panning) are all controlled with cycle~ objects set a different rates. When the four modules play back simultaneously, this creates a pretty dense noise texture which is constantly shifting - evoking the wind shearing through trees at varying intensities and trajectory. 

I've uploaded a breakdown of the Max patch on YouTube if anyone wants to explore the finer details of the process: https://youtu.be/5G59iszqXWw

[disquiet0398] the tape hiss of the trees

Tristan Louth-Robins is a South Australian artist working principally in the medium of sound art and field recording. Ideas of sound and its signification are key elements in Louth-Robins' practice, traversing the space between the visual and aural his work is realised through the mediums of recordings, installation, visual art and performance. He is interested in sound and its associative implications - including its relationship to objects, technology, urban space, memory and the natural world. 


Since 2005, Louth-Robins has presented work in Australia and internationally as a solo artist, whilst also collaborating with artists, writers, researchers, musicians and performers. 

Working across a vast array of activities encompassing composition, sound design, installation art, field recording and workshops, his work has been featured in events such as the Adelaide Festival of Arts (2006), The National Regional Arts Festival (2012), Mildura-Wentworth Arts Festival (2013), Fairfax Festival (2013) and Adelaide Fringe Festival (2014); and selected works exhibited at galleries including The Australian Experimental Art Foundation (2009), SASA Gallery (2012, 2015), Light Square Gallery (2012) and FELT Space (2015). His audio works have been broadcast on radio including Radio National, Classic FM, The BBC (UK), Acoustic Frontiers (USA) and RBB (Germany).