This film is brilliant. It has a certain spirit to it, and it’s really inspiring to see it executed so well.

This timelapse is about a year in the making. I started sometime in June of 2010 and finished it on August 19, 2011. It wasn’t constant work of course, just working on it every now and then. I’d estimate I have invested anywhere between 250 and 300 hours on it. Most of this was time I spent walking, biking, or riding the bus to locations I was shooting. There are very few locations I used a car to get to. Total frame count is about 28,000 frames and 85 different shots. All the frames weren’t used in the final product as I edited down the clips. You will notice that some of the shots were shaky. San Francisco is a very windy city and even my heavy tripod couldn’t remain still. In hindsight I should have bought a different head. All photos were shot in JPEG and then some light editing in Lightroom. Compiled into .mov clips in Quicktime Pro and then all brought together in Final Cut Pro.

I started this project because there are so many people photographing the city that I wanted to capture it in a different way that most were not. Between the time I started and the time I finished, timelapses have become huge. It’s amazing to see what fellow artists can make with even the most basic equipment.

This is the link to the video on Vimeo, and you can watch it right here:

Delia Derbyshire, whose 25-plus years of work with the BBC has only recently gained recognition, was a pioneering composer, innovative engineer, and something of an enigma. Her life story is really kind of a snapshot of a number of converging changes in society: The empowered woman, actively engaged in several fields all dominated by men well before the popular women’s movements; the avant-garde composer who challenged traditional Western notions of music; fighting government control of culture, music, and media; and, the free-thinking intellectual movements of the cultural wave which came to shape Western culture in the post-War era. This combination of elements is really quite amazing and it’s hard to believe that one person could have done it all.

Delia Derbyshire was a very complex and intense personality, and this BBC radio piece about her, “Sculptress of Sound: The Lost Works of Delia Darbyshire” does an amazing job of collecting various opinions and criticism and historical perspectives on her work. There’s some really glowing praise of her, and even the people who found her too difficult to work with (her idiosyncrasies are also explained) have absolutely nothing but praise for her.

Plus, I like the bit on the program where the critic said about Delia, to paraphrase: “She didn’t like the synthesizer. She felt that all ‘electronic music’ ought to be handmade.” Makes me feel kinda good

MP3 of the radio program

Did you ever learn to play an instrument, and then struggle to find your voice with it? I’m turning a corner, creatively. I feel like something’s changing but I don’t feel like calling it anything… it just is, and I’m happy to have it.

Here’s an experiment that turned out well. I love Allen Ginsberg and this is my interpretation of his poem, Psalm III. It’s not mastered yet but I’m really pleased with it so far. I hope you enjoy it.

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Here’s a direct link.

Hey friends,

It’s good to brush the dust off this blog and post new material. Hi!!

I discovered “Continuo’s Weblog” thanks to Google Reader. In this article there is a link to download an album called “Electronic Music From The Outside In”, released on Folkways records in 1980. The first track off the album is titled “Heavy Music For Four Crowbars”. The piece’s composer, Barton McLean, explains the technique behind the piece.

He goes through a number of concepts common to Musique Concrete production, elaborating on his use of splicing, looping, varispeed playback, filters, and modulators. This was particularly useful for me, being a fan of and creator of similar music, because I was exposed to a few concepts that I’d never considered or known of before. Specifically, his mention of using ring modulation was useful because it sent me to the Wikipedia article linked here, and I will at some point look into it further and attempt to build my own device.

Here’s the track in its entirety:

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The track is sixteen minutes long so I recommend downloading the track for yourself: Link here.

I’m still listening to the rest of the album and so far I’m really enjoying it. To download the album yourself, click here. To read the original post at Continuo’s Weblog, click here.

I want to thank everyone who read my previous post, re: Experimental Music and the Ego. The link was passed around the Web (Facebook in particular) and it elicited a number of responses, a few of which were added here as comments.

I plan on writing a followup post, put together from various comments and my reactions, but until then please take a look at the comments on the previous article. The responses were quite apt and I think they add a lot of value to the discussion.

Thanks!

I’m doing research on material for this blog and for my personal creative endeavors and I’m having quite a difficult time finding blogs and other online media covering experimental music.

Why is this?

I don’t think it’s for a lack of current works; it seems like there are plenty of young people out there trying new things with sound and music itself as a concept. Magazines The Wire and Signal To Noise prove there’s enough interest to garner advertising dollars in this niche. Pop acts like Animal Collective and Ariel Pink prove there’s at least some curiosity among the trendy, urban, fashionable crowd. Why then hasn’t the current generation seized on the fruits of seeds sown so long ago?

I could speculate, but doing so would open the gates of cynicism and egocentric shortsightedness. To be fair, experimental music in the Post War era never much got attention beyond academia, some dedicated music enthusiasts, and the fringes of pop culture, so it’s likely not a generational issue. Granted, the current generation has greater access to both the means of production and instant, worldwide communication than any generation before, but our culture and society overall haven’t necessarily adapted to take full advantage of this, or to let it affect its tastes or its general cultural awareness. Whether we ever will is another discussion.

There’s something deeper here. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how people perceive music and I keep coming back to arguments that John Cage made about how people typically perceive music, and more importantly, how one decides if something is, or isn’t, “music”. I’ve had many conversations with strangers about the music I’m making and it usually takes a bit of explaining before I see in them some kind of recognition or understanding of what I’m trying to achieve. I’m using my experience as an example because it’s what I know best. In my case, after the first question of “What kind of music do you make?”, there’s usually something like “So you make ambient music?” or “Oh, you make noise music”. Both are way off, but how can I succinctly describe to someone something that is so core to the experience of sound as an art form in a way that’s easy to understand?

Most people are not stupid. Most people will understand an argument for concrete and/or pure sound as music; I’m pretty sure of that. But what’s not happening on a wider scale is a sort of “wait and see” approach to music, where the listener disables her critical voice for the duration of the program and actually listens to what’s being presented to her before making her mind on what she’s heard. It’s sort of like when a stranger approaches you on the street and says “Excuse me, Sir”: you don’t know what this person is going to say, and if you’re not weary of strangers, you’re probably going to listen to what they have to say before you make your judgment and give a response. Why then isn’t this the same for music? Preconceived notions of what “music” is? This can become a circular argument – and again I’ll try not to speculate further on why this is – but I want to share some observations I’ve made on people’s reactions to unfamiliar musical styles.

One of the most difficult things I’ve encountered as a musician is that when I’m presenting my music to someone, often times the listener’s first reaction is to speak. Why, I’m not sure, but again I’d like to not be too cynical here. This actively defeats the purpose of listening to new music for two reasons: 1) They’ve already formed an opinion in just the first few seconds, and of course 2) They’re speaking and not listening. Secondly, after presenting my music, I’ve heard things like “The melody/riff/gesture didn’t go anywhere”, “There’s no melody”, “I expected a beat”, or “It never resolved itself” (strange, but I’ve heard it). Granted, I can’t make music that pleases everyone (or even a few people, sometimes!), but to me this speaks of what’s ostensibly some kind of commonly-held belief of what music is or should be. Tragically, to me, it seems like most listeners demand that new music meets the criteria of works they’ve already heard and have practically canonized.

I say that it’s tragic for listeners to expect new music to easily measure up against their sum total personal understanding of music because this effectively blocks any potential for surprise and growth. One thing I’ve said many times is: “Fear is anxiety over the unknown.” To take a philosophical turn here for just a moment, fear is something that manifests itself in human behavior in a number of ways, and a typical response to fear is to assess the situation, compare it to our own personal experience, and to categorize what’s happening at the moment accordingly. When we venture into unknown territory we’re on keen alert and we’ll quickly compare whatever stimuli we encounter to what we already know. Evolution proves that this is useful for our survival but in other avenues of life – specifically in the arts – it’s dangerous and detrimental to our growth as thinking, feeling beings. Why not take something at its face value instead of comparing it to what we already know? Why not take the artist’s expression in its purest form – her art – and accept it for what it is? Why must we assess, second-guess, and otherwise deconstruct the meaning of a piece instead of valuing it as a unique experience? I know that all of this seems incredibly idealistic but I see it as a practical approach to developing a personal understanding of art.

This argument / rant, nearly a manifesto without real demands, has been rolling around in my brain for a long time. I recognize that I take a very personal approach to music which projects my ideals onto the form as a whole. I fully acknowledge that not everyone sees the value of art in itself, and that most people have their own priorities in life that are much different from my own. Call this a plea for greater understanding, or call it a late-night rambling blog post, but either way, I accept that I’ve met an impasse and I’m dedicated to overcoming it.

Some time ago, I got my hands on a copy of the Conet Project set, and since then I’ve been quite obsessed with shortwave radio, or at least the idea of getting a shortwave radio and using it as a novel, ever-changing sound source.

Specifically, I’ve been wanting to find a vacuum tube-based radio because of the interesting sounds produced while tuning between stations. It’s a familiar sound from 1950s era science fiction movies, and a similar effect can be heard beginning around 0:35 in this little recording I made back in July:

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(Direct Link)

This sound was created by sending a very high frequency, somewhere between 500 and 600kHz on my Hewlett-Packard tube oscillator, to a cassette recorder. Signals at such frequencies corrupt the recorder’s bias signal and cause interesting distortions.

Right, shortwave radio. I occasionally search eBay and Craigslist for shortwave radios but it’s difficult to find a tube radio in good condition that also has a line out, or to find a solid state radio with a line out for that matter. When I do find one I like, though, I’m usually tight on cash and put the idea off. I’ll have to remember to look when I have an extra fifty bucks.

In the meantime, I enjoy finding videos on YouTube which feature some of the more unusual sounds and signals being sent through the air. A common finding are what are called “Numbers Stations“, which transmit information – ostensibly spy information or reconnaissance findings – encoded in arbitrary alphanumeric codes and often prepended by a chime, gong, or tune. Here’s one of the better examples from YouTube:

Other than that, there’s a few other things which pique my curiosity. I really like this next video. Who knows what’s generating this sound, or how, and for what purpose, but I enjoy it simply for what it is:

Some things give me very clear ideas for future audio pieces:

Anyway. I’ll search again for radios when I have some cash to blow. I can see myself recording what I find onto cassettes and just playing them as interesting background noise around the apartment.